Runner

by Thomas Perry

  "I only saw the man in the hallway, and then the other three outside. I never saw a car."

  "I didn't either. If I planned to set off a bomb, I wouldn't park in the hospital lot. I'd park on a dark street a block away. Let's hope they couldn't get to it in time to follow us." Jane drove past the lighted front of a small grocery store that took up half of a strip mall. She made a U-turn, stopped behind the building, and said, "Sit tight. I'll just be a second."

  She stepped to the pay phone on the wall and dialed 911. In a few seconds she heard the connection being made. She squinted at the tiny face of the white gold watch with the diamonds to time the call. "Hello," she said.

  "Emergency. What's the nature of your emergency?"

  "I was at the hospital a few minutes ago when the bomb went off. I saw the people who did it. There are four men and two women. The men were wearing dark suits to fit in with the benefit crowd. One of the men got hurt in the parking lot and seems to have a broken knee."

  "Who are these four people? Do you know them?"

  "Six people. Four men, two women."

  "Tell me your name."

  "Sorry. I have to go."

  "Where are you now?"

  Jane hung up, stepped to her car, and drove off. She could see that the girl was studying her.

  "Just a quick phone call. I had to tell the police the little we knew."

  "You shouldn't have done that."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I can't stay in Buffalo waiting for a trial, and I can't prove anybody did anything. The only person who would be stuck here is me, getting bigger and more pregnant every minute. If Richard knows where I am, he can hire sixty people instead of six."

  "This isn't about trials. I'm hoping the cops will see them and pull them over. That creates a record of their names, and it might get them searched for weapons and even tested for explosives. It's hard to plant a bomb without having a residue of certain chemicals on your hands. The main thing it would do is delay them for a day. Nobody knows your name or my name, and the call was too short to trace. Now we're on our way."

  "Where are we going?"

  "To the place where Sharon sent you—my house."

  The car swung north, away from the center of the city along the elevated, curving strip of the Scajaquada Expressway. Jane could always feel Nundawaono place-names in the muscles of her mouth—along the tongue and palate, and behind her teeth: Canandaigua, Conestoga, Schenectady. She reached the stretch of Interstate 190 that ran along the broad, night-black Niagara River—Nee-ah-gah, really, meaning the Neck. It was the long, straight conduit where all of the water of the Great Lakes narrowed to flow from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and go eastward to the ocean. Jane kept going along the river past the town of Tonawanda—swift water, in English—and then coasted off the 190 at the Grand Island bridge and drove along River Road into Deganawida, the town where she was born. It was named after the wandering solitary prophet—what else could he be called?—who founded the Iroquois league.

  When Jane drove the road on the bluff above the river it was more a physical act than mental—reflexes and long habit took the place of thought, and seeing took little attention because her mind was already so deeply imprinted with images of every house and tree and curve that it noticed only the changes. She turned off onto Two-Mile Creek Road, the first street, running between the dark groves of Veterans' Park, and then turned left onto the end of Fletcher, always watching her mirrors to see if anyone followed.

  She went as far as Wheeler Street and turned, then continued for a mile or more away from the river, across the railroad tracks behind the long-closed fiberboard factory, and then made three left turns to come back the whole mile to be sure that there was no chance that she had been followed. Finally she turned again and went along the street past her own house, one of a dozen narrow two-story houses built eighty years ago on this block by men who worked in the factories and lumber mills that once existed in Deganawida.

  She looked at the tall sycamore in the front yard beyond the privet hedge. Soon the days would be longer, and the sycamore's leaves would spend the summer growing as wide as two hands. She went around the final block and returned to the house, steered up the driveway, and pulled the car into the garage. Both women got out, and Jane closed the garage door so the car wouldn't be visible from the street. Then she went to open the back door of the house. She looked down at the back steps, then bent lower to see more clearly.

  "Stay back," she whispered. "Let me check it out first to see if anyone's been here besides you. Be ready to run."

  She opened the door and stepped into the dark interior space, smelling the stale air that had been trapped since she'd closed the door three days ago. She picked up the other smells. There was the lemony smell of the wax she'd used on the wooden floors and the chlorine cleanser in the sinks and the ammonia from the window cleaner. But it was a very old house, and she could even pick up the faint scent of the wax that her mother and her grandmother had rubbed into the floorboards and the woodwork for decades, the old paint her grandfather had brushed on for the first time eighty years ago. Maybe there was still, lurking somewhere beneath the paint, the particular scents of her family—her grandmother's corn soup, or the French pastries her mother had learned to make when she was a girl in New York.

  As she moved through the house, her senses took in everything. She could feel that the air was as it should be, that the doors and windows had been shut for a long time, but she had to be sure that the house had been that way for the three days since she had been here. She examined all the locks and latches and scanned the panes of glass. Before she walked on the living room carpet she knelt at the edge to see if shoes had left an impression on it. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and looked in each of the bedrooms and bathrooms, but detected no evidence that anyone had been inside.

