Runner (47 page)

As Jane was walking across the living room toward the sliding door, she heard a sound. She whirled and aimed her gun at the man on the floor. "You're alive."

"Help me," said Steve Demming. His voice was strained and weak, but she could hear him.

"Toss your gun so you can't reach it."

He flipped his wrist and the gun slid a dozen feet on the bare floor. "Help me."

"You need to help me first."

"Get an ambulance. There are no phones in the house."

She understood. He had brought no phone because if he had made or received a call, it would prove where he was while Jane was being killed. "Tell me about Christine."

"I can tell you where she is."

"Her body?"

"No. That day, when she tried to get away, this house was already set up like a damned hospital. The Beales had brought a doctor from Mexico to deliver the baby, and a nurse to take care of it. They were still here a week later. And Ruby Beale is a nurse, too—retired. After Sybil shot Christine, they were all over her in five seconds. She's alive."

It was already nearly ten in the morning. The sun was bright and hot enough to burn off the protective haze from the ocean. The drive to the Mexican border seemed longer than Jane had imagined it. To her, San Diego had always seemed to be right on the border. But the wealthy parts where she had been spending much of her time had their faces turned to the north. Mexico was present only in the Indian faces of the people who worked in the restaurants and stood at the bus stops. Now, as she drove south on Interstate 5 and then through National City, Chula Vista, and Palm City, she began to see signs advertising attractions in Mexico and brokers who sold Mexican auto insurance to tourists. She pulled off at Palm Avenue and bought a policy. She knew she would never file a claim, but if she was in an accident she didn't want to be detained while the Mexican police sorted things out. A few minutes after that she reached San Ysidro.

Jane took her place in one of the seven lanes of cars waiting to cross the border. She read all of the signs and watched the movement
of the cars on both sides of her, trying to be patient and calm because patience and calm were the things that customs agents on every border looked for. Jane had no experience at the southern border, but like most people in western New York, she had crossed the Canadian border frequently. This morning she was dressed in clothes that would make her identical to the hordes of female American tourists crowding the border. She wore a pair of expensive blue jeans, a long-sleeved white blouse, running shoes that showed she was expecting to be doing some walking, big sunglasses, and a baseball cap. She had her Alexandra Crowell identification in a worn wallet at the top of her purse, ready to show the customs officers.

The cars ahead didn't seem to be moving at all, but one at a time the ones at the row of customs kiosks changed. The people inching forward to the kiosks didn't seem worried, but they probably weren't carrying guns and ammunition and ten different sets of bogus identification. When she was given the wave to pull forward she took her turn with the Mexican officers. One of them came to her window.

Jane kept her face relaxed and blank, but looked at him attentively. He glanced at her for less than a second before he waved her into Tijuana and turned his eyes toward the next car.

Jane moved ahead. It had taken over two hours to get through the jam and into Mexico. She wanted to get out of the vicinity of the border, where the traffic was thick, but the traffic came with her and stayed with her—mostly in front of her—down Avenida Revolución. Mexico was crowded. The sidewalks were moving streams of people. There were hundreds of small stores and stalls and people selling everything—trinkets, textiles, leather, food. People who were obviously Americans elbowed one another to get closer to displays of brightly painted wooden objects. There were nightclubs, bars,
and hotels, and in front of many of them, stalls that seemed to represent all of the great profusion of objects that existed and could be sold by one person to another.

As she made it onto Boulevard Agua Caliente the traffic thinned, and she dared to lift her eyes from the road to look around her more often. But as the sense of crowding eased, she was shocked by the sight of the endless hills on both sides, covered with the small cottages and shacks of poor people, most of them probably squatters, since it was hard to imagine pieces of land being cut into such small parcels. They went as far as she could see, and beyond.

