“What is the real issue?
My sex life?”
“Your life, period.
Suppose I tell you that having sex with strangers is dangerous. Is
that news? Does it change anything?”
He looked down, silent.
“How about that it’s
even more dangerous for you, because the people who are chasing you
know that you do it?”
He watched her, but still said
nothing.
“You could improve your
chances a lot just by being slightly more selective. Women who go to
church social groups are less likely to be decoys than ones who step
out of dark doorways after midnight wearing two ounces of nylon. And
church groups are notorious for being exactly what you need. Join a
group for singles. Every woman there is looking for a man, and they
outnumber the men two to one. Someone like you would be very
welcome.”
“Are you trying to help
me, or get back at me for embarrassing you last night?”
“I’m being
realistic. Even if I were trying to embarrass you, who cares? Will
anything I think about your personal life matter when you’re on
your own? No, and it shouldn’t.”
“So where does that leave
us?”
“When I sent you to Denver
I hadn’t had time to get to know you. I expected you to live
like a monk. Maybe you did too. This time, let’s get it right.
Those security-minded condo places are that way because they’re
full of young, career-minded women. You’ll rind them hanging
around the pools and the exercise rooms. Some of the owners’
associations even have parties where the eligible women will push
themselves in front of your nose. Take them. Enjoy yourself. But
stick to your story. Never reveal anything that doesn’t fit.”
Hatcher looked at her sadly. “I
thought you were just being the pinch-faced schoolmarm. It’s
way past that, isn’t it? You sound like a scientist talking
about rats.”
She reached out and touched his
hand, then regretted it and pulled back. “I’m sorry. I’m
just being professional. If you’re happy, you’ll be able
to stay in one quiet, safe place for a long time. If you’re
not, you’ll take risks to get happy. So I need to make you
happy for as long as I can.”
“But you don’t feel
anything.”
“I don’t feel what
you feel. You see any woman on the youngish side with round breasts
and the right ratio of hips to waist, and you want her. I can know
that, but knowing is all I can do. It’s all any of us can do.
And what you did last night wasn’t shocking or particularly
newsworthy. It was just something I needed to be reminded of.”
“You’re taking one
incident and weaving it into a rope to tie around my neck.”
“No,” she said.
“This is hard for me to talk about, so let me get it all out of
the way. Last night I watched a young woman strip off a wet bathing
suit to put on makeup at two a.m. so she could lure you away from her
best friend. Ignoring the power, the need that makes people do that
would be stupid. Will you personally take the chance of getting
killed for sex? Sure. Scratch the topsoil anywhere on the planet and
you’ll find the bones of people who maybe didn’t all know
it, but who died over the instinct to mate. It’s not an
opinion, it’s a fact. What I think about it, or feel about it,
or what the implications are for romantic love or babies or families
or anything else is irrelevant. All I can do is get out of the way.
In this case it means putting you in the right location, so you’ll
survive.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He had
surprised her again.
“Yes. You don’t
think much of me today. When I ask you why you save people’s
lives, you say it’s because you’re a woman who saves
people’s lives. I want to know if you care about me. I know I
have no right to ask you to care. I just want to know if you do.”
Jane patted his hand and gave
him a smile that was achingly false. “Of course I do. You’re
the best brother I ever had.”
She turned her attention to the
plate of food in front of her. He had been eating while she had been
talking, and her scrambled eggs had turned cold and rubbery. She put
some into her mouth. She could feel tears beginning to gather behind
her eyes. Something was very wrong this morning, and she could not
find a way to fix it. Maybe she had placed too much weight on her
young, tender marriage. She had somehow gotten the impression that it
was going to be a shield that protected her, kept her at a distance
from certain kinds of hurt, certain ugly facts of other people’s
lives. If nothing else, it should have made her immune to feelings
about men like Pete Hatcher.
