Shadow Woman (41 page)

“Hold on,” he said.
He stared at the map on the table. He tore off a sheet of paper from
the pad with the hotel’s name on it, measured twenty miles on
the scale, then ran it in a circle from Swan Lake. “It can’t
be twenty miles from where I last saw them. There’s nothing
they couldn’t have driven to in about a half hour.”

“Is there any place that
would look safe to them? A private airfield or something?”

“Nothing I can see. Maybe
Canada.” He ran his finger along the road they had traveled:
Missoula, Salmon Prairie, Swan Lake, always north. What if, instead
of going left at Bigfork toward Kalispell, as he had, they had gone
right? He took the sheet of paper with the twenty-mile mark and ran
it slowly along the top of Montana at the Canadian Border. “Glacier,”
he said.

“What?”

“They could have turned up
into Glacier National Park by now. There’s only one big road
through the middle of it, and it takes a loop up about halfway across
that would put them about twenty miles from the border.” He
held the map close to his face. “Logan Pass.” He pushed
his thumbnail into the map and left a crescent-shaped mark so he
could find it again.

“I should go,” she
said. Her voice was low and whispery and quiet, like a child’s.

“You mean he’s there
now?”

“He just fell asleep.”

“Good.” It was as
close as Earl could come to a friendly statement. His relief was for
himself, because now he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the
night thinking about Linda spread out on the bed with that faceless
stranger going into her, over and over.

He heard Linda give a little
sob, then sniff it back. She said, “He wore himself out…
on me.” The sob came out again.

Earl found himself standing, and
the telephone crashed to the floor, but he could still hear Linda’s
voice, crying quietly. Earl could feel surges of blood pounding
behind his eyes.

“He’s a doctor,
Earl. He knows things about a woman’s body – the nerves
and things. He brings me up, all the way up so I can’t control
myself, and then keeps me there, won’t let me stop.”

Earl squeezed his eyes closed.
He wanted her to shut up. “It’s okay,” he said.
“It’ll be over soon.”

“Ten minutes ago I begged
him – ”

“Enough.” Earl’s
voice was harsh and dry. He wanted to tell her to drive a ten-penny
nail through the man’s chest while he was sleeping, and then
walk out. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Not yet. “Just
do the best you can. The minute I’ve got them, I’ll call
you there.” He found a pen on the nightstand with the little
questionnaire about the maid service. “What’s the
number?”

She read it to him off the
telephone dial. “But if you call me here, he’ll get
spooked. Leave a message on the machine at home or at the apartment I
rented.”

“Right,” he said,
but he wrote the number on the questionnaire. “I’ll call
you.” His writing was a scrawl, so even he could barely read
it. He was in a horrible confusion of jealousy of this McKinnon that
somehow merged into his rage at Pete Hatcher for putting him into
this spot. He felt disgust at Linda for being a woman – a
creature that had no other way of getting what she needed from a man,
but who could do it whenever she felt like it, because any man would
accept the offer. He felt shame and humiliation because he had been
able to invent no better way to find Pete Hatcher than to let his own
woman turn herself out as a whore.

He thought back on the shot he
had taken at Swan Lake and wanted to bite his finger off. She had
already given away everything she had just to buy him that shot, and
he had squandered it. Then he had the shadow pass across his vision
that maybe Linda, deep down, wasn’t as miserable about this as
she had to make him think she was. He brushed all of these thoughts
into the back of his mind. “You just think about what happens
to him the minute I’ve got Hatcher. You’ll get to do the
cutting. Keep your mind on that.”

“You can bet I will,”
said Linda. Her voice was hardening now into cold, clean anger, and
that made Earl feel better. But then her voice changed again, and he
could tell her mouth was away from the receiver. “In the
bathroom,” she called. Her voice was soft and thick. “All
right.” To Earl she whispered, “I’ve got to go,”
and hung up.

Earl placed the telephone
receiver into its cradle and put the telephone back on the
nightstand, then stepped to the door to the next room and looked at
Lenny.

He was lying on the bed staring
at the television. The two black dogs lifted their heads and looked
at Earl, but Lenny kept his eyes on the screen, where one man was
chasing another one along a catwalk in a dark factory.