  She stopped in her old bedroom and picked up the telephone to dial the message number. It said, "You have eight new messages." She heard the voice of Sharon Curtis. "This is Sharon, from a long time ago. I'm calling from a pay phone. I'm still well, still safe. I'm sending a girl to you. I hope you can give her the kind of help that you once gave me." The rest of the messages were all the voice of the young girl downstairs. The first began "You don't know me, but—" and the last said, "I'm going to try the place Sharon said to look for you. If you get this message, please call me. Once again, my number is—"

  She went back downstairs and held the door while the young woman stepped into the kitchen, then closed and locked the dead bolt before she turned on the light. "It's safe for the moment. Nobody's been in here."

  The young woman said, "It's nice here. Cozy. Do you live alone?"

  "This is the house where I grew up. My grandfather built it. I don't live here anymore." She pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. "Have a seat. I won't be long."

  Jane went upstairs again and dialed Carey's cell phone. She waited through the message: "You have reached Dr. McKinnon. If this is a medical emergency, please call the following number: 5559852. If you would like to leave a message, you may begin at the tone." Jane heard the tone, and said, "Carey, I'm afraid I have to leave tonight without seeing you. The bomb was planted by a crew of professionals. There are six of them—four men and two women—who have been trying to kidnap a pregnant girl who had checked in for observation yesterday. I'm with her now. One of the men got a dislocated knee tonight, so if you have a way to check with other hospitals, you might find something out and tell the police." She paused. "I love you, and I'm sorry." Jane went down the hall and descended the creaking stairs.

  When she reached the first floor Jane stopped for a second to look through the lighted doorway at the girl sitting in the kitchen. She looked exhausted, as if only the fear was keeping her from collapsing. Her light green eyes looked faded, almost gray, and her face was pale. Jane moved on. She opened the door to the cellar staircase and descended into the cool underground. The old walls were made of big stones h
eld together with mortar, but she'd had them reinforced with rebar and concrete a few years ago.

  Jane opened the stepladder and climbed it to reach the hiding place in the rafters, the old heating duct from the coal furnace that her father had removed when she was a child. She reached in, pulled out the steel box she kept there, balanced it on the top step of the ladder, and rifled through the items she had hidden there. She set aside a large stack of hundred-dollar bills, and selected four different driver's licenses with her picture on them and sets of credit cards in the same names. She took one quick look at the special sets she kept in leather folders, then returned them to their corner of the box. These were the identities she hoped never to use. One set she kept in case something went wrong. It was for a married couple and had pictures of her and of Carey. The other set was placed there in case everything went wrong. It held papers for each of them with different surnames.

  She put the money and her four false-identity packets into her purse, then hid the box, put away the ladder, climbed back upstairs, and entered the kitchen. She could hear nothing but the ticking of the clock on the wall as the girl turned to stare at her. "What do we do now?"

  "First we get ourselves something to wear from the closets upstairs. We can't go any place in scrubs. I don't keep that many clothes here anymore, but I have a couple of pairs of black drawstring yoga pants that are mid-calf length, and I think they'll fit you, and lots of running shoes. If they're too big we'll use thick socks to make them fit. And we'll take a couple of hooded jackets and sweaters. Come on."

  They climbed to the second floor and went into one of the bedrooms, where Jane began pulling things from the closet and the dresser drawers. "See if any of these looks as though it might fit you." While the girl picked up some of the clothes, Jane said, "You know, you haven't told me your name."

  "Christine Monahan."

  "Where did you come from?"

  Christine looked surprised at the question. "San Diego. That's how I know Sharon."

  "This man—the father of your child—do you think that what he wants is to kill you?"

  "Richard Beale. I think he wants to hurt me. I don't know how bad."

  "Why does he?"

  "I think because I left him. He doesn't like it if somebody doesn't do what he wants. He likes to control everybody around him."

  Jane was silent for a few seconds while the two changed their clothes. Christine was holding things back, but she didn't seem to be lying about her predicament. Jane could wait to hear the rest until they were away from here and in motion, but there was something else she had to get out of the way now. "There are some things that you should know before we go any further. This isn't as simple as it was ten years ago when Sharon came to me. It's not as safe. I made a lot of people disappear before I met her, and a lot after her. For every runner there are chasers, and some of them have seen my face. There are people looking for me—people who would do anything to get me in a small room someplace where they can ask me questions. It's possible that the most dangerous thing you've ever done is come here to see me." She paused. "That's one of the reasons why I stopped doing this."

  "You're ... retired?"

  "It was never a job, never a business. I simply stopped doing it about five years ago. The last person I took out of the world was me."

  Christine said, "Are you saying that you're not going to be able to help me?"

  "No. I just need you to know what comes with my help. It isn't all good."

  "If I hadn't found you, they would have caught me tonight. I wouldn't be here at all." Her eyes were beginning to fill with tears, but she wiped them away. "I appreciate the warning, but it doesn't change anything. If you're still willing to help me, then I want you to. I'll try to be as easy as I can."

  "Don't worry," said Jane. "I'm willing."

  "Thank you," she said. She looked at her reflection in the mirror in her borrowed clothes, shrugged, and turned to Jane. "Then what's next?"

