Shadow Woman (31 page)

“Oh?” he said.

“Well, it’s kind of
embarrassing. I leased this big black Mercedes when I got to town,
because I figured it would be good on snow and ice. But I’m not
very good with it. I managed to steer it to the hospital okay, but
about half an hour ago I went out to get my makeup bag from the front
seat…”

Carey’s lips slowly,
involuntarily curved upward.

“This is nothing to smile
about. I backed into an empty parking space and hurried to get
inside, so I wouldn’t be late and get stared at by a lot of
people who knew each other. There’s a color code and a sign,
but I guess I didn’t see it because I backed in. Anyway, I
guess it was for some kind of emergency vehicle, and the police towed
my car away. Why are you smiling?”

Carey’s smile grew, and he
began to chuckle.

“Are you some kind of
sadist?”

“No,” said Carey.
“I’m very sorry. I saw your car when I got here, and I
wondered whether I should say something. That’s all.”

“Then why on earth didn’t
you?” she asked. “I would have moved it in a second.”

He looked down at his hands,
then forced his eyes to meet her stare. “I didn’t want to
seem like a jerk. It was my parking space.”

It took two breaths for her face
to register confusion, then shock, then understanding. Her eyes
sparkled, and her laugh was clear and musical. It seemed to linger on
her lips. “You know where I can get a ride to the impound lot
after this thing ends?”

“It’s the least I
can do.”

Ultimately,
it seemed to Seaver, all investigations came down to staring through
a pane of glass at some doorway late at night. Sometimes it was
sitting in a car that smelled like old cigarettes, and sometimes it
was renting a rat’s nest of an office like this one, barring
the door, and trying to drink enough coffee out of styrofoam cups to
stay awake until something happened.

This time the doorway was on a
little storefront with a big sign that said open twenty-four hours,
so the surveillance was worse than it had usually been in the old
days. And Manhattan presented special problems. You couldn’t
sit on a street in a parked car for twelve hours without collecting a
stack of tickets, and even if you did, there wasn’t much chance
you could use the car to follow anybody. Suspects in Manhattan
scuttled underground to slip into subway trains, or stepped into
yellow cabs that barely came to a complete stop before they were off
again on a long street that looked like a river of identical yellow
cabs, each of them blowing its horn and weaving erratically to keep
going ten miles an hour faster than the speed limit. Or the suspect
veered into a doorway a hundred feet away and vanished into a
building that had fourteen elevators and sixty floors. Cars weren’t
much use. The quarry had to be stalked on foot and not taken down
until he was indoors, away from the hundreds of faces that were
always visible on the street.

Seaver had mailed a small
package addressed to Valued Cardholder, Box 345, 7902 Elizabeth
Street, New York, NY 10.003. The outer wrapping was bright orange
with iridescent yellow stripes on it, so he would have no trouble
spotting it when the mail was picked up. He couldn’t sit here
waiting for the dark-haired woman to show up in the flesh. There was
a better than even chance that the mail would be picked up by some
intermediary, and Seaver would have to follow the package.

If the woman had been hiding
fugitives for anything like the eight or nine years since Miranda’s
reincarnation, then the woman must have built some high walls between
her and people like Stillman. She couldn’t let people like him
find her easily. She would know what Seaver had known – that
even though some part of a career criminal’s stunted brain
believed that some day she might be his last chance of surviving, the
reason he would need her at all had a lot to do with his inability to
choose a future benefit over an extra pack of cigarettes right now.

Seaver was prepared for the
intermediary. Inside the package was an expensive sports watch packed
with a photocopy of a typed message explaining to Valued Cardholder
that it was a reward from Visa for using a credit card. Inside the
watch, and running off its battery, was a small radio transmitter
with a range of a thousand yards.

If Seaver got lucky, the
dark-haired woman might strap the watch to her wrist. Even if she
didn’t like it that much, she would at least see it was too
good to throw away, so she would shove it into a drawer in her
apartment. It didn’t matter. As soon as she had it, he would
have her. When he had her, he would have Hatcher.

