him for months, and he hurt me every day, until I got away and came to the shelter. He came here, too, but Melanie stopped him. She tried to make him leave, but he came after her.'
'We've got to call Sarah,' said Sandy, the woman who had met Jane and Iris when they'd arrived. 'Don't do anything until I come back.' She hurried into the living room.
The four women stood in the bedroom, as far from the wounded man as possible. None of them appeared to want to do anything to stop his bleeding.
He said to Jane, 'Police will be here soon. You really messed me up with that gun. You're going to jail, honey.'
'No, honey. I'm not,' said Jane. 'And if you do anything but lie there, you're not, either.'
Sandy came back, still holding the phone. 'She's on the way. She'll be here in a few minutes. She said don't do anything, don't say anything, just make sure he doesn't hurt anybody or get away.'
A few minutes later, Sarah Werth and the young assistant pulled up in front of the house in two cars, and came inside. The young assistant knelt over the man. 'Give me your arm.' She snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Then she stood.
Sarah Werth beckoned to Jane. 'Come out here with me, Melanie.' Jane stepped into her shoes and followed her into the kitchen.
Sarah looked at the door. 'Is this where he came in'
'Yes. He jimmied the lock with something. We'd better see what, because it's still on him. He came in to get Iris.'
'And you shot him after he jumped to get your gun away. Is that right'
'That's the short version.'
'We don't have much time.' She reached into her purse and produced a folded wad of money with a paper clip on it. 'Take this.'
'But-'
'This is no time to be coy. We have minutes.' She put the money in Jane's hand and added a set of car keys. 'Take the black car that's at the curb. Get as far away from here as you can. When you're safe, leave it somewhere sensible, and mail me the keys and a note saying where it is.'
'You can't do this,' said Jane. 'You'll get in terrible trouble.'
Sarah Werth said, 'He found her, broke in, and tried to kidnap her. When I intervened, he tried to attack me, so I shot him. I have a damaged door, five eyewitnesses, a registered pistol, and a lifetime of good behavior. I can take the heat without any effort. You can't. Now I need time to fire my own gun so there will be powder residue on my hands and a bullet missing. So go. You saved Iris's life tonight. Go save your own.'
Jane leaned close and kissed Sarah's cheek. 'You're like an angel.'
'So are you. Good for us. If we're mistaken, I'll be proud to spend some time with you in hell. Now get out of here.' She pushed Jane toward the front door.
Jane slipped out into the night. She put the gun into the waistband of her black exercise pants, limped to the small black Honda at the curb, got in, and started it.
She turned her head to look back at the safe house, but as she did, she saw Iris. She was running down the front lawn toward Jane, a look of terror on her face. She was carrying the backpack she'd brought with her. Jane could only imagine that somehow the man had gotten loose. She opened her car door and started up the lawn, but Iris reached her, clutched her arms, and said, 'Please, Melanie. Take me with you.'
Jane said, 'Iris, honey. I can't do that. Where I'm going, it will be more dangerous than it is here.'
'You have to. He's hardly hurt at all. He'll never stop looking for me. When he finds me this time, he'll kill me.'
There was the muffled sound of a shot from inside the house. It had to be Sarah firing her pistol. It wasn't loud, but Jane could see that a couple of lights had gone on in upper windows of houses along the street. Jane heard, far off, the sound of sirens. She knew before looking at Iris's face that she was telling the truth about the ex-husband. He would never stop, and there was no chance the women in the safe house could stop him. She looked back at the house just as the young assistant stepped out on the porch. She waved at Jane frantically, urging her away. 'Get in.'
She drove toward the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip and Interstate 15. The Strip was so big and bright that it threw its impossible smear of color into the sky-blue, green, gold, red-and tore a gash in the night. Her car rose onto the overpass above Route 15 and, for a moment, was part of the light.
Iris crouched in the passenger seat as Jane went over the bridge down the ramp and onto Route 15. She drove up the wide interstate out of town and into the darkness, keeping at the speed limit every second, never letting up at all. She was heading north, as the signs reminded her after every entrance ramp, and she drove with the sensation that every mile she put behind her was making her and Iris safer. It was another few minutes before she thought to take the pistol out of her waistband and hide it under her seat.
Jane said, 'I'm going to Salt Lake City.' She looked at Iris beside her, but there was no visible reaction. 'Since you're with me, that means that's where you're going too. Is Salt Lake City all right with you'
'I guess so,' Iris said 'I've never been there, and nobody there knows my name.'
'What is your name' said Jane.
'Iris May Salter,' she said. 'It used to be Hampton, but I had my maiden name restored in the divorce.'
'Iris Salter is your real name'
'Real Of course. It never occurred to me to change it again, but maybe that's a good idea.'
'You might want to consider it. I find it never hurts to make things a little harder for people who want to hurt you.'
'Steve-that's my ex-husband's name-seemed to think he had a right to hurt me.'
'People who like to hurt you can always tell you why it's your fault.'
Jane drove along Interstate 15, trying to put as much road as possible behind them. It was nerve-racking to be on such a major highway, the most obvious way out of Las Vegas. If the police listened to Iris's ex-husband and thought they needed to hunt for the woman who had really fired the shot, they would be on Interstate 15, too. They already were on Interstate 15, all day every day, all night every night, because Interstate 15 wasn't just a river of money coming into town. It was the route of an invading army of troublemakers and screwups. Jane couldn't afford to be pulled over by a cop for some minor infraction tonight. The authorities in Los Angeles had already had three days to take frame grabs from the security cameras in the courthouse and distribute them to cops along the obvious escape routes, and Las Vegas was the most obvious escape route of all.
As Jane drove, she tried to decipher and untangle her predicament. She was hurt. She had promised Jim Shelby she would meet him at the hotel in Salt Lake City, and she was already three days late. Crouching in the seat beside her was a young woman whose will seemed to have been beaten out of her.
Jane said, 'I think we should talk.'
'Okay. What about'
'I wasn't planning to take you with me. When you came running out, I thought something else had happened, and then you were in the car and we had to leave. For a lot of reasons you don't know yet, that might not have been your best move.'
'I had to get away.'
'Getting away from a man like that is a good idea, but that's not the point. The point is that everything you'd seen about me was an indication that I had a few problems that existed before I met you, and might put you in worse danger.'
'I know,' said Iris. 'I saw your back after your bath. And I saw the bandage on your leg. And the giant bruise around it.'
'You saw that'
'I wanted to meet you, so I went into our room, and I saw you weren't there. I went toward the bathroom, and you had finished your bath and opened the door a crack to get rid of the steam. When you reached up to clean the steam off the mirror with your towel, I slipped aside so you wouldn't see me in the mirror and think I was spying on you. But I saw.'
'Seeing the marks shouldn't have made you want to risk going with me. I couldn't even protect myself.'
'I could see you were someone who understood what it's like. Your burns are from metal that was heated up. You can see that on my back, too. When Steve did that to me he used a bunch of big nails. He heated them in a
