Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

18

Jane left the rented car at the agency in Missoula and picked up the one she had parked on the university campus. Pete Hatcher watched everything she did and listened to her explanations, then nodded his head. He had stopped asking questions, and that set off a tiny alarm in the back of Jane’s mind. It would not be out of the question for a man in his position to be contemplating suicide. It was also possible that he was only getting tired and passive. If that lasted long enough, it wasn’t much different from suicide.

She drove him northeast on Route 200 away from Missoula, and stopped at a motel in a small town called Potomac. They sat in the car for a moment. She waited for him to ask a question. Finally, she pulled a small leather wallet out of her purse and handed it to him.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“We need to sleep now. This is a motel. It isn’t part of a national chain, so that makes its records a lot harder to get. If we do everything the way everybody else does, we’re invisible. What everybody else does is that the man goes inside and registers. For the moment, we’re going to travel as Mr. and Mrs. Michael Phelan of Los Angeles. I have identification that matches. Now go do it.”

Too soon, he came out of the office and walked to the car. “They don’t have any suites or anything like that,” he said. “Should I rent two rooms?”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. He seemed to have lost his will to keep his mind working. “Pull yourself together and think. Mr. and Mrs. Phelan don’t sleep in separate rooms. Get it over with.”

He disappeared inside the office again and came out carrying a key. She watched him open the door, then started the car and pulled it into a parking space a distance from the room and went to join him inside. She surveyed the room. Her eyes rested on the king-size bed in the center of the floor. She forced them to move on. That was an extra problem with hiding a man. Dancing around in cramped quarters to keep the distances proper and the bodies covered became part of the job. She decided not to face that conversation yet. Anything she said now would not get a second bed in here, and would make him more passive and tentative.

She looked out the windows, checked the locks, examined the curtains, and continued her commentary. “When you check in, you take a mental picture of the world outside. The best way out of here is to the left, toward the car. I parked it in front of another door, away from the office. If somebody finds out we’re here, he doesn’t know which car is ours. If he finds the car, he doesn’t know which room is ours. It’s late now, so most of the other cars that will be in the lot are already here. Next time you look, what you’ll be looking for is newcomers. You lock everything that will lock.” She flipped the deadbolt and the safety latch. “If you do all the little things right, you’ll sleep better.”

She glanced at her watch. “I’m going out for a few minutes. When I come back I’ll knock four times, like this.” She rapped on the table.

“Where are you going?”

“To make a phone call from the booth at the gas station.”

“There’s a phone right here.”

“There would be a record of the call.”

She slipped out and walked toward the car in case the night clerk happened to be watching, then kept going past it and across the weedy margin of the property to the gas station, put a quarter into the telephone slot, and dialed zero, then the number of the house in Amherst. “I’d like to make a collect call. It’s Jane.”

She heard Carey pick up the telephone. “Operator.” The word came out before he had even said hello. “Will you accept a collect call from Jane?”

“Sure,” he said. The operator clicked off. “Jane?”

“Hi,” she answered.

“You okay?”

“Yes. I found him, and I picked him up, and now I’ve got him hundreds of miles away. I think we’re two hops ahead of them. Maybe only one hop, but it’s a good one.”

“Where are you?”

The question startled her. She had never talked to anybody at home while she was working—not really talked, because she had always lied. She felt a twinge almost like pain when she said, “I’m in a little town in the Wild West. At least I think I’m in town. There’s not much here, so I can’t be sure.”

“A hotel or something?”

“Sure. It’s not the Hilton, but I haven’t seen any cockroaches either.” She was saying words that were true, but she was lying. He wanted to know everything, and she was giving him breezy nonsense.

“You’re staying with … him? That can’t be safe.”

The lie came easily, like breathing, really. “Well, no, not exactly. One of the tricks of the trade. He’s in his motel room and I checked into another room across the parking lot. That way I can watch his door, and if anything suspicious happens, all I have to do is dial his room. He goes out the window on the side I can see is clear, and I pick him up on the highway.”

She knew it sounded plausible. She had been lying for so long that it was almost a reflex. She had heard the trouble building in his voice, and she had flinched to evade it. She pushed the question and the answer into a corner of her mind and labeled the corner a special exception. She had been trying to save him some anxiety, and the anxiety would have been pointless, because he would have been worrying about a dangerous situation that she had no way to evade. Or maybe, in the back of his mind, he had been worried about … something else. That was something she simply was not going to do, so worrying about it would serve no purpose. She loved Carey McKinnon.

Carey was already talking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I missed that.”

“I said, Do you know where you’re going next, or when you’ll be home?”

His kind, patient voice opened a wound in her, and she tried to make up for the small lie. “I’ll tell you what I know at the moment,” she said. “The attempt these people made was a little worse than I thought. He would be dead now if a cop hadn’t happened along in time to take the bullet for him. So he’s a mess—I mean psychologically. Guilty, scared, and, consequently, stupid. The hunters are a lot better at it than I had hoped, so I have to be cautious. At the moment the plan is to take him someplace where he’ll be almost impossible to find, teach him everything he could possibly need to know, and split. That’s what I should have done in the first place, but I couldn’t.”

Carey’s voice was a monotone, as though there was hurt and anger that he was making an effort to keep out of it. “It’s starting to sound like it will take a lot of time.”

“It shouldn’t,” she said. Why was she talking to him as though there were lawyers present? “There is nothing in the whole world that I want more than to be with you. Right now. Tonight. But I think this could take a couple of weeks. I’ve got to be sure I’ve lost the hunters, and then get him settled. When that’s done, I’ll rush home and have a lot of fun being Mrs. McKinnon again. Forever. Maybe I’ll lock you in the house for a month and see for myself if the bad reputation you have is justified. I’m pretty sure it is, but I’d like to double-check.”

She heard him give a small, unvoiced chuckle. “I miss you,” he said. She heard a sigh. “Well, I guess there’s nothing much I can do except wait and hold you to your word. Do what you have to do, and get home.”

She loved him. The lies were a pain in her chest. “I miss you so much I could cry.” She wanted to tell him things. A big truck rushed past on the highway and a hot, dusty wind blew off the pavement into her face. “Stupid trucks,” she said. “I’m going to try to jump around to a few of these little towns for a couple of days to see if anybody’s looking for us, then leave some trails in the wrong direction. After that I’ll put him in a place where he can stay for twenty years. But first, the little towns.”