Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Pete came out fully dressed and with hair wet from the shower, picked up his cards and both suitcases, and followed the usual routines. He set the suitcases down beside the car, dropped something so he could look beneath it, peered under the hood, and then loaded the trunk while Jane checked out. She came back and said, “You want to eat breakfast before we move on?”

“No,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get down the road a bit before we stop.”

Jane nodded and got into the passenger seat. She was not sure whether he was feeling queasy from the syrupy drinks or wanted to be gone before his little playmates woke up. As he drove off the lot onto the highway, he answered her question. “I don’t want to run into Pam and Carol.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because they want to travel with us for a few days. It came up last night. I can’t think of a good way to refuse without hurting their feelings. Everything I tried last night had an answer. This way I’m a jerk, and that will burn off the attraction. Because I left them both, neither one will take it personally. In a day or two they won’t mention me, even to each other.”

Jane did not speak, because he was probably right. His famous understanding of women seemed to have come back to him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise: he had given himself a giant dose of femininity in the past twelve hours. She studied her road map.

They stopped outside a big restaurant in Swan Lake. There was no evidence on the signs on nearby businesses that the name referred to anything but a lake that had once had swans in it. They walked inside and the head waitress noticed them. “Would you like to sit inside, or outside on the terrace?”

Pete glanced at Jane, who said, “Inside” and moved into the interior of the restaurant. “Is that booth over there taken?”

“No,” said the waitress, “but I could seat you by the window if you like.”

“No, thanks,” said Jane.

When the woman had left the menus and returned to her post by the door, Pete said, “What’s wrong? Are you hungover?”

Jane leaned forward, her forearms on the table, so she could talk quietly. “It’s a beautiful spot, so most people want to sit where they can see it. This time you don’t want what everybody else wants.”

“I don’t?”

“Sitting here is a precaution that costs you nothing, loses you nothing. It makes you invisible to anybody but the people to the side of this booth.”

His eyes moved to the side. “There aren’t any people to the side of this booth.”

She smiled. “That’s why I picked this one instead of another. Almost all precautions are simple and effortless. After a time you’ll take them without thinking each one through. The important thing is that you look at each situation and modify it to make yourself comfortable. If there’s a choice between a tiny bit of vulnerability and none at all, you pick none.”

“I thought the best place to hide was in a crowd.”

“It can be. If a crowd is immobile and on display, then it can’t hide you. If what you want it for is to hold off shooters by surrounding yourself with witnesses, then twenty is better than a thousand, because they can’t shoot even twenty, and all of them will see. So you don’t stand in long lines to go to movies or plays or games. You do your waiting at home. When the movie has been out a month, you can walk right in.”

“What if it’s a game? You can’t wait a month for that.”

“Watch it on television. If it’s so important to you that you still want to go, then it’s important enough to pay for the safest seats in the stadium.”

“Which are those?”

“Down near the field. The only ones who can see your face in a stadium are the ones below you. A hunter scanning for you would look up toward the seats in the back—not only because the back seats feel like a hiding place to an amateur, but because they’re all the hunter can see. So you pick the front seats. Everything is a choice.” She smiled. “You’re getting a feel for this. All you have to do is keep trying it out in different situations until they’re all automatic.”

Another waitress arrived and took their orders, then bustled off to the kitchen window to clip it to a stainless-steel wheel for the cooks to read.

Pete stared at the table. “ ‘Different situations.’ You’re trying to be tactful about the mistakes I made last night, aren’t you?”

Jane looked away for a moment, then back to him. “What was wrong last night? You tell me.”

“We met two strangers. I let them get too close before I was sure they were okay.”

“Go on.”

“I went to their room. Somebody could have been waiting.”

She waited, but that was all he was willing to say. “Or been called in by one of them while the other one … kept you busy. Prostitutes have been robbing clients for thousands of years, so the routines are pretty slick by now. You couldn’t know all of them.”

“For starters, they weren’t prostitutes.”

“I’m teaching you how to live by your wits, not by luck. Neither of us knew anything about them when they showed up. What about my mistakes?”

“Yours?”

“Sure. You can learn from those too.”

He seemed shocked. After a moment, he said, “I guess you let them get too close.”

“Good. I never saw them coming until they were by the corner of the building. I should have kept scanning the entrances to the courtyard while I was swimming.”

“Like those Secret Service guys,” he said sadly. “What a way to live.”

“It would have been easier than that. All I had to do was keep my mind on the possibility, and looking would have been unavoidable. As it happened, it didn’t matter. As soon as I saw them, I was certain they weren’t dangerous.”

“How?”

“They showed up in the skimpiest suits imaginable.” She saw Pete wince, but she went on. “In certain situations that would be ominous. Maybe they had been sent to distract you, keep you from looking in another direction. But it also let us see that they couldn’t be armed. And their presence wouldn’t make it any easier for someone else to kill you: they might get hit in the dark, and they could hardly expect me to be stupefied by the sight of a girl in a bikini.”

“Stupefied?”

“I’m sorry,” said Jane. “Distracted.”

“I’m the one who’s sorry. Once again.”

Jane’s eyes flicked to his face and then around the dining room. He was miserable, and she wasn’t being fair. “I guess we have to clear the air some more, don’t we?”

Pete shrugged. His face was apologetic and appealing, like a little boy who wanted to be forgiven.

Jane took a deep breath and saw the waitress striding toward them on rubber soles, carrying a tray. Jane waited until the waitress had served them, said, “Enjoy your meal,” and hurried away.

“Back to that air,” she said. “I’m a guide. I lead people who are about to be killed to places where nobody wants to kill them. I give them pieces of paper that say they’re somebody else. To the extent that I can, I train them to be the new person—how to look, act, think. If they’re being actively hunted, I give them a few tricks that can fool hunters.”

“And?”

“And then I turn them loose and go home.” Jane stared into his eyes and watched him to see if he understood everything she was saying. There was light behind his eyes, but it seemed only to be the life force, the glow of the eyes of a big, healthy animal.

“What is he like?”

Jane stiffened. “That wasn’t … I wasn’t talking about him.”

“No,” he said. “You know everything about other people, but they’re not supposed to know anything about you.”