She said, “So why did you go along with it—take me away like this?”
Jane gave a rueful smile. “It’s my job.” Then she added, “I guess they didn’t give you lesson number two. This is the price of disappearing.”
“What is?”
“You’re going to spend a lot of time looking over your shoulder. When you see something that might be trouble, you don’t wait to see if it is. You go.”
The woman didn’t seem disturbed. She looked out the window at the fronts of stores and houses. “I like it better this way.”
“Are you afraid of airplanes?”
“No. It means I have a little longer before I have to be alone. Probably forever.”
Jane studied the rearview mirror for the next ten minutes, giving herself time to think. The face-changers had given her a few tips. Maybe they had told her a little bit about what being a runner was going to feel like, and maybe she was simply shrewd enough to have figured it out for herself. Jane decided she needed an advantage. She said, “Whatever happened back there, I don’t see anybody following. Are you a good driver?”
“Yes,” the woman answered. There was a peculiar edge to her voice that Jane couldn’t quite identify. “I know that sounds odd coming from me, but I am.”
Jane wondered why it would be “odd coming from me.” It was the answer to a direct question, not a boast. Maybe it was just normal modesty magnified into something worse by the experience of prolonged dependence. She decided it was too risky to ask more questions now. “All right, then. I’m going to pull up here at the next exit and let you drive while I sleep.”
Jane decided that before she risked going to sleep while this woman was awake, she had better test her. When the car had stopped, Jane waited for the woman to get out and come around to take her place before she relinquished the driver’s seat. She was fairly certain that she had the woman fooled, but if she was wrong, the woman seemed alert enough to see that her best move would be to drive off while Jane was walking around to the passenger seat. But instead, the woman used the time to adjust the driver’s seat to her shorter legs.
Jane got in and said, “The entrance ramp is right up ahead. Get on it, head west, and keep going. If I sleep more than four hours or you run out of gas, wake me up.”
When they were on the highway heading in the right direction, Jane lay back on the seat, used her jacket for a pillow, and relaxed her muscles. She watched the woman drive for a few minutes and decided that whatever the woman had meant, she was not an incompetent driver. Jane closed her eyes. Over the past month she had gotten used to sleeping in the morning, but it was close enough to morning already.
Jane was operating on rough guesses now. She knew that she had to keep this woman off balance—to be smarter, quicker, more sure of herself. The simplest way to buy herself an edge was to sleep while the woman was awake, to rest while the woman wore herself out. And if the woman was craving company already, then she would be craving it more in a couple of hours. Jane let the vibration of the tires on the road and the unchanging rush of the wind against the surfaces of the car soothe her and lull her to sleep.
25
There was bright morning sunlight glinting off the chrome and mirrors of the cars ahead when Jane opened her eyes and sat up.
“You’re awake,” the woman announced.
“How’s it going?” asked Jane.
“It’s about fifty miles to Sioux Falls. If I don’t see a ladies’ room in a couple of minutes, I’m going to die.”
Jane leaned closer to look at the fuel gauge. “Pull off at the next exit. We’ll get some gas and use the rest room. We’ll find a place to eat breakfast.”
“There’s nothing around here but these tiny little towns.”
“Good,” said Jane. “Everything we want will be close together.”
They pulled onto a two-lane highway that had obviously been superseded by the interstate. A hundred yards farther on, they found a little business district dominated by a single blinking stoplight hanging across the intersection. Jane got out to fill the gas tank while the woman disappeared into the ladies’ room. Then they parked across the street in front of a diner that called itself a “family restaurant.”
As they ate in the little diner, Jane reflected on what she had just learned. The woman had never spent time in small towns. She didn’t know how they worked, or even what was in them. People in small towns needed all of the services that people in big cities needed—a store or two, a gas station, some kind of restaurant.
Jane studied her as the local people talked in cheerful tones at the counter. Sometimes they included someone who came in the door, or others who were at tables. The woman ate with her eyes down in a kind of embarrassment at the discovery that people in the diner talked to each other from table to table. When a girl of about twenty got up and walked around, then picked up a newspaper that had been left at an empty table and scanned the headlines before she went off to work, it seemed to strike her as tragic—as though the girl had been scavenging scraps from a plate.
There was no question that she had lived her whole life in big cities. People who had not come in the door together must be strangers, and strangers should avoid and ignore each other. Making eye contact was not only a breach of propriety, it was dangerous. Raising your voice across a room to talk to a stranger was something city people did when they had gone crazy enough to stop keeping themselves clean. Jane decided to get her outside before she got too uncomfortable. She paid the bill in cash and left an unmemorable tip.
When they were in the car again, she told the woman, “If you want to sleep, it’s your turn.” Jane was reasonably confident that the sun would keep her from getting much rest.
“Not yet. I guess I shouldn’t have had coffee.”
Jane drove back out onto the highway. She said nothing as she drove, until she could feel that the silence was making the woman as uncomfortable as the talk in the diner had. That was another sign of a person who had always lived in cities. If you weren’t a stranger, you had to fill up all the time with talk.
“Are we going to drive all the way to Los Angeles?” the woman asked.
“I think so,” said Jane. She had known the woman had planned to fly to Los Angeles, but she had not known whether she had been intending to fly on to some other destination. L.A. must be where she was going to live. “The safest way to lose yourself is in a car. It’s anonymous.” She looked ahead at the road. “When they call me in, it means they think it’s time to take precautions.”
“Do you have a gun?”
Jane looked at her in surprise. “I have several.”
“I mean now.”
Jane said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t conceive of a way that having two pounds of metal strapped to me would help me accomplish what I’m trying to do now. It doesn’t make me drive faster or keep your face from being recognized.”
“It would be safer.”
Jane sighed. “I’m sorry, but I was called into this at the last minute to pluck you out of an airport. I don’t know anything about you except the name they gave you, and nothing about the kind of trouble you were in. Do people shoot at you?”
“Oh,” said the woman. She looked disappointed. “That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you let me drive. That’s what got me here. I caused a terrible accident.”
Jane nodded sagely, as though that made sense: hit and run? “How did that happen?”
“It was so stupid. I can remember the whole thing exactly, every detail—what I was feeling and thinking.”
