Shadow Woman jw-3 Read online

  “Seaver said she bought him an hour after that.”

  “Right,” said Earl. “She did it, but she couldn’t know in advance that she could do it. How could this one woman think she could tie up those guys that long? No, she was counting on two hours, and whatever she got after that must have been insurance. Figure he drives sixty miles an hour, so there’s no chance he’ll lose twenty minutes getting a speeding ticket.”

  Linda stood up and pulled the map out of her suitcase. She measured 120 miles on a piece of dental floss, tied it to Earl’s pencil, and ran it in a circle around Las Vegas. “Kingman, Arizona, on Route 93; Bullhead City, Arizona, on 95. Maybe Lake Havasu if he pushes it on Route 95 south. Baker, California, on 15 south. There’s no airport for another hundred and twenty miles, so scratch 15 south. Nothing at all on 93 or 95 north, so scratch them. That leaves 93 or 95 south into Arizona or 15 north, into Utah. If it’s 93, it’s Kingman. If it’s 95, it’s Lake Havasu City. Both have airports.”

  “What about Utah?”

  “No airport until Cedar City. About a hundred and eighty miles.”

  “Okay, scratch that too. We’re down to two possibilities, then,” said Earl. “He flew out of Kingman or Havasu City. Now what we’ve got to do is see what flights go out on a Tuesday night at those airports between two in the morning and, say, three. There can’t be many.”

  “What if they go to Chicago and Dallas? Little airports usually just feed big ones.”

  “We’ll just hope the other things we’re doing give us a break, and tell us which one.”

  “What other things?”

  He pawed through her purse and saw the apartment rental bill. “First thing is, put on some gloves and mail this in with some cash. I want to make sure his landlord doesn’t evict him, in case we need to go back there.”

  “Okay. But where would he fly?”

  “Put yourself in his place. This woman must have asked him what places he could go. He can’t go to Atlantic City or Reno or some other place where they gamble. He’s going to pick a place he knows a little about. A place he likes, right?”

  “I would think so. The better he likes it, the longer he’ll stay put, and the harder he’ll be to find.”

  Earl clasped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “No close relatives, no permanent girlfriend, lots of friends, too many to narrow down …”

  “Vacations?” asked Linda. “Business trips?”

  “Maybe. If we can get a hotel charge on a credit report, we’ll have a place to start.”

  Linda lay perfectly still. “I just thought of something. He knows he’s in danger. He knows she got him out in the nick of time. He’s never done this before, and he doesn’t know if we’re stuck in this motel or already staring at the back of his head, right?”

  “That sounds right,” said Earl. “But—”

  “What’s the first thing he’s going to buy?”

  “If he dumped his car at some airport, he’ll buy another one.”

  “I’m not saying he won’t do that,” said Linda. “But what else do they always do? They buy a gun. If he flew out, he doesn’t have one. If she set all this up in a couple of days, she probably wouldn’t have time to get him one and leave it for him in the new town. Unless it’s stolen, she’d still have the five-day waiting period.”

  Earl grinned and squeezed her so hard her neck hurt. “Whatever else he does, he’ll do that. And that puts him on a list. It’s a list we can get, because it’s a public record. She’ll probably tell him not to, but the minute he’s on his own in a strange place, looking over his shoulder, he’ll do it.” He sat down and wrote more notes. “First, we’ve got to find out what airport he used, then what flight he took. Tomorrow I think we’ll drive into Arizona and see if we can find a car with Nevada plates that got left in one of those two airports at two in the morning on Tuesday.”

  Linda Thompson pumped harder on the stationary bike, slowly adding speed, watching the digital readout on the little electronic podium in front of the handlebars. Thirty miles an hour, thirty-five, forty. She moved her legs faster, then pushed the thumb-lever forward to jump to a higher gear, and the speedometer told her she was going fifty. She gradually worked the gears back until the pedaling was almost effortless. She kept moving her legs for a long time to avoid getting knots in her muscles, but she had lost interest in the machine. Nobody went fifty on a bicycle. The scale was designed to give suckers a warm, cozy feeling.

