Black Ghost Runner

by M. Garnet

  She turned, gave him a hard glare, then took off to enter the bank. The ice air inside made bumps on her tummy, but she went over to the guy he had pointed out.

  The man looked up, doing a double take. He rose out of his chair. “May I help you, Miss?”

  She held out her ATM card. “Yes, I want to make a large withdrawal.”

  “Sure, my name is Mark. Come into my office.”

  Forty-five minutes later, she left the bank. Part of the time was Mark wasting her time trying to talk her out of taking so much from of the bank. They let her have fifty thousand in cash, assuring her the numbers were tracked as they handed her a plain envelope. The rest was in three bank drafts, Mark also assured her that anytime he could be of help, day or night, she should just call him. The card he handed her had his personal phone number written on the back.

  Noble stood waiting for her by the jeep, so Beth slid back into it. He got in and waited for her to belt up and start the engine.

  She listened as he gave her directions. “Drive north out of town.”

  Pulling out, she headed in the direction indicated, then glanced over at him.

  “You have your money, so I’m free now, right?”

  There was a long silence that worried her. His answer was the correct one. “I have my bike at a gas station out of town. When we get there, you are done.”

  Beth wondered why she was a little disappointed. They drove in silence, the air keeping them cool in the morning as the sun rose overhead. The heavy forests were kept at a distance on each side of the highway. Finally, he pointed at a truck stop on the side, so she pulled over.

  It was a large place, but there was not a lot of activity at this time of the morning. There were some trucks parked, and a few drivers looked at them as they talked to each other. Some people were having late breakfasts inside. A car was pumping gas. She pulled up to another gas pump.

  “I need gas.” She looked over at him.

  “Get your gas, and I’ll go get my bike. I will swing back by on my way out.”

  Beth got out, took a card, and swiped it so she could begin to pump. She was leaning against the rear of the jeep when she heard the strong vibrations of the bike. Looking up, she saw the heavy black motorcycle pull around behind her. She finished, replaced the nozzle and looked over at him. No helmet, of course. He had put on the leather jacket, but probably hid the gun in one of the flat saddlebags. He had dark aviator glasses on, hiding his eyes.

  “So, I am free?” Beth asked him again as he let the rugged motor idle.

  “I will hope that I can leave you alone.” He said this without looking at her. “Beth, the answer to the question I wouldn’t answer is Shifter.” He gripped the handles as he gave the bike gas, then he was gone. She watched as he weaved the heavy machine out of the station, dust following him down the highway, headed further north.

  She stood there running his words over in her mind, then got back in her little jeep and drove to her apartment.

  Chapter Four

  Beth was surprised how calm she was as she drove home. She locked herself in her tiny two rooms.

  The next week was pure panic. She quit her job with Ev, much to everyone’s shock. She gave an excuse that someone in the family needed her help. She drew her money from the account in cash in smaller amounts, under ten thousand each from different branches, leaving a few dollars.

  Beth sold her jeep. She took a loss, but didn’t argue with the dealer. She bought clothes at the discount store. Solid pants with many pockets, mid thigh shorts that were almost stain proof. She found a vest with numerous pockets, a lightweight backpack that could carry tons of items. She added a good hunting knife, but most important a belt that would serve to hide her money or any other small important items within.

  Beth tried on hiking boots with good socks. She had one pair of sandals along with her tennis shoes. She went to a standard general merchandise store and bought solid cotton underclothes. She added dark, not black or navy t-shirts. She finished her shopping. She would leave everything else behind.

  Beth hunted in the papers as well as the yellow pages for computer repairs. She finally found a family owned business that specialized in Macs and Apple products. She went in making a deal by talking to them. It took her an hour to talk them into to selling her one of their own laptops. It had everything on it she needed. Of course it would, they were geeks. They would play all night on their own equipment. She paid twice what a new one would cost,, but the new one would not have all the extra memory or apps this one had.

  Beth joined an Internet Bank and put her money there. She received an ATM card at a rent-a-box under an assumed company name, paying extra for overnight delivery. She could get her money anywhere. She kept five thousand in cash on her, hidden in various places. She spent two days at a cheap motel to have time to study up on her computer. She needed to learn some things:

  Beth needed to know where people who wanted to live off the grid could go. She needed to know where people went to hike or live life in a more natural setting.

  She needed to search the web for the word shifter.

  The first two items were easy. Hundreds of ads popped up in Wyoming, Kentucky, North Dakota, anywhere there were forests, fast running waters and private ranches. Her problem would be to find one that might need some bookkeeping and computer work, or maybe even some help with dogs or animals, but somewhere that no one would know her or where she came from and wouldn’t ask for references.

  Wyoming seemed her best choice for a number of reasons. There were lots of ranches close to many small towns. Beth had never been in that state, so she had no connections that could be traced. There were lots of tourists, hikers or hunters, but they were all in small groups, and not the large quantities found in the tourist meccas like the Black Hills of the Dakotas or the numerous theme parks in Kentucky.