“Load up the car,”
said Earl. “Keep the camping gear on top.”

“We going someplace
tonight?” He said it as though the idiocy of loading the car at
night would be self-evident.

“Yeah, tonight. And get
the dogs into their carriers. They’re going too.”

Linda pushed her chair away from
the kitchen table and stood to hang up the wall telephone. She smiled
to herself contentedly. Linda looked around at the bright, clean
surfaces. She loved the careful, economical use of the space. The
pots and pans were all heavy and old; only French gourmet companies
still made them that way, and they charged hundreds of dollars for
them.

She padded around the kitchen in
her bare feet, collecting the ingredients and implements she would
need for this recipe. As she bent down to pull a big pot out of the
cupboard, she acknowledged that Jane’s blue jeans felt a little
tight in the thigh and the ass, but she wasn’t sorry. When
Carey got home from the late shift at the hospital, that wouldn’t
be something that he minded. Even men who thought that wearing tight
clothes made you stupid would look hard at whatever you let them see.

She filled the pot with water
and set it on one of the back burners to boil, then opened the door
of the big old-fashioned pantry. There, hanging on a brass hook, was
Jane’s apron. She slipped the loop over her head and tied the
strings behind her back in a bow. She looked down at the apron and
smiled. It was dark blue with a red ribbon border and little blue
cornflowers and yellow buttercups embroidered on it. It was almost
too pretty to use.

She began to open the drawers
under the counter, looking for ladles. In the second one she opened,
she found an old boning knife that had been sharpened like a razor.
She recognized instantly that this was the perfect tool. It was
simple to hide and felt good in her hand, too secure to slip, too
sharp to be brushed away. She set it sideways just inside the drawer,
where she could find it quickly without cutting herself, and opened
the next drawer. “Now,” she whispered. “Where do I
keep my ladles?”

An
hour later Earl drove the car past the sign that said
GOING-TO-THE-SUN ROAD OPEN MAY 15-SEPTEMBER 15. Jane Was about a day
too early. Earl was simply too much for her. He forced himself not to
acknowledge the way he had come by the information, because that
would make him think about what Linda was doing right now. Earl was
the one who was too much for all of them. When you won the pot it
didn’t much matter who put what chips into it.

He could drive quickly now that
it was dark, gliding into the turns and accelerating out of them to
keep his traction. Lenny gripped the door handle but kept silent.
Earl reached the Logan Pass visitor center, pulled into the parking
lot, and studied the cars that had been left there overnight. When he
didn’t find the one he had followed in the morning, he drove
past the building and found it parked at the edge of the woods not
far from a garbage Dumpster. “That’s it.”

Lenny said, “We going to
do something to the car?”

“Yeah. We’re going
to look at it.”

He parked beside the car and
looked inside. The keys were in the ignition. He opened the door,
took out the keys, unlocked the trunk, and found it empty. He could
see that they had cleaned the car out thoroughly. He said to Lenny,
“Don’t touch anything. Just let the dogs out, but keep
them behind the car. They don’t let dogs in the park.”

Lenny
let the two big black dogs out of their traveling cages. They panted
and huffed for a few seconds, wagging their tails and trotting in
circles. Earl opened the doors of the abandoned car. “Get in,”
he said.
“Einsteigen!”

The dogs leapt through the
doors, sniffing the car, the upholstery, the steering wheel. Earl
turned to Lenny. “Give them a few minutes to get the scent.”
He took a flashlight from Lenny’s car, walked to the Dumpster,
and opened it. He found the two suitcases covered with garbage. They
would be of no use.

Earl gingerly reached down,
pushed the garbage aside with his light, and opened the first
suitcase. Clothes… they had left clothes inside. His heart
beat faster as he took out his pocket knife.

In
a moment he was back at the car. He said quietly,
“Aussteigen!”
The dogs jumped out of the car and waited for his command. He
held the two shoes up so the dogs could take their time sniffing
them.
“Fund!”
he said.

The two big black dogs circled
the cars for a few seconds, looking puzzled. They sniffed the ground
and came back, then turned their wide heads to stare in various
directions. Lenny looked at Earl nervously, but Earl said, “Give
them as long as it takes.”

