“Good. Do you need
anything? Money or something?”
“No, thanks,” she
said. “I’d better get going. I love you.”
“Me too.”
“Bye.”
They both hung up. As she walked
away from the telephone, she fervently sent a wish across the
mountains. Let the surprise be flowers and champagne. Don’t
surprise me by having the upstairs bathroom remodeled. Then she felt
guilty and unworthy. The man she loved and wanted to spend her life
with was planning a surprise. Whatever it was, she resolved to smile
and throw her arms around his neck and kiss him as though all future
happiness depended on it. She was not foolish enough to think that it
didn’t.
Jane walked out of the park
building and found Pete Hatcher on the steps with their two full
canteens. She cinched hers onto her pack and did the same for
Hatcher.
“I thought you were
supposed to wear them on your belt.”
“Soldiers have to put up
with two quarts of water whacking their butts, but I don’t,”
she said. “Unlike them, we can stop and take off our packs when
we want without getting shot.”
“I hope,” he said.
She walked across the lot and
waited at the edge of the road. “Did you feel the change yet?”
“What change?”
“We just stepped across
the Continental Divide. If you spill your canteen now, it goes into
the Mississippi instead of the Pacific.”
“I’ll try to be
careful to preserve the levees.”
There was a break in the traffic
and they hurried across the road. Pete stopped beside a wooden sign
that had nothing on it but highline trail and an arrow pointing
north. “Just how long is this trail?”
She began to walk on the soft,
irregular ground, under hemlocks and cedars. It forced Pete to take
the first step off the pavement, then hurry to catch up with her, and
then they were walking along and the decision was over. “How
long?”
“Long.”
“What does ‘long’
mean to a woman like you in miles?”
“On the map it looks like
twenty as the crow flies, and maybe thirty if you take it in
sections, point to point. The map isn’t big enough to take into
account all the meandering, which is what trails through wilderness
do. And it’s two-dimensional, so I can’t tell just how
hard the climbing will be. It could be fifty miles and seem like
three times that.”
“Do you mind if I keep
asking questions?”
“Nobody can hear us, and
the trail is shorter if you talk.”
“What if they find the
car?”
“Then they have to make a
guess. If they think we changed cars, then they’ll drive fast
away from here to try to catch up and see the new one. If they think
we abandoned it and walked off into the mountains, they have to guess
which trail we took. If we went north toward Canada, there are a
dozen branches ahead that come out pretty far from each other. But
most likely they’ll think we left the car so it would look as
though we headed north for Canada, but turned south or east or west
instead. Those trails all reach roads at some point.”
“What if they don’t
fool themselves, know we headed for Canada, and pick the right
trail?”
“Then they have other
choices. They have to guess where we’ll surface when we get to
Canada, drive up there, and wait, or come up the trail after us.”
“That’s the one I
don’t like: some guy with a gun coming out here after us.”
“Even if they do, they
still have choices. We’re carrying about what a cautious person
would take on a day trip. A smart person would know there was the
possibility of not making it back by dark and having to spend one
night out there. Anybody who follows could choose to travel lighter
than that for speed, or they could carry tents and heavy clothes and
a week’s food and water. If they travel lighter than we are,
they could easily have to turn around and give up. If they load
themselves down with lots of gear, they’ll have a very hard
time catching up with us.”
“Especially with all those
guns.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t
going to mention those.” She looked at him for a moment as they
walked along. He seemed calm. “But you’re right. Good
sniper rifles are heavy – ten to fifteen pounds with the scope.
The ammo isn’t light, and this guy isn’t likely to scrimp
on that. It’s usually made for the military, so it’s 7.62
millimeters wide and 50 millimeters long. He’ll also carry a
sidearm of some kind, and ammo for that. I’d say he’ll be
carrying an extra twenty pounds of metal that we’re not.”
“Maybe we’ll wish we
were.”
“I doubt it, because if
he’s carrying the weight, he probably won’t catch us.
