Runner

by Thomas Perry

  "I'm sorry."

  "The reason she could even hold on to the money was that he went along with all of it. He never contested anything. He signed every piece of paper her lawyer sent him, including things that were outright lies—that she had brought money with her when they were married. Actually, when she moved into our house, I remember she had one small suitcase, and what was in it was an outfit to wear to go on her first shopping trip."

  "He probably thought if she had some money she'd take care of you and your brother and sister while he was away."

  "I suppose. What actually happened was that the minute we got home from seeing him off to Lompoc, Delia sat me down at the kitchen table and had a long talk with me. Or, at least she wanted it to be long. Have you ever noticed that the worst people in the world always want you to feel sorry for them?"

  "Yes," said Jane, "I have."

  "Well, that was Delia. While she was working up to throwing me out of the house, she was telling me how much she'd been suffering with my dad, and how hard it was on her. She even wanted me to feel sorry for her for the pain it gave her to refuse to give him the money to save himself. It had ruined her forever, she said. Her health was shot, and she was too old now to get a good enough job to support us all. She was crying, so I could barely understand her half the time. But what she was expecting was that I would throw my arms around her and tell her I was sorry for living, and would make it up to her by leaving."

  "You didn't?"

  "No, so she gave me a month to get out. And that was why I ended up getting a full-time job and an apartment and lying to say I was eighteen when I was sixteen."

  "Didn't you need papers to get the job?"

  "I used Delia's computer at home. An eight with a little white on the upper right side turns into a six. I did that to my birth certificate and made a copy of it on the printer. A Social Security card doesn't carry a birth date, but I made a copy of that, too. In California a sixteen-year-old's driver's license has a birth date and a red stripe and a blue stripe saying when you'll turn eighteen and when you'll turn twenty-one. I scanned mine and Photoshopped it to change the years to make me eighteen. The day I started work I brought in the copies. There was no secretary—that was the job I was taking—so I put the copies in the file I made for myself. If my boss ever noticed anything odd, he must have realized I had given him proof that he wasn't the one at fault."

  "Pretty effective. You'll do well to get some sleep while you can. We'll have to make a stop in a couple of hours, and I'll wake you up then."

  "Okay." Christine's voice sounded small and distant now, and she fell asleep within a few minutes.

  As Jane drove on along the rural road, she thought about what she had heard. What Christine had said about Sharon was true. The voice on the recorded telephone message had been Sharon's. And Christine seemed to be telling the truth about the way she'd changed dates on papers. She might have been exaggerating the story about her childhood, but probably not much if she had been on her own young enough to have to obliterate dates. There still seemed to be no lies, but there was much more she was leaving out.

  4

  Jane drove into the small town of Blackwater as the summer night took on its deepest silence. She slowed to twenty at the town limit, opened her window, and drove even more slowly, listening. Above the steady, gentle sound of the air going past, there was nothing. It was after two, and the town was asleep. She reached the center of town where the streets were lined with old houses that had been renovated by the latest generation of a long succession of owners. The house on her right looked about the way it must have in 1880, except that the white paint on the ornate cookie-cutter trim had been brushed on this spring. The house across from it still had the original brown sandstone foundation, but it looked to Jane as though it had just been professionally cleaned.

  She decided that this set of owners must be rich, probably a wave of lawyers and brokers and executives who had retired early from jobs in New York City and come here to reproduce a vision of village life they imagined existed a hundred years ago. On Jane's previous visits, there had been an impression of gray peeled paint, overgrowth of vines, and patches of weeds. Now everything was neat and fresh and orderly. The lawns were rolled and cut, and recent plantings of bleeding hearts and currant bushes had appeared near the houses. Separate beds of heirloom roses had been cut into the side yards.

  The biggest houses were all ranged around the small park in the center of town, each facing an ancient bandstand. As the road led off toward either edge of town, the houses got smaller, until they were simple, neat cottages that had been converted to stores, small restaurants, the offices of doctors, opticians, and realtors. Jane turned beyond the park, and kept going until she reached the barn-sized building that used to be the town's feed and hardware store. She pulled off the road to the gravel parking lot, and backed her car up to the rear of the building. As she got out of the car, Jane saw Christine open her eyes, blink, and focus on her. Jane whispered, "It's okay. Go back to sleep."

  Jane walked across the dark, quiet street, and listened. She headed back to the center of town to the park and into the shadows of the two-hundred-year-old maples and oaks. In small upstate New York towns like Blackwater, people often left their dogs out in their yards on summer nights, and Jane knew if she came too close to the houses, she would set off a proprietary bark or two, so she stayed on the path to the bandstand. When she came under the tallest of the trees she saw the broad wings of a gliding owl carry it to a high limb and flap soundlessly once to pause in midair while the talons took hold, but then she lost sight of the owl in the foliage.

  She passed the bandstand and crossed the street on the other side. She walked straight to the front of the big Civil War-era redbrick house, climbed the steps, and watched the door open in front of her. The person standing inside the dim doorway was shorter than Jane and slender, but Jane could see that there was a handgun in the right hand.

