when she knew it was the sensible thing to do.
Jane floated in the stream as long as the curve lasted, then dragged the tire to the shore with Dahlman clinging to it. He stood up with difficulty, the water running out of his clothes, then sloshed along in the shallows, leaning on her, until she could bring him up onto dry, pebbly ground. She pushed the tire back out into the current until it caught and rotated downstream, the momentum slowly nudging it toward the middle.
Jane brought Dahlman up into a little park full of willow trees. She let him lean against the trunk of a short one with branches that drooped nearly to the ground while she wrung out his sport coat and emptied the water from his shoes. She twisted her long hair into a rope, then shook it out, and the shake turned into a shiver.
“I know you’re cold,” she said. “So am I, but I seem to remember it was a hot night a little while ago. Maybe we’ll dry off a little on the walk.”
“The walk?”
“I’m afraid so.” She gripped his arm and began to ease him away from the tree to walk across a small open lawn.
He came with surprisingly little resistance, and it worried her a little, but he said, “Tell me what we’re doing.”
“I don’t know if you were following the course of the stream,” she said.
“I had my eyes closed most of the time.”
“Well, it was a curve, like a horseshoe. We left the car at one end, and came out of the water at the other. The people who built this park probably picked the spot because of the curve. It’s secluded, and there’s water on three sides. We’re going to walk straight north back to the other tip of the horseshoe, where we started—cut across the curve.”
“But I saw them driving right along that street. By now they’ve found the car.”
“I thought you had your eyes closed. But you’re right. So what are they doing now?”
“I have no idea.”
“First they looked inside it. They thought about breaking into it, but they saw that it has an alarm installed. I know they saw it, because otherwise we would have heard the alarm. They thought some more, and remembered that the car wasn’t what they wanted anyway. They want us. The reason I rolled the tire along the street and onto the mud was so they would eventually figure out that we had gone into the water. First they’ll look in all the alleys and Dumpsters and dark alcoves around the car, but at some point, they’ll see the track, and ours beside it. Even they will know that a single fresh tire track leading into a creek wasn’t made by a car. So they’ll follow the creek looking for us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’m not. I told you what I think. And if they had done anything but park, we would have seen their headlights again.” Jane was pleased. She had gotten him across the park, and now they were on a street leading away from the creek. They were heading straight for the car.
“What makes you think they’re not searching the whole town on foot?”
“Just a guess.” Her guess was that she had heard a story that they had not. When she had thought about the road crossing and recrossing the stream, she had remembered one of the stories about the Old People. Once, maybe two hundred years ago and maybe two thousand, there had been a small party of Senecas camped at a bend in a river. While they were sleeping, they had been stealthily surrounded by a much larger band of Cherokees. It must have happened on one of these winding waterways like the Conewango that ran south toward Pennsylvania and beyond, because that was the way the raiders had traveled in the endless wars. While his friends prepared for battle, a brave Cherokee had clung beneath a floating tree trunk and breathed through a hollow reed to reach the spot where the Senecas’ canoes were tied, and cut them loose. When he had done it, there was no way left for the Senecas to escape.
But a few Senecas had caught the canoes beyond the river bend. Then they portaged across the narrow spit of land to come out upstream on the river again. They had kept paddling down and carrying the canoes across, until the Cherokees had concluded that a huge army of Senecas was gathering at the camp. The Cherokees had quietly retreated.
Jane did not walk quickly, just kept Dahlman moving at a constant pace. She could tell that the time and the sleep and the cold water and the fear had taken away the last traces of anesthetic that could have been in his bloodstream. Now his body was rigid with pain, but it made him seem stronger, faster. As though to warn her that his personality had not changed, he said, “You could easily be wrong.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
He persisted. “They could simply call the police anonymously and say they saw me getting out of that car and recognized me. We could arrive to find a hundred police officers waiting for us.”
Jane said patiently, “I don’t think that’s what we need to worry about.”
“Why not?”
“Because if having you in police custody was enough for them, they would have left you alone in Buffalo.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those two men didn’t show up because you had escaped from the hospital. We only saw them because they and I happened to know the last few minutes when the police would leave you alone, and which would be the safest hallway in the building. If you’ll remember, we were on our way out, but they were on their way in.” She added, “Carrying guns,” to settle the matter.
“I sort of missed the implication,” he admitted. “There’s no way they could have known I wasn’t still in the operating room, is there?”
“No.”
“It’s still not a very good plan.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “Let’s hear yours.”
Dahlman was silent. Jane looked behind her at the sidewalk. Their clothes were no longer leaving drips on the pavement. The moisture evaporating from her clothes into the night air seemed to be taking most of her body heat with it and leaving her shaking, but a casual observer would not glance at her or Dahlman in the light of a street lamp and know that they had been in the water. At this hour she had little to fear from casual observers anyway. They were getting close to the creek again, because she could detect the familiar scent of it.
She kept scanning the street ahead for the shapes of men on foot. At each intersection she lingered in the shadows of the big old trees and looked up and down to detect any movement, then hurried Dahlman across and into the darkness again.
When they reached the street where she had left the car, she ushered Dahlman into the shadow beside the corner of a house and whispered, “Wait here for me.”
She slipped across the street and down the frontage road, staying close to the buildings. She came first upon the white car that had been following. It was parked three spaces back from hers. She saw no heads in the windows, but she approached it cautiously from behind the right side until her angle gave her a clear view of the interior. It was empty.
She hurried ahead to her rental car, clutching the keys. She went to her knees, examined the tires, then sighted along the top of the hood to be sure there were no spots where fingers had displaced the dust of the road. She lay on her back and stared up at the undercarriage. There seemed to be no booby traps.
Jane stood up, hurried back to the white car, took out her pocket knife, knelt in front of the hood, and reached under the grille. She felt around until she found the bottom radiator hose, then sliced it. She found the fan belt and cut that too. She stabbed the wall of the left front tire, then the right.
She ran to her rental car, started it, and swung it around to go back up the street. When she got there, Dahlman was already emerging from the shadows with a stiff, tottering gait. She got out and helped him into the back seat.
“Thank you,” he said.
Far off, in approximately the direction they had come from, there came sounds:
Dahlman was alarmed. “What was that?”
“Sounds like they’ve found the tire floating down the creek. They just killed it.”
