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.”
“Is there any place that would look safe to them? A private airfield or something?”
“Nothing I can see. Maybe Canada.” He ran his finger along the road they had traveled: Missoula, Salmon Prairie, Swan Lake, always north. What if, instead of going left at Bigfork toward Kalispell, as he had, they had gone right? He took the sheet of paper with the twenty-mile mark and ran it slowly along the top of Montana at the Canadian Border. “Glacier,” he said.
“What?”
“They could have turned up into Glacier National Park by now. There’s only one big road through the middle of it, and it takes a loop up about halfway across that would put them about twenty miles from the border.” He held the map close to his face. “Logan Pass.” He pushed his thumbnail into the map and left a crescent-shaped mark so he could find it again.
“I should go,” she said. Her voice was low and whispery and quiet, like a child’s.
“You mean he’s there now?”
“He just fell asleep.”
“Good.” It was as close as Earl could come to a friendly statement. His relief was for himself, because now he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the night thinking about Linda spread out on the bed with that faceless stranger going into her, over and over.
He heard Linda give a little sob, then sniff it back. She said, “He wore himself out … on me.” The sob came out again.
Earl found himself standing, and the telephone crashed to the floor, but he could still hear Linda’s voice, crying quietly. Earl could feel surges of blood pounding behind his eyes.
“He’s a doctor, Earl. He knows things about a woman’s body—the nerves and things. He brings me up, all the way up so I can’t control myself, and then keeps me there, won’t let me stop.”
Earl squeezed his eyes closed. He wanted her to shut up. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’ll be over soon.”
“Ten minutes ago I begged him—”
“Enough.” Earl’s voice was harsh and dry. He wanted to tell her to drive a tenpenny nail through the man’s chest while he was sleeping, and then walk out. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Not yet. “Just do the best you can. The minute I’ve got them, I’ll call you there.” He found a pen on the nightstand with the little questionnaire about the maid service. “What’s the number?”
She read it to him off the telephone dial. “But if you call me here, he’ll get spooked. Leave a message on the machine at home or at the apartment I rented.”
“Right,” he said, but he wrote the number on the questionnaire. “I’ll call you.” His writing was a scrawl, so even he could barely read it. He was in a horrible confusion of jealousy of this McKinnon that somehow merged into his rage at Pete Hatcher for putting him into this spot. He felt disgust at Linda for being a woman—a creature that had no other way of getting what she needed from a man, but who could do it whenever she felt like it, because any man would accept the offer. He felt shame and humiliation because he had been able to invent no better way to find Pete Hatcher than to let his own woman turn herself out as a whore.
He thought back on the shot he had taken at Swan Lake and wanted to bite his finger off. She had already given away everything she had just to buy him that shot, and he had squandered it. Then he had the shadow pass across his vision that maybe Linda, deep down, wasn’t as miserable about this as she had to make him think she was. He brushed all of these thoughts into the back of his mind. “You just think about what happens to him the minute I’ve got Hatcher. You’ll get to do the cutting. Keep your mind on that.”
“You can bet I will,” said Linda. Her voice was hardening now into cold, clean anger, and that made Earl feel better. But then her voice changed again, and he could tell her mouth was away from the receiver. “In the bathroom,” she called. Her voice was soft and thick. “All right.” To Earl she whispered, “I’ve got to go,” and hung up.
Earl placed the telephone receiver into its cradle and put the telephone back on the nightstand, then stepped to the door to the next room and looked at Lenny.
He was lying on the bed staring at the television. The two black dogs lifted their heads and looked at Earl, but Lenny kept his eyes on the screen, where one man was chasing another one along a catwalk in a dark factory.
“Load up the car,” said Earl. “Keep the camping gear on top.”
“We going someplace tonight?” He said it as though the idiocy of loading the car at night would be self- evident.
“Yeah, tonight. And get the dogs into their carriers. They’re going too.”
Linda pushed her chair away from the kitchen table and stood to hang up the wall telephone. She smiled to herself contentedly. Linda looked around at the bright, clean surfaces. She loved the careful, economical use of the space. The pots and pans were all heavy and old; only French gourmet companies still made them that way, and they charged hundreds of dollars for them.
She padded around the kitchen in her bare feet, collecting the ingredients and implements she would need for this recipe. As she bent down to pull a big pot out of the cupboard, she acknowledged that Jane’s blue jeans felt a little tight in the thigh and the ass, but she wasn’t sorry. When Carey got home from the late shift at the hospital, that wouldn’t be something that he minded. Even men who thought that wearing tight clothes made you stupid would look hard at whatever you let them see.
She filled the pot with water and set it on one of the back burners to boil, then opened the door of the big old-fashioned pantry. There, hanging on a brass hook, was Jane’s apron. She slipped the loop over her head and tied the strings behind her back in a bow. She looked down at the apron and smiled. It was dark blue with a red ribbon border and little blue cornflowers and yellow buttercups embroidered on it. It was almost too pretty to use.
She began to open the drawers under the counter, looking for ladles. In the second one she opened, she found an old boning knife that had been sharpened like a razor. She recognized instantly that this was the perfect tool. It was simple to hide and felt good in her hand, too secure to slip, too sharp to be brushed away. She set it sideways just inside the drawer, where she could find it quickly without cutting herself, and opened the next drawer. “Now,” she whispered. “Where do I keep my ladles?”
An hour later Earl drove the car past the sign that said GOING-TO-THE-SUN ROAD OPEN MAY 15— SEPTEMBER 15. Jane was about a day too early. Earl was simply too much for her. He forced himself not to acknowledge the way he had come by the information, because that would make him think about what Linda was doing right now. Earl was the one who was too much for all of them. When you won the pot it didn’t much matter who put what chips into it.
He could drive quickly now that it was dark, gliding into the turns and accelerating out of them to keep his