  "Now we run."

  3

  Jane drove with an almost animal alertness, looking in the car's mirrors for other cars, stopping at residential intersections with her window down to listen for the sound of engines and to see whether another vehicle was shadowing her on a parallel street. After a few blocks she made a right and headed out of town.

  The roads out of Deganawida were stories. Where Main Street left the city it became Military Road, the straight-surveyed road the British army had built between Fort George where Lake Erie flowed into the river, and Fort Niagara, where the river emptied into Lake Ontario. Jane made her way south, heading for one of the old trails that her ancestors had worn into the forest hundreds of years ago. It was the western end of the Wa-a-gwenneyu, the trail that ran three hundred miles from the spot that was now the foot of Main Street in Buffalo to the end of Iroquois territory, where the Mohawk River met the Hudson.

  Jane drove eastward for twenty minutes in silence. The road gradually became more suburban, and then the streetlamps and lighted buildings were farther apart. The darkness of houses with windows blackened for sleep enfolded them for longer periods, and the quiet and calm reassured Jane. Night highways were usually deserted, and when they weren't, the darkness and the glare of headlights provided anonymity.

  Christine said, "Why were you at that party? Do you work at the hospital?"

  "No. My husband is a surgeon. I was one of the people who volunteered to put on the benefit. It's the kind of thing that people expect of you if you're a doctor's wife. It's a good thing to do, and it's part of the role—the disguise." She turned to Christine. "I suppose that brings us to an unpleasant aspect of our relationship."

  "Ours? You and me?"

  "Yes. When I agree to take you away from your troubles, I'm saying that I know it's possible that someday your enemies will trace you partway and find me. In your case, that's pretty likely. They saw me, and they saw my car. I'm prepared for that."

  "You're prepared? How can you be?"

  "I mean that if they catch me, I won't tell them where you are. I'll die with that information in my memory, and only there." Jane turned again to look at Christine.

  "Oh my God," Christine whispered. "You want me to say that I'll do the same for you, don't you?" Her expression was a mask of uncertainty and discomfort.

  "No," said Jane. "I don't want you to say that. If you did I wouldn't believe you, and I would be disappointed in you for saying something that can't possibly be true. I only want you to begin thinking seriously about what you would do. No normal person walks around having made a plan for every bad thing that can ever happen. But if I ask you in four months, or six months, I'll expect that you've thought about it. For most people this kind of secret doesn't exist. For you, as of tonight, it does."

  "What if I think about it and realize that I simply can't do that?"

  "Then I want you to tell me, and we'll both know it, and we'll have to prepare in some other way to keep our families safe, no matter what happens to us."

  The girl didn't know yet. Jane reminded herself that they never knew in the beginning. The reason that decent human beings could go on from day to day was that they didn't darken their lives with thoughts of catastrophe. They didn't even think about dying in the normal ways. This girl was scared, alone and pregnant. It was too much to expect her to be able to keep her mind on anything but that.

  Jane would not consider telling her what keeping secrets really meant. In her purse each time she went out, even for the past five years, she carried a pretty cut-glass bottle. The liquid inside looked like perfume, but it was not perfume. It was the extract of the roots of the water hemlock, a plant that grew wild in most of the marshy places of New York State. It was the traditional Seneca means of suicide. To say that she was willing to die without having at hand the means of fulfilling the promise would have made it a lie.

  The suburban highway became a country road and the only lights for a mile or two at a time came from the sparse line of headlights behind her, c
hanging as the road left the lake plain and began to meet hills and curves. There were farms now, and old trees with dark, leafy canopies growing close to the road in some places. A few of them had signs advertising stands that would sell fresh corn when the sun came up tomorrow. She was driving east, the direction of New York City. New York was a good place for a person to lose herself, and for that reason it was also a good place to make a pursuer think she was going.

  Christine's voice was nervous, fearful. "Why do you keep looking back like that? Is somebody chasing us?"

  "I'm looking because it's the smart thing to do. I guess this can be your first real lesson in staying safe. You take as many precautions as you can—not as many as you think you need, as many as you can. The ones that you take early are the most important, because if you lose the chasers right away, they don't even know which direction you went. Later, if and when they find out that much, they have to come after you slowly. Every intersection they pass could be the one where you turned. Every hotel or motel could be the one where you stopped to spend a night. They have to be tentative and cautious, and it buys you time."

  "But what are you looking for?"

  "I don't let myself expect something specific," said Jane. "I look at what's there and evaluate it. I might see a car that's coming up on us fast. This time if there are lots of heads visible, I would be worried that it might be the people after us. Or I might see that the road behind us is empty and decide it's a good time for us to make a turn—go down the next road and head in another direction when nobody can see us do it. I'm looking for danger and opportunity."

  "It's scary. It's not the way I think. I can't wait until this is over."

  Jane glanced at her smooth young face, the forehead compressed in unaccustomed wrinkles and the mouth pouting. Jane decided to skip this natural opportunity to tell her the next lesson, the next warning. It would never be over. It would go on until either she was dead or the chasers were, and at this moment the odds were better for them.