Shadow Woman (34 page)

He slammed his suitcase shut,
stepped to the door, and hurried out of the room. He took long,
purposeful steps down the hallway toward the check-out counter. He
was in a perfect mood to kill somebody.

As Jane walked back to the hotel
room along the road through Salmon Prairie, she considered whether
she had succeeded in leaving the right kind of trail in the wrong
direction. She had charged some plane tickets for flights out of
Missoula and Helena to credit cards. The accounts were held by male
identities that were unripe enough to attract the attention of a
hunter who was using a computer network to search. She had made
guaranteed reservations for hotels and rental cars in the destination
cities so the charges would be recorded and would appear on credit
reports.

Her temptation was to use ten
identities to build twenty trails in twenty directions. There was no
reason to save false faces for fugitives anymore. This was her last
trip. But two identities were the right number. If the chasers picked
out both of them, they would think that one was an innocent who was
not running from anything but didn’t have much of a history.
But they couldn’t pick out one and ignore the other, so they
would split up. If she left twenty trails, they would sense that she
had made them all and wait.

Everything about the way they
had tracked and cornered Pete Hatcher looked like at least two
people. A lone woman might play the broken-car game, pop him on the
spot, and walk away, but she wouldn’t put him in the trunk and
expect to drive him away. There must have been at least one man
waiting unseen to do the heavy lifting and solve problems. It wasn’t
easy to kill an armed cop when he was looking at you.

Jane was almost certain that she
had made no mistakes since she had found Hatcher in Montana. They had
been on the move for a month, traveling as husband and wife. They had
spent a lot of time in the car each day, then used different names in
each town where they stopped to check into a motel late in the
afternoon. Pete was always visible to motel clerks and guests, but
always imperfectly and from a distance. Jane would stand at the
counter and sign a name, and Pete would be busy with his head under
the lid of the trunk pulling out the suitcases, or under the hood
checking the oil. Even if the searchers stopped at the same motels
later and asked the right questions, the clerks would not have been
able to give them a direction. Jane and Pete had gone slowly, taking
detours like tourists who had all summer.

She knew that she was just
thinking of reasons to turn Pete loose and go home. Carey had sounded
as though her call had depressed him, and the knowledge stung her.
When she tried to repeat the conversation now, everything that she
had said sounded empty and foolish, and she could do nothing to
change it.

Jane stared up the road at the
hotel and gave herself a reprimand. The quickest way home was to
concentrate on preparing Pete Hatcher for his new life. He had
already gotten accustomed to using false names, and he had begun to
develop a good sense of how to make himself invisible in public
places. He had listened carefully while she had explained how the
tricks were done and what to do when they didn’t work.

Now she had to teach him
something more subtle and difficult. The way he would defeat his
enemies was to outlast them. While they were staring at computer
screens or loitering late at night in airport baggage areas or
sitting in cars outside hotels at check-out time studying each male
who came out the door, he had to be somewhere living a normal,
reasonably contented life. If he could do that for long enough, they
would give up. Even the owners of a casino couldn’t keep a team
of assassins on the payroll forever to search for one man. And the
longer he went without showing any intention of doing them harm, the
more pointless the search would seem.

Jane had watched the changes in
Pete for several days, and she was satisfied with his progress. When
she had picked him up in Billings, his personality had already
retreated into him like a turtle’s head. Now he was slowly
emerging, getting his sense of humor back, looking less like a person
recovering from some illness. If she could get him to rebuild himself
– not to return to the same old Pete Hatcher, but to see the
man he now was as normal – then he had a chance. With a few
cosmetic changes and a surrounding establishment – a job, a
place to live, a car, a couple of promising friendships – he
would be better off than the people who were hunting him.

