Shadow Woman (39 page)

She was going to make the big,
wet tears come, and make her voice go small and helpless, and say,
“Then he did this, and this, and this.” And Earl, because
he was Earl, would make her do again everything she described for
him. She could already hear his voice, through clenched teeth,
whispering, “Like this? Was it like this?” And she would
be beside herself with excitement, because with Earl it wasn’t
like being with a man. It was like being possessed by a demon –
part guilty, shameful sensation, but mostly fearing and sharing all
of that power. A necessary part of her fantasy was that Earl would
begin her punishment only after he had killed Carey. She liked to
imagine that he would do it with a knife.

As
the sign for Hungry Horse drifted past her window, Jane said, “Keep
your eyes open for a sporting goods store. If we don’t find
what we need here, go on to Coram. If you see a military surplus
store or one of those places for survival psychos, don’t pass
it by.”

They both saw the store at the
same time, and it seemed to be a little of each. The sign was big and
crude, but the merchandise in the window included skis and toboggans.
“Park off the street,” she said. Pete found a space
behind the building between two delivery trucks and they entered.

Jane picked out two of
everything – compasses, canteens, sleeping bags, waterproof
matches, flashlights. Pete hovered beside her to take the merchandise
she selected, a worried look on his face. She whispered, “You
wanted another option. Without this stuff we don’t have one.”

She carefully picked out their
clothes: rainproof ponchos, olive-drab woolen pants with belted
ankles, pullover sweaters, hiking boots, wool socks, long underwear,
M-65 field jackets, gloves, and watch caps. Next she found a pair of
ten-power binoculars, polarized sunglasses and Swiss Army knives for
each of them, packets of dried food, a cook pot, and, finally, two
backpacks to carry it all in.

Then Jane joined Pete at the
counter, where he stood beside the pile of purchases he had built. As
an afterthought, Jane picked up a small foam fire extinguisher, added
it to the pile, and paid the clerk in cash.

When they had loaded all of the
bags into the car, Jane began to sort out her purchases and pack the
two backpacks while Pete drove. “There will be some kind of
ranger station or visitor center at West Glacier. Stop there too, but
put the car between two tour buses or behind a building or
somewhere.”

“Pretty authentic
disguises,” said Pete. Behind the thin sound of hope in his
voice there was dread.

“I’m afraid they’re
not disguises,” she said.

“They’re not?”

She looked at him
unapologetically. “Not exactly. It’s something I stumbled
on by looking at the map. We’re brought up to see the world as
a lot of roads. It’s like a grid, with dots for the towns at
the intersections and nothing between the roads at all. These people
will keep chasing us if we stay on the lines. We have to stop now and
then at one of those dots at the intersections, and they’ll
catch up. So we’ll see the map differently for a couple of
days.”

“We’re going
camping? What does that get us?”

“I’m not sure yet,
so I’m not making promises. I think they’re using
commercial computer databases to track us; the lists of people who
buy handguns, cars, or rent hotel rooms. I’ve never used the
same names or credit cards two days in a row, and that’s always
worked before. But it’s not working now. I made some phone
calls, but they were from pay phones. They don’t transmit the
numbers of pay phones for caller ID to pick up, so nobody can be
intercepting the signal and finding us that way. Even if they managed
to find out where I live and tapped my home phone, I never said where
I was calling from. Our phone bill comes at the end of the month, so
they’re not reading it. I don’t have any idea what these
people are doing, or how. And that scares me.”

“Isn’t it possible
that they just followed us?”

“Maybe. Maybe they
out-thought me – figured what I would do, then drove along the
right road and showed your picture to hotel desk clerks and
waitresses. But it’s not a great method if what you plan to do
after you find the person is kill him. It’s also possible that
they’re tracking this car electronically.”

“How do we find out –
search it?”

“Dump it.”

“Where do we get another
car out here?”

