A month after he had gotten out
of the army, he had begun his long search for something to do that
didn’t involve some guy who was no better than he was giving
him orders. He had driven a cab for a while, but then a cop had
pulled him over one night at the Burbank airport. The cop had said he
didn’t have the right kind of driver’s license and then
asked to see his cab permit, and then started writing tickets. There
was the fine for the license, the fine for the business permit, and a
ticket that said he couldn’t even ask for permission to get
into the cab business unless he spent twelve hundred bucks repairing
the cab. Lenny had not argued with him, because he was afraid the cop
would search the cab and find the gun. Driving a cab at night in a
big city was dangerous, and he had already needed to flash the little
SIG Sauer P 239 to save the cash box on two occasions, but the cop
wouldn’t have cared.
Lenny had used the cab to
deliver pizzas for a while, until the expenses had outpaced the tips
so dramatically that he’d had to sleep in it. Then he had
traded the cab for an old pickup truck, a skimmer, and sixty feet of
hose and become a pool man. That was how he had met Earl and Linda.
At first Earl, at least, had seemed almost normal. When Lenny had
come to clean and backwash the pool, Earl had generally been out
working or training the dogs or something. But soon he had noticed
that Linda never seemed to have anything at all to do. He would see
her behind the curtains in her room, just standing there for twenty
minutes, brushing her hair and watching him.
At first, the pool business had
seemed to be right for Lenny. Just about every house in the San
Fernando Valley had a pool behind it. If he could build up a list of
forty clients, allot an hour a week for each one, and charge seventy
bucks a month, he would clear twenty-eight hundred a month. With tips
at Christmas and a markup on chemicals, he could stretch it to maybe
thirty-five hundred. The best part was that it didn’t take
Lenny anything like an hour to clean a pool. It took twenty minutes,
tops.
After a few months Lenny had
become convinced that it was virtually impossible to work the pools;
keep replacing customers who moved away, got pissed off, or never
paid at all; buy the chemicals; keep the books; and still live a
decent life. If he drank too much one night, he couldn’t call
in sick. He still had to spend the next morning squinting against the
glare of the sun that flashed off the shimmering surface of some
swimming pool.
He was just at the point of
admitting to himself that the business was not as practical as it had
looked, when Earl had begun to toss him tidbits to keep him solvent.
Earl did it with the same manner that he used when he tossed a chunk
of meat to his dogs: “I got something for you, if you want it.”
At first it had just been watching the house and feeding the dogs
while Earl and Linda were away.
For a long time he had not even
known what business they were in. He could tell they made money at
it, but sometimes it seemed to Lenny that everybody in the world was
making money except him. It was like a joke that they had all heard
and he hadn’t. Linda had been the one to tell him they were
detectives.
Earl had asked him to watch some
guy’s apartment. He had sat for three days listening to people
on the radio bitching about the government, told Earl when the guy
came home, and collected a thousand in cash. Another time, Earl had
asked him to go pick up a package in Chicago. Lenny had received
another thousand for taking a plane ride. The ease of it had
suggested to him the plan of transforming himself from pool man to
detective. The only way to get a license was to serve an
apprenticeship consisting of two thousand hours of work for a
detective agency, but he was, in a manner of speaking, already
working for one.
It was only after Earl had
agreed to put him on a time sheet but just pay him when he needed him
that he began to see that the detective business was not what it
seemed any more than the pool business was. He had logged barely a
thousand hours on Earl’s fabricated time sheets before the day
came when he called Earl to say he had found a suspect, and then
watched Earl walk to the window, poke a shotgun through the screen,
and blow the guy’s head off. That had been five years ago.
