Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

He checked into a hotel in Billings and watched the report over and over on every local channel. For the first couple of hours he could feel that although his mind was still unsure, his body was already celebrating, pumping blood through the arteries in hard, dizzying surges, his breaths tasting sweet and full.

Seaver had been in the trouble business for over twenty years, and he had developed a clear idea of the odds. Swan Lake was a tiny town in the middle of the mountains. The population of the whole state was just a bit over eight hundred thousand. There probably hadn’t been a shooting in Swan Lake since the Indian Wars. How could it not be Earl who had done it? How could that dark-haired woman not be the dark-haired woman? But Seaver needed to be positive. He sat on the edge of the hotel bed, the remote control in his hand, switching from channel to channel for three hours.

At ten o’clock, when the local news came on again, there was a photograph of the shooting victim. It was a portrait of a man wearing a suit and tie, his expression in a forced smile. It looked a little bit like Pete Hatcher, but it wasn’t. The newswoman was telling Seaver that it was just some guy who had gotten himself shot—some unsuspecting dope who had been eating breakfast in front of the wrong window. Seaver couldn’t believe it.

His mind shuffled quickly through the possibilities, looking for hope. The picture was a fraud. Earl had hit Hatcher, but Hatcher wasn’t dead. The dark-haired woman had slipped the newsmen a fake picture to keep Earl from trying again while Hatcher was in the hospital. Or Earl had shot Hatcher, and Hatcher was dead. The picture was taken off some stolen ID the police had found in his wallet, and that was why it was a picture of somebody else. The more Seaver thought about it, the more he liked that theory. It made a lot of sense, especially if Hatcher had been shot in the head. Most people could barely look in the direction of a fatal head wound without fainting, and even if they did, there was so much blood on the face and so much distortion of the muscles—a slackening at first and then a tightening into a rictus—that any resemblance the corpse bore to a photograph of anything alive would have been accepted as a match.

Seaver clung to this theory for another half hour, waiting impatiently for the newswoman to come back from a commercial and announce that the initial identification had been wrong. His hope ended when the newswoman came back from a commercial with, instead, footage of the victim’s parents leaving the coroner’s office after identifying the body.

He wearily leafed through the pile of tourist magazines the hotel maids had left on the coffee table. They contained very little except ads for stores and restaurants in the area, but finally he found one with three pages of maps in it and spent a few minutes studying them.

Tomorrow morning, after he had caught up on his sleep, he would drive up to Kalispell. It looked like the only town up there that was big enough to hide a stranger comfortably. He would check into a hotel there and spend some time trying to pick up signs of Earl and Linda.

27

Jane led Pete along the trail in the waning light. She kept them at a double-time pace, along the long high cliff the map called the Garden Wall and on to Haystack Butte. When she judged that they had traveled two miles, she slowed to a walk. She waited for her wind to come back and then listened while Hatcher’s deep, labored breathing slowly became quiet. She said, “How do you feel?”

“Lousy.”

“Does your head ache?”

“Yes.”

“Dizzy?”

“Yes.”

“Green spots on your hands?”

“Yes.”

“Liar.”

“Yes.” He walked along at her shoulder, taking deep breaths and blowing them out. She listened to them attentively without speaking. There were no whistles, no bubbly liquid sounds that would mean he was in trouble. There were people who simply could not tolerate high altitudes. Unless they were brought down, their lungs filled up with fluid until they drowned. Starting Pete off with a two-mile jog probably had not been the safest way to find out that he wasn’t one of them, but she had needed to know before they had gone too far to turn back.

She had not lied to him about needing to use the last precious hour or two of light efficiently, to put distance between them and the road. It was already getting too dark to run. A twisted ankle would make the next thirty miles a nightmare.

As she walked, she subtly increased the pace again. She tried to keep her steps regular enough on the uneven, winding path to hold her speed. The end of the long summer had come, so the trail was as beaten down by other boots as it would ever be, and it had been laid out at about seven thousand feet, along the ridges just below the treeline, where soil was thin and poor and the constant winds stunted the fir trees.

After another mile they had passed Haystack Butte, and in the dusky light she saw the change she was looking for in the slopes to her left. There was a low, lush dark carpet of bushes and evergreens—lodgepole pine, spruce, fir—all young and thick. Among them loomed tall, ghostly gray trunks like the masts of sunken ships.

“Look at that,” said Pete. “I wonder why it looks like that.”

“A fire,” said Jane. “In 1967 this patch burned.”

He craned his neck to look at her with ironic amusement. “You from around here?”

She shook her head and smiled. “Of course not. I spent half the day in the car looking at maps. This is one of the places I picked out to get my bearings. If we get lost up here we’re not going to enjoy the experience.”

“What do we look for next?”

“After another mile or two, we should be able to look up on our right and see glaciers. First a little one. That’s Gem Glacier. Then a really big one, called Grinnell Glacier. Then Swiftcurrent Glacier, all in a stretch of a couple of miles.”

“And after that?”

“If we get that far before it’s too dark to travel, I’ll be very surprised.”

He walked along for a time, then said, “I guess I should be delighted at the news that I don’t have to keep trudging along all night. To tell you the truth, though, the farther we get from that guy with the rifle, the better I feel. And there’s even something about it getting dark that’s comforting. I’ve been having a prickly feeling in the back of my neck, like he’s back there looking down the barrel at me.”

Jane turned and looked up at him with an enigmatic smile. “He wouldn’t be looking down the barrel. Nobody puts a round through somebody’s temple from that far out without a scope.”

“You’re a very strange woman. You know that?”

“Of course I do.” She smiled. “It’s something I’ve cultivated over the years. But I’ll bet you want to keep going even more than you did a minute ago, don’t you?”

He seemed to be consulting an inner voice as he walked. “You’re right. It worked. I feel bad enough to walk for hours.”

“Bad isn’t exactly the feeling I was looking for, but that’s the price. As long as you never let your brain stop working, thinking about what’s behind you, you’ll be very hard to kill.”

“So the prickly feeling in the back of the neck doesn’t go away.”

“That’s right. I have it right now.”

Pete half-turned his head to look as he walked. There was nothing behind them but the empty trail as far as the last bend. “You think they’re back there?”

“If I did, I’d be running for my life,” she said. “I think they’re good. They’ll find out the car was left in that lot in about three days, when it’s towed out of the park. By then the only road here will be closed to visitors, the nearby car crossings into Canada will be closed too, and the long detours that go up there don’t go to where we’ll be. What I think they’ll do next is give up.”