Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

“Pick one, and I’ll call you there tomorrow.”

She felt a chill. “I can’t do that,” she said quickly. “I’ll be using different names, and I don’t know which one or where I’ll be yet. If I did, I couldn’t say it on the phone. I’ll call you.”

There was silence on the other end. Had he figured out that the name would be Mr. and Mrs. something?

“Carey?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can. I know this is hard. I love you.” She had never known that “I love you” was what a person said when she had run out of words and couldn’t say anything else. It was like reaching out a hand in desperation.

“I love you too. Just be careful, and come home in one piece.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve become a very cautious married lady.” She took a deep breath. “That reminds me. I guess I ought to get going now.”

“I could talk to you all night.”

“When we’re together,” she said. “Then I’ll talk until you want to smother me with a pillow. But I’d better go. Some people are born to disappear. This one takes a lot of hand-holding.” She drew in her breath, leaned her forehead against the phone booth, and shut her eyes. It was the middle of the night. If Hatcher was waiting for her to come back, the story that they were in different rooms didn’t make sense. She said quickly, “I love you,” and hung up. She turned and walked to the motel feeling sad and empty.

Jane approached the motel by circling it to study the cars in the lot, the traffic patterns on the two roads that intersected beside it, and the businesses nearby. The town was tiny and clean and presented an unassuming business face. But she could not induce a feeling of safety here. It was not big enough to provide a crowd to hide in, and not remote enough to be hard to find. As soon as Pete seemed rested and presentable, she would get him back on the road.

She thought about her conversation with Carey as she walked. She had been vague and evasive, but she had heard herself say something that she now realized was accurate. She had almost no idea where the chasers were, or what they were thinking. It was possible that Pete, in his novice’s panic and ignorance, had managed to leave them behind in Denver. They would certainly trace his car to Billings, but by the time they did, it would be in an impound lot and Pete could be anywhere.

Only if they were spectacularly good or phenomenally lucky—had an unseen person follow his car all the way to Billings—could they know he had gotten even that far. After that she had taken him out in a rented car, changed to still another car, and driven nearly eight hours. It was very unlikely that they could have followed without her seeing them.

If she kept Pete out of airports and big, well-lighted cities for a time, she would at least avoid squandering the lead she had on them. One way to do that was to keep him in suspended animation in the tiny resort towns up here, looking like one of the thousands of summer tourists.

She knew a little bit about the way the shooters must have found him the first time. They had looked at computerized public records and found out that the same man in Denver had registered a car and bought a gun at the same time. Probably they had run a credit check and found that he had also just arrived in town, and then they had flown in to take a look at him.

Now Jane would keep him from doing anything that got him on any lists for a time. Then she could control where and when he did anything else that created public records. She had already bought him a car under the name Wendy Wasserman. She would get him settled in his next apartment, find him a job, and help him fit in with the locals. He had already given in to the urge to buy a gun, and he still had it, so he probably wouldn’t make that mistake again.

She allowed herself a small feeling of optimism. Eight hours was not a huge lead, but it was growing. When she knocked on the door of their motel room, she heard him go to the window, saw him move the curtain aside to look out, then heard him step to the door and open it.

She slipped inside, closed the door, and glanced at him. He was in a pair of blue boxer shorts, and he turned away and hastily slipped his pistol into a pile of clothing on a chair. She couldn’t help being surprised by the sight of his body, but she fought to keep him from noticing. She had plucked the poor man away from Billings without his suitcase. She had not expected him to sleep fully dressed. She had not expected anything at all, and she reminded herself that she was going to have to anticipate his needs or she was going to wear them both out. She tried to formulate some words that would get them past this moment.

“It looks clear out there.” The attempt disappointed her. After all, what he was wearing wasn’t different from what men wore on the beach. She was a grown-up married woman. What difference did it make what he wore? Then it occurred to her that she was going to need to wear something to bed too. What she wore did seem to her to make a difference.

She pushed the thought aside and let the space fill itself with a trivial observation that had been prickling the back of her mind. “You did okay a minute ago, but all I’ve got to do right now is give you lessons, so here’s another one. You heard the right knock, so you thought it was me. You looked around the curtain to see if I was alone. Good. But I heard you, and saw you, and that was not so good. If I had been the wrong person giving the right knock, you’d be dead.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“You were right to want to look before you opened the door. The very best time for them would be those few seconds while you and I were standing together with the door open. They could see us both in the light, and if they missed one of us the first time, they wouldn’t need to break anything down to get the survivor. But you want to look without letting anybody know you’re doing it. Do what the cops do on surveillance: don’t move the curtain, just look over the top of the track it’s on.”

“You can’t see anything but the wall,” he said. “The track is above the glass.”

She moved a chair to the far side of the window, and said, “Trust me.”

Pete stepped on the chair and looked down over the top of the metal track. In the two-inch space he could clearly see the step in front of the door, the wall on either side of the door, and some of the sidewalk. “I can see more from here than I could when I opened the curtain.”

“Right. It’s a view that shows you the likely hiding places around the door. It’s above them, which is good, because people seldom look up unless they know what they’re looking for. They look to both sides, look behind, look down.”

“I never noticed that. Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the way the skull is connected to the neck. Maybe it’s some prehistoric instinct that serious trouble hardly ever comes at an animal our size from above the treetops. Notice anything else while you were up there?”

“It’s an odd angle.”

“Right. When you were at ground level peeking between the curtains, they could have seen you and shot you through the glass from the left, from the right, or from the parking lot. When you were beside the window and above it, the right side of the window and the parking lot were out. Anybody there couldn’t see you. The only danger left was that the person at the door would look up and to his left, pull out a weapon before you saw him do it, and make a world-class shot that hit the thin slice of your body that wasn’t protected behind the wall or the woodwork—all of that before you moved. Or, since you had a gun in your hand, before you opened fire on his completely exposed body.”