Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

“Where are we going now?”

“First, we’ll drop out of sight completely for a few days, to let the trail get cold. Then we’ll start all over again, and do this right. I’ll hide you somewhere, but I’ll stick around this time until I’m sure we’ve lost them for good. I’ll give you a few lessons I should have given you the first time. I’ll help you get used to the next new name, new place, new life. Then I’ll leave for good.”

“You said the first thing is dropping out of sight. How do you do that?”

“The best way is to do nothing.” She smiled. “Missoula looks like a good place to start doing it. We’ll buy you a new suitcase, check into a motel, and see if you got lucky and lost them. In fact, that’s the good part about what I was saying, and I almost forgot to tell you. They’re pros, and from what I can tell, they’re near the upper end of the scale of people who could be called that. That means we avoid them or we’re dead: there isn’t any mystery about the outcome. But the nice thing about pros is that they’re in it for the money.”

“So?”

“They get paid in two ways. One is that they get all of it when they’ve killed you. The other is that the client gives them some money up front for expenses, and the rest when they’ve got you. Either way, your best friend is time. They’ve just wasted three months for nothing, and spent a lot of money traveling. People like that could have made a lot in three months. Hardly anybody is very difficult to kill. If the client is paying for all this, then by now he’s going to be wondering what he’s getting for his money.”

“I still don’t get it. How does this help me?”

“If you wait long enough, pros go away.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. They don’t hate you. They’re in a business. At the moment when they calculate that the job is a waste of effort, they quit. If they’re getting paid for expenses, the time comes when the client makes the same calculation and stops paying.”

“Then I’ll be safe?”

She cocked her head and pursed her lips, then said reluctantly, “Not exactly. At least not yet.”

“Why not?”

“The client in your case can afford to replace them. But the replacement would have to start all over again at Las Vegas. Pros aren’t likely to turn over their information to competitors.” She shrugged. “I’m not saying you’re in the best position possible, but there are worse.”

“What’s worse than being chased by professional killers?”

She thought for a moment. “I guess the worst is if you’ve committed some really awful crime and people know it.”

“What would you do for a person like that?”

“Nothing,” she said.

16

Seaver drove along the desert highway, watching the long, empty gray road ahead wavering near the distant vanishing point as heat waves rose from the pavement. Now and then a dark reflective spot would appear on the road, the eyes would see it as water, but the brain would say “mirage,” and it would diminish to nothing as he approached it. He drove quickly, feeling the slight lift of the car’s springs as he reached the crest of each little rise, then feeling his body regain a few pounds more than its weight as the car came to the bottom and began the next climb.

Seaver was satisfied that he was going about this in the right way. The three partners had ultimately left the strategy up to him. Earl and Linda were probably getting close to payday by now, so whatever he did, he had to avoid getting in their way. He might have left a message on their answering machine, asking them to get in touch with him. But leaving a message like that on the answering machine of two professional killers required an absolute belief that they could not get caught, recognized, or traced on this job. The world didn’t always work that way. Anybody who had worked in Las Vegas for ten years had seen the ball stop on the double zero a few times.

He had considered tracing their movements and trying to catch up with them. But Earl would not look upon his sudden, uninvited appearance as a favor. It was, in the way these people looked at things, a terrible insult and a violation of their agreement.

Seaver suddenly showing up would mean that there were three people for bystanders to notice, instead of just two. And he would have traveled there by a separate route. That doubled the number of trails that later might be traced to Hatcher’s body. He was not at all sure that he wanted to place himself in some distant city with those two at the precise moment when he convinced them that he was so unprofessional and unreliable as to be an actual danger to them.

No, what he was doing made more sense. Earl and Linda were looking for Hatcher. He was looking for the woman. After he found her would be the time to think about meeting them. Then he would have something to bring to the party.

He had assigned five men just to talk to people who were in the chase-and-find business—skip tracers, retrievers who worked for bail-bond outfits, freelance bounty hunters—to see if any of them had ever come across a woman like this. A few of them had heard vague stories, but none of them knew anything that could lead to an actual living woman. It was then that he had realized that he was going about solving the problem backward.

The people most likely to know about her would be the ones in the run-and-hide business. He had called an old friend from the police department who had quit at about the same time he had and had gone to work in the California prison system. Seaver had not described his problem but had described the sort of prisoner he wanted to talk to. He needed one who had been in lots of jails in different parts of the country and who had drawn a long sentence the last time out. But most important, it had to be one who had a history of trading information for favors.

Seaver saw the low, drab buildings, the fence, and the watch-towers undulating in the heat waves across a barren field far back from the highway. He turned up the long, narrow drive that led to the small parking lot outside the gate and glanced at his watch. The drive out here had taken longer than he had expected, but he supposed it wouldn’t much matter. In order to miss this guy, Seaver would have to be about twenty years late.

As he turned off his car engine, he stopped to glance in the rearview mirror. Then he got out and put on his coat. He had chosen his clothes carefully. He wore a dark-gray summer-weight suit that cost more than his first new car. His white shirt was marine-pressed with the front and collar starched stiff, and the cuffs showed only a glimpse of his Rolex Oyster watch. A naive observer would have interpreted the bow tie as a whimsical touch, but Seaver didn’t expect to meet any naive observers. He was going into a maximum-security prison, where it was well known that nobody with a functioning brain wore anything tied around his neck with a slip-knot.

He walked to the gate, handed his driver’s license to the guard, watched him compare it to the list on his clipboard, then obeyed the invitation to step inside. He held up his arms and stood with his legs apart as the second guard ran a metal detector up and down his body, then ran a hand through several of his pockets. He submitted to the preliminaries patiently. Security was his business, and he knew that each stage of the process had two purposes. Scanning the human body for chunks of metal or contraband was the easy part. The hard part was studying the visitor to see if he had something hidden in his head. Each of these meaningless little steps was a test. A normal person would gradually get used to following the unfamiliar rules that applied in a place like this. The person hiding some rash and violent scheme would either feel his nerve draining out of him or get frustrated to the point of blind, undirected rage. Security was mainly a question of finding out whom you were letting breach your perimeter.