  She dismounted and looked out the glass wall of the exercise room. She was still alone. The gawkers were probably at their sales meetings. She went to the weight area, did a few more bench presses, a few more curls, then went to work on her latissimus dorsi, always using light weights and many repetitions to keep the muscles supple and avoid adding ugly body mass.

  She had been eager to begin hunting, and it was frustrating to be stalled for days right at the start. Hatcher might have been dumb enough to ditch the car at the Kingman airport or the Havasu airport, but the woman had not been dumb enough to let him. Earl wasn’t saying it yet, but none of the flights out of either airport fit the schedule. The woman wouldn’t set it up so that Hatcher had to drive out of Las Vegas at midnight and wait in an airport until seven for a flight. That was the kind of thing they did later, when she and Earl were getting close, and they were scared and desperate. At the beginning they still had a choice, and the first moves were smooth and efficient.

  She walked into the tiny changing area and came out the other door in her swimsuit, cap, and goggles. She ran her toes along the surface of the water and verified that it was cold. It was a pretty good trick to have a cold swimming pool in a place where it was over a hundred degrees in the shade. She slipped in and endured the shock, then began to swim slowly up and down, warming her body and letting the long, slow strokes stretch the muscles and clear her lungs. It was already nearly eleven, so she decided she would do only a half mile and get out. Hotels started to get busy around noon, even in places like Havasu, Arizona. She resented having to do everything in the morning each day. Linda was a night person.

  When she had finished her swim, she slipped back into the dressing room, and in a few minutes she was walking back up the hallway of the hotel. She opened the door and found Earl sitting at the table, tapping the keys of the laptop computer. Then she saw that the bags were packed.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What are you looking at?”

  “Airline schedules.” Earl grinned that strange grin he had. At times like this his face seemed more animal than human. “I think I figured out why none of the flights he could have gotten out of Arizona fit.”

  “Why not?” She set down her gym bag and waited. She was relieved that he had not made her bring that up. But he must have found something else. He actually looked happy.

  “Listen carefully,” said Earl. “He takes the car from the parking lot in Las Vegas. It’s about midnight. He drives two hours south toward Kingman or Havasu, Arizona. What time is it?”

  Linda shrugged. “Two o’clock. Nothing takes off for four or five hours, and then it’s just local stuff.”

  “Right. Suppose he doesn’t drive to Arizona. Suppose he drives north about a hundred and eighty miles at sixty miles an hour. He’s at Cedar City, Utah. What time is it?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  “Nope. Four o’clock. He’s crossed from the Pacific time zone into Mountain.”

  Linda sat on the bed. “But Utah is in the same time zone as Arizona.”

  “Yeah, but Arizona doesn’t do daylight savings time. That’s why we didn’t have to set the clocks forward when we got here.” He looked at her intently. “Okay. He’s driven three hours to Cedar City. It’s four o’clock. What time is it in Las Vegas?”

  Linda lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “Three o’clock. She’s just finishing up with Seaver’s men.”

  Earl nodded. “We ruled out Cedar City because it was too far to reach before Seaver’s men started look
ing. I would have ruled out his flight, too, because it left so late. She couldn’t have hoped to buy him enough time to make it, so why would she bother to buy him any time at all? But it wasn’t late. It was just the amount of time she was buying for him. It’s Flight 493 to Denver, at four eighteen A.M.”

  Earl looked at her expectantly, but she opened her suitcase, took out a comb, and walked to the mirror.

  “Aren’t you interested?”

  “Interested?” asked Linda. “Oh, sure.”

  “Then why aren’t you happy?”

  She sat down on the bed facing away from him to comb her hair so he couldn’t see her. “I was thinking about them. Hatcher and that woman. It’s such a simple trick, and I’ll bet when they thought of it they were laughing at us.”