Jane swallowed her eggs and
turned her attention to the people filling up the dining room for
lunch. There were the usual number of older people with gray hair,
the women in shoes like nurses wore and the men in socks that matched
their shirts, and lots of stuff in their pockets. There were two
families with children who had sat in cars all morning and now
fidgeted and thought of excuses to get up and wander in the dining
room. She let herself wonder if some day she and Carey would be like
this, threatening their kids in low voices to make them behave, or
later, growing old together and wandering around like the couple in
the next booth.
Then she saw two people who
intrigued her. The woman was tall and thin with long black hair, dark
almond eyes, and high cheekbones. Around here the blood was probably
Black-foot or Kootenai or Flathead. The man was big, blond, and
broad-shouldered – not muscular, but fit in the way that tennis
players were.
The head waitress moved them
from an inner table and seated them at a table beside the window.
They watched her set their plates in front of them and talked
quietly. Jane wished she had not seen them. The woman looked a little
like her, and so she had wanted the man to resemble Carey. It was a
childish and primitive impulse to make the world bend into congruence
with what she wanted, to have the universe send her an omen that
everything was all right. She did not want to notice at first, and
then she did not want to acknowledge the truth. If the man looked
like anybody, it was Pete.
She looked away. But before her
head had finished its turn, she sensed that she had seen something
strange. Her eyes shot back to the couple, focused on the high
hillside through the window beside them. She gazed at it for several
seconds, but the sight did not come again. She had imagined a small,
bright flash of sun on metal. She stared down at her plate, not aware
that her brow was furrowed.
Pete noticed her expression and
said, “What’s – ” just as Jane had put the
pieces together. She stood up quickly and took a step toward the
couple, and time ran out.
She saw the windowpane shatter
and the man by the window stop, his mouth open to receive the fork
with a piece of pancake on it. His head seemed to bob toward Jane,
his ear striking his shoulder, then bouncing back a little. Jane saw
the splatter of blood, bone, and dark tissue that had to be brain in
the air all mixed with glittering, sparkling fragments of glass.
The dark woman’s eyes grew
white-wide, her fingers curled like claws, and she shrieked as the
rest of the people in the crowded dining room took in a single gasp
and let it out in a shuddering moan. People began to scramble. Chairs
fell, plates broke.
Jane dashed over the shards of
glass, yanked the woman out of her chair, and pushed her into the
crowd that was backing toward the doorway just as the second shot
shattered another pane of the window. She turned to search for Pete
and he bumped into her, then held her to keep her from falling. The
details flooded her mind now: there had been no report of the weapon,
so it must have a silencer; no crack of a bullet breaking the sound
barrier, so the ammunition must be subsonic. It probably didn’t
have the velocity to pierce any walls. She said, “Hold on to
me,” and set off, with Pete’s hands on her waist.
They threaded their way into the
crowd cowering in the restaurant foyer. The cashier was shouting into
the telephone and the dark woman was off to the right screaming while
two elderly women held her. Janes mind raced. If the shooter had
finished firing and was already slipping away, then she should get
Pete out of here before he discovered his mistake. But what if he
wasn’t running away? His rifle scope had enough magnification
to let him put a bullet through the wrong man’s temple from the
mountainside. If he was using this time to creep down the mountain,
then in a few minutes he would be close enough to see faces clearly.
Jane knew she had to do
something that was not going to make her proud, and she had to do it
now. She began to push toward the door and yelled, “I’m
not going to stay here and get killed!”
The people who had been standing
paralyzed, waiting for some voice to suggest a remedy for their
terror, shifted in a single wave. The double door ahead of them
opened, then began to wag back and forth as each person nudged it
aside to get out.
Jane tugged Pete out in the
middle of the throng. As she had expected, once they were out in the
sunlight and fresh air, sanity seemed to descend upon the crowd. They
saw how open and unprotected they were in the parking lot, so they
began to spin like dancers, looking in every direction to see where
the danger was coming from as they retreated toward the overhanging
roof and brick wall of the restaurant.
