Jane knew she had to do something that was not going to make her proud, and she had to do it now. She began to push toward the door and yelled, “I’m not going to stay here and get killed!”
The people who had been standing paralyzed, waiting for some voice to suggest a remedy for their terror, shifted in a single wave. The double door ahead of them opened, then began to wag back and forth as each person nudged it aside to get out.
Jane tugged Pete out in the middle of the throng. As she had expected, once they were out in the sunlight and fresh air, sanity seemed to descend upon the crowd. They saw how open and unprotected they were in the parking lot, so they began to spin like dancers, looking in every direction to see where the danger was coming from as they retreated toward the overhanging roof and brick wall of the restaurant.
Jane sprinted to the car and crouched until Pete had joined her. As she had expected, her run—a definite, unhesitating move—seemed to some in the crowd to be shrewdly based on information they did not have. They ran to their cars, started them, and wheeled out of the lot to the highway.
“Drive,” said Jane.
Pete ducked into the driver’s seat and they joined the line of cars streaming out onto the road. Pete gripped the steering wheel hard, holding it steady with effort as though its natural inclination were to veer off into the woods. “I saw it,” he said. “I couldn’t think fast enough.”
“Saw what?” said Jane.
“I was thinking they looked a little bit like us. Like you and me.”
“Drive,” said Jane. “Don’t worry about the speed. Out here what they do when they want somebody is put up a roadblock. When they do, we’d better be on the other side of it.”
24
Jane studied the road map while Pete drove. She traced the red and blue lines meandering through the mountains, searching for turnouts and alternative routes. It was the wrong part of the country to evade someone in a car. The Rocky Mountains didn’t offer many vulnerabilities to road builders.
“Where do I go?” asked Pete.
“No choice but to keep going up 83 for a while,” she said. “There’s no place to switch until Bigfork.”
“What then?”
“I’ll tell you when I know. Right now, if you do that much, we’re not dead. When there’s a straight stretch, try to look behind you and make a list of all the cars you can see. Get to know them.”
“How do I know if he’s in one of them?”
“You don’t. Most of them will drop out at Bigfork to look for a police station or a telephone. The one we need to worry about won’t.”
He drove for fifteen minutes, and Jane noticed no cars coming toward them in the left lane. Finally, three police cars flashed past, driving hard toward Swan Lake. She turned to look after them, then switched on the car radio. After some static and blurts of music she found, “The police have asked us to report that Route 83 is closed south at Bigfork and north at Salmon Prairie. It will remain closed until further notice.” She switched it off and muttered, “Of course.”
“What?” said Pete.
“I hadn’t thought of that. They think they’ve got a sniper back there still taking shots across a highway at a restaurant. They don’t want to block the road out until they get people evacuated. What they’re blocking is the way in, so nobody gets shot.”
She went back to her road map. “All right. At Bigfork, turn right onto 35, to Creston, and keep heading north when it changes to 206.”
She set the map aside and stared out the back window. Maybe the shooter had not made it to his car in time to follow. He had been up above on the hillside, at least three hundred yards away. As soon as she had thought of it, she knew she was being foolish. It wasn’t likely that a pro would strand himself that far from his car and open fire. His car had been up there too, probably parked beside one of the firebreaks or timber roads cut into the forested hillside.
The reflection had not come from his equipment. All he had needed was a rifle and a scope, and the good ones were designed with that problem in mind. It was cars that were covered with chrome and mirrors. He was probably right behind them now, if not among the first few cars, then in the next pack.
“We have to talk,” she said.
“You start.”
“We have a problem here. I don’t have any idea how they knew where we were.”
“Obviously I don’t either.” He turned to her, eyes wide. “You don’t suppose Pam and Carol—”
“No,” she said. “If they had put two girls in your path to get you alone, that was when they would have killed you. And we left this morning before those two were up. They couldn’t have told anybody where we were going, because they didn’t know.”
“Then what could we have done to tell that guy where we were?”
“Maybe they have some spectacular new way of instantly picking out charges on the credit cards we’ve been using. Maybe they somehow found out about this car the day I bought it, and hid a transmitter in it. Whatever they’re using to trace us, it might as well be magic.”
“You’re making me more nervous than I am already, and I can hardly hold the wheel steady as it is.”
They passed a sign that said BIGFORK 5. She said, “We have five miles to make a choice. What I’m saying is that they shouldn’t be here. When I play this game, if my side wins a round, we get to play another round. If the other side wins one, the game is over.”
“A nice, sporting way of saying I’m dead.”
“We’ll both be dead. I’m trying to tell you we haven’t won any rounds. They had you in Denver, until the policeman got in the way. They had us twenty minutes ago, and that poor man took the bullet. They haven’t got you, but they haven’t exactly missed yet, either. It’s important to remember that. In a few minutes we’ll be in Bigfork. There are cops on the road there now, and more on the way. We could stop, tell them our story, and they would take over.”
“You mean give myself up?”
“You haven’t committed any crimes. They would protect you, beginning in four minutes. In a day or less, you could be a thousand miles away, telling the Justice Department what you know about Pleasure, Inc. They would keep you safe, at least until you testified in court.”
“Yeah, but what then?”
Jane threw up her hands and let them rest on her lap. “I can’t be sure. Probably they would do what I did: give you fake papers and a plane ticket. You’d be a protected witness. I’ll be honest with you. They’re very, very good at protecting you until you testify. After that you’re a drain on the budget and not much use. At that point you come back to me and I’ll try again.”
“I can’t go to the police,” said Pete.
“You said that when I met you. Now is the time to be sure.”
“There are three men who own Pleasure, Incorporated. I know enough about all of them to get the cops a warrant to investigate, and a few tips on specific places to look, and I’m done. I didn’t see things happen. I put two and two together. I heard them tell Calvin Seaver, the security guy, someone was a problem, and then read an obituary. I saw a rough count of the day’s take on a piece of paper, and then a lower number on the ledger in the computer. The paper’s gone. I’m not an eyewitness, I’m a rumormonger.”
Jane heard an edge in his voice. “You’re not telling everything. You did something.”
“The reason I was getting ready to leave was that I was expected to do things that could get me in trouble. I signed receipts when I knew the count was wrong. I deposited money that came in from side businesses I never saw, and sent it to investors without reporting it to the I.R.S. I never sat down and listed all the things like that, I just got out. I think the cops could find evidence against the owners, but I know they could find some against me. I’ll let you out of the car in Bigfork, or anything you want, but I can’t go to the police.”