Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

“It’s a tight fit,” he said as he tugged and stretched.

“It’s okay,” said Jane. “Now stuff some of these dry weeds under the soles of your boots, inside the sock, for padding. Don’t use leaves, because they’ll squish and get juicy. No pine needles, because they’re slippery.”

When they had finished, she led him off beside the center trail. They did not step onto the trail again for fifteen minutes, at the start of a stretch of bare rock that extended beyond the flashlight’s beam. Pete stopped and shone his flashlight back the way they had come. “No trail at all,” he said. “You’re amazing.”

“It cost us a half hour, but it always makes you feel better to do what you can. And if we are being followed, it will do more than make us feel better. You have to remember this isn’t the F.B.I. that’s after us. It’s probably just some guy who discovered early on that it was easier to pull a trigger than learn algebra.”

As Jane set off across the rocky plateau, she discovered that what she had told Pete was a lie. Stopping to disguise their trail had not made her feel safer. She tried to measure the prickly sensation in the back of her neck, and her body gave a convulsive shiver. She pivoted suddenly in her tracks and stared back into the forest. The sight gave her no comfort: the individual silhouettes of the trees had merged together into a shadowy mass of twisted limbs ready to assume any shape her imagination gave them.

“What’s wrong?” said Pete.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just checking to see if you were keeping up.” She turned and began to walk quickly, and as she walked she searched for a way to exorcise her uneasiness.

She caught herself wishing she could have spotted the shooter on the mountainside this morning—if only a running human form, a solid shape in the windshield of a speeding car. As it was, the restaurant window had suddenly imploded in a shower of glass, and a bloody hole had appeared in a man’s head. There was nothing mysterious about the way that had been accomplished, but to some part of her subconscious mind, knowing the mechanical workings of rifles and silencers was information too meager to lay to rest the sensations she had felt.

Since she had left home it had not felt to her as though professional killers had been logically tracing Pete Hatcher’s movements. It felt as though they had given up physical form entirely, and rode the wind, waiting to materialize wherever it suited them.

Earl readjusted Lenny’s load. When he cinched the straps to make everything secure, he nearly tugged Lenny off his feet. “Think you can keep your balance?”

Lenny slipped the tumpline over his forehead and took a few steps. “Sure,” he said. “In the army we used to pack ninety pounds of gear and add the extra ammo on top of it. This can’t be much worse.”

Earl’s jaw worked impatiently. Whenever Lenny was feeling resentful, he would just happen to mention that he had once been declared worthy to sign up to get his head shaved and hang around Fort Leonard Wood in case they needed extra cannon fodder. Earl was never quite sure whether Lenny was implying that cleaning latrines had made him Earl’s moral superior, or excusing his inadequacy by saying that those wasted years had set him too far back to ever recover. It didn’t much matter. Whatever they had done for him in the army, it hadn’t given him big enough balls to challenge Earl directly, so Earl tolerated the talk.

He said, “Just use your map and compass, like they taught you, and don’t lose your own ass out here.” He turned to T-Bone and Rusty. “ Raus! ”

The two dogs galloped down the trail to the first bend, then waited and stared back at him. Earl adjusted his own pack as he set off. Lenny’s military career had brought Earl one benefit, anyway. It had made him think of moving through these mountains the way armies did. He had loaded Lenny’s strong back with all the camping gear and supplies, so Earl could carry little and forge ahead with the dogs. If he wanted anything Lenny was carrying, he could meet him on the main trail.

Earl walked along the path after T-Bone and Rusty for a few hundred yards to let his pupils open to the dark and his muscles get warm. Then he stopped and did a few stretching exercises against a tall cedar. When he was ready, he began to run.

As he ran, Earl considered his circumstances, and he found them to his liking. Jane Whitefield and Pete Hatcher had graciously gone to a great deal of exertion and inconvenience to put themselves into a place where he was strong and they were weak. Hatcher had been saved twice by the simple fact that it was hard to kill a man in a public place without committing suicide. Now it was only one day before the whole national park closed, and there would be no more tourists setting out into the high country to get in the way.

Earl moved through the woods with a hunter’s practiced lope. He had always been a sportsman who loved to take the long, difficult shot, so he had spent many cold mornings running patiently through rough country, trailing wounded deer until they began to choke and cough too much blood to go on. Tonight he used his dogs to find his way and keep him on the path. He could hear the difference when their panting came from higher or lower, left or right, and the thuds of their big paws told him the nature of the surface they were running on. Turning on a flashlight in these woods would have given his presence away to anyone looking back from the ridges above, and the glare would have made his pupils contract, leaving him half-blind for several minutes.

Earl habitually held his head a little to the side as he ran, because the best night vision was at the edges of the eyes, and none of the wind from his running distorted the sounds. He knew his long legs carried him farther at each stride than his prey could step, and his stamina would keep him going longer than any man who had spent his days lounging around in Las Vegas.

He knew that the two of them must have started hiking at least four or five hours ago, but that did not bother him. They would walk for a few hours, until the moon was high and the wind up here started to howl, and then they would take their own exhaustion as an assurance that Earl would be too tired to follow. They would camp, make a shelter and a fire, and curl up. Maybe they would be cautious enough to tramp a distance off the main trail first, but they wouldn’t risk going too far.

They didn’t know what was after them. Earl could just discern the black barrel torsos of Rusty and T-Bone ahead of him in the dark—beasts with as much mass and muscle as small men, that could hear a twig the size of a toothpick snap under a boot, smell a fire in the woods for miles, and see with a predator’s vision that didn’t bother much with subtle gradations of tone and color but had evolved to pick out unerringly whatever was alive so they could sink their teeth into it.

As Earl ran, he could feel the strange, triangular field between him and Rusty and T-Bone, the dogs’ attentiveness to his sound and scent holding them in position. They were as alert to any change in his will as to the sights and sounds ahead of them. The dogs were part of him now. He was a creature with three heads and sharp teeth and a rifle and a man’s brain, galloping through the forest sniffing the wind for the smell of live meat.

Carey had finished his hospital rounds at seven, but he had found over the past ten days that each night he went home a little later. The old, comfortable house where he had grown up now seemed cavernous and empty because Jane wasn’t there waiting for him. Tonight he had gone back to his office and spent two hours making notations in the files of his patients, signing forms and letters that Joy had typed and left on his desk, then looking over the latest pile of medical journals for articles that he needed to study. At nine he walked back to the hospital lot, climbed into the BMW, and remembered that he still had not stopped to fill up the tank. In the midst of that Susan Haynes business last night, he had forgotten, and then in the morning she had managed to delay him long enough so that he had not had time.