Runner (3 page)

"I saw one of them here. He was walking up and down the halls in the upper floors looking for me. He was carrying a little bouquet of flowers he had bought in the gift shop, but he was looking in every door. He saw me, our eyes met, and he turned away. When he was gone I slipped out and hid in the visitors' restroom on the next floor. Then a while later there was the explosion. I looked out, and I could see the nurses and orderlies starting to evacuate patients. I ran so I wouldn't be where the six wanted me to be."

"Come on," said Jane. She guided the girl down the hall away from the emergency wing, avoided the lobby, and turned toward the new neonatal center that had been bought with the proceeds of the past year's fund drive. It was scheduled to open in a month, and all evening Jane and the rest of the committee had been leading donors through, showing them the facilities.

When Jane pushed open the door, she was surprised to see that the place had already changed. It was all bright lights and motion. There were hospital staff here, and there were people in bloody evening clothes on gurneys being moved into the rooms. Jane saw that one of the linen closets was open, so she stepped in and took two packaged sets of light green hospital scrubs, then pulled the young woman out through the doors with her.

She stayed close to the young woman, and spoke under her breath as they walked. "Did you leave anything upstairs that you need?"

"No," she said. "I've got my wallet in my robe pocket."

"Good. We're going to have to leave the hospital while these people are watching for you, so we've got to move fast and change
what we can." She hurried up the back hallway past the outpatient cancer-treatment rooms and into a bathroom. Jane took off her evening dress, draped it over the top of a stall, and put on a set of green scrubs.

The young woman said, "That's a beautiful dress."

Jane shrugged. "Glad you like it. You're going to wear it."

"I'm pregnant. I'll never fit in that."

"That's the idea. If they see you from a distance in an evening gown they'll look past you. Slip it over your head. We won't try to zip it. Leave the hospital socks on."

The young woman took off her bathrobe and Jane hurried out. A few minutes later, after the girl had the dress on, holding it up with her hands, Jane returned with a wheelchair. She set the second set of scrubs on the seat and said, "Get in the chair."

The young woman obeyed, and Jane arranged the dress so it looked as though the young woman fit into it. Jane pushed the wheelchair toward the big double doors at the end of the hall beyond the outpatient center. As she walked, she talked quietly to the young woman. "You're somebody who was at the benefit, and you've been treated, and now you're going home. You'll recognize the people who are after you, right?"

"Yes."

"I don't know what they look like, so if you see one of them tell me. You don't have to make a lot of noise or anything, but be sure I know."

"Okay."

The automatic doors gave a quiet
huff
and swung open and Jane pushed the wheelchair into the night air. There were more sirens that she had not heard before. She pushed the chair out into the service road that ran along the side of the hospital, and turned toward the
parking lots. As she came within sight of the back of the building she saw that at least a dozen police cars had arrived. She moved into the lot, hoping the presence of cops would protect them, but realized that the cars were all empty. They had simply been left at haphazard angles, and the officers had run inside. There were big knots of people in the lot now, many of them evacuated patients and hospital staff, some of them curious onlookers and others victims who had rushed out of the building. She was pleased that there was plenty of activity to distract the watchers, if they were out here.

She saw that the row of doctors' parking spaces near the building was full. It had been half-empty when she had arrived here this morning with the rest of the committee to prepare for the benefit. She couldn't help noticing Carey's black BMW in its reserved space. She pushed the wheelchair across the lot toward her own white Volvo sedan, looking ahead but watching for movement in her peripheral vision.

She arrived at the car, stepped into the space to the right of it to open the door and let the young woman get in. Then she tossed the package of scrubs onto the woman's lap and closed the door. She heard something behind her—the scrape of a shoe on the pavement—and she half-turned as a man's hand pushed her hard toward the car beside her.

Jane pivoted with the push and set her back against the car. She saw that he wore a dark suit, and recognized him as one of the men she'd seen standing outside the hospital kitchen. He looked surprised that his push had not sent Jane far out of his way, and he seemed to sense, dimly, that this tall, dark-haired woman in the green scrubs wasn't doing what he had expected. He reached into his coat.

Jane's stomp-kick to the side of the man's leg at knee level replaced his suspicion with intense pain as his knee popped and he
fell to the pavement clawing and grabbing at his ruined kneecap with his free hand. He struggled to free a gun from his coat and bring it around to aim it at Jane, but that idea had occurred to him too late. Her foot hit the side of his head and battered it against the door of her car, and her next kick propelled the gun out of his hand.

She knelt and looked at the pavement to see where the gun had gone, but she saw something else. There was a second man in a suit sprinting toward her from the direction of the emergency wing, passing the slow-moving people leaving the hospital. She rose and looked over the hood of the next car and saw that there was a third man running into the parking lot off to her right. As he skirted the knot of patients and nurses who had been evacuated, a few stepped aside and stared at him, but none of them seemed to interpret what he was doing. Jane whirled to see that there was a fourth standing on the other end of the lot. It was as though they were moving into firing positions.

Jane ran to the driver's side of her car, got in, and started the engine. She backed up quickly, saw the injured attacker trying to drag his tortured body toward a spot where he must have seen his gun. Jane swung the car around quickly and drove toward the end of the aisle.

She could see that one of the men was moving to the end of her aisle to wait for her. As she drove, he reached into the inside of his coat, as though he had his hand on a gun. Jane sped toward him, reached a spot where there were several empty parking spaces, swung abruptly through them to the next aisle, and cut away from the man.

In a moment she was out the exit and on the street. Jane made two rapid turns and then a third to take her along quiet residential streets to the entrance to the Youngmann Expressway. Then she was
on the big highway, moving along at sixty-five, far from the hospital. She said, "Do you still have the scrubs?"

"Right here."