Jane sprinted to the car and
crouched until Pete had joined her. As she had expected, her run –
a definite, unhesitating move – seemed to some in the crowd to
be shrewdly based on information they did not have. They ran to their
cars, started them, and wheeled out of the lot to the highway.
“Drive,” said Jane.
Pete ducked into the driver’s
seat and they joined the line of cars streaming out onto the road.
Pete gripped the steering wheel hard, holding it steady with effort
as though its natural inclination were to veer off into the woods. “I
saw it,” he said. “I couldn’t think fast enough.”
“Saw what?” said
Jane.
“I was thinking they
looked a little bit like us. Like you and me.”
“Drive,” said Jane.
“Don’t worry about the speed. Out here what they do when
they want somebody is put up a roadblock. When they do, we’d
better be on the other side of it.”
Jane
studied the road map while Pete drove. She traced the red and blue
lines meandering through the mountains, searching for turnouts and
alternative routes. It was the wrong part of the country to evade
someone in a car. The Rocky Mountains didn’t offer many
vulnerabilities to road builders.
“Where do I go?”
asked Pete.
“No choice but to keep
going up 83 for a while,” she said. “There’s no
place to switch until Bigfork.”
“What then?”
“I’ll tell you when
I know. Right now, if you do that much, we’re not dead. When
there’s a straight stretch, try to look behind you and make a
list of all the cars you can see. Get to know them.”
“How do I know if he’s
in one of them?”
“You don’t. Most of
them will drop out at Bigfork to look for a police station or a
telephone. The one we need to worry about won’t.”
He drove for fifteen minutes,
and Jane noticed no cars coming toward them in the left lane.
Finally, three police cars flashed past, driving hard toward Swan
Lake. She turned to look after them, then switched on the car radio.
After some static and blurts of music she found, “The police
have asked us to report that Route 83 is closed south at Bigfork and
north at Salmon Prairie. It will remain closed until further notice.”
She switched it off and muttered, “Of course.”
“What?” said Pete.
“I hadn’t thought of
that. They think they’ve got a sniper back there still taking
shots across a highway at a restaurant. They don’t want to
block the road out until they get people evacuated. What they’re
blocking is the way in, so nobody gets shot.”
She went back to her road map.
“All right. At Bigfork, turn right onto 35, to Creston, and
keep heading north when it changes to 206.”
She set the map aside and stared
out the back window. Maybe the shooter had not made it to his car in
time to follow. He had been up above on the hillside, at least three
hundred yards away. As soon as she had thought of it, she knew she
was being foolish. It wasn’t likely that a pro would strand
himself that far from his car and open fire. His car had been up
there too, probably parked beside one of the firebreaks or timber
roads cut into the forested hillside.
The reflection had not come from
his equipment. All he had needed was a rifle and a scope, and the
good ones were designed with that problem in mind. It was cars that
were covered with chrome and mirrors. He was probably right behind
them now, if not among the first few cars, then in the next pack.
“We have to talk,”
she said.
“You start.”
“We have a problem here. I
don’t have any idea how they knew where we were.”
“Obviously I don’t
either.” He turned to her, eyes wide. “You don’t
suppose Pam and Carol – ”
“No,” she said. “If
they had put two girls in your path to get you alone, that was when
they would have killed you. And we left this morning before those two
were up. They couldn’t have told anybody where we were going,
because they didn’t know.”
“Then what could we have
done to tell that guy where we were?”
“Maybe they have some
spectacular new way of instantly picking out charges on the credit
cards we’ve been using. Maybe they somehow found out about this
car the day I bought it, and hid a transmitter in it. Whatever
they’re using to trace us, it might as well be magic.”
“You’re making me
more nervous than I am already, and I can hardly hold the wheel
steady as it is.”
They passed a sign that said
bigfork 5. She said, “We have five miles to make a choice. What
I’m saying is that they shouldn’t be here. When I play
this game, if my side wins a round, we get to play another round. If
the other side wins one, the game is over.”