All of his history up to then –
as soldier, businessman, entrepreneur – and all of the
experiences he had endured since then that he didn’t especially
want to enumerate at the moment had led him to this. He was loaded up
and slogging through snowy mountains like a damned Sherpa, and he was
becoming more and more suspicious that he might be lost. The world
around him seemed inconceivably enormous – much bigger than it
seemed in the city – and yet he felt hemmed in by it, because
moving across it was a matter of inches and heartbeats. Going in any
direction in this snowstorm was like making a colossal bet. If he was
wrong, there would be no recovery. But already, when he picked out
his spot on the map, he could not be positive that he was pointing to
where he was, or where he wished he were.
He devoted the next mile to
hating Earl. It was Earl who had done this to him, left him here
laboring through the snow, probably toward his death. Earl’s
method had not been much different from the alternation of fear and
gratification that he used on his dogs. It was mortifying. For a
second he hoped that Earl was lost somewhere out in the deepest
wilderness, freezing to death.
Without warning, Lenny
experienced a moment of clarity. That was what Lenny’s personal
story was about: Earl was going to get killed – maybe not on
this job, but some time – and Lenny was going to inherit Linda.
He would also take possession of all of Earl’s stuff, as a
matter of course. There was money, the house, the detective agency,
and so on. None of that was important in itself. Its only purpose was
to allow the man who had Linda to keep her comfortably.
As soon as he had discerned his
destiny, Lenny began to feel better. He marched along with a dreamy
certainty, thinking ahead in time rather than space. As long as he
kept his face pointed toward the north, he would survive. He began to
develop a notion. It was too new, too vague and unformed to call a
plan. He would meet Earl somewhere on this trail. He would learn that
Earl had caught up with the man and woman he was chasing and bagged
them. Earl would start off along the trail toward home. Maybe Lenny
would let him get five or even ten miles before he pulled the P 239
out of his pocket and fired it into the back of his head. Lenny would
hurry back to California and console Linda.
When he reached a hundred-yard
straight stretch between parallel rows of trees, he set off more
quickly. He must have been on the trail all along. With the unbroken
snow ahead, the path looked like a sidewalk. He had taken ten steps
before the woman separated herself from the trees. She stood
absolutely still and erect, and at first he wondered whether he had
imagined her.
He kept walking, and he was
sure. She was gazing at him, but her eyes never moved. For a few
seconds he squinted at her, and his mind insistently offered him
interpretations so frightening that he forgot to stop walking. Maybe
she was dead, frozen to death leaning against a tree. Maybe Earl had
killed her, and this was her ghost, lingering on the spot. Maybe she
had always been something not quite human, and she had lured Earl
away from the trail to get lost and die and was waiting to do the
same to Lenny.
For the next few seconds he
calmed himself. She was not a spook. She was a woman. He could see
the long black hair streaming down from a navy watch cap, and there
was a strap across the front of her chest that had to be her pack.
Spooks didn’t need to wear packs. She must have circled back
and come out on the trail behind Earl, and now Lenny had her.
She must have seen him by now,
but still she didn’t turn to run. Maybe she didn’t know
Lenny had seen her. He had seen rabbits behave the same way in the
first snowfall of the year when he was a kid in Michigan. They seemed
to think the snow had made them invisible, so you could walk right up
and knock them on the head. He kept his eyes fixed on her and kept
walking, narrowing the space between them.
At seventy yards, with less snow
falling between them, he could see her more clearly. She was
definitely staring straight into his eyes. Then he recognized the
strap across her chest. The dark line above her shoulder that his
eyes had interpreted as a branch of a tree was the barrel of Earl’s
new rifle.
Lenny shrugged off his heavy
pack and heard it hit the ground. He pulled his pistol out of his
jacket and charged her. He paid no attention to what was under his
feet, just dashed toward her. He fired at her as he ran, a loud,
echoing blast. He saw the snow kick up five feet from her. He fired
again as she stepped to the side, and a small gash of white opened on
the pine tree behind her. She stopped a pace away, beyond the
snow-plastered trunk of a dead tree.
He saw her swing the rifle sling
over her head and grasp the big sniper rifle in her left hand. He saw
her put the fingers of her right hand between her teeth and pull the
glove off to bare her trigger finger. She raised the rifle to her
shoulder, brought up the bolt, slid it back, forward, down. He had to
keep her pinned behind that tree, afraid to stick her head out.
