Runner (4 page)

She stopped in her old bedroom and picked up the telephone to dial the message number. It said, "You have eight new messages." She heard the voice of Sharon Curtis. "This is Sharon, from a long time ago. I'm calling from a pay phone. I'm still well, still safe. I'm sending a girl to you. I hope you can give her the kind of help that you once gave me." The rest of the messages were all the voice of the young girl downstairs. The first began "You don't know me, but—" and the last said, "I'm going to try the place Sharon said to look for you. If you get this message, please call me. Once again, my number is—"

She went back downstairs and held the door while the young woman stepped into the kitchen, then closed and locked the dead bolt before she turned on the light. "It's safe for the moment. Nobody's been in here."

The young woman said, "It's nice here. Cozy. Do you live alone?"

"This is the house where I grew up. My grandfather built it. I don't live here anymore." She pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. "Have a seat. I won't be long."

Jane went upstairs again and dialed Carey's cell phone. She waited through the message: "You have reached Dr. McKinnon. If this is a medical emergency, please call the following number: 5559852. If you would like to leave a message, you may begin at the tone." Jane heard the tone, and said, "Carey, I'm afraid I have to
leave tonight without seeing you. The bomb was planted by a crew of professionals. There are six of them—four men and two women—who have been trying to kidnap a pregnant girl who had checked in for observation yesterday. I'm with her now. One of the men got a dislocated knee tonight, so if you have a way to check with other hospitals, you might find something out and tell the police." She paused. "I love you, and I'm sorry." Jane went down the hall and descended the creaking stairs.

When she reached the first floor Jane stopped for a second to look through the lighted doorway at the girl sitting in the kitchen. She looked exhausted, as if only the fear was keeping her from collapsing. Her light green eyes looked faded, almost gray, and her face was pale. Jane moved on. She opened the door to the cellar staircase and descended into the cool underground. The old walls were made of big stones held together with mortar, but she'd had them reinforced with rebar and concrete a few years ago.

Jane opened the stepladder and climbed it to reach the hiding place in the rafters, the old heating duct from the coal furnace that her father had removed when she was a child. She reached in, pulled out the steel box she kept there, balanced it on the top step of the ladder, and rifled through the items she had hidden there. She set aside a large stack of hundred-dollar bills, and selected four different driver's licenses with her picture on them and sets of credit cards in the same names. She took one quick look at the special sets she kept in leather folders, then returned them to their corner of the box. These were the identities she hoped never to use. One set she kept in case something went wrong. It was for a married couple and had pictures of her and of Carey. The other set was placed there in case everything went wrong. It held papers for each of them with different surnames.

She put the money and her four false-identity packets into her purse, then hid the box, put away the ladder, climbed back upstairs, and entered the kitchen. She could hear nothing but the ticking of the clock on the wall as the girl turned to stare at her. "What do we do now?"

"First we get ourselves something to wear from the closets upstairs. We can't go any place in scrubs. I don't keep that many clothes here anymore, but I have a couple of pairs of black drawstring yoga pants that are mid-calf length, and I think they'll fit you, and lots of running shoes. If they're too big we'll use thick socks to make them fit. And we'll take a couple of hooded jackets and sweaters. Come on."

They climbed to the second floor and went into one of the bedrooms, where Jane began pulling things from the closet and the dresser drawers. "See if any of these looks as though it might fit you." While the girl picked up some of the clothes, Jane said, "You know, you haven't told me your name."

"Christine Monahan."

"Where did you come from?"

Christine looked surprised at the question. "San Diego. That's how I know Sharon."

"This man—the father of your child—do you think that what he wants is to kill you?"

"Richard Beale. I think he wants to hurt me. I don't know how bad."

"Why does he?"

"I think because I left him. He doesn't like it if somebody doesn't do what he wants. He likes to control everybody around him."

