Runner (9 page)

Steve Demming got out of the car and leaned against the hood while he watched the headlights of the two women's vehicles coming toward him. The hot, humid air outside the car reminded him of how alien this place was to him. San Diego air was dry and flowing, either fresh from the ocean or fresh from the desert. This air was thick with moisture, and it seemed heavy, like something draped on him. As he waited, it seemed to him that the chirping of crickets was growing even louder. He sighed. This should have been a simple, easy errand, like going to pick up a stray dog at a pound. It occurred to him that he was as miserable at this moment as he had been in his life.

The two cars dipped forward a bit as the two women applied
their brakes, and then they rolled off onto the shoulder. When they stopped, their headlights illuminated big clouds of dust in the air. One set of lights went out, and Demming saw the tall, slender shape of Sybil Landreau silhouetted for a moment in the headlights of the other car before the second set of headlights went out. A moment later he saw Claudia's shorter form trotting toward him. The two women joined Demming at the front of his car. "How bad is he?" asked Claudia.

"Bad," Demming said. "He can barely breathe. If you listen, you can probably hear it from here. When I talked to him, I think he was trying to move, but he didn't seem to be able to."

Sybil said, "Think it's his spine?"

"It could be."

Claudia walked to the spot where Carl McGinnis lay. She knelt in the weeds beside him, put a small, soft hand on his forehead, and then gently stroked his hair. "Carl," she murmured. "Carlos, Carlito. I heard you got clipped. How ya doin', baby?"

"I ... I don't know," Carl said. "Maybe the four of you should start getting me into one of the cars. I think I need to get to a hospital."

"Can you walk?" she asked.

"I'm not sure, but I don't want to try and make things worse. I think my left hip might be broken. That whole side hurts like hell." He tried to move his head to see her clearly. "Claudia, honey. It's really late. Before too long, the sun is going to start coming up. I can't be lying here when that happens."

"I'll go talk to the others and see how we're going to do it," she said. "Just close your eyes and try to rest for a minute. Getting you into the car might be a bitch, so try to prepare yourself and save your strength."

Claudia got up and went back to join the others. Pete Tilton was
out of the car now, too. He and Demming and Sybil looked at Claudia expectantly.

"He's really fucked-up," she said. "He winced when I touched his hair. His hair hurts, for Christ's sake. He thinks his left hip might be broken, but if the car caught him in the midsection, he could easily be bleeding to death inside."

Sybil shrugged. "I've got a bad feeling about this. We can't drop him off at a local hospital. They'll fill him up with painkillers while the cops ask him questions."

"I've been thinking about that, too," Demming said. "There's no way we can go in and talk for him. If he can't walk, we can't drop him off at the door."

"No way," Sybil said.

Demming said, "And every minute we stand here, Christine Monahan gets another mile away." He and Sybil and Pete Tilton looked at Claudia.

"I'll do it," she said. "I was the one who invited him to work with us, and he's still closer to me than he is to anyone else."

Sybil's body slouched and her head cocked, and the others knew she was giving her familiar smirk. "Something's closer than fucking? What did you do?"

Claudia felt her jaw clench. "He trusts me."

"I'm sorry," Sybil said. "I'll help you with it."

"I don't want him to know. Hold his hand, be nice to him, and I'll do the work."

"Okay."

When Carl McGinnis heard the small, light footsteps coming toward him, he knew it must be both women. Claudia sat above him on the slope and cradled his head in her lap, while Sybil held his hand. "Hey," he said. "Did you get her?"

"Sure," Claudia said. "We ran her off the road. She's not in great shape, but it's over. She's in the trunk of my car."

"Good. How about the other one?"

"She's dead," said Sybil.

"Good," said Carl. He was trying to hide the fact that he was getting more worried. He had felt intervals of cold, and then repeated waves of light-headedness, and he assumed that must mean he was getting weaker. "I really think...," he said, then felt the pain find him. Getting past it was like climbing a hill, struggling as it got worse until he reached the crest and it went down again. "We've got to go. The guys. Tell Pete and Steve not to worry. I won't tell anybody anything. I was driving down this country road, got out to take a piss, and a car whacked me."