  8

  Jane heard a noise in the dark outside. She sat up and listened. The noise came again. She crept to the wall beside the bedroom window and leaned slowly to the side to bring one eye to the edge of the curtain to see. The wind was blowing from the east, making the long, leg-thick limb of the old maple tree behind the house bob its heavy foliage up and down. When it moved, there was a creak. There it was again, a rubbing sound that came once, then was quiet, a sound an intruder would make while he slipped into the house.

  She stepped back from the window and watched the soft, hot wind blow the curtain inward so a little glow of moonlight showed her the room. Sprawled on the other side of the bed was Carey, his eyes closed and his jaw slack in an almost-snore, a long silence and then, after it seemed too late, a soft, gentle indrawing of breath. She admitted to herself that she would probably wake up this way for a few more months. She had slept—happily fallen asleep—beside a few men over the years, and Carey was one of them. But now she was sleeping in Carey’s bed in the house where Carey had been a baby, which was now her house too. She had been in another life too long, a place where noises that might be intruders didn’t always turn out to be made by the wind. She sat on the bed and spent a minute staring at him. She let herself adore the big foot sticking out from under the sheet, the long, hard muscles of the arm. She leaned over to stare at his eyelids. She could see his eyes moving in little nervous twitches underneath, and she knew he was dreaming.

  She resisted the urge to touch him. She was his wife now, and that was different. She was supposed to take responsibility for the fact that he had to be at the hospital at six if he was going into surgery at seven, not wake him up and ask him what he was dreaming. She slowly lowered herself beside him, then lay on her back, closed her eyes, and listened to the wind fluttering the leaves of the maple outside the window until they made no sound.

  After a time, she sensed from the way that the trees around her kept revising their shapes until she got them right that she was in a dream. It was night, and low, thin clouds made the moon a small ball with a rainbow ring around it. She didn’t like the dream, but when she tried to fathom why that was, she found she had already known the answer before she had wondered. It was because the place where she was standing was familiar. She had not moved. She was still on the ground where Carey’s house was going to be built some day.

  She felt uneasy as she looked toward the street, because she saw only a narrow gap in the trees. There was no use trying to walk and find her way home, because if the path was there, the road was not yet on top of it, and the forest still stretched like this from the ocean to the Mississippi, and from the tundra to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Jane tried to fight the growing sensation that she was being watched. She tried to force herself to be rational. This might be the Old Time, but that didn’t mean there were such things as witches. There were no witches. If there ever had been, they had disappeared from the earth before Jane had been born. But her own memory told her she was lying.

  She had been in the courtroom in Atlanta when the judge had looked past little Max Curtin, who sat behind the table that came up nearly to his chin, not seeing his pale face and thin bird-bones showing he hadn’t just fallen down a lot but had not even been given enough to eat. The judge could see no grounds to take him away from his cousin. But the cousin had heard the words, and turned around quickly to gaze at Max Curtin’s face, and the cousin’s eyes had glowed, not only in triumph, but because he was drinking in the sight of the terror and despair that showed in the little boy’s face. The Grandfathers would have taken one look at the cousin and known he was a witch.

  She could feel the Workers of Evil were out there, feel them turning their attention to her. She had been thinking about them, and they had heard her thoughts, and now they were looking up, their faces vacant but alert. They were somewhere in the forest, and they began to turn and move toward her. She could feel the emptiness that was in them begin to fill up with excitement, anticipation. They were concentrating on her now, thinking about how happy she had been, and how easily that could be taken away from her. And they were coming.

  Jane caught herself worrying about Carey sleeping unprotected in his bed, and she felt a jab of alarm. She had to force herself to hide him in the back of her mind, where they would not find him. She turned her attention to the witches. As long as she concentrated on them, they would see only their own reflection in her mind. There had seemed to be dozens of them when she first had thought of them, all pricking up their ears to search the air for her. But now she saw that they had winnowed themselves down to just two. Because they stood for all witches, they had to be a man and a woman.

