'Go get it.'
Jake Reinert heard the sound of the car starting in the driveway next door. It was nearly dark already, but he couldn’t help going to the comer window to take a peek at what he could already see without using his eyes at all.
It was Jane Whitefield’s rental car, and the man was in the driver’s seat. Jake Reinert watched the man adjust the seat and the mirrors. As the car slowly moved past his window, he stared at the man hard, with the knowledge that in a week or so he might very well have to describe the face to Dave Dormont down at the police station.
8
Jane pretended to look down into her leather bag, but her eyes slipped to the side to confirm that Jake Reinert was where she had thought he would be, in his corner window.
'Where am I supposed to drive?' Felker asked.
'Go north along River Road while we talk.'
'All right.'
'While I was packing I noticed that you had searched my room. You went through the papers in my desk. Why?'
'I wanted to be sure that you were the woman Harry said you were. Even if you were, people move.'
'What did you find?'
'You have some credit cards that aren’t in your name. Finding your bills was a big relief.' He watched her closely for a moment, and she seemed satisfied. He asked, 'Where are we going?'
'We’re going to change cars.'
'Before we start?'
'This is a rented car. If somebody saw the company name on it already, then they’re not looking for one out of sixty million cars anymore, it’s one out of ten thousand or so. Say ten percent have New York plates. Now it’s down to one thousand. Half are this model? Five hundred. Half are this color? Two-fifty. If they have the company’s records, they’ll know where it gets turned in.'
He drove in silence a couple of blocks west before he reached the river. It looked big and dark in the early evening. Across the channel, the shore of Grand Island was dark except for the bright grid of windows on a hotel. He turned right and followed the road. 'Do you really think they could get the car company’s records? It used to take us a couple of days to do that, and we needed a court order.'
'If they can get into your company’s records, why not any company?'
'Yeah,' he said glumly. 'Why not?'
'I’m not trying to ruin your morale. I’m just being as careful as I can. We don’t know who they are or why they did it to you. But we do know they probably got, or are getting, a lot of money, and they think if you die, they can keep it. So they’ll spend as much as they have to.'
Felker sighed. Then he seemed to remember something. He turned toward her. 'Money,' he said. 'It’s funny how when your life is in danger you stop thinking about it. What do you charge for this? What’s your fee?'
She looked out the side window and watched the familiar buildings going by: the pizza parlor where she and her friends used to spend about half their evenings. It was Jimmy Connolly’s skinny ankles that had made her fall in love with him. She could see them now, but somehow she had lost the ability to bring back why they had seemed so attractive. A few doors down was the big old movie house that was called the Berliner until the First World War and the Tivoli for sixty years after that. It had closed twenty years ago and been broken up into little stores. The upper stories of the building still had the elaborate scrollwork because it was carved in the stone, and she could still remember the smell of ancient popcorn and the feel of the worn velvet seats. They used to show Tarzan movies on Saturdays for a quarter, so children had watched them without complaint. She had sensed that it was always a big moment when Jane got wet, but at the time the significance was lost on her. 'I don’t have a fee,' she said. 'Sometimes people send me presents.'
'You mean you live off presents?'
'I didn’t say they were small presents.' She smiled slyly.
He frowned. 'Just give me some idea. I want to be fair.'
He was such a ... man. Things had to be decided, nailed down and certified. He probably wanted to have each of them say it and then shake on it, give her hand one of those single, hard shakes. She turned toward him and said, 'Okay, I’ll tell you how it’s going to work. When this is over, you’re going to sleep for a day or so, and then you’ll take a week or two getting used to a new place, and then a month getting used to being somebody different. One day—maybe then, maybe a year from then—you’ll sit down and think about how it happened, and you’ll send me a present.'
She let him think about that, and stared past him at the river. The road was good and fast, through the quiet old towns that had grown up along the Niagara in the 1790s, after the Revolutionary War. From the beginning of time, all of this land had been a place where people lived. As a little girl she had walked along the river and found arrowheads, and they were still finding them, three hundred years after the metal brought in by the fur trade had replaced them.
As they crossed city lines, a stranger like Felker probably didn’t even know he wasn’t in Deganawida anymore, because the distinctions between these little towns were subtle and had to do with things that had happened through time. They weren’t boundaries, they were stories.
As they passed the long grassy strip on the way out of North Tonawanda and the brush began again, she caught herself watching for the marker along the river, where the river widened and she could see past the tip of Grand Island. The marker was old, almost invisible thirty feet from the road in the grove of trees that had grown up around it, so she tried to look fast, but it was too dark to spot it. That didn’t matter, because what was worth looking at was something that couldn’t be seen with the eyes anymore.
On this spot one summer in the 1670s the Frenchman La Salle had built the Griffon, the first ship to sail the Great Lakes. It must have looked strange to the Seneca staring at it from the dense forest beyond the stumps of the trees the Frenchmen had cut for lumber. The keel and ribs of the half-finished hull would have loomed just at the shore like the skeleton of an enormous fish, and the Seneca, who were still invincible in this part of the world, must have been more curious than threatened.
Beyond the town named after La Salle, the road grew into a parkway that took them past the congestion that had grown up around the Falls. Hennepin, the Jesuit priest on La Salle’s expedition, had been the first white man to blunder out of the woods and lay eyes on them, so people remembered his name. That had always struck her as funny. Here were these falls, well over a half mile wide and 180 feet high, so loud you could barely hear anything else and throwing big clouds of mist far into the sky that you could see for miles. In the 1670s every Indian from Minnesota to the Atlantic knew all about them, because they were the only serious interruption in the ancient trade routes. And those were the days when gods still had addresses. Heno the Thunderer lived in a cave right behind that wall of water.
As they continued on up the parkway, she glanced at Felker again. He was doing pretty well, considering the fact that his whole life had been destroyed in a couple of days and he had been on the run ever since. There was no whining, no questions she couldn’t answer. She supposed that if he had lasted eight years as a cop, the least he could be was tough. She had felt a little alarm when she had seen that he had searched her room, but he was a cop and that was the way cops were trained to find out who they were dealing with. And he had, at least once, been in the position she was in. He had seen a harmless little guy like Harry, with enemies closing in on him, and he had thought about it and decided to save him. She would do her best for him.
She tried to prepare herself. This was one of the hard ones, and she was tired. It was one thing when two social workers were at a convention and they were sitting at a bar in a city strange to both of them and confiding in each other, and one of them said she had a case that was horrible and the system just couldn’t be made to work, and the other one looked down into the bottom of her glass and said, 'I know a woman...' But it had long ago grown into something else. She had been out six times in the past year. She forced herself to forget what had gone before. She needed to keep thinking ahead.
