Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Remembering Paula’s call made Jane irritable. It wasn’t Paula’s fault, and it wasn’t even Pete Hatcher’s. It was her own. She was already feeling a sick twinge in her stomach about Carey, and she was not yet prepared to set aside time to think clearly about it. She had no business leaving a husband of three months. She had no business breaking her promise, so something in some primitive lobe of her brain told her she was going to be punished. What Paula had said had nothing to do with Carey. It should not have made her feel this way.

When Jane had met Pete Hatcher she had understood what Paula had meant. He had been scared and psychologically worn, but while he was standing up politely to shake her hand, his eyes had taken the long route up to meet her eyes. What he was saying at the time was something good-natured and self-deprecating about needing her advice and help. It should have been incongruous and discomforting, but somehow it wasn’t.

Carey would never do anything that simpleminded. He was much more … what? Highly evolved. Pete Hatcher appealed to women because he was guileless and optimistic. He made it clear that he was having a lot of fun, and that was a form of flattery. His expression said, “You delight me,” and delight was contagious and reciprocal. It created a magnetic field around it stronger than gravity.

But women loved Carey because he knew all their secrets, including the ones that weren’t any fun—wear and aging and imperfections and scars—and he was always on their side. It wasn’t that they seemed glamorous for the moment, or something. His appeal was a quick and sensitive mind but, more than that, an air that conveyed a knowledge that didn’t exclude things found in books but was full of things that he knew because of who he was.

Jane felt weak and foolish for letting Carey enter her mind now. She knew it was because she was about to do something that Carey would have had a right to object to. The bathing suit she chose was relatively modest. It was one piece, black, and not cut as high at the hips as the others in her size. She could have worn it at home without feeling uncomfortable. But she was buying it to wear for Pete Hatcher.

She had to be where the hunters weren’t looking and Pete Hatcher was. They would be looking at lobbies and parking lots, and he would be looking at women. He would be hiding, he would be scared, but he had a lifelong addiction to studying every woman who passed in front of his eyes. He would look, because runners had a way of falling back into old comfortable habits to calm themselves. She bought a canvas purse and a wraparound skirt, a big pair of polarized sunglasses and a pair of slip-on rubber-soled shoes that she could run in if she needed to.

The next day she allotted two hours to each of the biggest hotels: the Rainbow, the Traveler’s Rest, the Mountaineer. It was easy for a woman to get into the part of a hotel where Jane wanted to go. She entered at the end of a residential wing and walked down the corridor of rooms. She left it near the center of the building, before she reached the lobby, and stepped out into the courtyard. She knew that Pete Hatcher would not be in a ground-floor room, because he would not feel safe in a room where an intruder could walk up to the windows. If he had his choice he would be on an upper floor in a room facing the courtyard, so he could not be shot from the street.

At each hotel she walked to the swimming pool, found a big lounge chair, greased herself with sunblock, and lay back to feel the sun. At some point, Pete Hatcher would look out his window, and he would see her. A lot of people would notice that there was somebody out by the pool. Pete Hatcher would not leave it at that. He would stare at her hard, just because she was a woman between eighteen and fifty-five—and he would recognize her.

By noon she was glad that she had found some sunblock that was practically opaque. The sun came down clear and sharp at this altitude. She lay on her stomach at the Mountaineer and stared along the surface of the water in the pool, watching the sunlight break into spots on the surface and ricochet up against the concrete wall of the building.

She saw Pete Hatcher the second he stepped into the bar overlooking the pool. She stood up, put on her shoes, then wrapped the skirt around her and hooked her bag over her left arm while she watched him through the sunglasses. He was talking to a waiter. She walked quickly toward him.

She could see the waiter going to a cappuccino machine behind the bar that looked like the reassembled parts of a steam locomotive. Too late. The waiter was pouring a pitcher of milk into the boiler and flipping levers. She thought about what Paula had said. Pete Hatcher was standing there with a pulse rate that was probably nearing two hundred. He had just seen the arrival of what amounted to his last chance to blow out the candles on his next birthday, and his response was to order coffee for two. She stepped in the door. No, it was iced cappuccino for two, somehow even more absurd and courtly, because it was the right thing to order for a woman who had been lying in the sun.

He carried the glasses to the table, but Jane took his arm and moved him on to another that was out of sight of the door. The waiter was busying himself at the bar, so she leaned close and gave Hatcher a peck on the cheek before she sat down. “Very thoughtful,” she said. In a whisper, she added, “Why didn’t you call again?”

He looked pained. “I did. Your message ran, but then there was no beep to start the recorder. I said where I was, but I couldn’t tell if it picked anything up. I guess it didn’t.” He leaned close and looked into her eyes, and she thought of Paula again. Those long eyelashes were part of it—he didn’t seem to know they belonged to him. “I made a couple of mistakes in Denver,” he confided. “I thought I was doing great, but I was absolutely clueless. That scared me. That’s why I called in the first place. If you didn’t get my messages, how did you find me?”

“Okay,” said Jane. “It doesn’t matter. You got through. Now, what have you got up in your room that you can’t leave there?”

“One suitcase. The one you had me pack the last time. It’s got my money in it.”

“Give me the key,” she said.

He handed her the key, and she looked at it before she slipped it into her purse. He said, “The number’s not on it, but it’s 605.”

“Here’s what we do,” she said. “You sit here, sip your drink. If it takes too long, drink mine. Stay here with the waiter. If he leaves, don’t go to the lobby or follow me to your room or something. If everything unexpectedly goes wrong, don’t go to your car.”

“How did you know I had a car?”

She smiled sadly. “If they haven’t found you yet, all this is practice. If they have, what they’ve found is the car.”

Jane stood up and walked across the deck outside, back into the corridor where she had entered. She followed it until she found a fire door that led up the stairs. At the sixth floor she stood for a moment with her ear to the door. She heard nothing, so she stepped out into the hallway, found 605, and opened it.

The suitcase was neatly stowed in the closet. She tipped it on its side and searched it. There was sixty thousand dollars in hundreds, fifteen little plastic folders full of traveler’s checks, seven passbooks for savings accounts in Denver banks. She loaded the money, passbooks, and checks into her canvas bag and looked deeper.

When she found the box at the bottom she stopped. It was gold with a black stripe. It said, “.38 Special. 20 pistol cartridges.” She felt almost relieved. He had gone out and bought himself a pistol and a car. There was nothing mysterious about the way they had found him. All they had done was watch lists that anybody could get, until one man’s name had turned up on two or three lists. She put the box of cartridges into her bag with the money, then examined the suitcase for anything else Hatcher had neglected to mention.