by Thomas Perry
As she listened to the telephone ringing, she began to tease herself with thoughts about what she could say to make Earl feel the way she wanted him to. By the time the hotel operator answered, Linda was already beginning to feel choked with the emotions she had induced. When she gave the room number, her voice came out in a brave, sad little sigh.
Earl sat waiting in Lenny’s hotel room in Kalispell. He lifted the new British Arctic Warfare sniper rifle out of its fitted transit case and began to break it down so he could clean and oil it. He lovingly ran his fingertips along the smooth nylon foregrip, then loosened the Allen screws. He took out the trigger assembly and adjusted the pull and travel once again.
He had fired from a crook in a tree on the hill at five hundred yards through a window and drilled that guy’s temple. If he could have propped him up again and taken more shots, he could have grouped them within an inch of the first. He had supposed that watching her client’s head suddenly spout blood across breakfast would be sufficient for Jane for the moment, so he had not searched for her in the crowd and tried to hold her in the crosshairs. He wanted something more complicated and meaningful to happen to her.
The rifle had a simple, unambiguous integrity. The rifle was perfect. Earl was not. He had let himself be seduced by the beauty of it, the smooth, skinlike touch of the nylon stock against his cheek, the dull gleam of the barrel and the clear, soundless image in the scope. He had found the car in the parking lot, he had seen a man with light wavy hair sit down in the window with a dark-haired woman, and he had reached out and harvested him.
Earl had not needed to force himself to wait to make the shot true, because the rifle was perfect. He could exert three pounds of pressure with his finger and the man would certainly be dead. It was only after he had felt the recoil against his shoulder and the scope had settled on the window again that he had perceived that something had gone wrong. He had expected that the restaurant would be abruptly churned into turmoil, with people standing to bump into each other and spilling things, because he had seen it happen before. Seeing the second dark-haired woman pass across the field of the scope had not convinced him. It was driving down from the mountain and seeing that the car he had followed from Salmon Prairie was already heading up the road.
He pushed the knurled lever on the left side of the receiver, slid the bolt out of the rifle, and set it down on the table beside the Allen screws. Every piece of the A.W. reminded him by its weighty, elegant, and indestructable steel, machined to an exacting tolerance, that he was not its equal. This time it had not been a cop stumbling blind into the middle of the hit. This time it had been Earl getting so confident of his invincibility with the new rifle, and so eager to exert it, that he had reacted like a kid, popping the cap because his overheated mind had assumed that any creature that came along a deer run had to be a deer. People were a sorry commodity compared to precision rifles.
When the telephone rang, he glanced at his watch and noted that it was four o’clock. That made it six in Buffalo. He respectfully set the rifle on the bed and picked up the telephone. “Yeah.”
“Honey?” She had called him that maybe twice. Her voice was wet and gulpy as though she had been crying.
“Yeah,” he said.
“They’re hiking in the mountains. They’re going twenty miles if it were a straight line, but it isn’t, so it will take two or three days. During that time they won’t be near a phone.”
“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 tenpenny 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 facto
ry.
“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 in.”
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, “Herauskommen.” 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 newswoman 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 wind
ow. 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.
Seaver clung to this theory for another half hour, waiting impatiently for the newswoman to come back from a commercial and announce that the initial identification had been wrong. His hope ended when the newswoman came back from a commercial with, instead, footage of the victim’s parents leaving the coroner’s office after identifying the body.
He wearily leafed through the pile of tourist magazines the hotel maids had left on the coffee table. They contained very little except ads for stores and restaurants in the area, but finally he found one with three pages of maps in it and spent a few minutes studying them.
