Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

When he reached a hundred-yard straight stretch between parallel rows of trees, he set off more quickly. He must have been on the trail all along. With the unbroken snow ahead, the path looked like a sidewalk. He had taken ten steps before the woman separated herself from the trees. She stood absolutely still and erect, and at first he wondered whether he had imagined her.

He kept walking, and he was sure. She was gazing at him, but her eyes never moved. For a few seconds he squinted at her, and his mind insistently offered him interpretations so frightening that he forgot to stop walking. Maybe she was dead, frozen to death leaning against a tree. Maybe Earl had killed her, and this was her ghost, lingering on the spot. Maybe she had always been something not quite human, and she had lured Earl away from the trail to get lost and die and was waiting to do the same to Lenny.

For the next few seconds he calmed himself. She was not a spook. She was a woman. He could see the long black hair streaming down from a navy watch cap, and there was a strap across the front of her chest that had to be her pack. Spooks didn’t need to wear packs. She must have circled back and come out on the trail behind Earl, and now Lenny had her.

She must have seen him by now, but still she didn’t turn to run. Maybe she didn’t know Lenny had seen her. He had seen rabbits behave the same way in the first snowfall of the year when he was a kid in Michigan. They seemed to think the snow had made them invisible, so you could walk right up and knock them on the head. He kept his eyes fixed on her and kept walking, narrowing the space between them.

At seventy yards, with less snow falling between them, he could see her more clearly. She was definitely staring straight into his eyes. Then he recognized the strap across her chest. The dark line above her shoulder that his eyes had interpreted as a branch of a tree was the barrel of Earl’s new rifle.

Lenny shrugged off his heavy pack and heard it hit the ground. He pulled his pistol out of his jacket and charged her. He paid no attention to what was under his feet, just dashed toward her. He fired at her as he ran, a loud, echoing blast. He saw the snow kick up five feet from her. He fired again as she stepped to the side, and a small gash of white opened on the pine tree behind her. She stopped a pace away, beyond the snow-plastered trunk of a dead tree.

He saw her swing the rifle sling over her head and grasp the big sniper rifle in her left hand. He saw her put the fingers of her right hand between her teeth and pull the glove off to bare her trigger finger. She raised the rifle to her shoulder, brought up the bolt, slid it back, forward, down. He had to keep her pinned behind that tree, afraid to stick her head out.

Lenny fired twice more, quickly. He was so close now that he saw her push off the safety. He heard her yell, “Stop! I want to talk!” and then, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She was staring at him through the scope, but her small, female voice reminded him that he could do this. If he could make her flinch, duck for better cover—anything—he would be on her before she could recycle the bolt and take aim again.

Lenny raised his pistol again and tried to hold it on her as he ran. He fired again and again, his shots going wide, high, low, hitting bark and snow and rocks. She stood as still as the trees. He saw her finger start to tighten, and then he stopped seeing.

When Jane reached the trailhead at Logan Pass, it was night and the snow was a foot deep. The visitor center was dark, and the windows had been boarded over for the winter. She found the car that she and Pete Hatcher had left, and she could see that the keys were still in the ignition. She decided that it was best not to leave it here, where the search for lost campers it prompted might lead to shallow graves, so she drove to the next trail at Siyeh Bend, drove it into a snowbank, and walked back to Logan Pass.

She used the key she had taken off the body of the second man to open the rented four-wheel-drive Toyota and start the engine. She sat for a minute enjoying the sensation of being out of the cold wind, then drove out onto Going-to-the-Sun Road. At two in the morning, she reached the row of yellow steel stanchions set into the pavement to block the road for the winter. She had hoped the barrier would be fragile enough to crash through, but this one had been made with people like her in mind. She found her way out by backing up a quarter mile, driving through a small wooded grove and an open field, then coming out on the highway beyond the gate.

Jane drove ten miles from the park before she found a level, paved turnout on an exposed plateau, where the wind had swept away enough of the powdery snow to bare some of the blacktop. She stopped and left the motor running while she completed a cursory search of the vehicle. Under the seat was a key to a room at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, and in the glove compartment was a rental receipt for the Toyota.

She arrived in Kalispell before dawn, carried everything that had been left in the vehicle into the motel room, and began to study it. The men had left nothing in the room, but Jane had not expected them to. People in professions like theirs—or hers—didn’t leave things where other people were likely to find them. She opened the two men’s suitcases and sliced the linings enough so she could fit her hand inside to feel for hidden papers. She slashed the insoles of the shoes to see if they had been opened and glued back. She took apart their flashlights, the carrying case for the sniper rifle, then held up each piece of clothing and shone a flashlight through it to be sure nothing had been sewn into it.

When she had finished, she walked back out to the Toyota. She knew that there had to be a hiding place. After ten minutes of studying the engine compartment, removing door panels and carpets, taking out the spare tire and the gas-tank cover, she realized that she had looked at it and missed it. These killers wouldn’t simply have hidden their secrets: they would have wanted them guarded.

Jane hurried inside and began to dismantle the dogs’ travel cages. By the time she had pried out the false floor of the second one, she had confirmed her assumption that the licenses and credit cards the men had been carrying were counterfeit. The ones she found in the dogs’ cages were older and bore scrapes and dull finishes from being carried in men’s wallets.

She read the name on the cards in the first packet: Leonard Tilden. Leonard Tilden’s California driver’s license said he lived at an address in North Hollywood with an apartment number tacked onto it. He had only one credit card, and it carried the name of a bank that Jane recognized. The bank advertised credit cards for people with bad credit ratings who deposited enough to pay the limit. Tilden’s picture on his license identified him as the man who had been following along behind to carry the gear. He wasn’t a serious professional killer, he was a caddy. It was possible that she could use him to find out if the cards were real.

She stepped to the nightstand by the bed, picked up the telephone book, found the area code for the northern part of Los Angeles, and dialed Information.

A young man’s voice came on. “What city, please?”

“North Hollywood.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you have a number for Leonard Tilden, T-I-L-D-E-N?”

The young man was gone, and in his place was the familiar female voice of the information computer. “The … number … is—” Jane hung up.

The man she was interested in was the other one, the man who had carried the fancy sniper rifle. The little packet that contained his license, three gold credit cards, and one platinum card also contained fifty hundred-dollar bills. She dialed the Information operator again and asked for the number of Earl Bliss in Northridge. The computer came on and said, “We’re sorry. That number is unlisted.”