“Yes.”
“Liar.”
“Yes.” He walked along at her shoulder, taking deep breaths and blowing them out. She listened to them attentively without speaking. There were no whistles, no bubbly liquid sounds that would mean he was in trouble. There were people who simply could not tolerate high altitudes. Unless they were brought down, their lungs filled up with fluid until they drowned. Starting Pete off with a two-mile jog probably had not been the safest way to find out that he wasn’t one of them, but she had needed to know before they had gone too far to turn back.
She had not lied to him about needing to use the last precious hour or two of light efficiently, to put distance between them and the road. It was already getting too dark to run. A twisted ankle would make the next thirty miles a nightmare.
As she walked, she subtly increased the pace again. She tried to keep her steps regular enough on the uneven, winding path to hold her speed. The end of the long summer had come, so the trail was as beaten down by other boots as it would ever be, and it had been laid out at about seven thousand feet, along the ridges just below the treeline, where soil was thin and poor and the constant winds stunted the fir trees.
After another mile they had passed Haystack Butte, and in the dusky light she saw the change she was looking for in the slopes to her left. There was a low, lush dark carpet of bushes and evergreens—lodgepole pine, spruce, fir—all young and thick. Among them loomed tall, ghostly gray trunks like the masts of sunken ships.
“Look at that,” said Pete. “I wonder why it looks like that.”
“A fire,” said Jane. “In 1967 this patch burned.”
He craned his neck to look at her with ironic amusement. “You from around here?”
She shook her head and smiled. “Of course not. I spent half the day in the car looking at maps. This is one of the places I picked out to get my bearings. If we get lost up here we’re not going to enjoy the experience.”
“What do we look for next?”
“After another mile or two, we should be able to look up on our right and see glaciers. First a little one. That’s Gem Glacier. Then a really big one, called Grinnell Glacier. Then Swiftcurrent Glacier, all in a stretch of a couple of miles.”
“And after that?”
“If we get that far before it’s too dark to travel, I’ll be very surprised.”
He walked along for a time, then said, “I guess I should be delighted at the news that I don’t have to keep trudging along all night. To tell you the truth, though, the farther we get from that guy with the rifle, the better I feel. And there’s even something about it getting dark that’s comforting. I’ve been having a prickly feeling in the back of my neck, like he’s back there looking down the barrel at me.”
Jane turned and looked up at him with an enigmatic smile. “He wouldn’t be looking down the barrel. Nobody puts a round through somebody’s temple from that far out without a scope.”
“You’re a very strange woman. You know that?”
“Of course I do.” She smiled. “It’s something I’ve cultivated over the years. But I’ll bet you want to keep going even more than you did a minute ago, don’t you?”
He seemed to be consulting an inner voice as he walked. “You’re right. It worked. I feel bad enough to walk for hours.”
“Bad isn’t exactly the feeling I was looking for, but that’s the price. As long as you never let your brain stop working, thinking about what’s behind you, you’ll be very hard to kill.”
“So the prickly feeling in the back of the neck doesn’t go away.”
“That’s right. I have it right now.”
Pete half-turned his head to look as he walked. There was nothing behind them but the empty trail as far as the last bend. “You think they’re back there?”
“If I did, I’d be running for my life,” she said. “I think they’re good. They’ll find out the car was left in that lot in about three days, when it’s towed out of the park. By then the only road here will be closed to visitors, the nearby car crossings into Canada will be closed too, and the long detours that go up there don’t go to where we’ll be. What I think they’ll do next is give up.”
The sky was darkening quickly now, and she saw the glow of his teeth that had to be a smile. “Really?”
“They’ve been following you for about a hundred days. They’ve committed two murders they won’t get paid for. They’ve exhausted the computer searches, because from here on we aren’t going to use credit cards or even names, if we can help it. That means the hunting is going to get much harder. Following you into a foreign country adds a level of extra risk. I think for a professional, the point of diminishing returns has come. They’re in it for the money, and if this goes on much longer, the money’s not good enough. They could have made more of it more easily doing bitter divorce cases and premature life-insurance payouts.”
“Won’t Pleasure, Inc., hire somebody else?”
“There are several possibilities. One is that these killers will tell Pleasure, Inc., where they lost you. Pleasure, Inc., will decide that if you’re in Canada, then you’re not planning on talking to American police. A second possibility is that the people who are after us now will keep Pleasure, Inc., on the hook—tell them to be patient, they’re on your trail—but not waste any time actually hunting. Once a month they’ll use the computer to see if your aliases turned up again.”
“So I should feel good, right? I’m not being stupid.”
“No. Because in a week or so they’ll probably be off stalking somebody else, and if they’re replaced, the new ones will be starting at zero. This morning you were talking about a different feeling you had—that you were glad to be alive. It’s not gone, is it?”
“No.”
“The quiver in the back of your neck doesn’t go away, but the good feeling doesn’t either. Now that you’ve had it, every day is going to feel as though you won it in a world championship.”
He laughed. “It already does.”
“You’ll notice other things later.”
“What things?”
“Good things. The kind of ambition that’s stupid, the kind that makes you want a fancy car and a big house and flashy clothes, goes away.”
“Why?”
“Because having them makes you feel as though people are looking at you, and that’s uncomfortable. Being average, normal, makes you feel comfortable, and it isn’t very different unless you read labels very closely. That was always true, of course, but now you’ll be able to feel it, because you know that being a regular guy is a million miles from being dead.”
The trail led them up between thickets of berry bushes, across meadows of wildflowers now dry and well past blooming. As the light died for the night, Jane could see the higher peaks on her right, but the blue-white glacial ice was lost in the black silhouettes of the mountains. They walked on, sticking to the center of the path in the dark. Jane took her flashlight out of her pack and let it play on the ground in front of her. Finally, as the trail led them up into a stand of stunted pine trees, she stopped, knelt on the ground, and studied the map.
“Are we lost yet?” asked Pete. She felt his shoulder beside hers as he knelt down to look at the little circle of light.
She put her finger on the map. “We’re here.” It was a spot where twisting dotted lines seemed to radiate in all directions, like the strands of an unraveling rope. “The trail on the left goes back to the road, then up Flattop Creek. The one on the right goes through Swiftcurrent Pass and connects with this whole network of trails up here. This one in the middle is the one we want.” She aimed her flashlight up the path, and in the glow around it, Pete caught a glimpse of a wooden sign.
“So what’s the problem?”
She frowned. “Never give up a chance to deceive. This chance is a beauty. I’m just trying to figure out how to use it.”
He said, “Switch the sign?”
“They wouldn’t be looking for one trail or another. They’d be looking for us, probably our footprints. We’ve already put about seven miles of them on the path, and if they were following, by now they wouldn’t have much trouble recognizing them.”
Pete sat and waited while Jane stared at the map, then stood up, opened his pack, and handed him his
