She glanced at Pete Hatcher to see if he was listening. When she saw his face, her breath caught in her throat. His eyes were watering. Could he be crying? She pretended to pay attention to the road behind her for a few seconds. She glanced at him again. His big brown eyes were welling with tears. When he sensed that she was looking, he turned away and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. She waited.
“That policeman,” he said. “He lost his life, and I got mine. It was a bad trade. You should have seen him. His head was half gone. I couldn’t even tell what he looked like. The world lost him just to get a little more of me.”
Jane blew out a breath slowly. “I don’t think that’s a train of thought you want to follow too far.” She stared ahead at the entrance to the interstate, slipped her car into the center of the tight stream of traffic, and found herself silently talking to Paula. You didn’t have a way to say it, did you? In all the talk about his pleasant disposition and nice manners you never told me why you called me.
In all her years of snatching rabbits out of the fangs of the wolves, she had almost never heard a rabbit so much as wonder out loud what had happened to the other rabbits. They weren’t selfish. It always seemed to her to be physical, the body overpowering the mind to save itself. They never thought of looking back until they had run far enough. That was why a sensible nurse who had seen a lot of men would intercede for this one. The fact that he didn’t have a fine and complicated intellect was about the same as saying he didn’t have a twelve-cylinder Italian sportscar. He was a decent human being who was just trying to drive what he had.
When she looked at him again, she had an urge to give him something. “Okay,” she said, “let’s think practically. What do we do with what we know? You got a good look at the woman, right?”
“Right.”
“And she got a good look at you. Wherever we go, keep looking for her in the distance. She won’t be up close again, but she may be in a crowd, or in a window, or in a car that goes by. If you see her again, you go. No hesitation, no wondering if she saw you or not, no decisions. You go that minute. If you’re in the middle of a date in a restaurant a year from now, you go to the men’s room and never come back.” She watched him to see if he understood, and he seemed to. “Only this time, you’re going to know in advance where you’re going and how to get there.”
“Where are we going now?”
“First, we’ll drop out of sight completely for a few days, to let the trail get cold. Then we’ll start all over again, and do this right. I’ll hide you somewhere, but I’ll stick around this time until I’m sure we’ve lost them for good. I’ll give you a few lessons I should have given you the first time. I’ll help you get used to the next new name, new place, new life. Then I’ll leave for good.”
“You said the first thing is dropping out of sight. How do you do that?”
“The best way is to do nothing.” She smiled. “Missoula looks like a good place to start doing it. We’ll buy you a new suitcase, check into a motel, and see if you got lucky and lost them. In fact, that’s the good part about what I was saying, and I almost forgot to tell you. They’re pros, and from what I can tell, they’re near the upper end of the scale of people who could be called that. That means we avoid them or we’re dead: there isn’t any mystery about the outcome. But the nice thing about pros is that they’re in it for the money.”
“So?”
“They get paid in two ways. One is that they get all of it when they’ve killed you. The other is that the client gives them some money up front for expenses, and the rest when they’ve got you. Either way, your best friend is time. They’ve just wasted three months for nothing, and spent a lot of money traveling. People like that could have made a lot in three months. Hardly anybody is very difficult to kill. If the client is paying for all this, then by now he’s going to be wondering what he’s getting for his money.”
“I still don’t get it. How does this help me?”
“If you wait long enough, pros go away.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. They don’t hate you. They’re in a business. At the moment when they calculate that the job is a waste of effort, they quit. If they’re getting paid for expenses, the time comes when the client makes the same calculation and stops paying.”
“Then I’ll be safe?”
She cocked her head and pursed her lips, then said reluctantly, “Not exactly. At least not yet.”
“Why not?”
“The client in your case can afford to replace them. But the replacement would have to start all over again at Las Vegas. Pros aren’t likely to turn over their information to competitors.” She shrugged. “I’m not saying you’re in the best position possible, but there are worse.”
“What’s worse than being chased by professional killers?”
She thought for a moment. “I guess the worst is if you’ve committed some really awful crime and people know it.”
“What would you do for a person like that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
16
Seaver drove along the desert highway, watching the long, empty gray road ahead wavering near the distant vanishing point as heat waves rose from the pavement. Now and then a dark reflective spot would appear on the road, the eyes would see it as water, but the brain would say “mirage,” and it would diminish to nothing as he approached it. He drove quickly, feeling the slight lift of the car’s springs as he reached the crest of each little rise, then feeling his body regain a few pounds more than its weight as the car came to the bottom and began the next climb.
Seaver was satisfied that he was going about this in the right way. The three partners had ultimately left the strategy up to him. Earl and Linda were probably getting close to payday by now, so whatever he did, he had to avoid getting in their way. He might have left a message on their answering machine, asking them to get in touch with him. But leaving a message like that on the answering machine of two professional killers required an absolute belief that they could not get caught, recognized, or traced on this job. The world didn’t always work that way. Anybody who had worked in Las Vegas for ten years had seen the ball stop on the double zero a few times.
He had considered tracing their movements and trying to catch up with them. But Earl would not look upon his sudden, uninvited appearance as a favor. It was, in the way these people looked at things, a terrible insult and a violation of their agreement.
Seaver suddenly showing up would mean that there were three people for bystanders to notice, instead of just two. And he would have traveled there by a separate route. That doubled the number of trails that later might be traced to Hatcher’s body. He was not at all sure that he wanted to place himself in some distant city with those two at the precise moment when he convinced them that he was so unprofessional and unreliable as to be an actual danger to them.
No, what he was doing made more sense. Earl and Linda were looking for Hatcher. He was looking for the woman. After he found her would be the time to think about meeting them. Then he would have something to bring to the party.
He had assigned five men just to talk to people who were in the chase-and-find business—skip tracers, retrievers who worked for bail-bond outfits, freelance bounty hunters—to see if any of them had ever come across a woman like this. A few of them had heard vague stories, but none of them knew anything that could lead to an actual living woman. It was then that he had realized that he was going about solving the problem backward.
The people most likely to know about her would be the ones in the run-and-hide business. He had called an old friend from the police department who had quit at about the same time he had and had gone to work in the California prison system. Seaver had not described his problem but had described the sort of prisoner he wanted to talk to. He needed one who had been in lots of jails in different parts of the country and who had drawn a long sentence the last time out. But most important, it had to be one who had a history of trading information for favors.