The last danger that she would
have to save him from was the biggest. She had to teach him not to
throw away the advantages she had built for him, sink into a
depression, and stop trying, or grow so paranoid that he jumped at
every shadow and attracted attention. That had been her mistake in
Denver. She had sent him off to isolation in a small, dark apartment
and effectively severed all of his ties to other human beings. To a
man like Pete, who seemed able to maintain a sense of himself only by
watching the reflections in other people’s eyes, the days of
solitude had been like continuous, small doses of poison. She was
going to have to keep being his buddy, build up his confidence, and
make him strong again.

She reached the gift shop of the
hotel and found it had closed hours ago. She continued to the room,
gave her familiar knock, and used her eyes, her ears, and the soles
of her feet to try to sense where he was at each moment. Finally he
opened the door. “Very good,” she said as she entered and
locked the door. “I couldn’t have done anything but fire
blind through the door, and I would have missed.”

Pete walked back to his chair
and sat down. She could see he was watching something on the
television that featured a lot of men flying upside down in fighter
planes and shouting into radios. “Good,” he said. “That’s
one for me.”

“I just walked by the
pool,” said Jane. “There’s nobody in it, and the
lights are off.”

“Then it’s probably
a septic tank.”

“Nope. There’s a
diving board. I’m going for a swim. Want to come?” She
found the bathing suit she had worn in Missoula at the bottom of her
suitcase. “We’ll have to be quiet”

He glanced up from the
television screen for a second, then shrugged. “Can’t. No
suit”

She reached into his suitcase,
held up pairs of pants until she found a pair of jeans with a worn
knee. “Are you saving these for the Levi Strauss museum?”

He seemed to consider. “I’ve
heard I could get a good price for those in Tokyo. I don’t know
how to get there, though, so I guess that’s out.”

“Good thinking,” she
said. She put her foot on the bed and pulled her boot knife from her
ankle, sliced the legs off the jeans, and tossed what was left in
Pete’s lap. “I’ll change in the bathroom. Knock
when you’ve got those on.”

He knocked on the door sooner
than she had expected. When she came out, she carried the two big
towels from the rack by the tub, holding them in front of her
casually to disguise the way the suit rode up at the hip. The suit
seemed to her to be less modest than she had remembered it, but maybe
it was just the unfamiliar feeling of wearing one at night; there was
no sun to warm the places that weren’t usually uncovered. She
plucked the room key off the table. “Here. You have pockets.”

He took the key and she
approached him in a way that forced him to go out the door first and
start across the lawn to the pool. She dropped the towels, then
walked down the steps into the warm water at the shallow end of the
pool. She ducked down and swam the length of the pool under water.
The pool was so dark that when she reached the end, she nearly
crashed into him. Her fingertips brushed flesh, and she came up to
find his face a few inches from hers. “Sorry,” she
whispered, then sank, pushed off the wall and glided away again in
the silent darkness of the water.

While her momentum was slowing,
she felt a shiver of embarrassment. There was no reason for being so
squeamish about touching his belly. She was the best friend he had
right now, and she had not done it on purpose. She gave a kick and
rose to the surface, looking around for him. He was invisible, under
the glassy surface somewhere.

With a sudden start she felt his
big arm hook around her waist and lift her in the water. She was held
against his big body in a feeling that was at once smothering and too
pleasantly familiar. She gave a little cry, and he spun her around to
face him.

She could see the white teeth in
his smile, and the whites of his eyes, much too close. She leaned
away, but that brought her pelvis into contact with his, so she
jerked back. The white teeth disappeared and she felt the brush of
his shaven upper lip and the touch of the soft lips. “Time
out,” she said, too loudly. She put her hands on his chest, and
she was aware of the hard, hairy torso as she pushed him away.

She could see the silhouette of
his head and shoulders, but his face was in shadow. “I made a
mistake,” she said quietly. “I never told you I was
married.”

She could see him tilt to sink
backward into the water like a man blown over by a sudden wind. He
rose to the surface floating on his back, took a couple of shallow
breaths, and bobbed to his feet again. “I’m the one who
made a mistake,” he said. “I apologize. Please, forget it
ever happened. I didn’t know, and… I guess that’s
just me. I meant no harm.”