Lenny fired twice more, quickly.
He was so close now that he saw her push off the safety. He heard her
yell, “Stop! I want to talk!” and then, “Stop or
I’ll shoot!” She was staring at him through the scope,
but her small, female voice reminded him that he could do this. If he
could make her flinch, duck for better cover – anything –
he would be on her before she could recycle the bolt and take aim
again.
Lenny raised his pistol again
and tried to hold it on her as he ran. He fired again and again, his
shots going wide, high, low, hitting bark and snow and rocks. She
stood as still as the trees. He saw her finger start to tighten, and
then he stopped seeing.
When Jane reached the trailhead
at Logan Pass, it was night and the snow was a foot deep. The visitor
center was dark, and the windows had been boarded over for the
winter. She found the car that she and Pete Hatcher had left, and she
could see that the keys were still in the ignition. She decided that
it was best not to leave it here, where the search for lost campers
it prompted might lead to shallow graves, so she drove to the next
trail at Siyeh Bend, drove it into a snowbank, and walked back to
Logan Pass.
She used the key she had taken
off the body of the second man to open the rented four-wheel-drive
Toyota and start the engine. She sat for a minute enjoying the
sensation of being out of the cold wind, then drove out onto
Going-to-the-Sun Road. At two in the morning, she reached the row of
yellow steel stanchions set into the pavement to block the road for
the winter. She had hoped the barrier would be fragile enough to
crash through, but this one had been made with people like her in
mind. She found her way out by backing up a quarter mile, driving
through a small wooded grove and an open field, then coming out on
the highway beyond the gate.
Jane drove ten miles from the
park before she found a level, paved turnout on an exposed plateau,
where the wind had swept away enough of the powdery snow to bare some
of the blacktop. She stopped and left the motor running while she
completed a cursory search of the vehicle. Under the seat was a key
to a room at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, and in the glove
compartment was a rental receipt for the Toyota.
She arrived in Kalispell before
dawn, carried everything that had been left in the vehicle into the
motel room, and began to study it. The men had left nothing in the
room, but Jane had not expected them to. People in professions like
theirs – or hers – didn’t leave things where other
people were likely to find them. She opened the two men’s
suitcases and sliced the linings enough so she could fit her hand
inside to feel for hidden papers. She slashed the insoles of the
shoes to see if they had been opened and glued back. She took apart
their flashlights, the carrying case for the sniper rifle, then held
up each piece of clothing and shone a flashlight through it to be
sure nothing had been sewn into it.
When she had finished, she
walked back out to the Toyota. She knew that there had to be a hiding
place. After ten minutes of studying the engine compartment, removing
door panels and carpets, taking out the spare tire and the gas-tank
cover, she realized that she had looked at it and missed it. These
killers wouldn’t simply have hidden their secrets: they would
have wanted them guarded.
Jane hurried inside and began to
dismantle the dogs’ travel cages. By the time she had pried out
the false floor of the second one, she had confirmed her assumption
that the licenses and credit cards the men had been carrying were
counterfeit. The ones she found in the dogs’ cages were older
and bore scrapes and dull finishes from being carried in men’s
wallets.
She read the name on the cards
in the first packet: Leonard Tilden. Leonard Tilden’s
California driver’s license said he lived at an address in
North Hollywood with an apartment number tacked onto it. He had only
one credit card, and it carried the name of a bank that Jane
recognized. The bank advertised credit cards for people with bad
credit ratings who deposited enough to pay the limit. Tilden’s
picture on his license identified him as the man who had been
following along behind to carry the gear. He wasn’t a serious
professional killer, he was a caddy. It was possible that she could
use him to find out if the cards were real.
She stepped to the nightstand by
the bed, picked up the telephone book, found the area code for the
northern part of Los Angeles, and dialed Information.