Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Stillman put his tongue to his lips and spat out a flake of loose tobacco. “Okay, then I know some things.”

“Go on.”

“It’s probably none of it true. People talk about things like that. There’s a pair of Siamese twins in Vacaville they have to let out every other week, because one of them didn’t get convicted. There’s a four-fingered lawyer in San Diego who knows one thing they forget to do in almost every trial, so he can get anybody off who will send him a finger. One of the contractors who built this place was getting kickbacks on the materials, so just in case they caught him, he put a secret tunnel under the infirmary. There’s a woman who takes people out of the world and gives them new lives.”

“A little bit past her prime with blond hair, right?”

“Not in the version I heard. It was black. She had long black hair, and she was nice looking. I don’t vouch for that, because in stories the girl is always that way. It wasn’t like you said before, either. I heard the way it works is, you have to come to her. And you have to clean yourself before you do. If you want to bring something you left behind—maybe what you stole, maybe a girlfriend—she’ll tell you you’re not ready for her. If what you want is another chance to kill the one who set you up, she’ll tell you to go do it and not come back. She’s in the running business, not the fighting business. You don’t just give up your name, you have to give up everything you ever were, ever saw or did. You’re a new person, who doesn’t know any of that.”

“I heard that,” Seaver lied. It occurred to him that maybe Hatcher wasn’t planning to resurface after all—that maybe this was all a waste of time. But it was way too late for that kind of thinking. It just weakened him, distracted him. The partners had made their decision, and they were waiting. “Where do you go?”

“You mean where does she take you?”

Seaver spoke patiently, almost respectfully. “No. You’re on the run. You collect a pile of money for her fee. Where do you take it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who did you hear all this from?”

“I heard it a few times, and I can’t sort out which part I heard which time. The first one was seven or eight years ago, in Alameda County Jail. It was an old guy, and he was telling a kid. See, the kid was in for the first time. They had a running tab on him. It started out as some kid thing—vandalism or something. He tried to run: resisting arrest. He hot-wired a car to get away: grand theft auto. He drove it fast until a police car crashed into him to run him off the road, so it was attempted vehicular manslaughter. He struggled, so it was assaulting a police officer. On and on. He tried to hang himself, but the old man cut him down with a shank he carried. He said to the kid, ‘You got to get yourself in shape so the guards don’t know about this. On the day of your arraignment, you’re going to get out on bail for a month or so while they dream up more charges. That’s your chance. But if they know you did this, they can keep you here and watch you.’ He helped the kid get rid of the homemade rope and cover the welts, and then told him about the woman.”

“In front of you?”

“No. The old guy never talked to me at all. He didn’t like me from the minute he laid eyes on me. The kid came to me later and asked me if the old man was crazy—just jerking him around, or what.”

“How did he tell the kid to get in touch with this woman?”

“That was one of the things that made me think it was bullshit. He wouldn’t tell the kid the address, because the kid was too green to make it that far. The kid had to wait until he was out and write her a letter, then let her say where to meet her.”

“Do you remember where the letter was supposed to go?”

“A post office box in L.A. The next time I heard it, there was a house somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who mentioned the house?”

“Some counterfeiter. Just what they do is so stupid that you can’t believe what they say. They all get caught, then go out and do it again.”

Seaver sighed and looked at Stillman. He had seen Stillman’s record. The man had been in jails for twelve of his thirty-one years, and there was something he’d done before the adult record had begun that had put him in youth camp. If he ever got out again, he’d be a three-time loser before he even did anything.

Stillman went on. “He wouldn’t tell me where the house was. He said the only reason he had the address was because his girlfriend gave it to him just before he got arrested. She didn’t get arrested, though. She got away, and never got caught.”

“Is that true?”

“I once saw a thing on TV where they said nobody ever saw a U.F.O. until somebody said he saw one in 1947. Once he said it, everybody and his brother started seeing them. Maybe that’s the year when the U.F.O.’s got here. Maybe it’s just that once somebody makes something up, then it’s everybody’s. It gets to be another way to seem important, to have something to tell, because nothing that’s true about you is worth listening to. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, God, all that.”

“Do you think I could get to any of these guys—the old man, for instance?”

“The old man was here for a while, but he’s been dead a couple of years. The counterfeiter, name is Bill Ortega, I heard he was in federal prison back east someplace. I don’t know his girlfriend’s name. If you’ve got a lot of connections in the correctional system, maybe you can track him down.”

“What about the kid?” Seaver’s hands moved unseen from his lap to grip the support under the table.

Stillman squinted up into the air and smiled. “Now, him I don’t know about. I just don’t know. For years I’ve been wondering. Once in a while, I ask around with the guys who have been in a lot of joints all over. His name was Phil O’Meara. Nobody’s seen him, or seen his name on the count, or knows anybody who’s met him.” He smirked mysteriously. “Maybe he figured out to get the knot behind his ear and hung himself right.”

Seaver’s feet kicked out under the table and pushed Still-man’s chair over backward onto the floor. Seaver sprang up, used one arm to vault over the table, and came down with his knee on Stillman’s chest.

He spoke quietly, through clenched teeth. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? You think maybe, just maybe, they’ll forget who you are one day and let you unload the grocery truck so you can strangle the driver. Let me tell you something. It isn’t going to happen. And even if it did, and you got to her, she’d take one look at you and shut the door. You’re an evolutionary dead end, a throwback. She can smell it on you as well as I can. She can’t predict what you’re going to do next, because even you can’t. You’re a bad risk. Don’t hold out on me, because it’s nothing you’re ever going to use.”

Stillman seemed to be immune to surprise. His face seemed to slacken, to go blank in the prisoner’s stare. He looked past Seaver at the ceiling and said, “Two packs of cigarettes a week. A job in the library.”

“Done.”

“The box wasn’t in Los Angeles, it was in New York City. It’s Box 345, 7902 Elizabeth Street, in New York. There’s some fake name attached to it—a man’s name.”

Hours later, Seaver sat staring out through the scratched plastic pane of the window at the baggage carts and fuel trucks slipping past him backward as his airplane was pushed away from the terminal by a tractor with a tow bar. He thought about Earl and Linda again. When he had hired them, he had known a lot about Hatcher, but nothing about the woman. It was just as well, because this way he didn’t have to worry about bumping into them on this trip. With nothing to go on, they wouldn’t have seen her as the way to find Hatcher.