The dogs finally agreed that the
visitor center building was the right direction. They trotted to the
door and sniffed the steps and nosed the glass. Earl said, “They
probably walked over there, but they didn’t come back.”

Earl
picked up his backpack, then eased his arms into the straps and
walked to the visitor center.
“Auf den Fersen
folgen.”
The dogs fell into place at his
side. He crossed the road with them and watched their faces. They
seemed not to smell the scent, but maybe to dimly suspect it.

Lenny
joined him beside the sign that said highline trail. He gazed at the
dogs. “Doesn’t look like they picked up anything here.”

“No,” said Earl.
“The two of them bought new shoes. The first time they wore
them was probably when they got out of the car and walked over here.”

“Then why did you get them
to sniff the car and the old shoes?” The man’s head might
as well be a helmet. His was a mind that never failed to disappoint.

“Because in a day or so,
when we need help, the new shoes are going to smell exactly like the
old ones.”

Earl stood and stared into the
darkness where the trail led off under the trees. His mind formed the
words, “I’m coming. You’ll wish you had put a gun
in your mouth while you could.” He wasn’t sure precisely
whom he was talking to. The distinction didn’t mean enough for
him to try to sort it out. He would have all of them in their turns
and in the ways that they deserved.

It seemed to Calvin Seaver that
he had called Earl and Linda a hundred times – first from
Kennedy Airport, then from his stopover in Chicago, then Denver, and
finally from Billings. He had never gotten anything but the answering
machine, and he could hardly leave a message telling two killers that
Pete Hatcher was in Salmon Prairie, Montana.

It was in the Billings airport
that he saw the story on the television news, and he was glad that he
had been cautious. There was film of a lot of people milling around
outside a restaurant in Swan Lake, just a few miles up the road from
Salmon Prairie. The newsman, who looked enough like the one Seaver
usually watched in Las Vegas to be his brother, said a sniper had
fired through the window and killed a man. What caught Seaver’s
attention had not been the body bag being wheeled out on a
collapsible stretcher. It was the woman with long black hair who was
being helped into a police car beside the ambulance.

He checked into a hotel in
Billings and watched the report over and over on every local channel.
For the first couple of hours he could feel that although his mind
was still unsure, his body was already celebrating, pumping blood
through the arteries in hard, dizzying surges, his breaths tasting
sweet and full.

Seaver
had been in the trouble business for over twenty years, and he had
developed a clear idea of the odds. Swan Lake was a tiny town in the
middle of the mountains. The population of the whole state was just a
bit over eight hundred thousand. There probably hadn’t been a
shooting in Swan Lake since the Indian Wars. How could it not be Earl
who had done it? How could that dark-haired woman not be
the
dark-haired woman? But Seaver needed to be positive. He sat on
the edge of the hotel bed, the remote control in his hand, switching
from channel to channel for three hours.

At ten o’clock, when the
local news came on again, there was a photograph of the shooting
victim. It was a portrait of a man wearing a suit and tie, his
expression in a forced smile. It looked a little bit like Pete
Hatcher, but it wasn’t. The news-woman was telling Seaver that
it was just some guy who had gotten himself shot – some
unsuspecting dope who had been eating breakfast in front of the wrong
window. Seaver couldn’t believe it.

His mind shuffled quickly
through the possibilities, looking for hope. The picture was a fraud.
Earl had hit Hatcher, but Hatcher wasn’t dead. The dark-haired
woman had slipped the newsmen a fake picture to keep Earl from trying
again while Hatcher was in the hospital. Or Earl had shot Hatcher,
and Hatcher was dead. The picture was taken off some stolen ID the
police had found in his wallet, and that was why it was a picture of
somebody else. The more Seaver thought about it, the more he liked
that theory. It made a lot of sense, especially if Hatcher had been
shot in the head. Most people could barely look in the direction of a
fatal head wound without fainting, and even if they did, there was so
much blood on the face and so much distortion of the muscles –
a slackening at first and then a tightening into a rictus –
that any resemblance the corpse bore to a photograph of anything
alive would have been accepted as a match.