She gave her sad little smile
again. “We don’t. I’d love to get a new one and
drive until the tread is off the tires. But we tried that, and a
shooter turned up. I’d love to put on a blond wig and step onto
an airplane to anywhere. But unless we know for sure how they’re
tracking us, we can’t do anything that puts us in a
predetermined airport at a prearranged time. The safest tactic I can
think of is to do the opposite: go where there are no people to see
us, no schedules, and no records for anybody to break into. It’s
not a great idea, but it’s an idea. We’ve got to keep
moving.”

“Keep moving where?”

She sighed. “I think we
have no choice but to dump everything we had when we walked into that
restaurant this morning, and cross the border.”

“Canada?”

“If they’re using
computer data files, it’s possible crossing a national border
will make it harder. A lot of businesses are national – not
international. If their car gets searched at the border, there will
be guns in it. There might be other advantages, but there are no
disadvantages that I know of.”

As the road wound up into the
mountains, Pete seemed to be concentrating on his driving. “Shouldn’t
we leave this car someplace to mislead them?”

“I don’t want to
confuse them,” she said. “I want them stuck.”

“How do we manage that?”

“It’s September
thirteenth. In two days they’ll close this road for the winter.
If the chasers don’t get this far by then, they’ll have
to go back. If, after that, they find out we left the car inside the
park, they have the same choices we had: go on to the Chief Mountain
Highway, drive to the border, and get stopped, because the customs
station closes on the fifteenth too; go east to the next road that
crosses at the Piegan-Conway crossing; or go all the way back along
this road to Whitefish and drive up Route 93. Either way, we’ll
be in the space in-between, at least thirty miles from them with no
road to get to us.”

“And then?”

“And then we walk out of
the woods in Canada and pay somebody to drive us far enough away to
catch a bus. I’m not getting on any more planes until I know
they haven’t tapped the reservation system.”

They drove into the park at West
Glacier, bought a trail map at the ranger station, then joined the
long single-file line of cars on Going-to-the-Sun Road. The progress
was slow because me road was a Depression-era two-lane pavement with
high, rocky cliffs on the right and Lake McDonald on the left.
Drivers ahead of them pulled over whenever there was a turnout to
take pictures and stare at the icy, glass-clear lake and the
surrounding forests.

Pete said happily, “It
looks as though we won’t be needing that winter gear we bought.
The weather’s beautiful.”

She turned in her seat to look
at him. “I guess I should have asked you this before. Have you
ever spent time in the woods?”

He pursed his lips. “Let’s
see. By woods you don’t mean a bunch of trees next to the
fairway, do you? I mean, this is a park, right?”

“I’m glad I didn’t
ask. Here it’s seventy and sunny. The altitude is three
thousand feet and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. In
an hour or so, we’ll be at seven thousand feet. The temperature
drops about five degrees for each thousand feet. It could be fifty up
there now. Sunset tonight is about six twenty. That’s when it
sinks majestically below the horizon if you’re on the ocean,
not if you have a mountain or two to the west of you to cast a
shadow. It’s also windy on mountains. So that fifty could
already feel like thirty.”

He frowned. “Thirty
degrees? And you’re sure today’s the day the teddy bears
have their picnic?”

She stared at him for a second,
then laughed. “You’ve lost your mind.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“No matter what happens to
me after this, it won’t be anywhere near as interesting.”

“I wouldn’t give up
yet.”

“I know that sounds
idiotic,” he admitted. “I’ve been thinking about it
for a couple of days now, and I kept wondering if I’d bumped my
head. Then I was thinking that if I told you, I would just convince
you that I was too stupid to be scared. But I’m scared all the
time, and it still feels true. If they find me and kill me, it will
just be a sharp pain, and then nothing. If they don’t, I’ll
try my best to live a quiet life. But right now, every second is full
of possibilities, full of things I never thought about or looked at
before. I’ve never wanted to stay alive so much in my life.”