By the time she was away from the border, many of the cars had pulled away onto Route 10 along the ocean toward Rosarito and Ensenada, and she felt a bit less hemmed in. But being on this side of the border worried Jane. Everything was unfamiliar and took extra seconds to interpret. She had seen not only policemen in the area close to the border, but also small contingents of armed soldiers at various corners, watching the passing cars. She wasn't sure what to expect of them. The crowds of people everywhere—half of them Americans—made her feel a bit less worried about standing out. Her long black hair might make an eye passing over a crowd include her with the Mexicans, but she didn't speak Spanish, so the impression was only of value if she kept moving and didn't talk.

She knew she was going to have a difficult time finding the building she was searching for, a hard time getting in, and a hard time getting out. As she moved along Boulevard Agua Caliente, she began to see some of the things Steve Demming had told her to look for. There were whole blocks of pharmacies. People who were obviously Americans, most of them elderly, came in and out carrying large shopping bags. There was even a charter bus parked on a side street with its motor running.

Now she moved into the part of the district that she had been watching for. There were medical and dental offices in every space of each block. There were signs offering lap band surgery, tummy tucks, breast and buttock implants, collagen treatments, botox injections, face-lifts, liposuction. The larger buildings were all called
clinicas.
Most signs were in a sort of English that had an otherworldly quality, with words that were cognates, not translations. There were buildings devoted to medical care that were called "spas." And beside a business offering a jumble of unrelated but major kinds of surgery would be an office offering "painless dentistry" and teeth whitening.

Jane found the address in the center of this wilderness of medical and cosmetic marketplaces. The four-story stucco structure looked like an apartment building jammed between a pharmacy and another medical center, but it had balconies that opened onto a view of another stucco wall two feet away.

She drove past and then around the area for a few minutes before she found a parking space in a lot beside a large market. She went inside and used American dollars to buy a few snacks and some cans of Coca-Cola. She put them into her SUV and began to walk.

She thought about her conversation with Steve Demming. The address he had given her seemed to match his description of the building and the district. But she still wasn't positive that he had given up hope of killing her.

She had knelt beside him in the dark house. "Why should I believe you?"

He said, "Because I don't have anything to gain by lying now. I want to live."

She heard the siren in the distance. "The ambulance. One last thing."

"I know. If you find out I lied, or that I warned anyone that you were coming, you'll kill me."

"I hope you believe that."

"I do."

Jane walked along the street behind Agua Caliente listening and looking, trying to get a sense of everything that was happening around her. She went past dental offices, other places specializing in
"salud familiar."
Every place advertised that its doctor was board certified and everything cost less than half the U.S. price.

It took her a few minutes to walk to the Clinica Médica de la Mujer. She walked past and made a quick assessment. It had a staircase off the small lobby, and an elevator. There was a pretty young woman in a lavender skirt, matching high heels, and a white lab coat sitting at a graceful writing desk at the back wall. Near her sat a man in a set of hospital scrubs, but he was behind a solid counter that looked like a security station.

Jane never slowed down, and didn't attract any attention to herself. She kept going from one building to the next, shopping at stalls and watching the changes in the traffic and the movement of pedestrians. She had coffee in a nearby restaurant where she could watch the building through the front window but remain an undifferentiated part of the crowd. When she finished she walked to where she had left her car and drove off.

She spent the hours until dark exploring the city in the SUV. She took the road to Otay Mesa, where there was another border crossing, and studied the traffic there. When she judged it was late enough, she drove back to the Clinica Médica de la Mujer.

At midnight Jane climbed up the ladder at the back of the darkened pharmacy to the roof. It rose above the second floor of the Clinica Médica de la Mujer. She stepped close to the first balcony on the
second floor of the Clinica, jumped the few feet between them, and climbed over the railing onto the balcony. She looked in the sliding glass door, and she could see there was a woman asleep in the bed.

She tried the door, and found that it was open a crack. Someone had been enjoying the cooler night air. Jane pushed the window open and stepped inside. She saw a tray on the movable table near the bed, picked it up carefully so it wouldn't wake the sleeping woman, and took it with her as she stepped out into the hall. If people saw her, their own minds would supply the explanation. The hall was empty.

