Shadow Woman (19 page)

But he could see that the effect
he had wanted to convey was the only one that she had caught. She was
coming around the car to join him. She had snatched a clean red towel
from the trunk, and she was wiping her hands with it. He said, “At
this time of night, I’m afraid all the mechanics might be home
teaching their sons to overcharge.” He stared at the engine,
pretending he knew what he was looking for. “How is it acting?
Does it turn over?” He set his bag in front of the bumper.

She was right beside him now. He
could smell the scent of her hair. Things must be going much better
than he had imagined. She was much closer to him than was normal.
They were almost touching. She leaned over the engine and pointed to
a box bolted to the firewall that had colored wires plugged into it.
“When I opened it, I could smell something burning over here.”

He leaned in too, trying to see
if the insulation on one of the wires was melted. He felt a light
touch on the small of his back, and the hard, heavy weight of his
pistol was gone.

Almost instantly, his head was
pushed to the side. The pain was horrible, and it was coming from a
heavy metal object pressed to his temple. He could feel the red
cotton towel covering it, but he had no time to think.

She was speaking low, almost in
a whisper. “Police officer. Come around to the back of the
car.” He hesitated, but she tugged his coat hard, and he tried
to straighten so fast that he banged his head on the hood. When he
reached the back he noticed that the light in the trunk had gone out.

“Get in,” she
ordered.

“Look,” he said. “I
can explain the gun. I was just trying to help you.”

“You have the right to
remain silent.” She lifted the rag off her hand and he could
see the gun now. It was big and square and ugly, with a muzzle that
looked cavernous. “Get in the trunk, please. Anything you say
can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

Keller
was dazed. His mouth was dry and he couldn’t
swallow. He was getting arrested by a Denver cop, a woman decoy. On
an illegal weapons charge. They would find out who he was. There had
to be a way out of this.

“You have a right to have
an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an
attorney, the court will appoint one for you. Have you heard and
understood these rights?” Her thumb with the beautifully
polished, tapered nail came up and cocked the hammer.

David Keller climbed into the
trunk. Why did she have to put him in the trunk? Didn’t they
have a second car with regular cops who hauled you away when they
caught you? Of course. She wasn’t a decoy at all. She was off
duty. She had just seen the gun at his back, plucked it away, and
stuck hers in his face. The trunk slammed down on him and the world
went black.

Linda stood behind the trunk of
the car, squeezed her eyes closed, and smiled, smelling the thin,
delicious night air. She had found the mark, taken his gun away from
him, and locked him up, all by herself.

Part of the pleasure of it was
that she was not alone. She had done it from start to finish with
Earl watching her. He had seen her pretending to burn herself and
sucking her fingers and crying just a little bit, just enough to seem
soft and feminine and vulnerable. And he had seen her stand on her
tiptoes to bend over the engine in these tight jeans, just arching
her back a tiny bit, enough to make the mark ashamed of himself for
thinking that way, and enough to give Earl something to think about
too. For Earl, part of the experience was that it made him want to
hurt the guy, to break bones and teeth for Linda.

Linda didn’t really think
much about the mark once she had him. He was necessary, but he wasn’t
really a player in the event. She was just using him to act out for
Earl’s eyes how desirable she was. The mark was a mirror for
both of them. He let Linda see how beautiful she was through his
eyes, because she never could quite look at herself the way men did,
and so watching them look was the only way. And Earl could look at
the way she affected this mark, and it made Earl feel more that way
about her – as though he were seeing her for the first time
too, and because he was feeling desire, he knew exactly what the
other man was feeling, and that made him wild. The night was filled
with invisible sparks of energy shooting back and forth around her.
It was magic.

This was the part of their lives
that she craved. She loved it when they were out in the night hunting
together, thinking hard together about the mark and his habits and
what he would do, and deciding what they would do to bag him like
this. And now the hunt was right at its climax, with Earl out there
in the dark concentrating all of his attention on her. In a minute he
would emerge from the shadows to obliterate the mark and reclaim her.
They would drive him up into the mountains and bury the body before
dawn. She felt as though somebody had taken one of those
electric-shock machines they had in hospitals and pressed the paddles
to her chest to jump-start her heart.

She saw Earl appear from the
alley behind the little market, walking along briskly. He was primed.
She stepped to the front of the car and slammed the hood. That let
her see the police car.

Then it was pulling up beside
the Lexus. The cop was young, and she could see his lips were
straight across his face with no smile, but she knew it was waiting
to come, because the eyebrows had that wanting-to-be-concerned look
that cops sometimes got. He stopped the car, got out, and left the
door open so he could hear his radio. He didn’t do the things
they did when they were suspicious – put their nightsticks in
their belts, say something into the radio. She could hear the nasal
voice of a female dispatcher squawking out meaningless words and
numbers, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he stepped closer to
Linda and said, “Having car trouble?”

“No,” said Linda.
When she smiled she could feel that she had actually induced a blush.
Her cheeks were hot. “I thought I heard something in the
engine, but it was just my imagination. Everything is fine.”

He glanced at the car, then back
at Linda. “Why don’t you start it up, and I’ll
listen?”

Linda sensed that it was a
devious way of being sure the car wasn’t stolen without coming
out and asking for her license and registration. She was glad he was
so young and handsome, because the sight of him right after Hatcher
would be sending hot flashes of jealousy up Earl’s spine mixed
with the alarm and the wonder at how desirable the bait really was.
She smiled as prettily as she could for both of them and said, “Well,
if you wouldn’t mind….” then obediently opened the
driver’s door and sat behind the wheel.

The shot was so loud that her
legs kicked out and pushed her back against the seat. Blood and brain
from the cop had spattered the windshield. She scrambled out of the
car as though it were on fire.

