Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

He tried to be patient, but he could feel the anger growing. “She’s hiking in the mountains, and the place she’s going is about twenty miles away, by air. Since she doesn’t have wings, it’ll take that long to get to a phone, and then she’ll call. I’ll try to remember to ask her then, and let you know. That’s the best I can do.”

“Fair enough,” said Susan. “I’ll let you go now. I’m sorry to be such a pain, but I want to make it up to you for last night, and I’m warning you I won’t take no for an answer. Good-bye.”

As soon as she heard a fresh dial tone, Linda quickly punched new numbers into the telephone. She had wanted to goad him into making just one telephone call to Jane, instead of always waiting for her to check in. If he had agreed to call Jane, she could be sure he would have done it from his home telephone: he was too self-important about his work to do it from the hospital. Then Linda could have tape-recorded the tones of the number he dialed, just as she had done in Hatcher’s apartment in Denver. The tactic had not worked this time. Jane had not brought Hatcher to a long-term hiding place yet, so she hadn’t given Carey a number he could call. But what Carey had given Linda was better. It was fresher, harder to get, and so it proved that she was better.

As she listened to the telephone ringing, she began to tease herself with thoughts about what she could say to make Earl feel the way she wanted him to. By the time the hotel operator answered, Linda was already beginning to feel choked with the emotions she had induced. When she gave the room number, her voice came out in a brave, sad little sigh.

Earl sat waiting in Lenny’s hotel room in Kalispell. He lifted the new British Arctic Warfare sniper rifle out of its fitted transit case and began to break it down so he could clean and oil it. He lovingly ran his fingertips along the smooth nylon foregrip, then loosened the Allen screws. He took out the trigger assembly and adjusted the pull and travel once again.

He had fired from a crook in a tree on the hill at five hundred yards through a window and drilled that guy’s temple. If he could have propped him up again and taken more shots, he could have grouped them within an inch of the first. He had supposed that watching her client’s head suddenly spout blood across breakfast would be sufficient for Jane for the moment, so he had not searched for her in the crowd and tried to hold her in the crosshairs. He wanted something more complicated and meaningful to happen to her.

The rifle had a simple, unambiguous integrity. The rifle was perfect. Earl was not. He had let himself be seduced by the beauty of it, the smooth, skinlike touch of the nylon stock against his cheek, the dull gleam of the barrel and the clear, soundless image in the scope. He had found the car in the parking lot, he had seen a man with light wavy hair sit down in the window with a dark-haired woman, and he had reached out and harvested him.

Earl had not needed to force himself to wait to make the shot true, because the rifle was perfect. He could exert three pounds of pressure with his finger and the man would certainly be dead. It was only after he had felt the recoil against his shoulder and the scope had settled on the window again that he had perceived that something had gone wrong. He had expected that the restaurant would be abruptly churned into turmoil, with people standing to bump into each other and spilling things, because he had seen it happen before. Seeing the second dark-haired woman pass across the field of the scope had not convinced him. It was driving down from the mountain and seeing that the car he had followed from Salmon Prairie was already heading up the road.

He pushed the knurled lever on the left side of the receiver, slid the bolt out of the rifle, and set it down on the table beside the Allen screws. Every piece of the A.W. reminded him by its weighty, elegant, and indestructable steel, machined to an exacting tolerance, that he was not its equal. This time it had not been a cop stumbling blind into the middle of the hit. This time it had been Earl getting so confident of his invincibility with the new rifle, and so eager to exert it, that he had reacted like a kid, popping the cap because his overheated mind had assumed that any creature that came along a deer run had to be a deer. People were a sorry commodity compared to precision rifles.

When the telephone rang, he glanced at his watch and noted that it was four o’clock. That made it six in Buffalo. He respectfully set the rifle on the bed and picked up the telephone. “Yeah.”

“Honey?” She had called him that maybe twice. Her voice was wet and gulpy as though she had been crying.

“Yeah,” he said.

“They’re hiking in the mountains. They’re going twenty miles if it were a straight line, but it isn’t, so it will take two or three days. During that time they won’t be near a phone.”

“Hold on,” he said. He stared at the map on the table. He tore off a sheet of paper from the pad with the hotel’s name on it, measured twenty miles on the scale, then ran it in a circle from Swan Lake. “It can’t be twenty miles from where I last saw them. There’s nothing they couldn’t have driven to in about a half hour.”

“Is there any place that would look safe to them? A private airfield or something?”

“Nothing I can see. Maybe Canada.” He ran his finger along the road they had traveled: Missoula, Salmon Prairie, Swan Lake, always north. What if, instead of going left at Bigfork toward Kalispell, as he had, they had gone right? He took the sheet of paper with the twenty-mile mark and ran it slowly along the top of Montana at the Canadian Border. “Glacier,” he said.

“What?”

“They could have turned up into Glacier National Park by now. There’s only one big road through the middle of it, and it takes a loop up about halfway across that would put them about twenty miles from the border.” He held the map close to his face. “Logan Pass.” He pushed his thumbnail into the map and left a crescent-shaped mark so he could find it again.

“I should go,” she said. Her voice was low and whispery and quiet, like a child’s.

“You mean he’s there now?”

“He just fell asleep.”

“Good.” It was as close as Earl could come to a friendly statement. His relief was for himself, because now he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the night thinking about Linda spread out on the bed with that faceless stranger going into her, over and over.

He heard Linda give a little sob, then sniff it back. She said, “He wore himself out … on me.” The sob came out again.

Earl found himself standing, and the telephone crashed to the floor, but he could still hear Linda’s voice, crying quietly. Earl could feel surges of blood pounding behind his eyes.

“He’s a doctor, Earl. He knows things about a woman’s body—the nerves and things. He brings me up, all the way up so I can’t control myself, and then keeps me there, won’t let me stop.”

Earl squeezed his eyes closed. He wanted her to shut up. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’ll be over soon.”

“Ten minutes ago I begged him—”

“Enough.” Earl’s voice was harsh and dry. He wanted to tell her to drive a tenpenny nail through the man’s chest while he was sleeping, and then walk out. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Not yet. “Just do the best you can. The minute I’ve got them, I’ll call you there.” He found a pen on the nightstand with the little questionnaire about the maid service. “What’s the number?”

She read it to him off the telephone dial. “But if you call me here, he’ll get spooked. Leave a message on the machine at home or at the apartment I rented.”

“Right,” he said, but he wrote the number on the questionnaire. “I’ll call you.” His writing was a scrawl, so even he could barely read it. He was in a horrible confusion of jealousy of this McKinnon that somehow merged into his rage at Pete Hatcher for putting him into this spot. He felt disgust at Linda for being a woman—a creature that had no other way of getting what she needed from a man, but who could do it whenever she felt like it, because any man would accept the offer. He felt shame and humiliation because he had been able to invent no better way to find Pete Hatcher than to let his own woman turn herself out as a whore.