Seaver reached over to the desk
and pulled the plastic top off the next styrofoam cup of coffee. It
was not much warmer than the air around it now, the white powdery
substance that symbolized milk already beginning to coagulate in
little gooey lumps that floated just under the oily surface. He
covered it again and walked to the sink, ran the water until it was
steaming hot, stopped the drain, filled the sink a few inches, held
the cup in the water, and looked around for something heavy enough to
keep the cup from floating up and tipping over.

He could find nothing in the
little bathroom to hold it down, so he took the extra ammunition clip
out of his pocket and carefully placed it on the lid. Since he had
nothing else to do, he used the opportunity to urinate. That was
another problem with doing surveillance at this stage of his career.
He had not sat around like this drinking quarts of stale coffee in at
least ten years, and his kidneys were treating it as a new and
unpleasant experience.

He yawned, zipped up his pants,
took his coffee cup out of the water, and set it on the edge of the
sink while he washed his hands. When he carried the cup back to the
window he could still see the bright orange package through the
bronze and glass door of the woman’s mailbox, so he sat down
and took a sip.

He had a perfect view of the
small shop from his office window. His elevation placed the rows of
mailboxes in his field of vision, and he could see the surface of the
counter and part of the workspace behind it where bored employees
wrapped, weighed, and stacked packages, sorted letters, and sent
faxes. The streetlamp in front of the shop threw a splash of light on
the sidewalk outside the door.

He sipped the lukewarm coffee
and watched. At this time of night, so few customers came in that his
cop’s brain wondered whether the purpose of keeping the shop
open might be that other customers besides the dark-haired woman were
doing something illegal: leave your money in some other mailbox on
Tuesday, and come back on Wednesday and pick up your heroin from your
own. But he had watched the boxes for a full cycle of shifts now, and
he had detected no signs that he could interpret as commerce. Nobody
who came in to open a mailbox seemed to take the time to look around
him first for cops or thieves. Nobody seemed to bring anything in
with him that ended up in one of the other mailboxes.

It was nearly midnight when he
recognized the new clerk coming up out of the subway and walking
toward the shop for the changing of the guard. The skinny kid with
jeans and a black T-shirt came in the door, and the older man
collected his belongings – a greenish brown sport coat that
looked as though it had been picked up off a rag pile and a paperback
book that he put in the side pocket so the coat hung down and made
him look like the scarecrow he was.

But then he did something that
made Seaver put his coffee cup on the desk and lean forward. He
stepped behind the mailboxes. Seaver saw him reach into Box 345 and
start sliding envelopes into a big padded mailer. Seaver watched as
the orange and yellow package disappeared with the others.

Seaver snatched up his coat,
stepped to the door, and ran for the stairwell. As he hurried down
the steps, he switched on his receiver and watched the direction
indicator for a base reading. He slipped it into his pocket, stepped
out into the darkness at the side of the building, and walked slowly
toward the street, his eyes on the lighted window of the little shop.
He paused in the shadow until he saw the older man come out the door
carrying the mailer under his arm.

Seaver followed the man along
the dimly lighted street for three blocks, staying close to the
buildings, sometimes keeping his silhouette obscured by the irregular
oudines of pilasters and ornamental brickwork on the facades,
sometimes pausing in the alcoves at store entrances to be invisible
for a time.

The man turned left onto another
street and Seaver broke into a run to shorten the man’s lead.
As he turned the corner, he saw he had misinterpreted the man’s
intentions. He wasn’t on his way to meet the dark-haired woman
and hand her the mail. He was walking in a diagonal course along the
broad, empty sidewalk toward the curb, where there was a big blue
U.S. Postal Service mailbox. When the man had taken the woman’s
mail with him, Seaver had been sure he wasn’t sending it off
again. But he was definitely heading for that mailbox. The woman must
have given him orders not to leave any packages lying around the
store with her forwarding address on them.

Seaver’s mind was flooded
with disappointment at the unwelcome news. There would be more
airline trips, more nights sitting and watching doorways. No, it was
worse than that. If that package went into the postal system before
Seaver knew the address, he would have no idea whether it was going
to an apartment a block away or to Ethiopia. He had to keep that man
from reaching the mailbox.

