Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

It had not escaped Earl that Linda had been talking in a whispery voice over the telephone at one in the morning. That was three A.M. in Buffalo. Linda would have called with Hatcher’s location as soon as she could—the first minute when she could reach a telephone. If she was with this Carey McKinnon at three o’clock in the morning, worried that he would overhear her, then there wasn’t much question what they were doing. She had been doing it with him for hours, letting him put it to her until he had used himself up and fallen asleep. This was not a simple flirtation where she got a fact out of him that he wouldn’t remember saying and probably didn’t even know was a secret. This was a full night of it, her hair probably wet with sweat and his sperm still dripping out of her, sticky and warm when she called to tell Earl.

He was enraged. He hated this man, and he felt a mixture of awe and disgust at Linda. She had said she would do anything to find Pete Hatcher. But what she had done was not brave or cunning. It was pathetic, requiring only a fawning sort of guile and a strong stomach. It was like biting the head off a chicken. She was soiled. Unclean. The only way he was ever going to feel right about this was to make it even. He was going to do the same to Jane Whitefield before he killed her. Then he was going to make Linda go back and watch him drop the hammer on Carey McKinnon. Maybe he would make her go back and do it herself.

He stepped out of the shower, quickly dried himself, and dressed, tossing pieces of clothing into his suitcase as he saw them. Then he remembered the way she had cut him off at the end of the call—quickly, abruptly. It was probably because McKinnon was awake again. He nearly reeled with the sudden realization that it was worse, more humiliating than he had thought. McKinnon was awake. She would have put down the telephone and needed to distract him. She was doing him again right now, this second, while Earl was two thousand miles away in a hotel room. He didn’t dare close his eyes, because he knew that the sight of it was forming behind his eyelids.

He slammed his suitcase shut, stepped to the door, and hurried out of the room. He took long, purposeful steps down the hallway toward the check-out counter. He was in a perfect mood to kill somebody.

As Jane walked back to the hotel room along the road through Salmon Prairie, she considered whether she had succeeded in leaving the right kind of trail in the wrong direction. She had charged some plane tickets for flights out of Missoula and Helena to credit cards. The accounts were held by male identities that were unripe enough to attract the attention of a hunter who was using a computer network to search. She had made guaranteed reservations for hotels and rental cars in the destination cities so the charges would be recorded and would appear on credit reports.

Her temptation was to use ten identities to build twenty trails in twenty directions. There was no reason to save false faces for fugitives anymore. This was her last trip. But two identities were the right number. If the chasers picked out both of them, they would think that one was an innocent who was not running from anything but didn’t have much of a history. But they couldn’t pick out one and ignore the other, so they would split up. If she left twenty trails, they would sense that she had made them all and wait.

Everything about the way they had tracked and cornered Pete Hatcher looked like at least two people. A lone woman might play the broken-car game, pop him on the spot, and walk away, but she wouldn’t put him in the trunk and expect to drive him away. There must have been at least one man waiting unseen to do the heavy lifting and solve problems. It wasn’t easy to kill an armed cop when he was looking at you.

Jane was almost certain that she had made no mistakes since she had found Hatcher in Montana. They had been on the move for a month, traveling as husband and wife. They had spent a lot of time in the car each day, then used different names in each town where they stopped to check into a motel late in the afternoon. Pete was always visible to motel clerks and guests, but always imperfectly and from a distance. Jane would stand at the counter and sign a name, and Pete would be busy with his head under the lid of the trunk pulling out the suitcases, or under the hood checking the oil. Even if the searchers stopped at the same motels later and asked the right questions, the clerks would not have been able to give them a direction. Jane and Pete had gone slowly, taking detours like tourists who had all summer.

She knew that she was just thinking of reasons to turn Pete loose and go home. Carey had sounded as though her call had depressed him, and the knowledge stung her. When she tried to repeat the conversation now, everything that she had said sounded empty and foolish, and she could do nothing to change it.

Jane stared up the road at the hotel and gave herself a reprimand. The quickest way home was to concentrate on preparing Pete Hatcher for his new life. He had already gotten accustomed to using false names, and he had begun to develop a good sense of how to make himself invisible in public places. He had listened carefully while she had explained how the tricks were done and what to do when they didn’t work.

Now she had to teach him something more subtle and difficult. The way he would defeat his enemies was to outlast them. While they were staring at computer screens or loitering late at night in airport baggage areas or sitting in cars outside hotels at check-out time studying each male who came out the door, he had to be somewhere living a normal, reasonably contented life. If he could do that for long enough, they would give up. Even the owners of a casino couldn’t keep a team of assassins on the payroll forever to search for one man. And the longer he went without showing any intention of doing them harm, the more pointless the search would seem.

Jane had watched the changes in Pete for several days, and she was satisfied with his progress. When she had picked him up in Billings, his personality had already retreated into him like a turtle’s head. Now he was slowly emerging, getting his sense of humor back, looking less like a person recovering from some illness. If she could get him to rebuild himself—not to return to the same old Pete Hatcher, but to see the man he now was as normal—then he had a chance. With a few cosmetic changes and a surrounding establishment—a job, a place to live, a car, a couple of promising friendships—he would be better off than the people who were hunting him.

The last danger that she would have to save him from was the biggest. She had to teach him not to throw away the advantages she had built for him, sink into a depression, and stop trying, or grow so paranoid that he jumped at every shadow and attracted attention. That had been her mistake in Denver. She had sent him off to isolation in a small, dark apartment and effectively severed all of his ties to other human beings. To a man like Pete, who seemed able to maintain a sense of himself only by watching the reflections in other people’s eyes, the days of solitude had been like continuous, small doses of poison. She was going to have to keep being his buddy, build up his confidence, and make him strong again.

She reached the gift shop of the hotel and found it had closed hours ago. She continued to the room, gave her familiar knock, and used her eyes, her ears, and the soles of her feet to try to sense where he was at each moment. Finally he opened the door. “Very good,” she said as she entered and locked the door. “I couldn’t have done anything but fire blind through the door, and I would have missed.”

Pete walked back to his chair and sat down. She could see he was watching something on the television that featured a lot of men flying upside down in fighter planes and shouting into radios. “Good,” he said. “That’s one for me.”