Runner (36 page)

"Oh. Then I take it back."

"And I've tried to find out more about the people who were after her. I haven't gotten past the false names yet, but I will." She stopped. "Harry, what did you come to tell me?"

"Remind you."

"What don't I know?"

"The cold told you. It's already time. It's begun."

Jane awoke, and she was lying in the bed, the covers thrown off. The air had changed during the night. In the few hours while she was asleep, the smell and taste of it had changed. The hot, humid summer air had been replaced by a dry, still cold. Jane got up and went to the window, pushed aside the gauzy white curtains, and quietly slid down the sash to close it. She went back into the bed, lay close to Carey, but didn't close her eyes. Today would be the day.

She knew why she was having Harry dreams. Christine had seldom been out of her mind since the beginning of the summer, but Jane had resisted the strong temptation to keep calling her. Jane had waited, making plans. She still had over two weeks before Christine's due date, and first babies were usually late, but she wanted to be there in plenty of time. Jane got up and dressed in the dark.

She drove to Deganawida, went into the house where she'd grown up, and then up the stairs into the bedroom. She knew what she needed to bring, and packing didn't take long. There would be one suitcase that contained the minimum wardrobe and could be thrown away. She was going to carry a different purse this time. This one had two main compartments and between them a space for a handgun.

As always Jane's suitcase contained a lot of black—black jeans, black pullovers, black running shoes, black flats, a black dress. She had also gradually gathered a large collection of hundred-dollar bills. Once she had Christine set up in Austin, she would leave the
excess with her to delay the day when Christine had to do anything that would make her visible—pay by credit card, get a job, put the baby in day care.

Jane had nagging feelings of uncertainty about this trip. Things had not seemed right from the beginning, but she had not been able to identify what she was missing. The cities and apartments Jane had selected were right for Christine. The name Linda Welles, the look, the backstory were all right for her. What hadn't Jane seen? What had she forgotten to do?

Jane went down to move the ladder in the basement, disconnected the old disused heating duct, and looked in her hiding place. She picked up the identification packet that Stewart Shattuck had sent her for Christine. He had done a thorough job of collecting the identification she would need. That was one of the things that had moved one generation further while she had been out of the profession. Now the business consisted of creating antecedent documents and using them to apply for real ones of another sort, then using the first real ones to apply for other real ones. For an artist like Stewart, the work was making birth certificates, marriage licenses, fake driver's licenses that a runner would use as identification in applying for a real license in a different state or a foreign country.

She looked over the documents in the kit. They were all genuine—driver's license, passport, birth certificate, Social Security card, all in the name Mary Watson. Jane smiled when her eyes passed across the name. Stewart always had favored names near the end of the alphabet, on the theory that some searchers gave up or got careless by the time they reached the ends of lists. He had gotten her Visa, MasterCard, and American Express cards, then thrown in a health-club membership, a library card, an auto-club membership. Jane put them all back in the wallet and took it with her.

She reached far back in the duct and pulled out a canvas bag. Inside were two nine millimeter Beretta M92 handguns, a box of ammunition, and two spare magazines. One she would carry in the purse and one in the suitcase. She carefully closed the heating duct, moved the ladder away from it, and went back upstairs.

Jane drove back to Amherst to the McKinnon house before Carey woke. She was making breakfast when she heard the sound of Carey's feet coming down the stairs. "I'm in here," she called.

Carey walked into the room, saw that Jane was dressed in the black clothes she favored for traveling, saw the suitcase near the back door, and stopped. "Oh."

She looked at him apologetically. "I'm afraid it's today."

"How long?"

"I don't know. I'm going for the birth of the baby, which could happen as soon as next week. But first babies tend to be on the late side."

"I've heard," he said. "I'm a doctor."

"I thought you just said that to get dates."

She could see he wasn't amused. "And after the baby?"

