“Okay,” said Jane. “It doesn’t matter. You got through. Now, what have you got up in your room that you can’t leave there?”
“One suitcase. The one you had me pack the last time. It’s got my money in it.”
“Give me the key,” she said.
He handed her the key, and she looked at it before she slipped it into her purse. He said, “The number’s not on it, but it’s 605.”
“Here’s what we do,” she said. “You sit here, sip your drink. If it takes too long, drink mine. Stay here with the waiter. If he leaves, don’t go to the lobby or follow me to your room or something. If everything unexpectedly goes wrong, don’t go to your car.”
“How did you know I had a car?”
She smiled sadly. “If they haven’t found you yet, all this is practice. If they have, what they’ve found is the car.”
Jane stood up and walked across the deck outside, back into the corridor where she had entered. She followed it until she found a fire door that led up the stairs. At the sixth floor she stood for a moment with her ear to the door. She heard nothing, so she stepped out into the hallway, found 605, and opened it.
The suitcase was neatly stowed in the closet. She tipped it on its side and searched it. There was sixty thousand dollars in hundreds, fifteen little plastic folders full of traveler’s checks, seven passbooks for savings accounts in Denver banks. She loaded the money, passbooks, and checks into her canvas bag and looked deeper.
When she found the box at the bottom she stopped. It was gold with a black stripe. It said, “.38 Special. 20 pistol cartridges.” She felt almost relieved. He had gone out and bought himself a pistol and a car. There was nothing mysterious about the way they had found him. All they had done was watch lists that anybody could get, until one man’s name had turned up on two or three lists. She put the box of cartridges into her bag with the money, then examined the suitcase for anything else Hatcher had neglected to mention.
She went into the bathroom, picked up his bag of toiletries, wiped the faucets and fixtures with a washcloth, then came out and wiped the desk, the television set, the table, the doorknobs. Then she checked all the wastebaskets for receipts or papers that would hold a print. When she was satisfied, she closed the suitcase, put the sign that said MAID SERVICE on the doorknob, and slipped back into the stairwell.
She climbed to the top floor, then onto the roof of the building. She left the suitcase behind a big air-conditioning condenser and went back down the stairs. They would find it in a month or two and have no idea how it had gotten there.
Downstairs she found Pete Hatcher drinking his cold coffee and looking happy. “Time to go,” she said.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
She led him the way she had come, down the long corridor and out the door at the end of the east wing to avoid the lobby and the front entrance. When they were in her rented car on the next street she started the engine and waited. “Tell me where your car is.”
“It’s parked down the street near another hotel,” he said. “About three, four blocks down.”
She was beginning to feel a little more confident. It wasn’t a particularly cunning way to hide a car, but at least it showed he wasn’t totally unconscious. He was thinking. She turned the corner and drove in the opposite direction. “I hope you’re not too attached to it.”
“No,” he said. “Does that mean we’re just leaving it?”
She sighed. “If things were different I think I would be tempted not to. I would find a very good spot so we could watch the car around the clock. Eventually, the people who want you might come along, and I could see who they were. I’m not that curious this time.”
“I don’t want to imply that I am, but why aren’t you?”
“Several reasons. One is the way they found you.”
“You know how they found me? Even I don’t know.”
“I’m not positive, but you did two things that I know of that a person does who’s scared and running. You bought a gun and a car. That gave them two things to put together, two lists with the same name on them. So they might already be watching the car.”
“How did you know about the gun?”
“Hardly anybody carries ammunition in his suitcase who doesn’t have one,” she said. “Tell me exactly what happened in Denver.” She drove along the same street in the opposite direction and saw no other car turn to follow.
“There was a woman on the street when I was coming home from the grocery store. She looked like she had car trouble, and I walked over and took a look under the hood. She lifted the pistol out of my belt, stuck a big automatic in my face, and said she was a cop. She made me get in the trunk. A real cop came along right after that, and she killed him.”
“How did you see that from the trunk?”
“I didn’t, but when I got out, there he was.”
“How did you get out of the trunk?”
“She opened it, fired four shots at me, and slammed it again. I’m lying there and after a minute, I realize I’m not dead. She actually missed. On most cars there’s a latch inside the trunk. You pull it, and the trunk opens. I was alone except for the dead cop. I don’t know anything else.”
“That’s about all we need to know,” said Jane. “They managed to find you. I assume you walked to the same store by the same route regularly?”
He nodded.
“They knew that, and they knew you weren’t the sort of man who could walk past a woman with car trouble. Not everybody would stop. They knew you were carrying a pistol, because otherwise she wouldn’t have grabbed it before she showed you hers. The fact that she didn’t pull the trigger means they must have been planning to drive you out of town where they could shoot you without having anybody hear and bury you without having anybody find you.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘they’?”
“Did this woman look as though she could carry your body by herself?”
“No.”
“Then there was someone else who could. There’s also the dead policeman. Denver has serious criminals, and a serious police department. Any cop who stops his car is going to be sure he’s able to control whoever he sees. So probably he was shot by somebody he didn’t see. Not for sure, but probably.”
Pete Hatcher looked out the window and watched the display windows of businesses slipping past as the car moved west toward the interstate. “Then the one I didn’t see could have shot me the way he shot the cop—while I was alone on the street. Why didn’t he?”
“That’s one of those bits of good news that’s not quite as good if you take a second look at it,” Jane said. “Your former friends from Pleasure, Inc., aren’t hunting you themselves; they’ve hired professionals. The problems that raises should be getting obvious by now. Professionals know how to hunt. They know which ways to kill you are smart, and which ways are stupid. Taking you to a quiet, private place where nothing will be seen or heard is smart; blasting away in the middle of a city is not.”
“But that’s just what they did. They shot the policeman, and then—”
“They didn’t plan to, and that’s another side to it. When something unexpectedly goes wrong, professionals don’t get emotional. Killing you is just a job, and anybody else who happens along is nothing but a little extra work. They know in advance that they might have to get rid of witnesses, so they’re primed for it. They react quickly, and don’t spend time asking themselves philosophical questions first.”