Shadow Woman (24 page)

He looked pained. “I did.
Your message ran, but then there was no beep to start the recorder. I
said where I was, but I couldn’t tell if it picked anything up.
I guess it didn’t.” He leaned close and looked into her
eyes, and she thought of Paula again. Those long eyelashes were part
of it – he didn’t seem to know they belonged to him. “I
made a couple of mistakes in Denver,” he confided. “I
thought I was doing great, but I was absolutely clueless. That scared
me. That’s why I called in the first place. If you didn’t
get my messages, how did you find me?”

“Okay,” said Jane.
“It doesn’t matter. You got through. Now, what have you
got up in your room that you can’t leave there?”

“One suitcase. The one you
had me pack the last time. It’s got my money in it.”

“Give me the key,”
she said.

He handed her the key, and she
looked at it before she slipped it into her purse. He said, “The
number’s not on it, but it’s 605.”

“Here’s what we do,”
she said. “You sit here, sip your drink. If it takes too long,
drink mine. Stay here with the waiter. If he leaves, don’t go
to the lobby or follow me to your room or something. If everything
unexpectedly goes wrong, don’t go to your car.”

“How did you know I had a
car?”

She smiled sadly. “If they
haven’t found you yet, all this is practice. If they have, what
they’ve found is the car.”

Jane stood up and walked across
the deck outside, back into the corridor where she had entered. She
followed it until she found a fire door that led up the stairs. At
the sixth floor she stood for a moment with her ear to the door. She
heard nothing, so she stepped out into the hallway, found 605, and
opened it.

The suitcase was neatly stowed
in the closet. She tipped it on its side and searched it. There was
sixty thousand dollars in hundreds, fifteen little plastic folders
full of traveler’s checks, seven passbooks for savings accounts
in Denver banks. She loaded the money, passbooks, and checks into her
canvas bag and looked deeper.

When she found the box at the
bottom she stopped. It was gold with a black stripe. It said, “38
Special. 20 pistol cartridges.” She felt almost relieved. He
had gone out and bought himself a pistol and a car. There was nothing
mysterious about the way they had found him. All they had done was
watch lists that anybody could get, until one man’s name had
turned up on two or three lists. She put the box of cartridges into
her bag with the money, then examined the suitcase for anything else
Hatcher had neglected to mention.

She went into the bathroom,
picked up his bag of toiletries, wiped the faucets and fixtures with
a washcloth, then came out and wiped the desk, the television set,
the table, the doorknobs.

Then she checked all the
wastebaskets for receipts or papers that would hold a print. When she
was satisfied, she closed the suitcase, put the sign that said maid
service on the doorknob, and slipped back into the stairwell.

She climbed to the top floor,
then onto the roof of the building. She left the suitcase behind a
big air-conditioning condenser and went back down the stairs. They
would find it in a month or two and have no idea how it had gotten
there.

Downstairs she found Pete
Hatcher drinking his cold coffee and looking happy. “Time to
go,” she said.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She led him the way she had
come, down the long corridor and out the door at the end of the east
wing to avoid the lobby and the front entrance. When they were in her
rented car on the next street she started the engine and waited.
“Tell me where your car is.”

“It’s parked down
the street near another hotel,” he said. “About three,
four blocks down.”

She was beginning to feel a
little more confident. It wasn’t a particularly cunning way to
hide a car, but at least it showed he wasn’t totally
unconscious. He was thinking. She turned the corner and drove in the
opposite direction. “I hope you’re not too attached to
it.”

“No,” he said. “Does
that mean we’re just leaving it?”

She sighed. “If things
were different I think I would be tempted not to. I would find a very
good spot so we could watch the car around the clock. Eventually, the
people who want you might come along, and I could see who they were.
I’m not that curious this time.”

“I don’t want to
imply that I am, but why aren’t you?”

“Several reasons. One is
the way they found you.”

“You know how they found
me? Even I don’t know.”