"After the birth, I'll wait at least a couple of weeks letting the two of them get stronger so we can travel. I'll move them to their new home, spend a few more weeks helping her get settled, and making sure they're safe."

"That sounds like five to six weeks," he said.

"It will be if everything goes really well," she said. "Otherwise it could be longer—maybe much longer. I'm sorry. She's a tough person but she's very young, and she's alone."

"Will you call and tell me how it's going?"

"Of course not. If they've figured out who I am, they'll be listening."

"I didn't think so. Will you tell me where you're headed now?"

"I'll go, and when I'm done, I'll come home. You know how this works. Nobody knows anything about places, and it makes everybody safer."

"I'm not sure what to say. Drive carefully?" He sat at the table and watched her. The silence grew longer, until it was a barrier between them. "I'm wondering how much of the attraction is the girl, and how much is the baby. Can you tell me that, at least?"

"I'd say half and half," she said. "Two people." She turned toward him, her eyes narrowing.

He met her stare. "You're avoiding the question. You haven't done anything like this in years. Why this one? Because it was a pregnant girl. Other times, you took people away from their troubles, gave them new names, and that was the last they saw of you."

"I left when I thought they were safe," she said. "I don't think she's safe yet, and she asked me to come back. If I'm there to help her make the big transitions, she'll be more likely to survive them. You're right that I like babies, Carey. I love babies. But if you think it's going to make me happy to watch another woman having a new baby and then spend a couple of months teaching her how to take care of it, you're wrong. That's pure pain. She's going to have what I want most, and that's not pleasant. But I'm going to do it."

He looked down at the table, and she set his plate of eggs in front of him carefully, as though she were keeping herself from throwing it. He looked down at the plate, and pushed it away. "I love you. I'm sorry."

"Me, too."

He put his arms around her and held her. "I know you believe you have to do this."

"I do have to."

"When are you leaving?"

"In a minute or two. I just wanted to wait until you were awake so I could say good-bye."

"Then there's no point in having the last thing we remember about today be an argument." He put his arms around her and held her.

She gave him a long, lingering kiss. "Thanks, Carey." She stepped back. "This is a good time to go."

They walked to the back door and he picked up her suitcase to carry it. If he noticed that it was much heavier than it looked because of the guns and ammunition, he didn't show it. They went down the steps by the back door and walked to the garage. He said, "Be careful."

Jane took her suitcase from him, kissed him once more, then turned away. During the summer she had bought a five-year-old Ford SUV under the name Willa Stahl. She'd bought new tires, had the vehicle serviced, and made sure it would get her across the country. She took out the pair of thin goatskin gloves she had in her purse and put them on before she touched the door handle, got in, and looked back at the house, then at Carey. "I love you." Then she started the engine. Carey stepped away from the vehicle, and she backed out, waved once, and drove off.

As she steered along the quiet street under the big trees and turned onto the boulevard in the direction of the Thruway entrance, she couldn't force her thoughts away from Carey. It had occurred to her that if Carey had not been persistent, she would never have married. By the time she was twenty-two she had lost nearly everyone she loved. Her father had died in a construction accident on a bridge in Washington when she was twelve, and her mother had died of cancer shortly after she graduated from college. Her grandparents
were long gone. She had retained relationships with the relatives on the Tonawanda reservation and a few in other places. She spoke frequently with Jake Reinert, the elderly next-door neighbor in Deganawida who had been her father's closest friend. But because of the work she did, she had become more and more adept at being elusive and difficult to corner. She was on the road most of the year, came and went quietly, and didn't cultivate any relationships that required her to answer questions.

Jane had met Carey at a party years before when they were students at Cornell. He was from Amherst, which was close enough so they could occasionally share rides home on holidays. She had lost touch with him for years after graduation, when he was in medical school and surgical residency, and then one day he had simply turned up at her front door in Deganawida. She opened the door and there he was. He said, "Hi. I was just updating my address book." He had come back to live in Amherst, just as she had come back to Deganawida. He had set up a practice doing surgery at Buffalo General.

