in a gesture that should not have been intriguing because it was self-conscious and calculated, but it was mesmerizing because she was posing for him, trying to look more beautiful. “I was just calling my machine in San Francisco. I didn’t want to use the phone upstairs and wake you up. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I just wondered—”
“Don’t worry, though. I used a credit card, so it won’t be printed on your phone bill.”
He felt a sick chill. It had not occurred to him before that he had somehow become a man who was in the business of hiding evidence from his wife: first the champagne, and now the telephone bill.
Susan seemed to forget about him for a moment. She hitched her shoulder uncomfortably, then did a poor job of retucking the bedsheet she was using as a sarong. She frowned, unwrapped a little of it, and tried again. It was as though she had unaccountably forgotten she was not alone. But then she abruptly looked up into his eyes, pretended to follow his line of sight and be surprised to find her own eyes looking down at the translucent sheet that covered her body. As she tucked the sheet under her arm she looked up again with the knowing, amused expression.
“Something else on your mind?” The smile was still on her face as she moved up the stairs toward him. She walked so lightly that her feet seemed not to touch, as though she were floating.
He shook his head, as much to clear it as to communicate with her. “No,” he said, already backing away. “No. I was afraid it was a burglar or something. But it was just you. See you in the morning.” As he walked back to his room and closed his door, he wondered why it was that virtue had to be so clumsy and inept.
22
Earl sat up and looked out his hotel window at Pete Hatcher’s car. He was through staring at its dusty finish, each day picking out new spots of birdshit on the windshield with his binoculars, never seeing a human being go near it. Now he needed to think ahead. He unfolded his road map and studied it, then picked up the telephone again and dialed.
He heard the sleep in Lenny’s voice. “Yeah?”
“It’s me,” said Earl. “Listen. I want you to close the place up and get on a plane right away. Get a suite at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Stay there until I call. It could be two weeks, or the phone could be ringing when you walk in the door.”
Earl could hear rustling noises and groaning. Lenny must be sitting up in bed. Lenny coughed to clear his throat. “The place already is closed up. I went to bed an hour ago. What’s up?”
“Did you understand what I said? This isn’t a dream.”
“Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Wait there for you. Right.” Earl could almost hear him thinking. “Hey—Rusty and T-Bone. What do I do with the dogs?”
“Bring them.”
Earl hung up before Lenny could start protesting about the difficulty of flying dogs around. If people did it with fancy show dogs, then it certainly wouldn’t harm two big, muscular beasts like the Rottweilers, and he didn’t care what it did to Lenny.
He walked into the bathroom and turned the water on cold, then stepped under the icy stream. He gasped, then slowly let the water warm up. He was fully awake now, confident that he was thinking clearly. It would take ten minutes to dress, pack, and clean his prints off everything he had touched. It might take another ten minutes to check out and get on the road.
It had not escaped Earl that Linda had been talking in a whispery voice over the telephone at one in the morning. That was three A.M. in Buffalo. Linda would have called with Hatcher’s location as soon as she could—the first minute when she could reach a telephone. If she was with this Carey McKinnon at three o’clock in the morning, worried that he would overhear her, then there wasn’t much question what they were doing. She had been doing it with him for hours, letting him put it to her until he had used himself up and fallen asleep. This was not a simple flirtation where she got a fact out of him that he wouldn’t remember saying and probably didn’t even know was a secret. This was a full night of it, her hair probably wet with sweat and his sperm still dripping out of her, sticky and warm when she called to tell Earl.
He was enraged. He hated this man, and he felt a mixture of awe and disgust at Linda. She had said she would do anything to find Pete Hatcher. But what she had done was not brave or cunning. It was pathetic, requiring only a fawning sort of guile and a strong stomach. It was like biting the head off a chicken. She was soiled. Unclean. The only way he was ever going to feel right about this was to make it even. He was going to do the same to Jane Whitefield before he killed her. Then he was going to make Linda go back and watch him drop the hammer on Carey McKinnon. Maybe he would make her go back and do it herself.
He stepped out of the shower, quickly dried himself, and dressed, tossing pieces of clothing into his suitcase as he saw them. Then he remembered the way she had cut him off at the end of the call—quickly, abruptly. It was probably because McKinnon was awake again. He nearly reeled with the sudden realization that it was worse, more humiliating than he had thought. McKinnon was awake. She would have put down the telephone and needed to distract him. She was doing him again right now, this second, while Earl was two thousand miles away in a hotel room. He didn’t dare close his eyes, because he knew that the sight of it was forming behind his eyelids.
He slammed his suitcase shut, stepped to the door, and hurried out of the room. He took long, purposeful steps down the hallway toward the check-out counter. He was in a perfect mood to kill somebody.
As Jane walked back to the hotel room along the road through Salmon Prairie, she considered whether she had succeeded in leaving the right kind of trail in the wrong direction. She had charged some plane tickets for flights out of Missoula and Helena to credit cards. The accounts were held by male identities that were unripe enough to attract the attention of a hunter who was using a computer network to search. She had made guaranteed reservations for hotels and rental cars in the destination cities so the charges would be recorded and would appear on credit reports.
Her temptation was to use ten identities to build twenty trails in twenty directions. There was no reason to save false faces for fugitives anymore. This was her last trip. But two identities were the right number. If the chasers picked out both of them, they would think that one was an innocent who was not running from anything but didn’t have much of a history. But they couldn’t pick out one and ignore the other, so they would split up. If she left twenty trails, they would sense that she had made them all and wait.
Everything about the way they had tracked and cornered Pete Hatcher looked like at least two people. A lone woman might play the broken-car game, pop him on the spot, and walk away, but she wouldn’t put him in the trunk and expect to drive him away. There must have been at least one man waiting unseen to do the heavy lifting and solve problems. It wasn’t easy to kill an armed cop when he was looking at you.
Jane was almost certain that she had made no mistakes since she had found Hatcher in Montana. They had been on the move for a month, traveling as husband and wife. They had spent a lot of time in the car each day, then used different names in each town where they stopped to check into a motel late in the afternoon. Pete was always visible to motel clerks and guests, but always imperfectly and from a distance. Jane would stand at the counter and sign a name, and Pete would be busy with his head under the lid of the trunk pulling out the suitcases, or under the hood checking the oil. Even if the searchers stopped at the same motels later and asked the right questions, the clerks would not have been able to give them a direction. Jane and Pete had gone slowly, taking detours like tourists who had all summer.
She knew that she was just thinking of reasons to turn Pete loose and go home. Carey had sounded as though her call had depressed him, and the knowledge stung her. When she tried to repeat the conversation now, everything that she had said sounded empty and foolish, and she could do nothing to change it.
Jane stared up the road at the hotel and gave herself a reprimand. The quickest way home was to concentrate on preparing Pete Hatcher for his new life. He had already gotten accustomed to using false names, and he had begun to develop a good sense of how to make himself invisible in public places. He had listened carefully while she had explained how the tricks were done and what to do when they didn’t work.
Now she had to teach him something more subtle and difficult. The way he would defeat his enemies was to outlast them. While they were staring at computer screens or loitering late at night in airport baggage areas or