What you do when you’re running is put lots and lots of forks
in the road behind you. Each time the hunter comes to one, your
chance of losing him is fifty percent. Next fork, fifty percent.
We’ve put a lot of forks behind us already. If we stay ahead of
him, then even making all the right choices won’t help him.”
She looked up at him as they
walked. He was tall and strong, and he was in acceptable physical
condition, because all the women who got off airplanes in Nevada
would have found that attractive. “How do you feel?”
“Scared.”
“Me too. Are you dizzy or
light-headed, sick to your stomach?”
“No more than I have been
for months. Why?”
“Then you don’t have
mountain sickness. I didn’t think you would, after three months
in Denver. Are your muscles warm and loose?”
“Don’t tell me,”
he said.
“I’m sorry,”
said Jane. “But we’ve only got about two hours of light
left. I’d really like to get the first of those forks in the
trail behind us.” She began with a slow trot, the pack shifting
at each step and making clanking noises. Pete trotted along, making
even more noise. When Jane felt the sweat beginning to come, she
lengthened her steps a little, watching the trail for rocks and roots
and trenches.
He said, “We sound like a
pair of skeletons on a tin roof.”
“The noise is good,”
she said “It is?”
“Bears don’t like
surprises.”
As
Carey made his evening hospital rounds, he kept thinking about Jane.
Here it was late summer, but in the Rocky Mountains it must be
getting cold already. She had sounded well and confident that she
knew what she was doing, but he suspected that she would never have
called if she had any doubt that she could convey that impression.
She had been perfectly capable of lying to him about what she was
doing for over a decade, and he had never suspected her. That was a
train of thought he decided not to follow. She would get her client
to wherever he was going, and she would come back to him. She would
be very surprised at how welcome she was going to be.
He left the room of Mr.
Cadwallader and walked down the hallway toward the nurses’
station to make his notes. He was pleased. Cadwallader would be
moving around nicely by noon tomorrow, and home by the next day. As
he pulled Cadwallader’s chart from the holder, Nancy Prelsky
tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Telephone, Doctor.”
“Huh?” He looked up.
“Oh, thanks.”
As he took the receiver, he
assumed it would be Joy at his office. “Dr. McKinnon.”
“Hello, Carey.” The
voice shocked him. How could Susan Haynes have known where to call
him? Of course. The main switchboard had tracked him down and
connected her. He hoped they had done it because it was a slow
evening, and not because she had implied it was an emergency.
“Hello,” said Carey.
“Look, I don’t want to be rude, but didn’t they
tell you I’m on duty right now? And this phone is at a nurses’
station on a floor with some very sick people.”
“I apologize for calling
you at work, but I’ll make it brief. After last night’s
fiasco I’d like to start over again, and invite you and your
wife to a dinner party with a few friends. There will be about
twelve, and that takes a little advance notice.”
He winced. He hated dinner
parties, and he was appalled that this woman would call a surgeon in
the middle of his rounds to arrange some social event. “I think
that’s the sort of problem we ought to talk about at another
time. If you’ll leave your number with my answering service,
I’ll try to call you tomorrow.”
“Please. You have to give
me a way to thank you, and this is the way it’s done. Can you
tell me when Jane will be home?”
“I’m afraid I don’t
know.”
“You don’t know? Why
in the world not?”
“I just don’t.”
“I’m sorry to be
pushy, but this kind of dinner party takes a certain amount of
thought and arranging. Would you please call her and ask?”
He found himself looking around
to see if Nancy was still within hearing range. He glanced at the
call board and saw that there was a trouble light flashing on the
board to signal that an IV had come loose in Room 469. “I can’t
call her. She’ll call me when she can – probably in two
or three days.”
“Two or three days? Where
is she – in jail?”
He tried to be patient, but he
could feel the anger growing. “She’s hiking in the
mountains, and the place she’s going is about twenty miles
away, by air. Since she doesn’t have wings, it’ll take
that long to get to a phone, and then she’ll call. I’ll
try to remember to ask her then, and let you know. That’s the
best I can do.”
