“Registered?” said Jane. “Then it was a suicide gun?”
“That’s what I think now, after all the dust that got kicked up. I think the idea was to shoot them both and put the gun in his hand. Maybe they figured it was safer to just kill her: no matter how hard the police look at a murder it’s still a murder, but a murder-suicide doesn’t always include a real suicide. If the suicide doesn’t hold up, they start looking for somebody else.” He frowned at Dahlman. “They obviously put too much confidence in police marksmanship.”
Jane said, “Are you going to help us, or not?”
“I still like money,” he said. “But something in my mind keeps telling me, ‘Janie and these faceless guys are about to bump into each other. Who’s coming home to dinner?’ Your suitcases are waiting.”
Jane walked to the door, picked up Dahlman’s suitcase and reached for hers, then saw the keys beside the handle. She could see that the papers beneath them were a car registration and a pink slip with no names on them. She straightened and turned toward Sid Freeman.
“Just fresh horses, that’s all,” he said. “It’s the quickest way to get him out of my place of business.”
14
Jane drove the new car down the hill and along the parkway beside the lake. Dahlman stared ahead for a few minutes. Then he said, “It’s astounding. I’ve been rejected by even the worst criminals.”
“Oh, Sid’s okay,” said Jane.
“ ‘Okay’?” Dahlman said. “He has no mercy, no morality, no—”
“Don’t get launched, or I’ll be listening to what he doesn’t have all night. He got us out of a very hot car and into one we could keep forever if we were careful. That’s more than any number of nice law-abiding citizens could do. He also told me some things we might have died finding out.”
“He probably told you lies … nonsense,” said Dahlman. “He’s probably on the telephone right now, telling the people who are after us exactly where we are.”
Jane shook her head. “Once you’re in a car, he doesn’t know exactly where you are.”
“I don’t know that he’s not following us.”
“I do.” She sighed. “Sid doesn’t have a set of rules. He has to make his decisions as they come up. All things being equal, he would rather I lived than that my enemies did. He knows that he can’t affect the outcome, so it’s unwise to try too hard. But he gave us what we needed.”
“He said several times his only interest is money.”
“Nobody is only interested in money. Sid wants to be important, and he lives on impulse, so he needs money. But the way he gets money means he has to live in isolation in a house with bulletproof walls and armed guards. He won’t sell us out.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“To those ‘faceless guys,’ as he calls them?” said Jane. “They have not endeared themselves to Sid. They’ve been so careful to be sure he doesn’t know who they are that he can’t get word to them to negotiate a price for us. He resents that, and he resents them. They don’t come in person to talk to him. I do.”
As Jane drove through the night, she thought a bit about Sid’s dead companion, Christie. She had always been the one in the background, floating around like the bad fairy. Jane could picture her now, with her anorexic body, close-cropped red hair, and nocturnal pallor, watching with a smug look on her face as though Sid’s visitors were there for some sadistic amusement of hers. It had come as a surprise to Jane that Christie’s sudden absence had made so little difference—not to Sid, but to anyone. Jane had always suspected that Christie had done most of the thinking—concocting the plans and then cajoling and manipulating Sid into executing them. But the atmosphere of the strange household, an uneasy tension between agonizingly slow, patient scheming and temporarily suspended violence, had not changed since Christie had died. Nothing had changed. The teenaged girl Jane had seen watching from the staircase had even looked a little like Christie.
Memories of Quinn were not so easy for Jane to exorcise. During the long minutes while she had been walking Dahlman to Sid’s house, Quinn had been the one she had been thinking about. Christie had made her uncomfortable, but Quinn had frightened her. Quinn had been a changeling—not a fugitive, but a person who had experienced some voluntary midlife transformation. He had been something else once—she had heard lawyer, she had heard insurance investigator, she had heard detective.
Sid had told Jane that one day Quinn had simply stumbled on a truth that Sid considered obvious: that if he never again let anything interfere with his inclinations, he would, inevitably, have everything he wanted. The discovery had been exhilarating, and it had liberated his imagination. He had thought of a great many things that he wanted. But now he had undergone a second transformation. Quinn’s change from alive to dead had been an immense step up.
It was two A.M. when Jane reached the outskirts of Waterloo, Iowa. She turned off the main highway and spent twenty minutes driving up and down the streets, studying the little city. When she was satisfied, she found a motel and checked in. Then she woke Dahlman and hurried him into the room before anyone else was awake.
As she opened the suitcases, she asked, “Are you up to having the bandages changed?”
“Yes.”
Jane undid the bandages on his back and chest, then said, “I can’t tell how you’re doing as well as you can. Take a look in the mirror.”
Dahlman squinted at the bathroom mirror, turned on all the lights, poked the wounds, turned this way and that. “I’d say considering the age of the patient, he’s doing pretty well.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Let me wrap you up again, and then we can get some sleep.”
It was evening when Dahlman awoke to find Jane sitting on the other bed watching him. He saw that she had repacked the suitcases, and that clean clothes were laid out on the bed for him.
“Are we leaving?” he asked.
“We’re not going far,” she answered. “I’ve rented an apartment.”
She drove Dahlman to a one-story building across the town, and pulled the car into a space under a carport that had eight other cars in it. She helped him into the back entrance of the building, hurried him down the hall and into a door marked 3, then went back to the car to unload.
Dahlman looked around him. The apartment was furnished with cheap furniture that seemed clean and sturdy. There was a small kitchen that was separated from the living room by a low counter, and on the opposite side, a bedroom that seemed to be situated so that little light or noise was likely to reach it in the daytime. He heard Jane come back and heard her unlatching a suitcase.
Dahlman opened a cupboard and saw a sparse collection of china and glasses. He peered into the refrigerator and was surprised to see that it was already packed with food. “It looks like an awful lot of food,” he said.
“I wanted you to have enough,” said Jane.
He turned to look into her eyes. “You’re leaving?” He had assumed she was unpacking her suitcase, but she had been unpacking his. Hers must still be in the car.
“I wasn’t lying to Sid when I told him I had to leave you for a little while.”
“How long?”
“I may be back tomorrow, and it may not be for two weeks. How long depends on what’s out there.”
“But what’s your plan?” He seemed frightened.
Jane stepped away from the doorway into the kitchen. “It’s not much of a plan. You said before that you’re healing okay, and there are no complications, right?”
“Right.”
“So now we use up some time. If you’re not traveling or making noise or even going outdoors, nobody sees you and you’ll heal. And the longer we keep you safe, the more likely it is that something big will happen.”
“I’m supposed to sit here waiting for something big to happen to me?”
Jane smiled and sat down at the kitchen table. “Not to you. We’ve got problems because your story is peculiar, and that makes it newsworthy. There are a lot of murders in this country—maybe a hundred a day. But for
