Shadow Woman jw-3

by Thomas Perry

  He knew that if the bear charged, there was no way he could outrun it. He had to kill it before it reached him. He went to a prone position with his flashlight against the foregrip again, and waited.

  As he waited, the third possibility, the one he had almost forgotten, occurred. The enormous dark shadow seemed to rise and grow as it lifted its snout from Rusty’s carcass and turned its head toward Earl. It had finished feeding on the dog. It sniffed the air, turned, and slowly walked away.

  31

  Earl lay curled up on the top of the ridge, sheltered from the wind by a rock outcropping. It was cold enough to snow now, and he was almost sure the flakes would begin to fall before sunrise. A man could easily freeze to death up here with no sleeping bag, no tent, no tarp, no … He decided not to make a list. All of the gear was on Lenny’s back right now, somewhere behind him on the other trail. If the dogs had been alive, he could have lain between them and used their body heat.

  The slaughter of his dogs was the very last offense that Earl was going to suffer. He knew who had done that. Jane had fed the bear something to keep it in Earl’s path. She had known that the bear would kill the dogs and probably Earl too. Great upwellings of rage came out of his chest with each breath like convulsions, making his head pound with anger.

  About now she would be certain Earl was either being eaten or clinging to a tree limb someplace down in that valley waiting for the bear to go away. A woman like her would be too smart to try to make her way north down there in the dark, through a forest that had never been cut. She would have to travel up here where the vegetation was almost nonexistent and she could take a step with some confidence about what was going to be under her foot when she put her weight on it. She would have felt the change in the wind and the drop in the temperature too, and she would want to be out of the mountains before the snow hit.

  Earl lay still and kept his eyes focused on the long expanse of bare ridge ahead. When he heard the first sounds below the heights, he held his head up a few inches and listened, trying hard to pick out the noises he had sensed were different. Their footsteps were slow coming up, as though they were picking their way with difficulty. No, it was caution. Jane was that smart. She knew that if Earl was alive it was because he had backed away from the bear, staying downwind and heading for the heights, where there was nothing for bears to eat, so he wouldn’t repeat the encounter.

  She seemed to satisfy herself after a minute. He heard her footsteps begin to quicken, and then the bigger, heavier steps came faster too.

  Earl took his hands out of his pockets, where he had been warming them, then slowly rolled onto his belly and pushed the A.W. against his shoulder. This was the sort of shot he had waited for. They would be moving away from him with their backs fully exposed.

  He listened and strained his eyes to see, but he could not quite tell where they were. He picked up the flashlight and clamped it against the foregrip with his left hand, then turned it on.

  For an instant he saw them: the man on the left, the woman on the right. But the flashlight had an unforeseen effect. The woman seemed to pitch forward onto her face, and the man crouched beside her and fired. Earl saw the first bright flashes as the man fired the pistol at his flashlight.

  Earl ducked low and switched off his flashlight. He heard the ricochets as the next two bullets pounded off the rocks behind him. Then, after one more shot, there was silence.

  Earl thought hard. Hatcher had fired. Jane had not. It had been a reasonable shot—certainly the best they could hope to get. Why had she held her fire? Earl crawled a few feet away to a new hiding place and peered over the rocks. He could see nothing.

  He steadied himself, aimed the rifle, and switched on the light. Hatcher leapt up from his crouch and ran, but Jane stayed on the ground. Hatcher dashed to the left, back toward the woods. Earl followed him in the scope, but suddenly sensed something was wrong: Jane could have sent Hatcher off to draw Earl’s attention while she rushed him in the dark. Earl held his fire and quickly swept the light toward the woman. She wasn’t dashing toward Earl. She was still lying there. When the light hit her, she rolled to her side and screamed. “Pete! Don’t leave me here!” There was no answer, and her voice came again, lower and with less hope. “Please!”

  Earl swept the light along the slope of the mountain, but Pete Hatcher was gone. Then he turned the light back on the woman. She still didn’t fire, and she still didn’t get up. She began to drag her body along on the rocks, using her left leg and her hands to try to slither out of the beam that pinned her there. She couldn’t be faking it. She knew as well as he did that if the bright white beam could reach her, the bullet could too.

  Earl’s heart beat faster. He knew exactly what had happened, because for two days he had been afraid it would happen to him. She had been startled when the light went on, turned her head to look at it, taken a blind step, and twisted her ankle in the rocks.

  Hatcher had certainly emptied his pistol firing at the light. That could not be faked. When he had no bullets left and Jane was not about to do any running, there wasn’t much he could do but take off and hope Earl took his time killing her. No, Hatcher probably didn’t even have that much calculation in him. He had panicked, as they always did at the end. Now he would run until he was exhausted and lost before he remembered there was such a person as Jane.

  Earl began to walk toward her. He could probably have bagged her from this distance, even in the dim light of the flashlight and with her lying down, but doing it that way made no sense. He had only ten rounds left, and after that the beautiful precision rifle would be seventeen pounds of useless metal. He began to relish the chance to look into her eyes before he killed her. He could afford to do that. Pete Hatcher was going nowhere. He would never have gotten this far without professional help, and now he was alone with an empty pistol in mountain wilderness with a snowstorm coming. There was a good chance he didn’t even have the map and compass. Jane never would have let an amateur do the navigating. Earl would search her body and find out.