Seaver called, “Excuse
me.”

The man glanced over his
shoulder and straightened. He was surprised to see Seaver suddenly so
close. He kept going, a little more quickly.

“Wait!” shouted
Seaver. “Sir?”

The man went more quickly, his
long legs taking steps that made him strain. Seaver had made a
mistake by not letting the man get a clear look at him right away, on
a lighted street. In the light, Seaver could easily have passed for a
prosperous middle-aged executive coming home from a restaurant. But
the man was acting as though he expected to be mugged. Instead of
stopping, he went faster. He seemed to want to get rid of the package
so he would have both hands free to defend himself. It didn’t
matter what he thought he was doing, or what Seaver had planned. The
man was hurrying toward the mailbox.

Seaver walked faster, screwing
the silencer onto the end of the barrel. “Sir?” he
called. The man had obviously made his decision. Now he seemed to
want to reach the big mailbox and use it as a shield.

Seaver stopped on the sidewalk
with his feet apart, bent his knees slightly, extended both arms to
steady his right hand, blew the air out of his lungs to keep the
carbon dioxide from causing a tremor, and squeezed the trigger. The
gun jumped upward and Seaver heard the spitting sound.

The man pitched forward. The
mailer fell and slid a few feet, but the man had forgotten it. He was
writhing on the sidewalk, bleeding.

As Seaver ran to finish him, he
saw that a car had appeared near the far end of the block. He clamped
the pistol under his left arm, knelt over the man, and said, “I
tried to warn you. There was a guy in a car shooting. Lie still now.”

The man seemed to barely hear
him. He was squeezing his eyes in an agonized squint and rolling his
head from side to side on the pavement. Seaver glanced down at the
blood on the shirt. It was bright crimson and bubbly, so the bullet
must have passed through a lung.

Seaver saw the car pull up to
the curb. It was a yellow cab. “Is he all right?” called
the driver. Seaver could see only the dark shape of a torso and an
oval head.

“He just tripped and
fell,” said Seaver. “He’ll be okay in a minute.”
The wounded man struggled to reach out his arm toward the cab, and
moaned.

“Does he need to go to the
hospital?”

“No,” said Seaver.
“I’ll take care of him.” He returned his eyes to
the wounded man, shifted his position slightly, and rested his right
forearm on his knee. If Seaver heard the click of a car door latch,
he would move the hand a few more inches and grasp the gun. He would
use the time it took the driver to walk around the rear of the car
into the open to pivot and fire.

The driver shook his head
doubtfully, then stared anxiously ahead through his windshield for a
moment. Just as Seaver acknowledged that he now had the task of
killing this one too, the driver pushed a button to roll up the
window and accelerated up the street.

Seaver felt an abrupt, wrenching
tug, and realized that the wounded man was trying to pry the pistol
out of his armpit Seaver’s right hand swatted the man’s
fingers away, and he straightened his legs so quickly that he nearly
toppled backward. He pulled out the pistol, aimed downward, and shot
the man through the chest. This time he judged that he had hit the
heart. The man gave one spasmodic jerk and went limp. Seaver gave him
a kick, but it prompted no reaction. Seaver decided there was no
reason to keep wondering, so he fired one more round into the man’s
head, put the pistol into his inner coat pocket, picked up the padded
mailer, stuck it into his belt at the small of his back, and covered
it with his coat.

Seaver turned and looked around
him. The little discreet surveillance had degenerated into a bloody
disaster, a tangle of complications and obstacles and hazards. There
was a narrow alley between two buildings to his right, but there was
a high iron fence to block it. He could never lift a grown man’s
body above his head and push it over the fence. He thought he might
be able to carry the body a short distance, but how could he do that
without attracting attention? As he considered the problem, he saw
another set of headlights come around the corner at the far end of
the block and head toward him. He saw the lights jump upward as the
car accelerated, but then they dipped and stayed low. The car was
going to stop.