Demming had told her that Christine was on the fourth floor of the building. She set the tray on the floor and stepped into the staircase near the end. She climbed to the fourth floor, walked down the hall, and looked in each of the rooms. There were no patients in any of them. When she got to the end of the hall away from the balconies, she saw a room with a solid door with a small double-glazed, metal-webbed window. It looked like a room for some kind of physical therapy or diagnostic equipment. But what caught her eye was that a key hung on a nail beside the door.

Jane moved close and looked in the window. There was a bed, and a patient asleep in it. She took the key and used it to unlock the door, then put it back on the nail so it wouldn't be missed, and slipped inside. She moved past the bed, and she could tell from the shape of the lump under the covers that it was a woman. She opened the blinds to let a little moonlight into the room. It was Christine. Demming had told the truth.

Christine was sleeping soundly, lying on her back, but Jane could see her chest rising and falling in a too-slow rhythm. Jane noticed that there was a medical chart on a clipboard hanging beside the door. She wasn't sure what it said, but there seemed to be a list of
drugs and doses. The only one she recognized was diazepam. Valium. They must be giving it to her to help her sleep.

Jane went to the bed and touched Christine's shoulder. She didn't move. Jane shook her gently, then patted her face, but she didn't react. Finally, Jane lifted her to a sitting position and whispered in her ear, "Christine. Christine. You've got to wake up. You've got to be alert now and talk to me. Wake up."

There was no change. Christine was still limp and unconscious. Jane eased Christine down on the bed.

Jane pulled back the covers, then untied the hospital gown at the back of the neck, and looked under it. A fresh, clean-looking bandage stretched across Christine's upper chest from her left shoulder to under the right arm. Jane covered her again. Maybe the other medications were for pain. Bullet wounds were painful and took a long time to heal.

Jane searched the room and then the rest of the floor, looking for equipment that might help her get Christine out. There was no wheelchair, but maybe that was a good sign. If Christine couldn't walk, this was going to be difficult. There didn't seem to be a walker or crutches, either. Then she returned to Christine's room and tried again to wake her. Jane was acutely aware that time was passing. The clock on the wall said 2:14.

She heard the elevator arrive on the fourth floor, a quiet, sliding sound as the doors rolled open. She couldn't hear footsteps, but she was sure the staff must wear rubber-soled shoes. She went into the small bathroom, opened the shower curtain, stepped into the bathtub, and listened. She was right next to the corridor wall, so she heard a scrape as the newcomer lifted the key off the nail. Jane heard a louder sound as the key slid into the lock and rattled a bit when the door proved to be unlocked.

Jane stayed still. The person opened the door, stepped in, and let it close. Jane heard squeaky footsteps on the polished floor as the person stepped to Christine's bed. The person moved the rheostat on the wall up so the lights began to glow dimly. It was a woman's voice. "Christina," she said loudly. "Christina, are you asleep?" She waited a few seconds, there was a rustling sound, and then the woman set something on the table by the door and then went out again.

Jane listened while the woman locked the door. When Jane heard the elevator move again, she came out of the bathroom and looked at what the nurse had left on the table. It was a small tray with a pitcher of water, a plastic cup, and a small cup containing four colored pills. Since Christine hadn't been able to take her medicine, maybe the nurse would return soon.

Jane searched the area around the bed for a telephone or intercom, then for a button to summon the nurse. If there had ever been anything like that, it had been removed. Jane went to the window to see what was visible on this side of the building.

"What are you doing?"

Jane spun and looked down. Christine's eyes were open, gleaming with reflected light from the window.

Jane stepped closer. "I'm glad to see you're alive. They told me at first you were dead."

Christine seemed to be trying to sit up, but she was too groggy. She raised her head. "Jane?"