  When Earl was fifty feet away from her, he turned on his flashlight again. Her eyes squinted against the glare and she struggled to rise to her knees, but she didn’t seem to be eager to put weight on the ankle. Earl moved closer.

  “Don’t bother to get up on my account, Jane,” he said.

  “How do you know my name?” She could not keep the fear and shock out of her voice. How could he possibly know her real name?

  Earl kept walking. “I know everything about you. You’ve been mine for months. Since June, I think.”

  As he approached, he watched her. She fidgeted in the beam as though it were intense heat instead of ordinary light.

  “What are you waiting for?” asked Jane.

  “I was just trying to decide. One part of me says you ought to go just the way my dogs did—gutted and left to lie there for a while before you die.”

  He could see that Jane had to force her mouth into that unconvincing skeptical smile. “We’re both professionals. You won, I lost. You can afford one bullet to the head and be on your way. Those are the stakes, not torture.”

  He set his rifle on the rocks, took his pistol out of his jacket pocket, and came closer. He was within fifteen feet of her now. “Is that so? What you’ve been putting me through—is that just business? You’ve been slowly sawing my balls off.”

  He began to pace on the rocks. The flashlight’s beam whipped across her face, then bobbed up and down on her body.

  She tried to make her voice sound calm, almost cheerful. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t personal. I don’t know you.” She could see that his agitation was growing.

  He stepped quickly toward her. “Well, you’re going to, because I’m going to do just what he did to Linda.”

  She tried to decipher the words, but her mind stumbled, and gave her nothing but the terror. “Who? Who’s Linda?” The grimace on his face and the abrupt, jerky movements of his body told her that whether Linda was
a real person or “what he did to Linda” was just a slang way of saying something awful, what this man was planning was not a mere execution. She watched, mesmerized, as he bent his knees to set his lighted flashlight and pistol on the ground a few yards from her feet, where she could never hope to reach them.

  As he stepped away from them toward her, his big silhouette caught in the dim aura of the flashlight, Jane brought Pete Hatcher’s pistol around her body and fired it four times into his chest.

  Earl’s eyes squeezed tight with pain, then opened wide with knowledge. He knew why Hatcher had still been kneeling beside her in the dark after he had emptied the pistol, when he should have been running. It was to hand it to her, so she could reload it and lie there with her body hiding it.

  He toppled forward across her legs.

  The weight was smothering, confining. She used all her strength to lift his torso an inch and pull her legs out, then dropped him. It was not until she had stood up and taken a step backward that she was sure he was dead.

  She took two deep breaths and heard Pete’s running footsteps, coming along the ridge. He had completed his circle to come up behind the hunter, and now he was carrying the sniper rifle. He sidestepped around the body, keeping his eyes on it, horrified at the body and still frightened that the man might be alive.

  She bent and picked up the hunter’s flashlight and his pistol. She said, “I’m going to ask you two questions. No matter what the answers are, I’ll show you how to get out of here and leave you safe. But I have to know.”

  He looked at her, uncomprehending. “Anything. Ask.”

  She knelt beside the body, clutched the belt and the shoulder and rolled him over, then shone the flashlight on the face. “Have you ever seen this man before?”

  Pete Hatcher stepped close and stared down at the blood that had soaked the front of the shirt. “Uh,” he grunted. Then he kept walking around to the man’s feet to see the face right side up. “No,” he said. “Never.” He seemed to shiver once to get the sight out of his mind.

  Jane moved the light to Pete Hatcher’s face. “Do you know somebody named Linda?”

  Pete’s shoulders came up in a shrug and stayed there. He seemed to search the night sky for a moment. “A few. Linda Horn. I dated her in college. Linda Becker. She used to do my taxes, but she married a lawyer and they moved to New York. I don’t know.… Give me a hint.”

  Jane didn’t move the light. “We’re miles from anywhere, where nobody can hear. Obviously I’m not going to tell anybody about any of this, ever. Is there a reason somebody named Linda might wish she’d never met you?”

  She could see he was genuinely confused, searching his memory over and over without finding an answer. “No. I don’t think so.”

  Jane switched off the flashlight. She looked up. The moon and stars had never come out, and the cold wind was pushing low, dark clouds in an endless stream across the sky. “You’d better go find a soft place and start digging a hole for him.” She looked back down at the body and began searching the pockets.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Hurry. Snow is coming.”

  Jane searched the man’s pockets, pulled up his shirt and his pant legs to search for anything that might be strapped to his body, took off his jacket. She found a map like hers and a good compass, a magazine for the rifle with six rounds in it. There was a knife stuck in the belt at the small of his back. The coat was stuffed with jerky and crumbled biscuits. When she had taken them out, she felt a stiff spot in the lining, so she sliced it open with his knife and found a thick plastic packet full of money and identification cards.

  Jane picked up her flashlight and searched the plateau carefully and methodically, beginning with the spot where she had first seen the man, then the hiding place where he had opened fire, then backtracking until she found the tracks where he had come up out of the valley, then simply walking back and forth to sweep the rocky, windblown expanse with her light.