"Must happen all the time out here," said Sybil.

"They know you're going to be okay," Claudia said.

Sybil said, "They're just trying to put together a stretcher." She looked at Claudia. "I guess it's time for me to pull the car up." She relinquished his hand and kissed his cheek, then got up and moved off in the dark.

Claudia said, "Hold on a minute, Carl. The dumb bastards need me." She gently moved back, disengaging herself. Carl heard her take a few steps up the slope to the shoulder. He lost sight of her, and then the bullet passed through his brain. Claudia came back a few feet, just far enough from his body so the blowback wouldn't spatter blood on her clothes, and shot him again.

Christine twisted in her seat to look out the back window. Watching the empty road behind them for a few minutes seemed to calm her. She faced forward again and adjusted her seat belt. "I'm sorry. I'm scared to death. I've been scared for weeks. I've been
moving around, and the most sleep I've had was in that crazy house back there. I sort of lost it."

"It's all right. All of this is scary, for both of us. But we're okay, at least for now."

Christine sat quietly for a time, and then said, "You ran down Carl McGinnis."

"Is that who that was?"

"I saw his face in the headlights. Afterward it looked to me as though he was hurt really bad."

"It was all I could do once he took out the gun."

"Believe me, I'm not blaming you. I hate him. He gives me the creeps. He has a way of looking at you that makes you want to back away from him. Once I was leaving work when he was walking across the parking lot, and honestly, I got in the car as fast as I could, locked the doors, and started the engine in case he tried to get in." She looked at Jane. "Maybe the one who drove the car into the ditch is hurt, too."

"I couldn't tell, but I wouldn't count on it. More likely the air bag went off, and he couldn't drive after us right away."

"She, I think."

"She?"

"I'm pretty sure the other man I saw at the roadblock with Carl McGinnis was Pete Tilton. There was a third car, and the person in it probably was Steve Demming. That means the two coming up behind us would have to be Sybil Landreau and Claudia Marshall." She looked at Jane again, and noticed her preoccupied expression. "What's wrong?"

"Just thinking," said Jane. "How could they possibly have known where to ambush us?"

"I don't know."

"Let me make sure I've got everything straight," said Jane. "You knew these six people because they worked for Richard Beale in San Diego when you did."

"That's right. They didn't exactly work for the Beale Company, because they weren't on the payroll. But I never heard of them working for anybody else but Richard."

"When you ran away, how did they know where you went? Buffalo is a long way from San Diego."

"I don't know," said Christine. "I figured they must have found out about the plane reservation. I didn't think they could. I didn't make it on my computer. I called on Sharon's phone, and then she drove me right to the airport a couple of hours later. If they were following me, I never saw them, and I was looking."

"And what about Buffalo General? How did they know you were in a hospital?"

"I haven't had time to figure that out. I'm pretty sure I would have seen them if they were on the same plane. And I waited outside your house in Deganawida all night, and I know I would have seen them there. I was so scared that if anything had moved, I would have run. You know, when I went to the hospital, I had to show my ID and health insurance card. Maybe they called Richard's office to ask if I was covered or something."

"No. Hospitals don't call your employer. If they need to call anybody, it would be the insurance company. Since you were only there for observation, I can't imagine why they would do more than verify your coverage." Jane was silent for a moment. "Do you have a cell phone?"

"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"

"I mean with you—in your purse."

Christine reached into her purse, took out a phone, and held it
up. "I haven't called anybody since I left—not even Sharon, because the bill would come to Richard's house at the end of the month."

"Did he give it to you—Richard?"

"Yes. When I was working for him, he wanted to be able to be in touch every minute. Then when we were—"

"I think the phone might be the way they keep finding you."

"Oh, my God. Of course. That's just like him. I'll bet he got me a phone with a satellite tracking program, the kind parents give their kids. All this time he's probably been tracking me on his computer."