Jane found herself in a depth
where her toes brushed the bottom, so she stood on them. “Look,
don’t overdo it,” she said. “It’s reassuring
to an old bat like me. It’s just that – well, you know –
I’m taken.”

She swam the rest of the way to
the shallow end and sat on the bottom step with the water up to her
neck. From here the light of a fixture on the wall of the hotel
reflected on the surface and she could see him swimming. He was not
very graceful, but he was strong, each armstroke pulling him a few
feet. She knew he was trying to work out a way to face her after
making a pass and being turned down flat. It occurred to her that it
was probably a new experience for him.

Jane wished she had never
thought of swimming at this hour. The night was unseasonably warm,
and she had wanted to get him involved in something that was careless
and fun. Now she was afraid he was going to withdraw again. But there
was something worse going on, and it was something that she had not
prepared herself to defeat. She had almost let it slip out while she
was saying no, detected it crowding up behind the other words and put
her face into the water to keep it from coming out. It was, “I’m
not offended. I don’t have anything against sex.”

If she weren’t married, if
this had all happened years ago, she might very well have let Pete
Hatcher’s hand stay around her waist, might have stayed in the
water and waited with great interest for it to move where it pleased.
And even worse, if she had not considered the marriage vow
unconditional and permanent, Pete was exactly the sort of man she
might have chosen to disregard it with, and this was exactly the sort
of time and place when it could have happened. The incredibly clear,
warm night air with the strange brightness of the stars, the feeling
of floating weightless in the dark water might have made it seem to
be an exception.

Pete disappeared again and
surfaced at her feet. He was smiling tentatively, the water gleaming
on his smooth, hard shoulders. “I think we’d better clear
the air,” he said.

She nodded. “Good idea.”

“I’ll never put you
in a position where you have to feel uncomfortable again.”

“Thanks,” she said.
“I won’t do that either. What you did wasn’t
exactly assault, you know. It was a question. The answer is no,
that’s all.”

“You don’t wear a
ring, you never mentioned a husband. Maybe because we spent so much
time alone, I’ve been holding you under a magnifying glass. I
interpreted a lot of things wrong – movements, words,
everything. I like you. You’re not like anybody I’ve ever
met, and – ”

“Relax,” said Jane.
“I like you too. I’ve said that before, and maybe I
shouldn’t have, or I said it wrong. We’ll still be just
as close. Maybe closer, because of this. But I’m your sister,
not… not anybody else. Have we said enough?”

“Hi.” The quiet
female voice came from the shadow beside the hotel doorway. Jane spun
her head and saw the shape of a woman. Jane’s muscles tensed,
and she let herself slip lower into the water, but the balls of her
feet found traction on the rough surface of the pool steps.

“Hi,” said Pete.
Jane’s jaw tightened. If this was the woman who had tried to
kill him in Denver, he had just helped her locate him in the dark
water.

“Hello,” said Jane.
Maybe two voices would complicate her directional fix on Pete. She
studied the silhouette as it took its first step toward her. The
towel was wrapped around the waist like a skirt, but there could
easily be a gun tucked in back. Then she saw a second silhouette step
from the entrance, and for a half second she was sure. She took in a
breath to prepare to move, but the two shapes stepped into the dim
swatch of light from the lamp at the same time.

She could tell from their bodies
that neither was a young girl – not seventeen or eighteen. The
curve of hip and thigh and breast were too pronounced. She could see
their faces now, and they were both mildly attractive, but to
determine age she needed to see them in bright light, where the
texture of the skin would show mileage. The thinner one with red hair
stuck her toe in the water near Jane’s face. “Oh, good.
It’s really warm,” she said. She whisked the towel off
and tossed it on the deck. Jane was satisfied that this one was not
armed. The green two-piece bathing suit would not have hidden a razor
blade.