Jane had not sensed that trouble
was coming, and here it was again. It was not that she would be
tempted to have a fling with Pete Hatcher. This was the fling, and
she was having it. She felt the same exhilaration he did. This time
the hunters were the best she had ever faced, and Pete Hatcher was
her last client, and after this great flaming burst of clarity she
was either going to die or let her life settle down to a steady
unchanging glow like a pilot light. From then on, when evil came, it
would come in some equivocal form – spite or pride or jealousy
– sidling up to her and leaving her nothing clear and direct
that she could do to fight it. This was the guide’s last trip.

Jane studied the road ahead and
saw the Loop coming. It was the only hairpin turn on the highway,
eight miles out of the way to follow the course of the McDonald River
and eight miles back under Mount Cannon. “Pretty soon we’ll
be there,” she said. “If you’re not willing to do
this, tell me now.”

“I already told you,”
he said. “I want to live.”

He drove the long curve, then
climbed again, higher into the mountains. When he pulled into the big
parking lot at the Logan Pass visitor center and stopped, Jane said,
“Pull over by the garbage Dumpsters and wait for me.”

She opened the trunk and went
through the suitcases one last time. She put Pete’s pistol in
his pack and the ammunition in hers to even the weight, then split
his money between the two packs, closed them tight, and dropped the
two suitcases into the Dumpster and covered them with garbage.

Jane used her Swiss Army knife
to unscrew the Montana license plates and replace them with Colorado
plates from a nearby car. She got into the car again and parked it as
far from the road as possible, then handed Pete his pack, bedroll,
and canteen. Finally she sprayed the inside of the car with the fire
extinguisher and tossed it on the floor in the back seat, left the
keys in the ignition, and walked away.

“What was that for?”
asked Pete.

“The spray is just carbon
dioxide. It’ll be gone in a little while, but so will the
fingerprints. If somebody traces the plates, they’ll have a
problem because the car’s not registered in Colorado. It might
buy us some time to make them trace it in other states.”

“Why did you leave the
keys?”

“Out of a million
visitors, we can hope for one car thief. They must take vacations
too.” She handed him her canteen. “I’m entitled to
one last phone call. Go fill these up with water from the tap over
there while I make it.”

She went to the telephone at the
far end of the row, put in a quarter, dialed the private line on
Carey’s desk in his office, waited for the operator to tell her
how many more she needed, and put those in too. Change made noise in
pockets, and there would be no more collect calls for her. She
couldn’t be entirely sure that the shooters weren’t using
the telephone company’s billing system to trace her.

“Hello.”

“I love you,” she
said.

“What?”

She laughed. “I said, I
love you. At least I hope it’s you, or I just made a fool of
myself for a perfect stranger.”

“No,” he said. “Not
perfect. Do you have time to talk?”

She looked around to see if
anyone was near. “Not much, but probably more than you do.”

“Good for you,” he
said. “Having fun?”

“Not much,” she
began. Then she stopped herself. Could she tell him that a few hours
ago she had watched a rifle bullet churn its way through a man’s
head because he looked like Pete Hatcher? Not if she wasn’t
also going to tell him it was over. “We’re not out of the
woods yet. Literally. I won’t be able to call for a few days.
We’re traveling on foot, and there won’t be any phones.”

She could hear him breathing on
the other end, then: “Why on foot?”

“It’s safer. I’ll
tell you all about it in excruciating detail when I get home.”

“That’s what I was
wondering,” he said. “Can you tell me when you’re
coming home?”

“We’ve got to go
about twenty miles, but that’s measuring it straight. I figure
two or three days to get up there, and then two weeks more to finish
this for good. Then I’ll be home.”

“Why do you need two
weeks?”

She sighed. “Because I
never, ever want to do this again. If I do it right, it’s
over.”

She waited a long time for his
answer. Finally, he said, “I understand,” as though he
didn’t. “Just promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Before you get on the
plane, give me a call. I want to pick you up at the airport.”

“I can probably find a
phone before then.”

“I know, but that’s
something else. Promise?”

“Sure,” she said.
She had spent her adult life inventing lies, and she could tell when
somebody was hiding something. If Carey wanted to arrange a surprise
for her, it was worth playing dumb to keep from ruining it. “I
promise.”