They became better friends than they'd ever been at college. She asked him to the movies, he took her to dinner. She did not recognize for the first year that he was courting her. He dated other women constantly, complained to her about them and asked for her advice. He was a tall, handsome, funny young surgeon in a city where such men were as rare as whirling dervishes, so he got no sympathy from Jane Whitefield.

Jane had never wanted to fall in love with Carey McKinnon. She had resolutely remained his friend without encouraging anything more, until the evening when everything changed. She had been away with a client for a month, and came home physically exhausted and emotionally drained. He was at her house waiting for her with
roses. She was simply too tired to care about her determination to keep him at a distance. He offered to rub her back, and while he was doing it, the barrier between them dissolved. Afterward, he had been so concerned about her feelings that she'd had no choice but to admit she liked him more than before. A few months later he asked her to marry him, and she refused. She explained that she was perfectly willing to keep having sex with him, but she couldn't have the sort of relationship that restricted her movements or required her to answer questions.

For the next year he stayed near her and waited. Eventually, as he had probably known it would, a day came when her reluctance stopped making sense to her. It was pointless. After she had spent a year going out with him most nights when she was in town and then sleeping with him, he asked her for the hundredth time why she wouldn't marry him and she gave in.

Today was one of the reasons why she had been reluctant. She had not wanted to feel this way over and over, to experience this sense of loss, the knowledge that she might never see him again. She supposed she resented him a little, too, at the moment. Letting someone get so close to her had been an act of faith that she had known was a risk. Intimacy—letting someone see her weaknesses and doubts—shouldn't have been a license to use them in an argument. He should never have talked about the baby.

It had been five years since she had taken to the road like this to meet a runner. What she was beginning to wonder was whether she had spent those five years trying to make herself into a different woman so she would be a good wife to Carey, or if she had been using her marriage to him as a disguise to hide herself from her enemies. If it was the first, she was cheating herself, and if it was the second, she was cheating Carey.

Her route was the same one she had driven with Christine three months ago, but now the world she moved through was different. The northern latitudes had changed from summer to fall, so the air that rushed by outside the car was cooler, and the sun seemed always to shine at a lower angle so it was in her eyes most of the day and went down just at dinnertime. She drove as much as possible in the dark. At night a car was just a pair of bright lights in a rearview mirror. She was harder to see, and when she was seen it would be harder to tell that she was a woman driving alone.

Jane knew the best places to stop late at night as she made her way west. After midnight the interstate highways outside cities were largely the domain of long-haul truckers, and the roads inside cities were mostly occupied by young men who would be better off doing their drinking at home. Jane stayed with the trucks, and kept her speed just a few miles above the limit. She didn't want to take the chance of being pulled over by a cop and having him find two M92 Berettas and thousands of dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She made one stop to sleep at a motel outside Chicago, and then pushed on to Minneapolis, heading into the city after dawn with the sun at her back.

It was a clear, warm morning in Minneapolis. Jane waited until she judged that most of the people in Christine's apartment complex were up and off to work. She performed a drive around Christine's neighborhood, searching for signs of watchers. There were no men sitting in vehicles parked where they could watch Christine's apartment, no windows in nearby apartments with curtains hung too low so an eye or a lens could peer out above them. Jane drove through a second time and looked in all directions, not trying to detect anything specific, just looking at everything and being open to the possibility that she would see something unusual. There were more cars parked in the complex than there had been in June, because the students had returned from summer break.

She found a parking space on the street, half-opened the tailgate of her SUV, then changed her mind and closed it again. She would leave the suitcase in the back until she had spoken with Christine. She walked to the front door of Christine's building, carrying only her purse. She pushed the buzzer for number 4, Christine's apartment, and waited, then pushed it again. It was nearly nine, and she
had assumed Christine would be awake. Maybe she had gone out already.