26
As Carey made his evening hospital rounds, he kept thinking about Jane. Here it was late summer, but in the Rocky Mountains it must be getting cold already. She had sounded well and confident that she knew what she was doing, but he suspected that she would never have called if she had any doubt that she could convey that impression. She had been perfectly capable of lying to him about what she was doing for over a decade, and he had never suspected her. That was a train of thought he decided not to follow. She would get her client to wherever he was going, and she would come back to him. She would be very surprised at how welcome she was going to be.
He left the room of Mr. Cadwallader and walked down the hallway toward the nurses’ station to make his notes. He was pleased. Cadwallader would be moving around nicely by noon tomorrow, and home by the next day. As he pulled Cadwallader’s chart from the holder, Nancy Prelsky tapped him on the shoulder. “Telephone, Doctor.”
“Huh?” He looked up. “Oh, thanks.”
As he took the receiver, he assumed it would be Joy at his office. “Dr. McKinnon.”
“Hello, Carey.” The voice shocked him. How could Susan Haynes have known where to call him? Of course. The main switchboard had tracked him down and connected her. He hoped they had done it because it was a slow evening, and not because she had implied it was an emergency.
“Hello,” said Carey. “Look, I don’t want to be rude, but didn’t they tell you I’m on duty right now? And this phone is at a nurses’ station on a floor with some very sick people.”
“I apologize for calling you at work, but I’ll make it brief. After last night’s fiasco I’d like to start over again, and invite you and your wife to a dinner party with a few friends. There will be about twelve, and that takes a little advance notice.”
He winced. He hated dinner parties, and he was appalled that this woman would call a surgeon in the middle of his rounds to arrange some social event. “I think that’s the sort of problem we ought to talk about at another time. If you’ll leave your number with my answering service, I’ll try to call you tomorrow.”
“Please. You have to give me a way to thank you, and this is the way it’s done. Can you tell me when Jane will be home?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Why in the world not?”
“I just don’t.”
“I’m sorry to be pushy, but this kind of dinner party takes a certain amount of thought and arranging. Would you please call her and ask?”
He found himself looking around to see if Nancy was still within hearing range. He glanced at the call board and saw that there was a trouble light flashing on the board to signal that an IV had come loose in Room 469. “I can’t call her. She’ll call me when she can—probably in two or three days.”
“Two or three days? Where is she—in jail?”
He tried to be patient, but he could feel the anger growing. “She’s hiking in the mountains, and the place she’s going is about twenty miles away, by air. Since she doesn’t have wings, it’ll take that long to get to a phone, and then she’ll call. I’ll try to remember to ask her then, and let you know. That’s the best I can do.”
“Fair enough,” said Susan. “I’ll let you go now. I’m sorry to be such a pain, but I want to make it up to you for last night, and I’m warning you I won’t take no for an answer. Good-bye.”
As soon as she heard a fresh dial tone, Linda quickly punched new numbers into the telephone. She had wanted to goad him into making just one telephone call to Jane, instead of always waiting for her to check in. If he had agreed to call Jane, she could be sure he would have done it from his home telephone: he was too self-important about his work to do it from the hospital. Then Linda could have tape-recorded the tones of the number he dialed, just as she had done in Hatcher’s apartment in Denver. The tactic had not worked this time. Jane had not brought Hatcher to a long-term hiding place yet, so she hadn’t given Carey a number he could call. But what Carey had given Linda was better. It was fresher, harder to get, and so it proved that she was better.
As she listened to the telephone ringing, she began to tease herself with thoughts about what she could say to make Earl feel the way she wanted him to. By the time the hotel operator answered, Linda was already beginning to feel choked with the emotions she had induced. When she gave the room number, her voice came out in a brave, sad little sigh.
Earl sat waiting in Lenny’s hotel room in Kalispell. He lifted the new British Arctic Warfare sniper rifle out of its fitted transit case and began to break it down so he could clean and oil it. He lovingly ran his fingertips along the smooth nylon foregrip, then loosened the Allen screws. He took out the trigger assembly and adjusted the pull and travel once again.
He had fired from a crook in a tree on the hill at five hundred yards through a window and drilled that guy’s temple. If he could have propped him up again and taken more shots, he could have grouped them within an inch of the first. He had supposed that watching her client’s head suddenly spout blood across breakfast would be sufficient for Jane for the moment, so he had not searched for her in the crowd and tried to hold her in the crosshairs. He wanted something more complicated and meaningful to happen to her.
The rifle had a simple, unambiguous integrity. The rifle was perfect. Earl was not. He had let himself be seduced by the beauty of it, the smooth, skinlike touch of the nylon stock against his cheek, the dull gleam of the barrel and the clear, soundless image in the scope. He had found the car in the parking lot, he had seen a man with light wavy hair sit down in the window with a dark-haired woman, and he had reached out and harvested him.
Earl had not needed to force himself to wait to make the shot true, because the rifle was perfect. He could exert three pounds of pressure with his finger and the man would certainly be dead. It was only after he had felt the recoil against his shoulder and the scope had settled on the window again that he had perceived that something had gone wrong. He had expected that the restaurant would be abruptly churned into turmoil, with people standing to bump into each other and spilling things, because he had seen it happen before. Seeing the second dark-haired woman pass across the field of the scope had not convinced him. It was driving down from the mountain and seeing that the car he had followed from Salmon Prairie was already heading up the road.
He pushed the knurled lever on the left side of the receiver, slid the bolt out of the rifle, and set it down on the table beside the Allen screws. Every piece of the A.W. reminded him by its weighty, elegant, and indestructable steel, machined to an exacting tolerance, that he was not its equal. This time it had not been a cop stumbling blind into the middle of the hit. This time it had been Earl getting so confident of his invincibility with the new rifle, and so eager to exert it, that he had reacted like a kid, popping the cap because his overheated mind had assumed that any creature that came along a deer run had to be a deer. People were a sorry commodity compared to precision rifles.
When the telephone rang, he glanced at his watch and noted that it was four o’clock. That made it six in Buffalo. He respectfully set the rifle on the bed and picked up the telephone. “Yeah.”
“Honey?” She had called him that maybe twice. Her voice was wet and gulpy as though she had been crying.
“Yeah,” he said.
“They’re hiking in the mountains. They’re going twenty miles if it were a straight line, but it isn’t, so it will take two or three days. During that time they won’t be near a phone.”
“Hold on,” he said. He stared at the map on the table. He tore off a sheet of paper from the pad with the hotel’s name on it, measured twenty miles on the scale, then ran it in a circle from Swan Lake. “It can’t be twenty miles from where I last saw them. There’s nothing they couldn’t have driven to in about a half hour.”