  "Put it away," said a voice from somewhere deeper inside the house. "I know her. Evening, Jane."

  "Hello, Stewart," said Jane. Now she could just make out the distinctive shape of Stewart Shattuck, short and wide-shouldered, standing by the staircase.

  "Come on to the office."

  In the dim light that leaked from beneath a closed door at the end of the hallway she followed him to the door to the left of the staircase. The office was a room that must have been, at some early date, some kind of interior storage space. It was in the center of the first floor of the house, opposite the stairwell, and it had no windows. Shattuck was nocturnal, and during his business hours no ray of light escaped his workroom to raise suspicion outside.

  When he had closed the door behind them, he moved the switch on a rheostat to bring up the lights. He said, "Will you sit down, please?" He settled himself on a straight-backed chair beside the eight-foot table he used as a desk, and made a few tiny marks on a piece of paper in front of him, bending so his face was within six inches of it.

  Jane chose the straight-backed chair across from the table. It felt warm to her, and when she looked straight ahead she had a clear view of an array of video monitors from closed-circuit cameras mounted on the front, back, and sides of the house. She had taken the chair that belonged to Shattuck's guard. The images on the screens were now motionless, no living creature moving out there.

  After a full minute in which he seemed to have forgotten Jane was there, Shattuck said, "It's been several years. I had assumed that you had been killed."

  "Not yet."

  He raised his eyes to look at her. "You're wise to think of it that way. I always thought that wisdom was the direction where you were heading, even when you were very young. Now that you've reached middle age, you've arrived."

  "If I agree I'm wise, do I have to accept that I'm middle-aged? Or is accepting it more wisdom?"

  Shattuck smiled so his glasses sent a flash of reflected light, then lowered his head to his paper again. "Of course you would s
ee the way out of the trap. I've missed your visits."

  "I only come when I've got trouble, so I don't share the feeling."

  "There is that, isn't there? But most of the customers for a forger aren't pretty or wise." He sat up straight, took a look at the document he had been working on, and put it aside reluctantly, keeping his eyes on it all the way to the pile at the corner of his table. "All right. Let's hear what you need this time." He lifted a pad and changed pens.

  "It's a young girl, nineteen or twenty. First she needs ID to travel. It has to be good enough to pass, but only the essentials—driver's license, Social Security card, maybe a few simple things to fill a wallet, a library card, and so on."

  "What next?"

  "The hard stuff—a second good, solid set of papers that will last her forever, if necessary."

  He squinted and stared past Jane's shoulder, then wrote as he spoke. "Driver's license, Social Security, birth certificate. MasterCard, Visa, American Express. Passport, too?"

  "If you can get all that safely."

  "Of course. But passports are taking at least six weeks these days."

  "I'll give you a mail-drop address to forward it to."

  Shattuck said, "Is it all right if we give her an address in Syracuse to start? That way I don't have to go far to pick it up."

  "Sure. She can fill out change-of-address forms when she's settled somewhere. Until then, just forward everything to the mail drop." She pointed at his pad. "May I?"

  He handed her the pad and pen, and she wrote out an address and handed them back.

  "Telephone?"

  "Make one up."

  He held out his hand. "Let's see her photograph."

  "I have her with me."

  "Even better. We'll take different shots for each form of ID. Anything else for you tonight?"

  "Yes," she said. "When you have the first set of documents, I'd like you to put together a set of papers for a baby with the same surname. A birth certificate and a Social Security card. That ought to do it if she has to run."

  "How old is the baby?"

  "Make it two to five months from now."

  Shattuck's head turned only a half-inch. "She's pregnant?"

  "Yes." She watched him closely. "I guess the real birth date will be September or October." She could see he had stopped writing.

  Shattuck said, "It's been a while since you've been here. I should warn you that the prices of all of these items have gone up. Increased security and new electronics."

  "I had assumed something like that would have happened."

  "Everything has to survive electronic scanners. It's got to be real."

  "I'm not surprised."

  "In order to get a driver's license, I have to send somebody with a birth certificate to some other city, and have her apply for the license and take the tests. The credit has to be grown over time."

  "That was always the best way to do things," said Jane. "I expected it."

  "Well, the good news is that once an identity is planted, it grows more quickly. That's much better than it used to be. Once anything is verified by anyone anywhere, it proliferates—moves from one data bank to another. That's one of the methods I've been refining since the last time I saw you. I plant articles about imaginary people on Web sites and blogs so that Google will pick them up when anybody searches. I'm constantly updating and expanding. That's all cheap and easy. But the planting of first-rate identities still works best if you can get someone on the inside to create a real record. People who get caught selling things like birth certificates and driver's licenses go away for a long, long time."

  "Oh, one more thing," Jane said. "I'd like a simple set, maybe just a California driver's license, with my picture, in the name Delia Monahan."

  "Delia Monahan. I take it we're talking about a real, living person?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I can get a duplicate and doctor it."

  "Good. How much are we talking about for everything I want?"

