found the white line on the pavement leading into her door, saw the bright taillights of the other car still diminishing at high speed, and regained her sense of direction. She straightened the car and began to accelerate northward, the way they had come.
“Who are they?” gasped Dahlman. “Police?”
“No such luck,” said Jane. She watched the rearview mirror as she added speed. “It’s the two men we saw outside the hospital.” The other car was still going south, but then the taillights came on bright They were stopping.
“How?”
“Maybe they were at the airport when I rented the car. Maybe anything. We’re in trouble.”
“What do we do?”
“Run.”
She stared in the mirror just as she entered the first curve, and the mirror showed a flash of the white side of the other car turning around to come after them, and then she could see only the empty darkness of the trees beside the curve. She tried to remember in reverse order all of the sights that had floated past her window on the way south. Whatever she did, it had to be soon.
Her speedometer said fifty, sixty, seventy. At eighty-five, the big car was harder to keep on the right side of the white line, and each bump seemed to make it rise into the air and come down with a bone-jarring bounce. She knew she was putting some distance between them and the white car, but two men who had planned to walk into a hospital full of cops and shoot a patient who was already in custody probably had an optimistic view of the nature of risk. The fact that they were following her would add to their safety. All they had to do was get her taillights in view and keep them there. Any obstacle in the road might kill Jane and Dahlman, but the white car would have plenty of time to stop.
She said to Dahlman, “How are you feeling?”
“Rotten, but fortunately I was asleep when it happened, so I woke up on the floor and didn’t see enough to give me a heart attack.”
“I’m afraid we have to do something. If you’re not up to this, tell me now and we won’t try.”
“I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no.”
“What am I thinking?”
“You’ve disarmed them. You have their guns, and they have nothing. You want to arrange an ambush and shoot them. I won’t permit that. I’ll let you off somewhere with the guns, and drive on by myself.”
Jane fought her way through competing thoughts, each in its own way important, but distracting. She had left the guns in Jake’s car, because she had been trying to get on an airplane. Dahlman wasn’t very observant, but he was unexpectedly brave. He wanted to take all of the risk on himself and let her escape—a completely impractical idea. He also had been lucky enough to live in the world all this time without learning anything about criminal behavior. The pistols those men had been carrying at the hospital were throwaways: ones they could use on him, then drop in a trash can before they walked out. If they had not left others in their car, they would never have come after him now.
Dahlman was naive and overconfident and insistent about matters he knew nothing about, but Jane supposed she should have felt glad. A man who would not use a gun to protect himself in a situation like this could be called many things, but he was certainly no murderer. Circumstances had presented her with the proof that she might have gotten around to wishing for later. Carey had been right about Dahlman, but it wouldn’t matter unless she could keep him alive.
“You’re wrong about nearly everything, but we have less than a minute for talk, so I’ll do all of it. Those men aren’t unarmed, so don’t give them a target. Just do as I say.”
“What’s your plan?”
“To have you do as I say.”
“I thought I had an option. What if I can’t do this?”
“Then you’ll die trying.”
Jane turned the car quickly to the side and up a street in the little town. It ran along Conewango Creek a short distance, then reached a dead end. She parked the car between two others along the curb, got out, and hurried to the trunk. Dahlman stepped out stiffly and leaned on a taillight to watch her. She pushed the two small suitcases aside, then lifted the false floor of the trunk, pulled out the spare tire, tossed her purse into the trunk, and slammed it.
“Come on.” She rolled the tire across the street and between two old brick buildings, then scrambled down a rocky bank onto a narrow muddy plateau. “Take my hand.”
Dahlman let her help him down onto the mud and stared at her in confusion as she lifted the tire down beside them. She said, “I know you’re not in any shape to swim, but that’s what the tire is for. The rim is heavy, so it will float low, but it will hold you up. Cling to it. If you can’t, I’ll hold you.”
Jane eased him into the cold, dark stream and placed his hands on the tire, then kept walking until the muddy bottom was no longer under her feet. She felt the current begin to pull them downstream. The momentum of the water tended to sweep them outward, away from the bank, but Jane resisted it, keeping her legs pumping steadily in a frog kick that didn’t risk breaking the surface.
She saw the white car flash past over the bridge upstream, but she kept her eyes in that direction for several minutes because she knew it was too much to hope that the men would simply miss the turnoff and keep going. “How are you doing?” she whispered.
“Cold. I can take it for a while,” said Dahlman.
“That’s all you need to do.” She changed her grip and began to push Dahlman downstream on the tire, using only her legs to propel them onward in hard surges.
It was probably a lie, she thought, but Dahlman seemed to find contradicting her either beneath his dignity or beyond his strength, because he said nothing.
The old, dim street lamps along the road above the stream and the faint glow of light behind the translucent curtains of the old two-story houses made the little town of Frewsburg look unreal, like a stop in an elaborate electric train set. It was after midnight now, and there were no cars moving along this road.
She kept looking back at the bridge, and she had almost begun to believe that the white car would not be back when it came into view again. She kept her eyes on it and felt a weight in her stomach. The car was slower now, prowling along the quiet street like a police cruiser. She could not see the men from this distance, so the car itself seemed to become the predator. It glided to the middle of the bridge and stopped.
Jane turned her face away and put her head under the surface, feeling the dark water pushing her along at its own slow pace. In the cold silence she thought and waited. She could not pull Dahlman under with her, but as long as his head was close to the tire, the shape would be hard to see and it wouldn’t look like a man.
She held her breath for a long time, then surfaced on the downstream side of the tire and looked back. The car was moving again. It came off the bridge and turned up the street where she had parked. Jane rolled in the water and began to kick again, taking in deep breaths and blowing them out rhythmically, as she pulled the tire along with one arm.
She could tell that her memory had been right about the course of the little river. As it turned and meandered out of the hills toward Pennsylvania, there were lots of lazy curves. But these little old towns had all been built along rivers and streams that would run a mill, so there were probably narrows ahead where the water would get difficult. She needed just one big curve to do this right. The first one was too gradual, so she kept kicking. But as she did, the curve extended—not cutting back on itself but making a much bigger half circle to the east. She bent her arms to bring her close to Dahlman’s ear.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” said Dahlman.
“The worst part is over.” Dahlman was lying, and so was she.
Jane raised her wrist close to her face and tried to read the dial of her watch, but the moon was hidden by clouds and she had not checked the time when she had entered the water, so the watch would tell her little anyway. She held the watch to her ear. It was still ticking. She was glad she had put the one Carey had bought for her in a drawer and strapped this cheap plastic one to her wrist. She had never worn anything that could be construed as jewelry while she was working unless it was part of a disguise meant to distract a viewer from her face, because jewelry was memorable. It was also precious, and that might make her hesitate to throw it away
