Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

“What change?”

“We just stepped across the Continental Divide. If you spill your canteen now, it goes into the Mississippi instead of the Pacific.”

“I’ll try to be careful to preserve the levees.”

There was a break in the traffic and they hurried across the road. Pete stopped beside a wooden sign that had nothing on it but HIGHLINE TRAIL and an arrow pointing north. “Just how long is this trail?”

She began to walk on the soft, irregular ground, under hemlocks and cedars. It forced Pete to take the first step off the pavement, then hurry to catch up with her, and then they were walking along and the decision was over. “How long?”

“Long.”

“What does ‘long’ mean to a woman like you in miles?”

“On the map it looks like twenty as the crow flies, and maybe thirty if you take it in sections, point to point. The map isn’t big enough to take into account all the meandering, which is what trails through wilderness do. And it’s two-dimensional, so I can’t tell just how hard the climbing will be. It could be fifty miles and seem like three times that.”

“Do you mind if I keep asking questions?”

“Nobody can hear us, and the trail is shorter if you talk.”

“What if they find the car?”

“Then they have to make a guess. If they think we changed cars, then they’ll drive fast away from here to try to catch up and see the new one. If they think we abandoned it and walked off into the mountains, they have to guess which trail we took. If we went north toward Canada, there are a dozen branches ahead that come out pretty far from each other. But most likely they’ll think we left the car so it would look as though we headed north for Canada, but turned south or east or west instead. Those trails all reach roads at some point.”

“What if they don’t fool themselves, know we headed for Canada, and pick the right trail?”

“Then they have other choices. They have to guess where we’ll surface when we get to Canada, drive up there, and wait, or come up the trail after us.”

“That’s the one I don’t like: some guy with a gun coming out here after us.”

“Even if they do, they still have choices. We’re carrying about what a cautious person would take on a day trip. A smart person would know there was the possibility of not making it back by dark and having to spend one night out there. Anybody who follows could choose to travel lighter than that for speed, or they could carry tents and heavy clothes and a week’s food and water. If they travel lighter than we are, they could easily have to turn around and give up. If they load themselves down with lots of gear, they’ll have a very hard time catching up with us.”

“Especially with all those guns.”

She laughed. “I wasn’t going to mention those.” She looked at him for a moment as they walked along. He seemed calm. “But you’re right. Good sniper rifles are heavy—ten to fifteen pounds with the scope. The ammo isn’t light, and this guy isn’t likely to scrimp on that. It’s usually made for the military, so it’s 7.62 millimeters wide and 50 millimeters long. He’ll also carry a sidearm of some kind, and ammo for that. I’d say he’ll be carrying an extra twenty pounds of metal that we’re not.”

“Maybe we’ll wish we were.”

“I doubt it, because if he’s carrying the weight, he probably won’t catch us. What you do when you’re running is put lots and lots of forks in the road behind you. Each time the hunter comes to one, your chance of losing him is fifty percent. Next fork, fifty percent. We’ve put a lot of forks behind us already. If we stay ahead of him, then even making all the right choices won’t help him.”

She looked up at him as they walked. He was tall and strong, and he was in acceptable physical condition, because all the women who got off airplanes in Nevada would have found that attractive. “How do you feel?”

“Scared.”

“Me too. Are you dizzy or light-headed, sick to your stomach?”

“No more than I have been for months. Why?”

“Then you don’t have mountain sickness. I didn’t think you would, after three months in Denver. Are your muscles warm and loose?”

“Don’t tell me,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” said Jane. “But we’ve only got about two hours of light left. I’d really like to get the first of those forks in the trail behind us.” She began with a slow trot, the pack shifting at each step and making clanking noises. Pete trotted along, making even more noise. When Jane felt the sweat beginning to come, she lengthened her steps a little, watching the trail for rocks and roots and trenches.

He said, “We sound like a pair of skeletons on a tin roof.”

“The noise is good,” she said.

“It is?”

“Bears don’t like surprises.”

26

As Carey made his evening hospital rounds, he kept thinking about Jane. Here it was late summer, but in the Rocky Mountains it must be getting cold already. She had sounded well and confident that she knew what she was doing, but he suspected that she would never have called if she had any doubt that she could convey that impression. She had been perfectly capable of lying to him about what she was doing for over a decade, and he had never suspected her. That was a train of thought he decided not to follow. She would get her client to wherever he was going, and she would come back to him. She would be very surprised at how welcome she was going to be.

He left the room of Mr. Cadwallader and walked down the hallway toward the nurses’ station to make his notes. He was pleased. Cadwallader would be moving around nicely by noon tomorrow, and home by the next day. As he pulled Cadwallader’s chart from the holder, Nancy Prelsky tapped him on the shoulder. “Telephone, Doctor.”

“Huh?” He looked up. “Oh, thanks.”

As he took the receiver, he assumed it would be Joy at his office. “Dr. McKinnon.”

“Hello, Carey.” The voice shocked him. How could Susan Haynes have known where to call him? Of course. The main switchboard had tracked him down and connected her. He hoped they had done it because it was a slow evening, and not because she had implied it was an emergency.

“Hello,” said Carey. “Look, I don’t want to be rude, but didn’t they tell you I’m on duty right now? And this phone is at a nurses’ station on a floor with some very sick people.”

“I apologize for calling you at work, but I’ll make it brief. After last night’s fiasco I’d like to start over again, and invite you and your wife to a dinner party with a few friends. There will be about twelve, and that takes a little advance notice.”

He winced. He hated dinner parties, and he was appalled that this woman would call a surgeon in the middle of his rounds to arrange some social event. “I think that’s the sort of problem we ought to talk about at another time. If you’ll leave your number with my answering service, I’ll try to call you tomorrow.”

“Please. You have to give me a way to thank you, and this is the way it’s done. Can you tell me when Jane will be home?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Why in the world not?”

“I just don’t.”

“I’m sorry to be pushy, but this kind of dinner party takes a certain amount of thought and arranging. Would you please call her and ask?”

He found himself looking around to see if Nancy was still within hearing range. He glanced at the call board and saw that there was a trouble light flashing on the board to signal that an IV had come loose in Room 469. “I can’t call her. She’ll call me when she can—probably in two or three days.”

“Two or three days? Where is she—in jail?”