Shadow Woman (43 page)

When they had finished, she led
him off beside the center trail. They did not step onto the trail
again for fifteen minutes, at the start of a stretch of bare rock
that extended beyond the flashlight’s beam. Pete stopped and
shone his flashlight back the way they had come. “No trail at
all,” he said. “You’re amazing.”

“It cost us a half hour,
but it always makes you feel better to do what you can. And if we are
being followed, it will do more than make us feel better. You have to
remember this isn’t the F.B.I, that’s after us. It’s
probably just some guy who discovered early on that it was easier to
pull a trigger than learn algebra.”

As Jane set off across the rocky
plateau, she discovered that what she had told Pete was a lie.
Stopping to disguise their trail had not made her feel safer. She
tried to measure the prickly sensation in the back of her neck, and
her body gave a convulsive shiver. She pivoted suddenly in her tracks
and stared back into the forest. The sight gave her no comfort: the
individual silhouettes of the trees had merged together into a
shadowy mass of twisted limbs ready to assume any shape her
imagination gave them.

“What’s wrong?”
said Pete.

“Nothing,” she said.
“Just checking to see if you were keeping up.” She turned
and began to walk quickly, and as she walked she searched for a way
to exorcise her uneasiness.

She caught herself wishing she
could have spotted the shooter on the mountainside this morning –
if only a running human form, a solid shape in the windshield of a
speeding car. As it was, the restaurant window had suddenly imploded
in a shower of glass, and a bloody hole had appeared in a man’s
head. There was nothing mysterious about the way that had been
accomplished, but to some part of her subconscious mind, knowing the
mechanical workings of rifles and silencers was information too
meager to lay to rest the sensations she had felt.

Since she had left home it had
not felt to her as though professional killers had been logically
tracing Pete Hatcher’s movements. It felt as though they had
given up physical form entirely, and rode the wind, waiting to
materialize wherever it suited them.

Earl readjusted Lenny’s
load. When he cinched the straps to make everything secure, he nearly
tugged Lenny off his feet. “Think you can keep your balance?”

Lenny slipped the tumpline over
his forehead and took a few steps. “Sure,” he said. “In
the army we used to pack ninety pounds of gear and add the extra ammo
on top of it. This can’t be much worse.”

Earl’s jaw worked
impatiently. Whenever Lenny was feeling resentful, he would just
happen to mention that he had once been declared worthy to sign up to
get his head shaved and hang around Fort Leonard Wood in case they
needed extra cannon fodder. Earl was never quite sure whether Lenny
was implying that cleaning latrines had made him Earl’s moral
superior, or excusing his inadequacy by saying that those wasted
years had set him too far back to ever recover. It didn’t much
matter. Whatever they had done for him in the army, it hadn’t
given him big enough balls to challenge Earl directly, so Earl
tolerated the talk.

He
said, “Just use your map and compass, like they taught you, and
don’t lose your own ass out here.” He turned to T-Bone
and Rusty.
“Raus!”

The two dogs galloped down the
trail to the first bend, then waited and stared back at him. Earl
adjusted his own pack as he set off. Lenny’s military career
had brought Earl one benefit, anyway. It had made him think of moving
through these mountains the way armies did. He had loaded Lenny’s
strong back with all the camping gear and supplies, so Earl could
carry little and forge ahead with the dogs. If he wanted anything
Lenny was carrying, he could meet him on the main trail.

Earl walked along the path after
T-Bone and Rusty for a few hundred yards to let his pupils open to
the dark and his muscles get warm. Then he stopped and did a few
stretching exercises against a tall cedar. When he was ready, he
began to run.

As he ran, Earl considered his
circumstances, and he found them to his liking. Jane Whitefield and
Pete Hatcher had graciously gone to a great deal of exertion and
inconvenience to put themselves into a place where he was strong and
they were weak. Hatcher had been saved twice by the simple fact that
it was hard to kill a man in a public place without committing
suicide. Now it was only one day before the whole national park
closed, and there would be no more tourists setting out into the high
country to get in the way.

