Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Earl kept walking. “I know everything about you. You’ve been mine for months. Since June, I think.”

As he approached, he watched her. She fidgeted in the beam as though it were intense heat instead of ordinary light.

“What are you waiting for?” asked Jane.

“I was just trying to decide. One part of me says you ought to go just the way my dogs did—gutted and left to lie there for a while before you die.”

He could see that Jane had to force her mouth into that unconvincing skeptical smile. “We’re both professionals. You won, I lost. You can afford one bullet to the head and be on your way. Those are the stakes, not torture.”

He set his rifle on the rocks, took his pistol out of his jacket pocket, and came closer. He was within fifteen feet of her now. “Is that so? What you’ve been putting me through—is that just business? You’ve been slowly sawing my balls off.”

He began to pace on the rocks. The flashlight’s beam whipped across her face, then bobbed up and down on her body.

She tried to make her voice sound calm, almost cheerful. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t personal. I don’t know you.” She could see that his agitation was growing.

He stepped quickly toward her. “Well, you’re going to, because I’m going to do just what he did to Linda.”

She tried to decipher the words, but her mind stumbled, and gave her nothing but the terror. “Who? Who’s Linda?” The grimace on his face and the abrupt, jerky movements of his body told her that whether Linda was a real person or “what he did to Linda” was just a slang way of saying something awful, what this man was planning was not a mere execution. She watched, mesmerized, as he bent his knees to set his lighted flashlight and pistol on the ground a few yards from her feet, where she could never hope to reach them.

As he stepped away from them toward her, his big silhouette caught in the dim aura of the flashlight, Jane brought Pete Hatcher’s pistol around her body and fired it four times into his chest.

Earl’s eyes squeezed tight with pain, then opened wide with knowledge. He knew why Hatcher had still been kneeling beside her in the dark after he had emptied the pistol, when he should have been running. It was to hand it to her, so she could reload it and lie there with her body hiding it.

He toppled forward across her legs.

The weight was smothering, confining. She used all her strength to lift his torso an inch and pull her legs out, then dropped him. It was not until she had stood up and taken a step backward that she was sure he was dead.

She took two deep breaths and heard Pete’s running footsteps, coming along the ridge. He had completed his circle to come up behind the hunter, and now he was carrying the sniper rifle. He sidestepped around the body, keeping his eyes on it, horrified at the body and still frightened that the man might be alive.

She bent and picked up the hunter’s flashlight and his pistol. She said, “I’m going to ask you two questions. No matter what the answers are, I’ll show you how to get out of here and leave you safe. But I have to know.”

He looked at her, uncomprehending. “Anything. Ask.”

She knelt beside the body, clutched the belt and the shoulder and rolled him over, then shone the flashlight on the face. “Have you ever seen this man before?”

Pete Hatcher stepped close and stared down at the blood that had soaked the front of the shirt. “Uh,” he grunted. Then he kept walking around to the man’s feet to see the face right side up. “No,” he said. “Never.” He seemed to shiver once to get the sight out of his mind.

Jane moved the light to Pete Hatcher’s face. “Do you know somebody named Linda?”

Pete’s shoulders came up in a shrug and stayed there. He seemed to search the night sky for a moment. “A few. Linda Horn. I dated her in college. Linda Becker. She used to do my taxes, but she married a lawyer and they moved to New York. I don’t know.… Give me a hint.”

Jane didn’t move the light. “We’re miles from anywhere, where nobody can hear. Obviously I’m not going to tell anybody about any of this, ever. Is there a reason somebody named Linda might wish she’d never met you?”

She could see he was genuinely confused, searching his memory over and over without finding an answer. “No. I don’t think so.”

Jane switched off the flashlight. She looked up. The moon and stars had never come out, and the cold wind was pushing low, dark clouds in an endless stream across the sky. “You’d better go find a soft place and start digging a hole for him.” She looked back down at the body and began searching the pockets.

“What are you looking for?”

“Hurry. Snow is coming.”

Jane searched the man’s pockets, pulled up his shirt and his pant legs to search for anything that might be strapped to his body, took off his jacket. She found a map like hers and a good compass, a magazine for the rifle with six rounds in it. There was a knife stuck in the belt at the small of his back. The coat was stuffed with jerky and crumbled biscuits. When she had taken them out, she felt a stiff spot in the lining, so she sliced it open with his knife and found a thick plastic packet full of money and identification cards.

Jane picked up her flashlight and searched the plateau carefully and methodically, beginning with the spot where she had first seen the man, then the hiding place where he had opened fire, then backtracking until she found the tracks where he had come up out of the valley, then simply walking back and forth to sweep the rocky, windblown expanse with her light.

When she returned, she found Pete waiting for her. They each took an ankle of the corpse and dragged it to the hillside. Pete had rolled some big stones aside and dug in the soft earth beneath them, filling his jacket with dirt, then dumping it out and filling it again. He had managed to dig about three feet down before he had hit bedrock. Jane helped Pete drag the body into the hole and push all of the dirt over it, then roll the big stones into place.

They walked back to the spot where they had left their packs, and Jane began to redistribute the gear. She put all of the money and most of the food in Pete’s pack with his pistol and his ammunition. Then she handed him the dead man’s map and compass. He said, “Why are you giving these to me?”

She turned on her flashlight and held it on the small pile of belongings the dead man had been carrying. “Besides the map and compass, he had identification, money, biscuits and jerky, bullets.”

“So?”

“Think about what he didn’t have. No tent, no bedroll, no pack, not even a change of socks. No car keys. There’s somebody else, coming along the trail carrying the heavy stuff.”

“Then let’s get moving,” he said. “If they’re carrying all that stuff, it should be easy to keep ahead of them.”

She handed him his pack. She pointed north along the ridge. “Go as straight as you can, to the north. In an hour, maybe three at the most, you’ll be able to see a lake below you on the right. That’s Cameron Lake. It’s in Canada, and at the end of it is a big, modern road.”

“But I can’t leave you out here alone, waiting for some killer.”

“You can’t do anything else,” she said. She put on her pack, stuck the killer’s .45 pistol in her jacket pocket. “I don’t work for you anymore. I quit. If you walk in that direction until dawn, you can be in Lethbridge by noon, and on a plane by dinner time. Head for Dallas. Rent a place like the one I told you about. If you use the papers in your pack, you’ll be safe.”

He held her shoulders. “Come with me,” he pleaded. The next words came out as though he thought they would be a surprise. “I love you.”