“I’m not positive,
but you did two things that I know of that a person does who’s
scared and running. You bought a gun and a car. That gave them two
things to put together, two lists with the same name on them. So they
might already be watching the car.”

“How did you know about
the gun?”

“Hardly anybody carries
ammunition in his suitcase who doesn’t have one,” she
said. “Tell me exactly what happened in Denver.” She
drove along the same street in the opposite direction and saw no
other car turn to follow.

“There was a woman on the
street when I was coming home from the grocery store. She looked like
she had car trouble, and I walked over and took a look under the
hood. She lifted the pistol out of my belt, stuck a big automatic in
my face, and said she was a cop. She made me get in the trunk. A real
cop came along right after that, and she killed him.”

“How did you see that from
the trunk?”

“I didn’t, but when
I got out, there he was.”

“How did you get out of
the trunk?”

“She opened it, fired four
shots at me, and slammed it again. I’m lying there and after a
minute, I realize I’m not dead. She actually missed. On most
cars there’s a latch inside the trunk. You pull it, and the
trunk opens. I was alone except for the dead cop. I don’t know
anything else.”

“That’s about all we
need to know,” said Jane. “They managed to find you. I
assume you walked to the same store by the same route regularly?”

He nodded.

“They knew that, and they
knew you weren’t the sort of man who could walk past a woman
with car trouble. Not everybody would stop. They knew you were
carrying a pistol, because otherwise she wouldn’t have grabbed
it before she showed you hers. The fact that she didn’t pull
the trigger means they must have been planning to drive you out of
town where they could shoot you without having anybody hear and bury
you without having anybody find you.”

“Why do you keep saying
‘they’?”

“Did this woman look as
though she could carry your body by herself?”

“No.”

“Then there was someone
else who could. There’s also the dead policeman. Denver has
serious criminals, and a serious police department. Any cop who stops
his car is going to be sure he’s able to control whoever he
sees. So probably he was shot by somebody he didn’t see. Not
for sure, but probably.”

Pete Hatcher looked out the
window and watched the display windows of businesses slipping past as
the car moved west toward the interstate. “Then the one I
didn’t see could have shot me the way he shot the cop –
while I was alone on the street. Why didn’t he?”

“That’s one of those
bits of good news that’s not quite as good if you take a second
look at it,” Jane said. “Your former friends from
Pleasure, Inc. aren’t hunting you themselves; they’ve
hired professionals. The problems that raises should be getting
obvious by now. Professionals know how to hunt. They know which ways
to kill you are smart, and which ways are stupid. Taking you to a
quiet, private place where nothing will be seen or heard is smart;
blasting away in the middle of a city is not.”

“But that’s just
what they did. They shot the policeman, and then – ”

“They didn’t plan
to, and that’s another side to it. When something unexpectedly
goes wrong, professionals don’t get emotional. Killing you is
just a job, and anybody else who happens along is nothing but a
little extra work. They know in advance that they might have to get
rid of witnesses, so they’re primed for it. They react quickly,
and don’t spend time asking themselves philosophical questions
first.”

She glanced at Pete Hatcher to
see if he was listening. When she saw his face, her breath caught in
her throat. His eyes were watering. Could he be crying? She pretended
to pay attention to the road behind her for a few seconds. She
glanced at him again. His big brown eyes were welling with tears.
When he sensed that she was looking, he turned away and wiped his
eyes on his sleeve. She waited.

“That policeman,” he
said. “He lost his life, and I got mine. It was a bad trade.
You should have seen him. His head was half gone. I couldn’t
even tell what he looked like. The world lost him just to get a
little more of me.”

Jane blew out a breath slowly.
“I don’t think that’s a train of thought you want
to follow too far.” She stared ahead at the entrance to the
interstate, slipped her car into the center of the tight stream of
traffic, and found herself silently talking to Paula. You didn’t
have a way to say it, did you? In all the talk about his pleasant
disposition and nice manners you never told me why you called me.