“Fair enough,” said
Susan. “I’ll let you go now. I’m sorry to be such a
pain, but I want to make it up to you for last night, and I’m
warning you I won’t take no for an answer. Good-bye.”
As soon as she heard a fresh
dial tone, Linda quickly punched new numbers into the telephone. She
had wanted to goad him into making just one telephone call to Jane,
instead of always waiting for her to check in. If he had agreed to
call Jane, she could be sure he would have done it from his home
telephone: he was too self-important about his work to do it from the
hospital. Then Linda could have tape-recorded the tones of the number
he dialed, just as she had done in Hatcher’s apartment in
Denver. The tactic had not worked this time. Jane had not brought
Hatcher to a long-term hiding place yet, so she hadn’t given
Carey a number he could call. But what Carey had given Linda was
better. It was fresher, harder to get, and so it proved that she was
better.
As she listened to the telephone
ringing, she began to tease herself with thoughts about what she
could say to make Earl feel the way she wanted him to. By the time
the hotel operator answered, Linda was already beginning to feel
choked with the emotions she had induced. When she gave the room
number, her voice came out in a brave, sad little sigh.
Earl sat waiting in Lenny’s
hotel room in Kalispell. He lifted the new British Arctic Warfare
sniper rifle out of its fitted transit case and began to break it
down so he could clean and oil it. He lovingly ran his fingertips
along the smooth nylon foregrip, then loosened the Allen screws. He
took out the trigger assembly and adjusted the pull and travel once
again.
He had fired from a crook in a
tree on the hill at five hundred yards through a window and drilled
that guy’s temple. If he could have propped him up again and
taken more shots, he could have grouped them within an inch of the
first. He had supposed that watching her client’s head suddenly
spout blood across breakfast would be sufficient for Jane for the
moment, so he had not searched for her in the crowd and tried to hold
her in the crosshairs. He wanted something more complicated and
meaningful to happen to her.
The rifle had a simple,
unambiguous integrity. The rifle was perfect. Earl was not. He had
let himself be seduced by the beauty of it, the smooth, skinlike
touch of the nylon stock against his cheek, the dull gleam of the
barrel and the clear, soundless image in the scope. He had found the
car in the parking lot, he had seen a man with light wavy hair sit
down in the window with a dark-haired woman, and he had reached out
and harvested him.
Earl had not needed to force
himself to wait to make the shot true, because the rifle was perfect.
He could exert three pounds of pressure with his finger and the man
would certainly be dead. It was only after he had felt the recoil
against his shoulder and the scope had settled on the window again
that he had perceived that something had gone wrong. He had expected
that the restaurant would be abruptly churned into turmoil, with
people standing to bump into each other and spilling things, because
he had seen it happen before. Seeing the second dark-haired woman
pass across the field of the scope had not convinced him. It was
driving down from the mountain and seeing that the car he had
followed from Salmon Prairie was already heading up the road.
He pushed the knurled lever on
the left side of the receiver, slid the bolt out of the rifle, and
set it down on the table beside the Allen screws. Every piece of the
A.W. reminded him by its weighty, elegant, and indestructable steel,
machined to an exacting tolerance, that he was not its equal. This
time it had not been a cop stumbling blind into the middle of the
hit. This time it had been Earl getting so confident of his
invincibility with the new rifle, and so eager to exert it, that he
had reacted like a kid, popping the cap because his overheated mind
had assumed that any creature that came along a deer run had to be a
deer. People were a sorry commodity compared to precision rifles.
When the telephone rang, he
glanced at his watch and noted that it was four o’clock. That
made it six in Buffalo. He respectfully set the rifle on the bed and
picked up the telephone. “Yeah.”
“Honey?” She had
called him that maybe twice. Her voice was wet and gulpy as though
she had been crying.
“Yeah,” he said.
“They’re hiking in
the mountains. They’re going twenty miles if it were a straight
line, but it isn’t, so it will take two or three days. During
that time they won’t be near a phone.”