  "I'd say we're probably in the vicinity of..." He put a dot beside each item he had written, mouthing "Ten, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-four," then said aloud, "Forty thousand. Could go as high as sixty."

  "Can I pay you ten right now, and send the rest later?"

  He looked regretful. "Janie, your word is the word of the saints. But the saints are dead. You could die, too."

  "Someone has already been looking for this girl, haven't they, Stewart?"

  Shattuck pursed his lips and stared at her for a second. "There could be other pregnant twenty-year-olds. I'll let you see if it's the same one." He walked across the room to a second table, woke up a laptop computer that was attached to a printer, and brought up an e-mail message. "Read."

  Jane stepped to the computer. The screen read, "Christine Monahan, Female, age twenty, is worth one hundred thousand. Open attachment to see photo gallery." Then it gave an 800 telephone number, but no name or address. Jane said, "Did you open the attachment?"

  "No. If I took money for turning in people on the run, how long would I live?"

  "May I?"

  "Go ahead."

  Jane downloaded the attachment and opened it. There were a dozen small pictures on the page. In a couple of them Christine was sitting at a desk that was set on a shiny slate floor in a room that seemed to be all glass with tropical plants behind it, like an atrium. In a few, Christine's hair was long and blond, and in others dark and shorter, pinned behind her head. They seemed to have been taken over a period of years. Jane said, "This isn't good news."

  "I expect not."

  "But it doesn't change our deal. I still need the ID for her. Can you charge a credit card for the price?"

  "How much?"

  "All of it—forty thousand."

  He looked at the pictures on the screen, then back at Jane. "You barely know her. Are you sure you want to spend that much?"

  "Think of the air miles I'll earn."

  "That kind of charge usually triggers a phone call. Will you be available to take it and tell the Visa people that it's really you?"

  "No, but I'll call them before I drop out of sight, and authorize it."

  "That works for me. You can bring her in."

  When Jane opened the door, the thin, silent figure was standing on the other side, as she had expected. In the light, she saw it was a pretty woman about thirty, not a teenager. She was wearing a pair of tight black satin pants and an indigo pullover that made her look very slender.

  Jane said, "I've got to go outside for a few minutes, and bring someone back."

  "I know. You can park closer to the house if you want." The woman opened the front door, and Jane stepped outside.

  The night air felt even warmer now that Jane was out of the air-conditioned house. She could see that the streets around the park were still deserted, but she stopped after she was away from the house and listened for engines. There was still the same silence. As she made her way across the park and she could see the Volvo, she strained her eyes to see Christine, but she couldn't. She must have gotten into the back seat to sleep.

  Jane kept her eyes moving, but they returned to the Volvo. She had driven the car for a couple of years, so she had a practiced intuitive feel for the shape, the weight, the steering, and the way the car looked when it was parked. Something felt wrong. She stopped beside the nearest tree trunk, stayed in its shadow for a moment, and looked at the car. It was sitting too high. That's what it was. When Jane had gotten out of the car, she had looked back. The car had rested very slightly lower on its springs than it did now. It was empty. Jane trotted along the side of the park, crossed the street, and came back around the big old feed store slowly, listening for the sounds of movement. On her second turn she came up beside the Dumpster, and she could see Christine crouching behind it.

  Jane said quietly, "Christine, it's me."

  Christine's body jerked and she spun to see Jane. "Oh, you scared me so much. I didn't hear you."

  Jane crouched, too. "Why are
you out here?"

  "I woke up and you were gone."

  "I told you I was going."

  "You did?"

  "Yes."

  "I must have been asleep. I woke up and I got worried. Where were you?"

  "Come on. I'll tell you while we drive over there." They got back into the car and she pulled forward. "I was at that big brick house across the park. See it?"

  "Yeah."

  "It belongs to a man I know who sells identification, and that's something you're likely to need."

  "Tonight?"

  "Tonight is the time when we're here. Later we might be near other people who do this kind of work, but most of them aren't as good at it, and some of the others might sell us out if somebody waves enough money around. This man probably won't."

  "Probably?"

  "He hasn't in the past. That's all you really know about what anyone will do." Jane drove slowly around the park toward the house. "When he talks to you, listen carefully and answer him honestly and politely."

  "I'm not a child."

  "I'm sorry. I don't know you well, so I can't guess what you know. These transactions are tricky. We're all taking risks. He can sell us out, but we can sell him out, too. We're forming a temporary alliance. He and I are still alive because so far, in all of our temporary alliances, we've been selective about the people we trust, and we've been trustworthy. We've chosen the right ones and sent the wrong ones away."

  "You're saying he's going to judge me."

  "Exactly. He's got a soft spot for runners, but don't make it hard for him to believe in you." She pulled the car to the curb.

  They got out and walked up the steps. The door opened again, and Jane nodded to the woman in the doorway, studying her without seeming to. She had a very pretty face, but her only expression was watchfulness. Now that the woman was comfortable with Jane she stared once into Christine's eyes, then devoted all of her attention to scanning the street, the park, and the other houses before she locked and bolted the door. "Go in."