“How do we find out—search it?”
“Dump it.”
“Where do we get another car out here?”
She gave her sad little smile again. “We don’t. I’d love to get a new one and drive until the tread is off the tires. But we tried that, and a shooter turned up. I’d love to put on a blond wig and step onto an airplane to anywhere. But unless we know for sure how they’re tracking us, we can’t do anything that puts us in a predetermined airport at a prearranged time. The safest tactic I can think of is to do the opposite: go where there are no people to see us, no schedules, and no records for anybody to break into. It’s not a great idea, but it’s an idea. We’ve got to keep moving.”
“Keep moving where?”
She sighed. “I think we have no choice but to dump everything we had when we walked into that restaurant this morning, and cross the border.”
“Canada?”
“If they’re using computer data files, it’s possible crossing a national border will make it harder. A lot of businesses are national—not international. If their car gets searched at the border, there will be guns in it. There might be other advantages, but there are no disadvantages that I know of.”
As the road wound up into the mountains, Pete seemed to be concentrating on his driving. “Shouldn’t we leave this car someplace to mislead them?”
“I don’t want to confuse them,” she said. “I want them stuck.”
“How do we manage that?”
“It’s September thirteenth. In two days they’ll close this road for the winter. If the chasers don’t get this far by then, they’ll have to go back. If, after that, they find out we left the car inside the park, they have the same choices we had: go on to the Chief Mountain Highway, drive to the border, and get stopped, because the customs station closes on the fifteenth too; go east to the next road that crosses at the Piegan-Conway crossing; or go all the way back along this road to Whitefish and drive up Route 93. Either way, we’ll be in the space in-between, at least thirty miles from them with no road to get to us.”
“And then?”
“And then we walk out of the woods in Canada and pay somebody to drive us far enough away to catch a bus. I’m not getting on any more planes until I know they haven’t tapped the reservation system.”
They drove into the park at West Glacier, bought a trail map at the ranger station, then joined the long single-file line of cars on Going-to-the-Sun Road. The progress was slow because the road was a Depression-era two-lane pavement with high, rocky cliffs on the right and Lake McDonald on the left. Drivers ahead of them pulled over whenever there was a turnout to take pictures and stare at the icy, glass-clear lake and the surrounding forests.
Pete said happily, “It looks as though we won’t be needing that winter gear we bought. The weather’s beautiful.”
She turned in her seat to look at him. “I guess I should have asked you this before. Have you ever spent time in the woods?”
He pursed his lips. “Let’s see. By woods you don’t mean a bunch of trees next to the fairway, do you? I mean, this is a park, right?”
“I’m glad I didn’t ask. Here it’s seventy and sunny. The altitude is three thousand feet and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. In an hour or so, we’ll be at seven thousand feet. The temperature drops about five degrees for each thousand feet. It could be fifty up there now. Sunset tonight is about six twenty. That’s when it sinks majestically below the horizon if you’re on the ocean, not if you have a mountain or two to the west of you to cast a shadow. It’s also windy on mountains. So that fifty could already feel like thirty.”
He frowned. “Thirty degrees? And you’re sure today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic?”
She stared at him for a second, then laughed. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“No matter what happens to me after this, it won’t be anywhere near as interesting.”
“I wouldn’t give up yet.”
“I know that sounds idiotic,” he admitted. “I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days now, and I kept wondering if I’d bumped my head. Then I was thinking that if I told you, I would just convince you that I was too stupid to be scared. But I’m scared all the time, and it still feels true. If they find me and kill me, it will just be a sharp pain, and then nothing. If they don’t, I’ll try my best to live a quiet life. But right now, every second is full of possibilities, full of things I never thought about or looked at before. I’ve never wanted to stay alive so much in my life.”
Jane had not sensed that trouble was coming, and here it was again. It was not that she would be tempted to have a fling with Pete Hatcher. This was the fling, and she was having it. She felt the same exhilaration he did. This time the hunters were the best she had ever faced, and Pete Hatcher was her last client, and after this great flaming burst of clarity she was either going to die or let her life settle down to a steady unchanging glow like a pilot light. From then on, when evil came, it would come in some equivocal form—spite or pride or jealousy—sidling up to her and leaving her nothing clear and direct that she could do to fight it. This was the guide’s last trip.
Jane studied the road ahead and saw the Loop coming. It was the only hairpin turn on the highway, eight miles out of the way to follow the course of the McDonald River and eight miles back under Mount Cannon. “Pretty soon we’ll be there,” she said. “If you’re not willing to do this, tell me now.”
“I already told you,” he said. “I want to live.”
He drove the long curve, then climbed again, higher into the mountains. When he pulled into the big parking lot at the Logan Pass visitor center and stopped, Jane said, “Pull over by the garbage Dumpsters and wait for me.”
She opened the trunk and went through the suitcases one last time. She put Pete’s pistol in his pack and the ammunition in hers to even the weight, then split his money between the two packs, closed them tight, and dropped the two suitcases into the Dumpster and covered them with garbage.
Jane used her Swiss Army knife to unscrew the Montana license plates and replace them with Colorado plates from a nearby car. She got into the car again and parked it as far from the road as possible, then handed Pete his pack, bedroll, and canteen. Finally she sprayed the inside of the car with the fire extinguisher and tossed it on the floor in the back seat, left the keys in the ignition, and walked away.
“What was that for?” asked Pete.
“The spray is just carbon dioxide. It’ll be gone in a little while, but so will the fingerprints. If somebody traces the plates, they’ll have a problem because the car’s not registered in Colorado. It might buy us some time to make them trace it in other states.”
“Why did you leave the keys?”
“Out of a million visitors, we can hope for one car thief. They must take vacations too.” She handed him her canteen. “I’m entitled to one last phone call. Go fill these up with water from the tap over there while I make it.”
She went to the telephone at the far end of the row, put in a quarter, dialed the private line on Carey’s desk in his office, waited for the operator to tell her how many more she needed, and put those in too. Change made noise in pockets, and there would be no more collect calls for her. She couldn’t be entirely sure that the shooters weren’t using the telephone company’s billing system to trace her.
“Hello.”
“I love you,” she said.
“What?”
She laughed. “I said, I love you. At least I hope it’s you, or I just made a fool of myself for a perfect stranger.”