Earl’s strong hand clamped
her arm. She danced at the end of his arm, tugging to get moving, but
he tightened his grip. “He’s still alive, right?”

At first she thought he meant
the cop. “How could – ” she began, then remembered.
Hatcher was still in the trunk. She held her panic in check as she
hurried to the trunk, unlocked it, and lifted the lid three inches.
She stuck her big Colt into the dark space, then pulled the trigger
four times before Earl grabbed her and slammed the trunk.

In the sudden silence she could
hear the sirens too. More police were coming. Earl dragged her toward
the alley, his grip so tight that she could feel the blood beginning
to collect below it, so her fingers throbbed. His voice was a raspy
whisper. “Don’t ever fire blind into the trunk of a car
when your ass is that close to it again, you dumb bitch. The gas tank
is right under it.”

She had forgotten about the gas
tank. Imagining the bright orange explosion she had flirted with gave
her a giddy feeling of luck, but even better, she detected that the
strain in Earl’s voice was genuine concern. He had just dusted
a cop to reclaim her, and he really didn’t want to lose her.
She let him pull her along the alley, then lead her up the dark space
beside the market and over to the next street. In another minute and
a half they were on the pedestrian mall along Sixteenth Street, far
from the sirens and far from the cops cruising around looking for a
getaway car.

When he saw her turn her head to
look at the display window of a boutique, Earl gave a sullen nod and
followed her inside. Linda bought a silk summer dress that made her
feel light and pretty, a little bit like a butterfly.

Pete Hatcher was crouching on
his knees, shaking. He could tell that he must have lost some of his
sight and hearing. He had seen the trunk begin to open. He had just
found the safety latch inside the lid by touch and gotten the courage
to release it when he had heard the keys in the lock and seen the
crack of light appear.

He had been terrified that the
cops would see his hand near the lock, so he had reflexively
recoiled, scuttled back into the corner of the trunk behind the loose
spare tire and curled up. He had seen the pistol appear in the
opening, but he had never expected the gun to go off. The blast, the
flash, and the shower of sparks made him bring his knees to his
chest, clap his hands over his ears, and close his eyes.

She had fired again and again at
the spot where he had first lay down when she locked him in –
first where his head had been, then his belly, then halfway back up,
to his chest, then his head again.

He heard nothing now, but his
ears were still ringing, so he wasn’t sure that there were no
sounds. The woman had every right to think he was dead, so now she
would drive the car somewhere. He waited for the sound of the engine,
but it didn’t come. He tried to figure out what he should do,
but first he had to know why she had shot at him. No, that was wrong.
Somebody was going to open the trunk again soon, expecting him to be
dead. When they discovered that he wasn’t, they would certainly
correct the oversight. He could die that way, or he could try to run.

He pulled the safety latch
behind the lock and cautiously pushed the trunk open a crack. He
heard the sound of a police radio, then saw the police car. He closed
his eyes and felt sweet relief. She couldn’t kill him if the
other cops had already arrived. That was probably why she had done
such a hasty job of it – to finish it before they got here. He
popped the lid up, then swung his leg over the rear bumper, misjudged
the height of the trunk, and toppled over onto the street. He began
to sit up, then lay back down again and stared along the underside of
the car.

He could see the body of a
policeman lying on the street at the front, almost under the
radiator. There was a big hole in his forehead as though the skull
had been punched outward, and blood draining down over his left eye
into a pool. Hatcher’s brain tried to take all that it knew and
make sense of it. Did she imagine Hatcher had killed the policeman
earlier, and then think she was executing him for it? What was he
thinking? It was impossible. She had killed the policeman. She was no
cop.

His breathing stopped. He had no
idea how long he had been hearing the sirens. He was alone with the
body of a murdered policeman. He had just bought two guns, and this
woman had probably used one of them on a policeman. It might be lying
around here someplace, and if it wasn’t, the police certainly
had a way to know he had owned two and had only one left.

Hatcher stood and backed away
from the car, his head swiveling around, first to see if the madwoman
was still nearby waiting to fire, then to see if any of the people in
the houses had come out, then just to see where he was going. He
walked to the front of the car and picked up his grocery bag. He
turned, and then his feet were pounding on the sidewalk, carrying him
away, the momentum building and building, his mouth open in a grimace
so the air hissed in and out through his clenched teeth.

His mind burned through the mass
of impressions into a bare, heightened clarity as he ran. There was
no moment of indecision, no wavering among choices, because he had no
choices. He knew the police would come toward this spot from three
directions at once, because there were only three ways for a car to
come. They would flood each end of the block and come up the alley.
He took the fourth way, entering the lobby of an apartment building
that looked a lot like his own, walking through it, down the
first-floor hallway and out the back door, then beside the next one
and across the street, where he entered the lobby of the next one, so
he emerged on his own street a block from his apartment.

He walked into his entryway and
climbed the stairs for the last time. He knew that the madwoman
almost certainly believed he was dead. Even if she had any doubts and
knew where he lived, she would have had a difficult time getting here
before he had. He opened the apartment door, slipped inside, and
locked it behind him.

He had no difficulty working out
the order of tasks. He made the telephone call first. She wasn’t
home, but he left a message. Then he collected the cash from its
hiding places in the apartment, packed his clothes quickly, and wiped
his fingerprints off all the surfaces he usually touched. He took all
of the food jars and bottles out of the refrigerator, put them into
the sink, and ran water over them until he was sure they carried no
fingerprints, then put them all into a big plastic trash bag with his
groceries.

He went out, locked the door,
wiped the doorknob, walked quietly down the hall, and carried his
suitcase and his trash down the back staircase. He put his trash in
the Dumpster. Then he walked around the corner to where his car was
parked, set his suitcase in the trunk, and began to drive.