“Are you trying to help me, or get back at me for embarrassing you last night?”
“I’m being realistic. Even if I were trying to embarrass you, who cares? Will anything I think about your personal life matter when you’re on your own? No, and it shouldn’t.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“When I sent you to Denver I hadn’t had time to get to know you. I expected you to live like a monk. Maybe you did too. This time, let’s get it right. Those security-minded condo places are that way because they’re full of young, career-minded women. You’ll find them hanging around the pools and the exercise rooms. Some of the owners’ associations even have parties where the eligible women will push themselves in front of your nose. Take them. Enjoy yourself. But stick to your story. Never reveal anything that doesn’t fit.”
Hatcher looked at her sadly. “I thought you were just being the pinch-faced schoolmarm. It’s way past that, isn’t it? You sound like a scientist talking about rats.”
She reached out and touched his hand, then regretted it and pulled back. “I’m sorry. I’m just being professional. If you’re happy, you’ll be able to stay in one quiet, safe place for a long time. If you’re not, you’ll take risks to get happy. So I need to make you happy for as long as I can.”
“But you don’t feel anything.”
“I don’t feel what you feel. You see any woman on the youngish side with round breasts and the right ratio of hips to waist, and you want her. I can know that, but knowing is all I can do. It’s all any of us can do. And what you did last night wasn’t shocking or particularly newsworthy. It was just something I needed to be reminded of.”
“You’re taking one incident and weaving it into a rope to tie around my neck.”
“No,” she said. “This is hard for me to talk about, so let me get it all out of the way. Last night I watched a young woman strip off a wet bathing suit to put on makeup at two A.M. so she could lure you away from her best friend. Ignoring the power, the need that makes people do that would be stupid. Will you personally take the chance of getting killed for sex? Sure. Scratch the topsoil anywhere on the planet and you’ll find the bones of people who maybe didn’t all know it, but who died over the instinct to mate. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. What I think about it, or feel about it, or what the implications are for romantic love or babies or families or anything else is irrelevant. All I can do is get out of the way. In this case it means putting you in the right location, so you’ll survive.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He had surprised her again.
“Yes. You don’t think much of me today. When I ask you why you save people’s lives, you say it’s because you’re a woman who saves people’s lives. I want to know if you care about me. I know I have no right to ask you to care. I just want to know if you do.”
Jane patted his hand and gave him a smile that was achingly false. “Of course I do. You’re the best brother I ever had.”
She turned her attention to the plate of food in front of her. He had been eating while she had been talking, and her scrambled eggs had turned cold and rubbery. She put some into her mouth. She could feel tears beginning to gather behind her eyes. Something was very wrong this morning, and she could not find a way to fix it. Maybe she had placed too much weight on her young, tender marriage. She had somehow gotten the impression that it was going to be a shield that protected her, kept her at a distance from certain kinds of hurt, certain ugly facts of other people’s lives. If nothing else, it should have made her immune to feelings about men like Pete Hatcher.
Jane swallowed her eggs and turned her attention to the people filling up the dining room for lunch. There were the usual number of older people with gray hair, the women in shoes like nurses wore and the men in socks that matched their shirts, and lots of stuff in their pockets. There were two families with children who had sat in cars all morning and now fidgeted and thought of excuses to get up and wander in the dining room. She let herself wonder if some day she and Carey would be like this, threatening their kids in low voices to make them behave, or later, growing old together and wandering around like the couple in the next booth.
Then she saw two people who intrigued her. The woman was tall and thin with long black hair, dark almond eyes, and high cheekbones. Around here the blood was probably Blackfoot or Kootenai or Flathead. The man was big, blond, and broad-shouldered—not muscular, but fit in the way that tennis players were.
The head waitress moved them from an inner table and seated them at a table beside the window. They watched her set their plates in front of them and talked quietly. Jane wished she had not seen them. The woman looked a little like her, and so she had wanted the man to resemble Carey. It was a childish and primitive impulse to make the world bend into congruence with what she wanted, to have the universe send her an omen that everything was all right. She did not want to notice at first, and then she did not want to acknowledge the truth. If the man looked like anybody, it was Pete.
She looked away. But before her head had finished its turn, she sensed that she had seen something strange. Her eyes shot back to the couple, focused on the high hillside through the window beside them. She gazed at it for several seconds, but the sight did not come again. She had imagined a small, bright flash of sun on metal. She stared down at her plate, not aware that her brow was furrowed.
Pete noticed her expression and said, “What’s—” just as Jane had put the pieces together. She stood up quickly and took a step toward the couple, and time ran out.
She saw the windowpane shatter and the man by the window stop, his mouth open to receive the fork with a piece of pancake on it. His head seemed to bob toward Jane, his ear striking his shoulder, then bouncing back a little. Jane saw the splatter of blood, bone, and dark tissue that had to be brain in the air all mixed with glittering, sparkling fragments of glass.
The dark woman’s eyes grew white-wide, her fingers curled like claws, and she shrieked as the rest of the people in the crowded dining room took in a single gasp and let it out in a shuddering moan. People began to scramble. Chairs fell, plates broke.
Jane dashed over the shards of glass, yanked the woman out of her chair, and pushed her into the crowd that was backing toward the doorway just as the second shot shattered another pane of the window. She turned to search for Pete and he bumped into her, then held her to keep her from falling. The details flooded her mind now: there had been no report of the weapon, so it must have a silencer; no crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier, so the ammunition must be subsonic. It probably didn’t have the velocity to pierce any walls. She said, “Hold on to me,” and set off, with Pete’s hands on her waist.
They threaded their way into the crowd cowering in the restaurant foyer. The cashier was shouting into the telephone and the dark woman was off to the right screaming while two elderly women held her. Jane’s mind raced. If the shooter had finished firing and was already slipping away, then she should get Pete out of here before he discovered his mistake. But what if he wasn’t running away? His rifle scope had enough magnification to let him put a bullet through the wrong man’s temple from the mountainside. If he was using this time to creep down the mountain, then in a few minutes he would be close enough to see faces clearly.