  The last search kept her up an entire night. Shifter. Wikipedia had a long discussion on it starting with A shape shifting character in science fiction, fantasy fiction, and role-playing games.

  The first two main words sucked her breath away. She just sat, waiting for her sight to return. It took her several minutes to read all that Wikipedia covered. She was frozen, unable to move her fingers. She went back to the original Google search page and found over forty-four million results to her request on the word shifter.

  Beth just read the short paragraphs on the list on the first page. She did the same on the next and the next. From the first few lines, it seemed that there was a great deal of controversy over shifters. Shifters were declared fact, then on another page, declared fiction. You could be trained to shift, it was all fallacy, and no one could shift. Natives around the world claimed to be able to shift, no one could prove that any Native American or South American Indian had ever shifted. There were long stories about Native Americans shifting, especially into wolves. It was very popular due to recent books or movies.

  Conspiracy nuts claimed the Government had a secret program that used drugs to make soldiers into shifters. The Government also captured black Jaguars—here, she caught her breath—in Central America because they were shifters that could be used in warfare. There were just as many scientific reports that claimed to prove it was absolutely impossible for the body to shift into another form.

  Towards morning, Beth finally gave up. She couldn’t read forty four million reports on shifters. She couldn’t tell what, if any, held truth. She had gotten to the point that she didn’t believe what the Internet said, whether it was the scientist that knew beyond a doubt that a body couldn’t change or it was the scam artists who were selling tonics that would let you change into your house cat. Then there were the stories, like a Cherokee child who saw his uncle change into a wolf.

  There was only one thing she knew. His eyes had changed in front of her. It was not a little change, like eyes retracting in sunlight—they’d really changed. She didn't see whites at all, nor the normal brown that she
saw in him sometimes, but the eyes of a cat, all old gold that covered the entire eyeball, with the black slit that contracted or expanded. Within that knowledge, she knew that she didn’t want to see those eyes ever again. She would do whatever it took to run, to hide, to stay out of sight, so that he wouldn’t find her. Part of the reason was what her own body had done in its betrayal by responding in some erotic way to him.

  Beth brought up Wyoming to begin to look up small towns. She went into the Bus Lines web site looking for their schedules. She found that a couple days of uncomfortable travel would take her to the area she wanted.

  With a small duffle along with her backpack, Beth went west. Bus travel wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t fast. It had found a niche to take the place of the trains or the planes. It was cheap. It went to all the little short hops that needed the service to take a few people from town to city to town. If you were going over a long distance, you changed buses frequently, stopped a lot to eat in run-down bus stops, but eventually saw a lot of the US that you wouldn’t normally see any other way.

  The second stop in Wyoming wasn’t her final destination, but it looked right, so she got off. She told the driver not to worry about her refund. She would contact the main office later. She got a room in the only hotel, got up early five AM, and went down to look for the local diner for breakfast to sit down in a corner to eat and listen. It took her two days of the good cooking before she heard what she was waiting for.

  “So, Steve, what are you doing about your office worker? I know you don’t even know how to turn that damn computer on.” This brought a general amount of laughter from a couple of guys in the booth in front of her.

  Beth looked at the men in the booth. She knew they were local by the way the waitress was treating them. They were all dressed in outdoor clothes. Not work clothes, but hiking or hunting clothes. There were two with their backs to her, teasing the guy facing her. He wasn’t smiling, so he was the one missing an office worker.

  She got up and took her slip up to the cash register. When the waitress came up, she gave Beth a big smile. Beth had been leaving big tips on purpose so now she was hoping it would pay off.

  “Everything good?”

  “As usual, I am glad I stopped here if it was just for the food. Hey, Madge, the guy with his back to us, in the booth next to mine, he has a business in town?”

  Madge looked over. “Sure, hon.” She turned back to Beth. “That’s Jim Whistle. He has Whistle Stop Tours. Clever company name, right?”

  Beth smiled. “Where is his office?”

  “Oh, it’s just down in the next block, on this side, but no one is in there right now. Brigit ran off with one of the tourists. Left Jim high n’ dry.” She laughed heartily as she gave Beth her change.

  Beth sat back the twenty percent tip and left, looking down the way Madge had pointed. It didn’t take long to find the door with the name on it. She tried the handle. It was unlocked, of course, in small towns like this. She entered, looked around, then slid behind the front desk. She looked at all the mail and all the papers sitting beside the PC on the desk.

  Beth sat down and turned on the PC. She began to sort the mail. She did three piles, one personal, one bills, then one junk that went into the basket on the floor. The junk took away most of the mail, which was normal in offices. This got the desk space opened up a little. She brought up the system on the computer to find out what they were using for bookkeeping.

  They had an outdated bookkeeping system, Simple, but it looked like he didn’t run a very involved business, so it probably did the job. Beth could save him a little money by doing a better job on expenses. She would handle that later. She looked at the date of the last entry and found it was a month ago. She had some catch up she could do for him.

