Thomas Perry: Shadow Woman

She bought breakfast and waited for her flight in the cafeteria, because fewer people could pass close by and look at her face here than in the waiting area. Every move Jane made while she was working was calculated to shift the odds a little more into her favor. Taking Pete Hatcher out of the world from a standing start had presented special problems and forced her to accept special risks.

Usually the ones she took out of trouble could be taken more quietly. A woman with bruises would show up at a shelter in the middle of a big city a thousand miles away and talk to a counselor. After an hour or two of listening to options and remedies that had already been tried and gotten her more bruises, she would tell the counselor that what she really wanted was magic—to simply have it all end and start again as somebody else. The counselor would pick up the telephone, and maybe the woman would notice that the counselor’s other hand was busy erasing her name from the sign-in list.

The ones who were children usually arrived at Jane’s door in the night, holding the hand of some adult who didn’t think of herself as a hero, who maybe hadn’t even run the inventory of statutory punishments for what she was doing but already knew that the punishment for doing nothing was worse.

The usual victims were the helpless, and they were almost invisible to begin with. The authorities who had not seen their agony were no better at noticing their absence. Their names were simply added to the enormous list of people all over the country who were missing, and after they had left Jane’s hands those names were no longer theirs. The petty criminals—the adults who had burned up one life by an accretion of small mistakes and infractions—were almost as easy. They often came to her at a time when they, at least, believed they were in no immediate danger. That meant they had no friends, no plans, and no temptations to keep their minds off the emptiness they had created for themselves.

Pete Hatcher had been the other kind. He was already trapped, and she had to get him out while their eyes were on him. He had been a successful middle manager in a town where the locals were all in the same business and engaged in ferocious competition to dominate it. Once he had come under suspicion at Pleasure, Inc., there had been little that could happen to dispel it.

When he asked why he was being isolated and kept out of meetings, they decided he must have been waiting anxiously for signs that his disloyalty had been discovered. When he mentioned the possibility that it was time to find a new job, they thought he had been conspiring with a competitor who had already prepared a safe haven for him. When he offered to resign with no job in sight, they figured he must not need one—had probably found a way to skim casino proceeds or helped an accomplice fix a game. It was when he did nothing that their worst fears were aroused. They suspected he was staying in place because he had made a deal with some federal agency and had been bullied into collecting evidence for them. They had watched him for weeks, waiting to find out which it was so they could clean it up after they killed him.

Casinos were like a lot of businesses. A tenth of what went on was disguised by showmanship, and the rest was invisible. Part of what wasn’t easy to see were their gigantic security departments. They had people to guard and transport the vast sums of cash that appeared each day, other people to watch the dealers, cashiers, and croupiers to be sure that the nimblest fingers in the world never palmed anything, others to investigate possible high rollers, still others to find them if they didn’t pay. They had more to simply protect the casino itself—people who watched for undesirable visitors who had come to prey on the guests and quickly, quietly hustled them away before they disturbed the unreal tranquility of the gambling palace. It had always struck Jane as ironic that probably the safest place in the country for a woman traveling alone was inside any of the big Las Vegas hotels.

In a way, the security was what had saved Pete Hatcher. Without that enveloping but unobtrusive protection, a woman named Paula might not have felt comfortable enough to go there by herself, and certainly wouldn’t have dared get friendly with a gambler like him. A year later, when he was in trouble and trying to think of places to stay that his bosses wouldn’t know about, he had remembered Paula’s number and she had remembered Jane’s.

Jane heard her flight announced over the loudspeaker, picked up her canvas bag, and walked toward the gate. She held herself with her spine straight and looked directly ahead, never allowing her eyes to focus on those of the other travelers, never turning away to give them permission to study her. She walked quickly, joined the line after it had begun to move efficiently but was long enough to include a lot of other people who would be more interesting for a bored observer to stare at than she was, and disappeared into the loading tunnel.

As soon as the plane was in the air, Jane pushed her seat back as far as it would go and closed her eyes. She had been anxious for two nights, trying to work out a path for Pete Hatcher that wouldn’t lead him in front of a gun muzzle, then spent the third running. She knew she could sleep only fitfully now, because she had not dreamed in four nights and her mind was holding a jumbled backlog of jarring impressions that would plague her sleep. But lying with her eyes closed prevented other passengers from trying to talk to her, and that was another of her precautions. The road home was where the worst of the traps were, because she had already given dangerous people a reason to want her. That was when they would be making their best attempts to track her or place friends of theirs in her path.

Jane got off the plane in Chicago and found another, under the name Tracy Morgan, that took her to Rochester, New York. In the airport store she bought a packet of pipe tobacco, then drove a few miles southeast of the airport to Mendon.

Jane parked her car along the road above the bend of Honeoye Creek and walked to the quiet little park at Mendon Ponds. She sat where she always sat when she came here, at a picnic table with a surface scarred with carved initials, took out her manicure kit, and trimmed and buffed her nails.

The two little lakes were glassy and greenish. The tall, thick trees along the bank away from the road grew out of the water from submerged roots and protected the ponds from the tiniest breeze. The only ripples came from long-legged water bugs that skittered across the surface now and then.

Three hundred feet away, up the grassy bank, a mother with very white legs and feet sat in the shade of a sunhat and big dark glasses, watching her two little golden-haired children digging with plastic shovels in the muck. If the mother wasn’t careful, they might actually find something, Jane thought. The People had lived here once. That black mud made it easy to grow corn, beans, and squash with a digging stick, and the weeds came right up with a tug.

The village was called Dayodehokto, a phrase that meant “a bend in a creek,” so the rows of longhouses had probably been close to the stream on the far side of the trees, but the cultivated fields had stretched for a couple of miles in all directions. A Dutchman who came through here in the 1670s counted 120 longhouses with twelve or thirteen fires in a line down the center of each one. On opposite sides of each fire were a pair of compartments, where two adult women slept with their husbands—when the men were home—and their children. After allowing for the usual exaggeration, Jane guessed the village would have contained nearly three thousand people on June 23, 1687, when this quiet little spot had its moment of importance in global politics.