Jane said, "I didn't say I was positive. I just think it might be."

"I'm sure. You just have to know Richard. When I worked for him he would call me at all hours and talk about something I had to do the next day, or ask me about some piece of property, just because he happened to be thinking about it, or even call to tell me to remind him of something he wanted to remember. Instead of just writing it down, he would call me. But once in a while he would say something like 'I'll bet you're on your way to the mall.'"

"And he was right?"

"Yes. It got to be a kind of joke between us. And then other times, he would call when it was really inconvenient. I would look at the phone and see it was his number and turn it off. Then he would be mad at me the next day. After he and I started dating, I stopped thinking about the phone calls. I kind of liked it. Stupid me. He was just checking up on me." She began to roll down the car window.

"Wait!" Jane said. "Don't throw it away. Just give it to me." Jane took it and put it into her purse.

The sky began to take on the purple-gray quality that indicated night was nearly over. A few miles ahead they reached the entrance to the New York State Thruway at Liverpool. Jane accepted a toll ticket and headed east. She kept going until she came to a Thruway
rest stop with a franchise restaurant and a gas station, coasted off onto the approach, then parked at the far side of the lot where the big tractor-trailer rigs sat idling. She took two elastic hair bands from her purse and slipped them over her right wrist, then said, "Let's get some breakfast and use the restroom." She walked close to a big truck that had license plates for four states, none of them nearby. She didn't move her head, but scanned the immediate area. When she saw nobody looking her way, she quickly knelt under the trailer, slid Christine's cell phone on top of a big nut screwed to the steel frame, and slipped the two hair bands over the phone to keep it there. Within a few seconds she was out from under the truck and had caught up with Christine.

They stepped through the glass doors into the restaurant, and found a small table near the window overlooking the parking lot. They ordered food, and the waitress brought it quickly without much chatter or insincere smiling. Just as the waitress came back with extra coffee, Jane watched a man in blue jeans and a baseball cap cross the parking lot with long-l egged strides, climb into the tractor-trailer truck, and pull the truck ahead onto the entrance ramp to return to the Thruway. She watched him use the long entrance strip to crank his transmission up through its forward gears to bring his speed up high enough to merge the big rig into the fast traffic heading east.

Christine said, "Where do you suppose my phone is going?"

Jane shrugged. "New York, probably. Maybe Boston or Montreal."

"Do you think they'll follow it all the way?"

"Sometimes playing hide-and-seek isn't about who is faster, it's about who makes the fewest mistakes. We've got to give them a lot of chances to choose wrong."

"I guess we won't know for a while if we won."

Jane became silent, and sipped her coffee as she gazed out the window.

"What? Did I say something wrong?"

"No," said Jane. "A lot has happened to you very quickly. When I was doing this kind of work regularly, sometimes my runner would be a woman who was trying to get away from a man who lived with her. I would try to go to meet with her while she was still in her old life. I would spend time getting to know what—and who—she was afraid of. I would work out the best ways for her to slip away with a long head start. We would plan the time when nobody would be watching her. Sometimes I would arrange a distraction. Once or twice I even made sure the person she was worried about ate something that put him out of commission for a couple of days. When the runner went, she would have her new identification and a place to live in a new town. Obviously I couldn't arrange any of that for you. But maybe the worst part is that I couldn't talk to you ahead of time."

"Talk to me? What would you have said?"

"One thing I would have told you about was winning. They're dogs, we're rabbits. If the dog wins once, he gets to eat the rabbit. If the rabbit wins, all he gets is the chance to go on being a rabbit."

"Are you saying you think Richard wants to kill me?"

"I don't know what he wants. His people have missed some chances, but when we drove away from them I heard gunshots."

"I don't really understand what's going on with Richard. I don't know what he thinks he's accomplishing. He always said he loved me."

"Do you believe it was true?"

"I believe he wanted me. Maybe he wants to make me stay with
him and be his girlfriend forever. I know there are men who do that—or try to, anyway."