In all her years of snatching
rabbits out of the fangs of the wolves, she had almost never heard a
rabbit so much as wonder out loud what had happened to the other
rabbits. They weren’t selfish. It always seemed to her to be
physical, the body overpowering the mind to save itself. They never
thought of looking back until they had run far enough. That was why a
sensible nurse who had seen a lot of men would intercede for this
one. The fact that he didn’t have a fine and complicated
intellect was about the same as saying he didn’t have a
twelve-cylinder Italian sportscar. He was a decent human being who
was just trying to drive what he had.

When she looked at him again,
she had an urge to give him something. “Okay,” she said,
“let’s think practically. What do we do with what we
know? You got a good look at the woman, right?”

“Right.”

“And she got a good look
at you. Wherever we go, keep looking for her in the distance. She
won’t be up close again, but she may be in a crowd, or in a
window, or in a car that goes by. If you see her again, you go. No
hesitation, no wondering if she saw you or not, no decisions. You go
that minute. If you’re in the middle of a date in a restaurant
a year from now, you go to the men’s room and never come back.”
She watched him to see if he understood, and he seemed to. “Only
this time, you’re going to know in advance where you’re
going and how to get there.”

“Where are we going now?”

“First, we’ll drop
out of sight completely for a few days, to let the trail get cold.
Then we’ll start all over again, and do this right. I’ll
hide you somewhere, but I’ll stick around this time until I’m
sure we’ve lost them for good. I’ll give you a few
lessons I should have given you the first time. I’ll help you
get used to the next new name, new place, new life. Then I’ll
leave for good.”

“You said the first thing
is dropping out of sight. How do you do that?”

“The best way is to do
nothing.” She smiled. “Missoula looks like a good place
to start doing it. We’ll buy you a new suitcase, check into a
motel, and see if you got lucky and lost them. In fact, that’s
the good part about what I was saying, and I almost forgot to tell
you. They’re pros, and from what I can tell, they’re near
the upper end of the scale of people who could be called that. That
means we avoid them or we’re dead: there isn’t any
mystery about the outcome. But the nice thing about pros is that
they’re in it for the money.”

“So?”

“They get paid in two
ways. One is that they get all of it when they’ve killed you.
The other is that the client gives them some money up front for
expenses, and the rest when they’ve got you. Either way, your
best friend is time. They’ve just wasted three months for
nothing, and spent a lot of money traveling. People like that could
have made a lot in three months. Hardly anybody is very difficult to
kill. If the client is paying for all this, then by now he’s
going to be wondering what he’s getting for his money.”

“I still don’t get
it. How does this help me?”

“If you wait long enough,
pros go away.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. They
don’t hate you. They’re in a business. At the moment when
they calculate that the job is a waste of effort, they quit. If
they’re getting paid for expenses, the time comes when the
client makes the same calculation and stops paying.”

“Then I’ll be safe?”

She cocked her head and pursed
her lips, then said reluctantly, “Not exactly. At least not
yet.”

“Why not?”

“The client in your case
can afford to replace them. But the replacement would have to start
all over again at Las Vegas. Pros aren’t likely to turn over
their information to competitors.” She shrugged. “I’m
not saying you’re in the best position possible, but there are
worse.”

“What’s worse than
being chased by professional killers?”

She thought for a moment. “I
guess the worst is if you’ve committed some really awful crime
and people know it.”

“What would you do for a
person like that?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Seaver
drove along the desert highway, watching the long, empty gray road
ahead wavering near the distant vanishing point as heat waves rose
from the pavement. Now and then a dark reflective spot would appear
on the road, the eyes would see it as water, but the brain would say
“mirage,” and it would diminish to nothing as he
approached it. He drove quickly, feeling the slight lift of the car’s
springs as he reached the crest of each little rise, then feeling his
body regain a few pounds more than its weight as the car came to the
bottom and began the next climb.