  When she returned, she found Pete waiting for her. They each took an ankle of the corpse and dragged it to the hillside. Pete had rolled some big stones aside and dug in the soft earth beneath them, filling his jacket with dirt, then dumping it out and filling it again. He had managed to dig about three feet down before he had hit bedrock. Jane helped Pete drag the body into the hole and push all of the dirt over it, then roll the big stones into place.

  They walked back to the spot where they had left their packs, and Jane began to redistribute the gear. She put all of the money and most of the food in Pete’s pack with his pistol and his ammunition. Then she handed him the dead man’s map and compass. He said, “Why are you giving these to me?”

  She turned on her flashlight and held it on the small pile of belongings the dead man had been carrying. “Besides the map and compass, he had identification, money, biscuits and jerky, bullets.”

  “So?”

  “Think about what he didn’t have. No tent, no bedroll, no pack, not even a change of socks. No car keys. There’s somebody else, coming along the trail carrying the heavy stuff.”

  “Then let’s get moving,” he said. “If they’re carrying all that stuff, it should be easy to keep ahead of them.”

  She handed him his pack. She pointed north along the ridge. “Go as straight as you can, to the north. In an hour, maybe three at the most, you’ll be able to see a lake below you on the right. That’s Cameron Lake. It’s in Canada, and at the end of it is a big, modern road.”

  “But I can’t leave you out here alone, waiting for some killer.”

  “You can’t do anything else,” she said. She put on her pack, stuck the killer’s .45 pistol in her jacket pocket. “I don’t work for you anymore. I quit. If you walk in that direction until dawn, you can be in Lethbridge by noon, and on a plane by dinner time. Head for Dallas. Rent a place like the one I told you about. If you use the papers in your pack, you’ll be safe.”

  He held her shoulders. “Come with me,” he pleaded. The next words came out as though he thought they would be a surprise. “I love you.”

  She bobbed up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “I love you, too. You’re my brother.” She slung the big sniper rifle over her shoulder, turned away, and began to walk.

  Pete Hatcher stood and stared after her as long as he could, a tiny human form diminishing along the dark, rocky plateau. Twice he watched her drop onto a lower shelf where he could not see her, then reappear, climbing the next one. The third time, he did not see her again.

  32

  Lenny made his way along the trail with difficulty. It had been hard enough to walk ten miles a day carrying a hundred and fifty pounds of gear along a rough trail, but during the night a steady snow had begun to fall. The rocks and tree roots had acquired a thin glaze of ice and a covering of feathery snow that could turn an ordinary step into a broken leg. The path was getting harder to see, and in a few hours it would look just like the sparse pine forest around it. He stopped frequently to consult his compass and look for identifiable landmarks, but the snow whitened the air and hid the crests of the mountains like a fog. He was beginning to feel more and more uneasy.

  At six in the morning he had calculated that if he kept to the trail, he would make it to the campsite at Goat Haunt by eight. Now it was after ten, and he was not sure he was even on the trail. The scraggly evergreen trees were beginning to look ghostly and unclear. A packing of white along one side of each trunk had made them begin to fade into the stillness of the landscape.

  The fact that he had allowed himself to be put into this predicament was a source of amazement to him. He tried to follow the logic of events backward, but his mistake—his share in the blame for this disaster—could not be found in the recent past. It wasn’t anything he had done. It had only been his vulnerability to people like Earl.

  A month after he had gotten out of the army, he had begun his long search for something to do that didn’t involve some guy who was no better than he was giving him orders. He had drive
n a cab for a while, but then a cop had pulled him over one night at the Burbank airport. The cop had said he didn’t have the right kind of driver’s license and then asked to see his cab permit, and then started writing tickets. There was the fine for the license, the fine for the business permit, and a ticket that said he couldn’t even ask for permission to get into the cab business unless he spent twelve hundred bucks repairing the cab. Lenny had not argued with him, because he was afraid the cop would search the cab and find the gun. Driving a cab at night in a big city was dangerous, and he had already needed to flash the little SIG Sauer P 239 to save the cash box on two occasions, but the cop wouldn’t have cared.

  Lenny had used the cab to deliver pizzas for a while, until the expenses had outpaced the tips so dramatically that he’d had to sleep in it. Then he had traded the cab for an old pickup truck, a skimmer, and sixty feet of hose and become a pool man. That was how he had met Earl and Linda. At first Earl, at least, had seemed almost normal. When Lenny had come to clean and backwash the pool, Earl had generally been out working or training the dogs or something. But soon he had noticed that Linda never seemed to have anything at all to do. He would see her behind the curtains in her room, just standing there for twenty minutes, brushing her hair and watching him.

  At first, the pool business had seemed to be right for Lenny. Just about every house in the San Fernando Valley had a pool behind it. If he could build up a list of forty clients, allot an hour a week for each one, and charge seventy bucks a month, he would clear twenty-eight hundred a month. With tips at Christmas and a markup on chemicals, he could stretch it to maybe thirty-five hundred. The best part was that it didn’t take Lenny anything like an hour to clean a pool. It took twenty minutes, tops.