Jane was silent for a few seconds while the two changed their clothes. Christine was holding things back, but she didn't seem to be lying about her predicament. Jane could wait to hear the rest until
they were away from here and in motion, but there was something else she had to get out of the way now. "There are some things that you should know before we go any further. This isn't as simple as it was ten years ago when Sharon came to me. It's not as safe. I made a lot of people disappear before I met her, and a lot after her. For every runner there are chasers, and some of them have seen my face. There are people looking for me—people who would do anything to get me in a small room someplace where they can ask me questions. It's possible that the most dangerous thing you've ever done is come here to see me." She paused. "That's one of the reasons why I stopped doing this."

"You're ... retired?"

"It was never a job, never a business. I simply stopped doing it about five years ago. The last person I took out of the world was me."

Christine said, "Are you saying that you're not going to be able to help me?"

"No. I just need you to know what comes with my help. It isn't all good."

"If I hadn't found you, they would have caught me tonight. I wouldn't be here at all." Her eyes were beginning to fill with tears, but she wiped them away. "I appreciate the warning, but it doesn't change anything. If you're still willing to help me, then I want you to. I'll try to be as easy as I can."

"Don't worry," said Jane. "I'm willing."

"Thank you," she said. She looked at her reflection in the mirror in her borrowed clothes, shrugged, and turned to Jane. "Then what's next?"

"Now we run."

Jane drove with an almost animal alertness, looking in the car's mirrors for other cars, stopping at residential intersections with her window down to listen for the sound of engines and to see whether another vehicle was shadowing her on a parallel street. After a few blocks she made a right and headed out of town.

The roads out of Deganawida were stories. Where Main Street left the city it became Military Road, the straight-surveyed road the British army had built between Fort George where Lake Erie flowed into the river, and Fort Niagara, where the river emptied into Lake Ontario. Jane made her way south, heading for one of the old trails that her ancestors had worn into the forest hundreds of years ago. It was the western end of the Wa-a-gwenneyu, the trail that ran three hundred miles from the spot that was now the foot of Main Street in Buffalo to the end of Iroquois territory, where the Mohawk River met the Hudson.

Jane drove eastward for twenty minutes in silence. The road gradually became more suburban, and then the streetlamps and
lighted buildings were farther apart. The darkness of houses with windows blackened for sleep enfolded them for longer periods, and the quiet and calm reassured Jane. Night highways were usually deserted, and when they weren't, the darkness and the glare of headlights provided anonymity.

Christine said, "Why were you at that party? Do you work at the hospital?"

"No. My husband is a surgeon. I was one of the people who volunteered to put on the benefit. It's the kind of thing that people expect of you if you're a doctor's wife. It's a good thing to do, and it's part of the role—the disguise." She turned to Christine. "I suppose that brings us to an unpleasant aspect of our relationship."

"Ours? You and me?"

"Yes. When I agree to take you away from your troubles, I'm saying that I know it's possible that someday your enemies will trace you partway and find me. In your case, that's pretty likely. They saw me, and they saw my car. I'm prepared for that."

"You're prepared? How can you be?"

"I mean that if they catch me, I won't tell them where you are. I'll die with that information in my memory, and only there." Jane turned again to look at Christine.

"Oh my God," Christine whispered. "You want me to say that I'll do the same for you, don't you?" Her expression was a mask of uncertainty and discomfort.

"No," said Jane. "I don't want you to say that. If you did I wouldn't believe you, and I would be disappointed in you for saying something that can't possibly be true. I only want you to begin thinking seriously about what you would do. No normal person walks around having made a plan for every bad thing that can ever happen. But if I ask you in four months, or six months, I'll expect
that you've thought about it. For most people this kind of secret doesn't exist. For you, as of tonight, it does."

"What if I think about it and realize that I simply can't do that?"

"Then I want you to tell me, and we'll both know it, and we'll have to prepare in some other way to keep our families safe, no matter what happens to us."