Earl moved through the woods
with a hunter’s practiced lope. He had always been a sportsman
who loved to take the long, difficult shot, so he had spent many cold
mornings running patiently through rough country, trailing wounded
deer until they began to choke and cough too much blood to go on.
Tonight he used his dogs to find his way and keep him on the path. He
could hear the difference when their panting came from higher or
lower, left or right, and the thuds of their big paws told him the
nature of the surface they were running on. Turning on a flashlight
in these woods would have given his presence away to anyone looking
back from the ridges above, and the glare would have made his pupils
contract, leaving him half-blind for several minutes.

Earl habitually held his head a
little to the side as he ran, because the best night vision was at
the edges of the eyes, and none of the wind from his running
distorted the sounds. He knew his long legs carried him farther at
each stride than his prey could step, and his stamina would keep him
going longer than any man who had spent his days lounging around in
Las Vegas.

He knew that the two of them
must have started hiking at least four or five hours ago, but that
did not bother him. They would walk for a few hours, until the moon
was high and the wind up here started to howl, and then they would
take their own exhaustion as an assurance that Earl would be too
tired to follow. They would camp, make a shelter and a fire, and curl
up. Maybe they would be cautious enough to tramp a distance off the
main trail first, but they wouldn’t risk going too far.

They didn’t know what was
after them. Earl could just discern the black barrel torsos of Rusty
and T-Bone ahead of him in the dark – beasts with as much mass
and muscle as small men, that could hear a twig the size of a
toothpick snap under a boot, smell a fire in the woods for miles, and
see with a predator’s vision that didn’t bother much with
subtle gradations of tone and color but had evolved to pick out
unerringly whatever was alive so they could sink their teeth into it.

As Earl ran, he could feel the
strange, triangular field between him and Rusty and T-Bone, the dogs’
attentiveness to his sound and scent holding them in position. They
were as alert to any change in his will as to the sights and sounds
ahead of them. The dogs were part of him now. He was a creature with
three heads and sharp teeth and a rifle and a man’s brain,
galloping through the forest sniffing the wind for the smell of live
meat.

Carey had finished his hospital
rounds at seven, but he had found over the past ten days that each
night he went home a little later. The old, comfortable house where
he had grown up now seemed cavernous and empty because Jane wasn’t
there waiting for him. Tonight he had gone back to his office and
spent two hours making notations in the files of his patients,
signing forms and letters that Joy had typed and left on his desk,
then looking over the latest pile of medical journals for articles
that he needed to study. At nine he walked back to the hospital lot,
climbed into the BMW, and remembered that he still had not stopped to
fill up the tank. In the midst of that Susan Haynes business last
night, he had forgotten, and then in the morning she had managed to
delay him long enough so that he had not had time.

He turned the key carefully with
dread in his heart and listened intently. The engine turned over, and
the car violated Carey’s sense of the laws of physics by
starting, then taking him to the gas station without running dry.

As Carey drove up to the big old
house in Amherst he was thinking about food. It was nearly ten
o’clock, and he had not had dinner yet. Maybe he would just
make himself a sandwich and go to bed. He saw that there were lights
on in a couple of the downstairs windows. Susan Haynes had obviously
forgotten to turn off any switches before she had locked the door
this morning… if she had remembered to do that much. He pulled
into the long driveway toward the garage. As he reached the place
where the drive turned the corner of the house, his headlights lit up
the bright-red tail reflectors of the car parked by the back door. It
was the big black Mercedes that Susan Haynes had leased.

Carey stopped his car, pulled it
forward around the big Mercedes to keep from blocking it in, and
killed the engine. He glanced at his watch again. It was nine
fifty-six. This woman was in his house at nine fifty-six waiting for
him to come home. He closed his eyes and felt a constriction in the
muscles of his throat.