  She took her vest off and hung it in on the back of the chair, then went back to look at the bills. She saw some important ones such as power and phone. These she opened to carefully check. They were due now, but didn’t have a past due amount, so if he had funds in his account, they could be paid immediately to keep him out of trouble.

  Beth looked at the system again. According to it, he was paying his girl every week, on the payroll account, about three hundred dollars before taxes. The system said he had four thousand one Hundred dollars plus odd change in the bank. She knew she could get into his banking system to check. She looked around and pulled out the central drawer. She pulled out the sliding wooden work piece that fit above the top left hand drawer. The girl had written down all the passwords for the system, the bank account along with some other items on sticky notes on that wood.

  She looked up as the door opened.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jim did a double take, looking at her, at the desk, then behind him as if the answer was out the door.

  Beth thought for only a second, remembering the name on her new driver’s license. “My name is Sally, I am your new office worker. These two bills need to be paid today or tomorrow. I’ll go through the rest as soon as possible to see what needs to be paid next. This is your personal mail. I didn’t open it, but if you like, I can do that in the future. Your last girl left all your vital passwords on this pull-out tray. Let’s not do this in the future. Consider this first hour free. You can start my payroll at one PM, right after lunch.”

  She watched as Jim looked down at her and took the mail she handed him. “Little lady, you got some balls. How did you know I needed any office help?”

  Beth—now Sally—laid the rest of the mail back down so she could sit back in the chair. “It’s a small town. Madge said that since Brigit ran off, you were high and dry, so you needed help. Your buddies said you couldn’t even turn on the computer. I doubt that, because I see a nice Blackberry in your pocket. My guess is you have better things to do than keep records—like talk to customers, take out tours and make sure guys with two left feet get the thrills they think they want, then get back safe.” She pointed at the junk mail in the basket.

  “Me, I need a job real bad. I have no references. I know more about computers than anyone does. I am over qualified, but I am willing to work. I need the fresh air of a small town in Wyoming instead of the exhaust from vehicles in Chicago. I can’t afford your tours, yet if I work for you, I bet once in a while I’ll get a chance to come out to help set up a camp, work too hard to dig holes for the rich guys to piss in. Besides knowing how to turn this old PC on, I know which end of a shovel to use. So, what do you say, boss?”

  Beth-Sally waited for his answer as he stood there for a long moment looking at her behind the desk. He ran his hand through his slightly grey hair. “Wha’cher’ your name?”

  She pulled out her driver’s license—the one she’d obtained when she picked up a new birth certificate in Chicago.

  “Okay, Sally Denison, you got a job while I have the Sheriff check you out. If you don’t have any outstanding warrants—also you will need to pee in a cup because I don’t allow drugs—you got a job.”

  Sally spent the rest of the day getting used to the computer system, which was a snap. The rest of the time also was getting to know her boss. At first, he stayed in his office with the door closed, but eventually, at last, he came out.

  “The Sheriff is a friend, and his office is just down the street. He says no outstanding warrants. Go pee in a cup for him so you can report back here at eight tomorrow. I have a group that I am meeting out on the river tomorrow, so you won’t see me for the next week...well, five days.” He slid a card over to her on the desk. “This is my cell phone number. Do you have a cell? I can get you one when I get back so we can keep in contact. I will pay for it.”

  “No, I have one. I’ll send you a message, which will give you my number. If you want, you can pay for part of the bill.”

  He was gone. Sally was now in charge of the office with life started anew. She peed in the cup, taking a gentle kidding from the female deputy at the Sheriff’s office. She found a room in the back of a house in to
wn. It suited her fine. It had a separate entrance up a back stairs with lace curtains, open windows and a spotless, old-fashioned bathroom.

  Not only that, everyone knew her. This was a small town. When someone new entered, gossip traveled fast. They knew what she had eaten each time she sat in the diner from the first day she got off the bus. Normally, the bus stopped, but no one got on or off. Occasionally a local, including a town folk, a local rancher or one of the reservation Indians boarded or disembarked. That also was news to pass around. Even with a satellite dish, TV was iffy, so gossip was great entertainment.

  Sally was not local yet, but she was part of the town, since she worked for Whistle Stop Tours. Most of the groups that Jim set up didn’t come into town because they were met on a campsite he had set up to begin their great outdoor adventure. Still, a few came in to spent money that the town appreciated.

  Jim used a couple of young kids from the reservation to help when he needed extra hands with the horses rented from a local ranch. It was all one big family, so she was able to keep up with the office work, handle inquiries, and still have time on her hands.

  The summer passed into fall, and hunters moved in to take the place of the hikers, along with late fishermen. The Government allowed elk hunting to keep the herds thinned, but under strict control. Any elk that wandered on the reservation grounds, which was extensive, Indians were allowed to hunt without any restrictions, but the word was that the Indians only took what they needed.

  There were a couple of Casinos on the reservation, but the reservation was so large that the Casinos were on the other side of the state. All the tourists for these came in from the Federal Highways that ran through northern Wyoming. They were so far away that even the outdoor types that came to use Whistle Stop Tours didn’t go up there to enjoy the gambling.