a computer screen, next some hard-sided notebooks that could be manuals or books of tickets or even the source of all of those forms that cops seemed to whip out when anything happened. It wasn’t until she reached the bright intersection that she found the switches she had been searching for.
She made the turn, drove past the hospital, and began to look for Dahlman. She searched for the two pursuers, but she could not see them either. Could they have run hard and caught him already? She tried to imagine it. They would have needed to recognize him, see her part from him, decide she was going for help, dash to catch him, and either kill him silently and hide the body or push him into a car.
Jane was nearly at Carey’s office. As she came to the parking lot, she spun the wheel sharply toward the entrance to make the car seem to have come from nowhere. As soon as her front wheels touched the driveway, she reached to the dashboard, switched on the red and blue lights, and stopped.
Just outside the beams of her headlights she discerned the two men walking toward the end of the building near a red car. If Dahlman had followed her instructions, then they must have seen him come as far as the building. If they were looking at the red car and not the gray, then they hadn’t found him yet. Their heads turned in her direction, then away. Jane put her hand on the upright shotgun beside her and waited. The men didn’t move.
Jane suspected they could see a head silhouetted in the windshield above the headlights, and she knew they could see the bright red and blue lights revolving on the roof. Maybe they could see Jane was alone, or even recognize her.
She closed her right hand on the grip of the shotgun, but didn’t lift it. Of course it would be loaded. There would be no shell in the chamber, but there would be five rounds of number four buckshot in a line ahead of it in the magazine.
With her left hand she switched on the spotlight mounted on her door, and manipulated the handle to sweep the beam along the side of the building. She let the car begin to drift forward slowly in their general direction as she shone the light on the door of the building, then along the ground near it, inching her way along like a cop who had received a prowler call. Then she swept the beam ahead to the corner of the building. The two men were gone.
She hit the gas pedal and shot forward to stop behind her own gray car, then waited. Where was Dahlman? She craned her neck to look in every direction, but she saw nothing. Her breath came out in a hiss through clenched teeth. She had come too late. The men must have killed him, and she had let them walk away. She began to turn the police car around, then hit the brake. Of course: What had she been thinking?
Dahlman was a fugitive. If he saw a police car pull into the lot with its lights flashing, would he come out of hiding and climb in? She backed up quickly, opened the door of the police car, and ran to the row of cars parked behind the building. “Dr. Dahlman?” she called.
“Here,” came the quiet voice behind her.
She whirled. “Where?”
Dahlman slowly stood up behind the low brick wall at the end of the lot. She stepped to the wall and helped him swing his legs over it.
“Did you see what they did when I got here?”
“They threw something over the wall. Over there someplace. I heard it but I couldn’t see what it was.”
Jane didn’t need to see. She vaulted over the brick wall and walked the weedy patch between the two parking lots. She found first one gun, then the other only a few feet away, picked them up, and ran to the police car. She looked around anxiously. “Get in.”
Jane helped him ease his body into the passenger’s seat, then handed him the two guns. “Hold these.”
She turned off the flashing lights and drove quickly out of the lot and up a dark side street, then turned and drove up another. She drove until she passed a house a mile away with its lights off and a FOR SALE sign stuck on the lawn. She stopped, backed up, and pulled into the driveway.
She opened the garage door, got back into the car, and drove inside. She opened Dahlman’s door and helped him out. “Do you think you can walk a little farther by yourself?”
He said, “Yes.”
“Then start walking up the street in that direction. I’ll catch up.”
“What are you doing?”
“Go,” she said.
As soon as she could see that Dahlman was heading in the right direction, Jane closed the garage door, turned on the headlights, and found a rag hanging on a nail on the garage wall. She quickly wiped the steering wheel, the shotgun, the door handles, the shifter, then opened the trunk and found the foam fire extinguisher. She sprayed it liberally inside the car, then wiped the extinguisher off too, and tossed it onto the front seat. The foam would destroy any fingerprints she had missed. She turned off the headlights and stepped out the small door in the back of the garage. She walked along the house to the street and hurried after Dahlman.
When she caught up with him, she said, “I don’t want you to faint or fall down. But can you walk a little faster?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure. You could get caught.”
He turned his head to focus his sharp gray eyes on her. “Suppose those men had seen your face—figured out that the police car was stolen? That you weren’t a police officer?”
Jane shrugged. “They were still on foot in a parking lot. They could see I had a very big car, and suspect that there was a very big shotgun inside it.”
“But suppose they had guessed that those were just part of the bluff?”
Jane looked at him with quiet sincerity in her eyes. “If they had guessed that, then one of them would have tire tracks on his chest, and the other would have a five-inch hole in his. This isn’t a game.”
4
Jake Reinert hung up the telephone, put on his jacket with slow deliberation, lowered his weight carefully down each of the front steps, and walked to his car. He had been Jane Whitefield’s neighbor for her first thirty-one years, and had lived beside her parents and grandparents for the forty years before that. Since she had married Carey McKinnon he had found himself living beside an empty house. He had watched the lights going on to illuminate unoccupied furniture in the evening, then going off at bedtime, heard radios talking to themselves during the day, and sometimes heard the telephone ring four times before the answering machine cut in. Burglars might not be fooled by all that, but if they came in they certainly would not be lonely.
Jane’s unexpected telephone call had disturbed Jake, but he was making an effort to hold his anxiety in abeyance. He started his car and drove down the street toward Delaware Avenue.
The night air was chilly, and Jake began to feel better as the engine warmed enough to permit him to engage the heater. If Henry Whitefield’s daughter had called him at any hour of the day or night in any of her thirty-three years and said, “Jake, I’m having trouble. Can you fly down here to Peru and pick me up?” he would certainly have been on his way to the airport. Tonight she was just asking for a ride home from a movie.
Jake began to feel impatient to see her face and verify that this was all she was asking. He glanced at his speedometer and saw that his foot had begun to get impatient too. Thirty-seven in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone wasn’t exactly madness, but it wasn’t especially smart, either. A man in his seventies could easily fail to discern some pedestrian in the dark, and then react too slowly to do anything but stop and back up over the body.
After about twenty minutes, Jake saw the bright lights of the marquee over the theater and began to search for an acceptable place to pull over. He failed to find one until he was abreast of the place, so he stopped in front.
There was a startling thump on the roof, and he looked over the back seat to see Jane standing there yanking the right rear door open. “Hi, Jake,” she said. “Wow, it’s hot. Is the heater on?”
“Evening,” said Jake. He turned off the heater while she helped a man about his age slide into the back, then slammed the door and got into the front seat beside Jake.
“This is Dr. Dahlman,” said Jane, “and this is my friend Jake.”