His mind surveyed his mistakes
leading backward in time like stepping stones. He should never have
given her his key. He should never have invited an unattached woman
to stay the night, never have given her a ride, never even have let
on that her car had been towed to clear his parking space. He batted
away the excuses that his mind automatically fabricated and spit out
for him, like a machine that had short-circuited: no, he had not done
it because she had really needed his help. He had done it because she
was beautiful and he had not wanted to stop looking at her; because
she was smart and distracting and he was tired of being alone. He had
liked her. The nervously clinical words of an old study of
physiological responses came back to him. Affection – even the
most innocent kind – was found to prompt a “slight
tumescence of the genitals.” And that, in turn, would probably
prompt a rationalization.

He knew that he could not start
his engine again, back out of the driveway, and abandon his house
until this woman got tired of waiting and went away. The only other
option he had was to go inside and find out what she thought she was
doing. It took him a moment to identify the source of his reluctance
to face her. It was the instinctive alarm that made animals shy away
from one of their kind that was behaving strangely. It had probably
kept a lot of epidemics from spreading to healthy animals and wiping
out entire species. This time the instinct was serving no purpose.
Neuroses weren’t contagious.

He walked around to the front
door, found it unlocked, and stepped inside. The smell of food
cooking overwhelmed him and reminded him how hungry he was. Susan had
sneaked into his house and cooked something for him. He was relieved.
It was unwelcome, but at least it was comprehensible, possibly even
within the boundaries of normal behavior. He tried to analyze his
lingering irritation at her. What had she actually done? He supposed
that what had annoyed him most was that she had playfully set off a
sexual longing that he was not entitled to feel. As soon as he had
admitted it, he felt ridiculous for resenting her for it: blaming
women for stimulating impure thoughts had gone out with witch trials.
Or it should have.

He detected that he was also
straining against some primitive territorial reaction she had
triggered by coming into his lair without permission. The hostility
was misplaced – just another legacy from earlier primates that
had begun to get in the way. She wasn’t trying to harm him. She
was trying to be kind, after all. A lot of people believed that the
rules should be abrogated for surprises. Carey was not one of those
people, but he had to live in the world. “Hello?” he
called. “Anybody here?”

When he heard no answer, he
ventured into the living room. He moved into the dining room, and saw
her. She was facing away from him, wearing a pair of jeans and a
sweatshirt that he recognized as Jane’s. If it had not been for
the long, golden hair he might almost have convinced himself that she
was Jane. She was pouring champagne into two glasses. The table was
elaborately set with the best silver, and the candles were lit. She
turned and held out a glass. “Hi,” she said. The
reserved, distant smile was on her lips. “Have you eaten
dinner?”

“No,” he admitted.
“To what do I owe all this?” He realized that his jaw was
tight, the muscles working. He smiled to cover the tension.

She shrugged, and he wished that
it had not made him aware of the movement of her breasts under the
fabric. “I’m showing you my gratitude. You’ve been
very nice to me.”

“I thought you had your
heart set on a big dinner party.” He looked around the corner
toward the living room. “Should I expect the Rotherbergs and
Bortonis to leap out from behind the curtains?”

She grinned and shook her head.
“No, it’s not a surprise party. It’s just a
surprise.” She sipped her champagne and looked into his eyes.
“For you.”

“Why?” He tried to
seem casual. “I mean, I guess I should just say, ‘Thanks.’”
Unexpectedly, the rest of it came out. “But, to be honest with
you, coming in and finding someone inside my house is not my favorite
experience. I suppose that for a lot of people, it must be an
accepted custom: it seems to turn up in television plots almost as
often as the Evil Twin or the Long-Lost Father, and nobody else seems
shocked. But I am. If I want somebody to come, I invite them.”

The suddenness of her smile
staggered him. It seemed to come from absolutely nowhere, and to be
immune to anything he had said. She shrugged. “I gave you every
opportunity, but you don’t seem to let yourself think about
anything personal until after work, and that would have been too
late, wouldn’t it? If I’d known it would bother you, I
would have done it another way.” She turned away and began
fiddling with the objects on the table again.