"Then take off the dress and put them on."

"Okay." The woman tore open the plastic package, pulled the dress off over her head, and quickly pulled on the scrub shirt, and then eased into the bottoms. She folded the dress and held it on her lap.

Jane's eyes flicked from one mirror to the other, then returned to the road. "Okay. I'm persuaded that you're not imagining that they're after you. Is this about your child?"

"It has to be. I didn't think anybody even knew I was pregnant when I left, but they must have found out."

"Who sent these people?"

"His name is Richard Beale."

"What does he do?"

"He runs a company—business rentals, some residential, some real estate sales, some loans. I was his personal assistant. I quit, and he didn't want me to."

"Why does he know the kind of people who would set off a bomb in a hospital to help them kidnap somebody?"

"Because he's that kind of person, too. I didn't know it when I met him. Now I do."

Jane exited the expressway and drove up a side street. "They must have had a car at the hospital. Have you seen it?"

"I only saw the man in the hallway, and then the other three outside. I never saw a car."

"I didn't either. If I planned to set off a bomb, I wouldn't park in the hospital lot. I'd park on a dark street a block away. Let's hope they couldn't get to it in time to follow us." Jane drove past the
lighted front of a small grocery store that took up half of a strip mall. She made a U-turn, stopped behind the building, and said, "Sit tight. I'll just be a second."

She stepped to the pay phone on the wall and dialed 911. In a few seconds she heard the connection being made. She squinted at the tiny face of the white gold watch with the diamonds to time the call. "Hello," she said.

"Emergency. What's the nature of your emergency?"

"I was at the hospital a few minutes ago when the bomb went off. I saw the people who did it. There are four men and two women. The men were wearing dark suits to fit in with the benefit crowd. One of the men got hurt in the parking lot and seems to have a broken knee."

"Who are these four people? Do you know them?"

"Six
people. Four men, two women."

"Tell me your name."

"Sorry. I have to go."

"Where are you now?"

Jane hung up, stepped to her car, and drove off. She could see that the girl was studying her.

"Just a quick phone call. I had to tell the police the little we knew."

"You shouldn't have done that."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't stay in Buffalo waiting for a trial, and I can't prove anybody did anything. The only person who would be stuck here is me, getting bigger and more pregnant every minute. If Richard knows where I am, he can hire sixty people instead of six."

"This isn't about trials. I'm hoping the cops will see them and pull them over. That creates a record of their names, and it might get
them searched for weapons and even tested for explosives. It's hard to plant a bomb without having a residue of certain chemicals on your hands. The main thing it would do is delay them for a day. Nobody knows your name or my name, and the call was too short to trace. Now we're on our way."

"Where are we going?"

"To the place where Sharon sent you—my house."

The car swung north, away from the center of the city along the elevated, curving strip of the Scajaquada Expressway. Jane could always feel Nundawaono place-names in the muscles of her mouth—along the tongue and palate, and behind her teeth: Canandaigua, Conestoga, Schenectady. She reached the stretch of Interstate 190 that ran along the broad, night-black Niagara River—Nee-ah-gah, really, meaning the Neck. It was the long, straight conduit where all of the water of the Great Lakes narrowed to flow from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and go eastward to the ocean. Jane kept going along the river past the town of Tonawanda—swift water, in English—and then coasted off the 190 at the Grand Island bridge and drove along River Road into Deganawida, the town where she was born. It was named after the wandering solitary prophet—what else could he be called?—who founded the Iroquois league.

When Jane drove the road on the bluff above the river it was more a physical act than mental—reflexes and long habit took the place of thought, and seeing took little attention because her mind was already so deeply imprinted with images of every house and tree and curve that it noticed only the changes. She turned off onto Two-Mile Creek Road, the first street, running between the dark groves of Veterans' Park, and then turned left onto the end of Fletcher, always watching her mirrors to see if anyone followed.

She went as far as Wheeler Street and turned, then continued for a mile or more away from the river, across the railroad tracks behind
the long-closed fiberboard factory, and then made three left turns to come back the whole mile to be sure that there was no chance that she had been followed. Finally she turned again and went along the street past her own house, one of a dozen narrow two-story houses built eighty years ago on this block by men who worked in the factories and lumber mills that once existed in Deganawida.

She looked at the tall sycamore in the front yard beyond the privet hedge. Soon the days would be longer, and the sycamore's leaves would spend the summer growing as wide as two hands. She went around the final block and returned to the house, steered up the driveway, and pulled the car into the garage. Both women got out, and Jane closed the garage door so the car wouldn't be visible from the street. Then she went to open the back door of the house. She looked down at the back steps, then bent lower to see more clearly.

"Stay back," she whispered. "Let me check it out first to see if anyone's been here besides you. Be ready to run."

She opened the door and stepped into the dark interior space, smelling the stale air that had been trapped since she'd closed the door three days ago. She picked up the other smells. There was the lemony smell of the wax she'd used on the wooden floors and the chlorine cleanser in the sinks and the ammonia from the window cleaner. But it was a very old house, and she could even pick up the faint scent of the wax that her mother and her grandmother had rubbed into the floorboards and the woodwork for decades, the old paint her grandfather had brushed on for the first time eighty years ago. Maybe there was still, lurking somewhere beneath the paint, the particular scents of her family—her grandmother's corn soup, or the French pastries her mother had learned to make when she was a girl in New York.

As she moved through the house, her senses took in everything. She could feel that the air was as it should be, that the doors and
windows had been shut for a long time, but she had to be sure that the house had been that way for the three days since she had been here. She examined all the locks and latches and scanned the panes of glass. Before she walked on the living room carpet she knelt at the edge to see if shoes had left an impression on it. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and looked in each of the bedrooms and bathrooms, but detected no evidence that anyone had been inside.