Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

The sky was darkening quickly now, and she saw the glow of his teeth that had to be a smile. “Really?”

“They’ve been following you for about a hundred days. They’ve committed two murders they won’t get paid for. They’ve exhausted the computer searches, because from here on we aren’t going to use credit cards or even names, if we can help it. That means the hunting is going to get much harder. Following you into a foreign country adds a level of extra risk. I think for a professional, the point of diminishing returns has come. They’re in it for the money, and if this goes on much longer, the money’s not good enough. They could have made more of it more easily doing bitter divorce cases and premature life-insurance payouts.”

“Won’t Pleasure, Inc., hire somebody else?”

“There are several possibilities. One is that these killers will tell Pleasure, Inc., where they lost you. Pleasure, Inc., will decide that if you’re in Canada, then you’re not planning on talking to American police. A second possibility is that the people who are after us now will keep Pleasure, Inc., on the hook—tell them to be patient, they’re on your trail—but not waste any time actually hunting. Once a month they’ll use the computer to see if your aliases turned up again.”

“So I should feel good, right? I’m not being stupid.”

“No. Because in a week or so they’ll probably be off stalking somebody else, and if they’re replaced, the new ones will be starting at zero. This morning you were talking about a different feeling you had—that you were glad to be alive. It’s not gone, is it?”

“No.”

“The quiver in the back of your neck doesn’t go away, but the good feeling doesn’t either. Now that you’ve had it, every day is going to feel as though you won it in a world championship.”

He laughed. “It already does.”

“You’ll notice other things later.”

“What things?”

“Good things. The kind of ambition that’s stupid, the kind that makes you want a fancy car and a big house and flashy clothes, goes away.”

“Why?”

“Because having them makes you feel as though people are looking at you, and that’s uncomfortable. Being average, normal, makes you feel comfortable, and it isn’t very different unless you read labels very closely. That was always true, of course, but now you’ll be able to feel it, because you know that being a regular guy is a million miles from being dead.”

The trail led them up between thickets of berry bushes, across meadows of wildflowers now dry and well past blooming. As the light died for the night, Jane could see the higher peaks on her right, but the blue-white glacial ice was lost in the black silhouettes of the mountains. They walked on, sticking to the center of the path in the dark. Jane took her flashlight out of her pack and let it play on the ground in front of her. Finally, as the trail led them up into a stand of stunted pine trees, she stopped, knelt on the ground, and studied the map.

“Are we lost yet?” asked Pete. She felt his shoulder beside hers as he knelt down to look at the little circle of light.

She put her finger on the map. “We’re here.” It was a spot where twisting dotted lines seemed to radiate in all directions, like the strands of an unraveling rope. “The trail on the left goes back to the road, then up Flattop Creek. The one on the right goes through Swiftcurrent Pass and connects with this whole network of trails up here. This one in the middle is the one we want.” She aimed her flashlight up the path, and in the glow around it, Pete caught a glimpse of a wooden sign.

“So what’s the problem?”

She frowned. “Never give up a chance to deceive. This chance is a beauty. I’m just trying to figure out how to use it.”

He said, “Switch the sign?”

“They wouldn’t be looking for one trail or another. They’d be looking for us, probably our footprints. We’ve already put about seven miles of them on the path, and if they were following, by now they wouldn’t have much trouble recognizing them.”

Pete sat and waited while Jane stared at the map, then stood up, opened his pack, and handed him his flashlight. “This is probably a waste of time,” she said. “But if they do follow us, it isn’t. You go down the left path as far as you can until it gets so narrow you can’t step off it. A quarter mile would be great, but at least a couple of hundred yards. When you get to that point step off, and come back parallel with the trail, never stepping back onto it. Meet me here.”

Jane walked down the trail to the right alone. She stopped once to listen for Pete’s footsteps, and when she heard them they sounded as though he was doing what she had asked. One of the qualities that made Pete Hatcher worth saving was that he never resisted. He wanted to live, so if she was willing to help him, he would do what she asked. Simple.

As she walked, she imagined herself taking Carey out of the world. Everything he said would be a question too, but the questions he asked would come from a more complicated intelligence, one that would be sifting and evaluating and testing alternative logical paths. The problem with classically intelligent people was that they seemed to be able to discern too many alternatives to pick any of them during the brief periods when what they did still mattered. She wondered what she had meant by that, and was back to the night ten months ago when Carey had asked her to marry him. She had said she would not marry him right then. She would tell him about her last trip—about who she really was—and then give him a year to think before he asked again.

He had not listened and then said instantly, “I don’t care about any of this. Marry me now.” He had listened judiciously and then let the waiting period begin. When he had thought about it for a month, instead of sticking to the terms and letting her spend the year cutting her ties, he had realized that he didn’t want to wait—not shouldn’t, but didn’t want to. He had been unfair. He had focused his intellect on convincing her to marry him while she still had no business marrying anyone.

Her mind abruptly collided with something and jumped to another track. That story was fictitious. Jane Whitefield walked through the world with her eyes wide open. She could not pretend she had not known what might happen, or what she would do if it did. She had always felt contempt for women who accepted the theorem that if they were unhappy it could only be because their husbands had not made them happy. This must be how it started: constructing convoluted proofs that their mistakes were not actually their mistakes but their husbands’ failure to prevent them or cure them. Not me, she thought. I did this, because I wanted his love more than I wanted to be careful. Now I’m going to get through it and go home to my husband, who is impatient because he adores me.

She watched the path narrowing, the rock slope on her right rising into a wall, and the little margin of weeds on her left thinning into a ledge that bordered a steep chasm. She put the flashlight into her back pocket, leaned both hands on the wall, placed her toes on the weeds, and began to sidestep back the way she had come. She had inched along for fifty feet before she was able to stand upright again. Then she carefully took a diagonal course down a gentler slope and headed for the crossroads.

When she approached the rocky knoll, she saw Pete Hatcher waiting patiently for her. She switched on her flashlight so he would see her coming and not be startled. “Been waiting long?”

“No,” he said. “Just got here. I went as far as a streambed, where it started to get wet. I came back through the woods.”

“Very good,” she said. She sat beside him. “Now we change our socks.” He watched her untying her boots for a second, then did as she said. When they had their boots on again, she said, “Now put the old socks on over your boots.”