The girl didn't know yet. Jane reminded herself that they never knew in the beginning. The reason that decent human beings could go on from day to day was that they didn't darken their lives with thoughts of catastrophe. They didn't even think about dying in the normal ways. This girl was scared, alone and pregnant. It was too much to expect her to be able to keep her mind on anything but that.

Jane would not consider telling her what keeping secrets really meant. In her purse each time she went out, even for the past five years, she carried a pretty cut-glass bottle. The liquid inside looked like perfume, but it was not perfume. It was the extract of the roots of the water hemlock, a plant that grew wild in most of the marshy places of New York State. It was the traditional Seneca means of suicide. To say that she was willing to die without having at hand the means of fulfilling the promise would have made it a lie.

The suburban highway became a country road and the only lights for a mile or two at a time came from the sparse line of headlights behind her, changing as the road left the lake plain and began to meet hills and curves. There were farms now, and old trees with dark, leafy canopies growing close to the road in some places. A few of them had signs advertising stands that would sell fresh corn when the sun came up tomorrow. She was driving east, the direction of New York City. New York was a good place for a person to lose herself, and for that reason it was also a good place to make a pursuer think she was going.

Christine's voice was nervous, fearful. "Why do you keep looking back like that? Is somebody chasing us?"

"I'm looking because it's the smart thing to do. I guess this can be your first real lesson in staying safe. You take as many precautions as you can—not as many as you think you need, as many as you can. The ones that you take early are the most important, because if you lose the chasers right away, they don't even know which direction you went. Later, if and when they find out that much, they have to come after you slowly. Every intersection they pass could be the one where you turned. Every hotel or motel could be the one where you stopped to spend a night. They have to be tentative and cautious, and it buys you time."

"But what are you looking for?"

"I don't let myself expect something specific," said Jane. "I look at what's there and evaluate it. I might see a car that's coming up on us fast. This time if there are lots of heads visible, I would be worried that it might be the people after us. Or I might see that the road behind us is empty and decide it's a good time for us to make a turn—go down the next road and head in another direction when nobody can see us do it. I'm looking for danger and opportunity."

"It's scary. It's not the way I think. I can't wait until this is over."

Jane glanced at her smooth young face, the forehead compressed in unaccustomed wrinkles and the mouth pouting. Jane decided to skip this natural opportunity to tell her the next lesson, the next warning. It would never be over. It would go on until either she was dead or the chasers were, and at this moment the odds were better for them.

Jane said, "There won't be any more stops for a while, so if you want to sleep, you can."

"I'm really not very sleepy right now. I slept most of the afternoon because I had been up the night before. Then, when I saw Steve
Demming walking past the door of my room, it was like an electric shock. From then on I haven't been able to calm down."

"Steve Demming. That's the name of the man with the flowers in the hallway? Tell me about Steve Demming."

"He's one of the six, and he seems to do most of the talking, sort of like the foreman of a crew, not like an employer. None of them seems to be a boss or anything. I saw him at the office now and then. Until I was promoted to being Richard's assistant I didn't know who Demming was, and then when I happened to learn, what I learned wasn't even true. I was supposed to cut him a check, and the notation on the stub was that the money was for electrical contracting. Another time I did the same thing, and the check was to one of the others—one of the women—for interior decorating. Every few months, one or another of the six might come by, and maybe they would get a check, or maybe not."

"What about the other five? Do you know their names, too?"

"Yes. Over time, I started to pay attention and remember. The two women are Sybil Landreau and Claudia Marshall. The four men are Steve Demming, Ronnie Sebrot—he's the one you hurt in the parking lot—Pete Tilton, Carl McGinnis."

Jane's telephone rang, and the sudden noise made Christine jump. Then she lifted Jane's purse from the floor and held it while Jane snatched the phone and looked at the number on the display. "This I've got to take." She pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road, got out, and walked to the front of the car before she answered it. "Hi. You got my message?"