  There were footprints on the path, so sooner or later it had to lead to a place where people lived. Jane set off and followed it, then worked up to a run. It was hard for Jane to run on the trail at night, and she was ashamed of how clumsy she had become. She had been lazy for the past three months, and she began to get winded after only a hundred yards. Her foot hit the edge of the path, where it was higher, and she tripped. She gave a little gasp of surprise, and she knew it had reached the man and the woman and told them she had been flushed from hiding.

  Although they were far behind her, only now reaching the clearing where she had started, she had no trouble seeing them. The man burst through the bushes, breaking branches and trampling the brush at his feet. He saw the path. He hunched over and stared down to read it for fresh tracks. He leaned forward on his knuckles, and his heels came up like those of a runner at the starting blocks. He grinned with a horrible emotion that looked like appetite, and his grin changed him. His lips kept moving, curled upward, and his bared teeth seemed to grow. His heavy jaw thickened, and he sprouted hair along his back, and then his haunches and arms. His small, black eyes lost none of their intensity as he started to move along the path on four feet.

  The woman was quiet. She seemed to materialize out of the forest without moving a leaf, as though her feet didn’t quite touch the ground. She stood still for a few breaths, listening. Jane didn’t let herself think about what the woman was sensing about that place, but it was why Jane was trying to draw her away from there. The woman didn’t hurry. She watched the man lumbering away down the path, growing bigger and heavier, his claws now long and black and the fur thick and impenetrable. He was a wolf.

  The woman smiled to herself and held her arms up, her long, graceful fingers fanned out, made longer by her pointed nails. She looked up at the moon glowing through the clouds, ringed with the faint colors of the spectrum, and as she did, she seemed to rise. Her fingers were impossibly long now, her neck was elongated to look upward, and her face in the moonlight was beautiful and ghostly. The bright, liquid eyes opened wider.

  Jane could see the fingers were the shafts of feathers, and she watched the feathers spread along the woman’s forearms and then all the way to her shoulders. The woman’s skin glowed white and smooth and flawless, and she had a soft, shapely grace that made Jane not want to turn her attention away. The arms were definitely wings now. The woman’s white neck seemed to curve, stretching up toward the moon, and Jane’s heart beat faster—a swan! In the old stories, swans were never evil. As soon as Jane
allowed herself to feel hope, it expanded in her chest and she almost cried with joy. The female apparition wasn’t a witch at all. She was probably some powerful woman asleep somewhere, who was now entering Jane’s dream to help her. Jane had acquired an ally, a sister.

  But the woman’s face had not stopped changing. The eyes kept growing bigger and brighter, and now they seemed to ignite, to burn with a light from inside that looked like fire. Suddenly the woman ducked forward in some wrenching physical reflex like a retch. Her shoulders shrugged, her neck shortened, the flesh of her feet shriveled and left only curved talons. She was no longer human. She gave the great wings a flap, and she soared into the dark sky. She was an owl.

  Jane was stung with shock, and in a few seconds the hurt threatened to soften and degenerate into heavy-footed despair. She strained to run harder, staring at the darkness ahead to discern the deeper black of the trail ahead of her feet, the empty air between the trees that could show her the way.

  Jane could hear the wolf behind her and to her right, his body lean and hard but heavy, crashing through the underbrush. He knew the path because he was a human, and he was cutting across the curves. Jane stepped off the path and ran to the right, into the cover of the forest. She had to go more slowly now, slipping through thickets, sliding down inclines and then straining to scramble up the next rise, tiring herself just to get to level ground again. At the bottom of a steep, rocky hill she found the beginning of a stream. She turned with it and trotted for a few hundred paces, splashing along the stony creekbed until she came abreast of a rocky ledge and pulled herself up onto it just because it was difficult and the wolf would expect her to avoid it. Then she shifted her course toward the path, and in another mile she came out onto it again. She knew she had fooled the wolf. Her feet seemed light, running on the clear, even ground.

  Then she felt rather than heard the sound above her, not so much a sound as a displacement of air behind her neck. She took two more steps and then whirled and swung hard at the same time so it would be her fist that arrived first instead of her face. Her knuckle felt the soft, downy brush of the breast feathers but swept past, hitting nothing solid at all.