girder out over the water again. There was another man standing on it. She looked at her mother again.
She could see that her mother was anxious, almost afraid to answer her. “It’s the brothers doing this. The world they beat out between them is a battlefield, and the fight doesn’t stop. You don’t get to fuss around for months, watching and poking around while your enemies are busy.”
Jane watched the steel I-beam rise into the sky. The man waved his arm, but this time he was waving at her. She felt her heart stop. It was Carey. “No!” she screamed.
“If you want him, you have to go up there yourself.”
She froze. “That’s the price?”
Her mother spoke quietly. “That’s always the price. That’s how the brothers play. They won’t stop until somebody loses everything.”
She stared at her mother. “But I don’t know enough yet. I know a name—Brian Vaughn. I don’t know what he’s running from, or who is hunting him.”
“You know something just as good.”
“What?”
“You know people who will hunt anybody.” She stopped and watched Jane. “People who are hunting you.”
Jane stood on the arch of the bridge as Carey rose higher and higher. The crane operator made some move that was a little faster than he had intended, and the girder began to swing away. It reached the end of its swing, then began to come back. It moved closer, closer, and Jane knew she would have just one chance. As it stopped, ready to swing away again forever, she jumped for it. She felt herself falling faster and faster, the wind tugging at her hair, the water rushing up at her, and then she woke, lying on the bed in the dark room.
35
When Alvin Jardine saw her he happened to have his head back to drink the last sweet, muddy residue of sugary coffee at the bottom of his cup. He took in a breath and nearly choked. She was coming off a flight from San Francisco and her eyes scanned the way their eyes always did, then snapped straight ahead. Jardine shut his briefcase and stood to turn away while she passed, then decided that the briefcase might be a problem. He pushed it into a rental locker, dropped the quarters into the slot, and took the key. He didn’t need a Wanted poster or printed circular to remember that face. There was nothing in print on her anyway, and he knew he didn’t want to get close to her encumbered by baggage. He quickly walked to the big open portal toward the concourse.
This was just another piece of evidence to prove that life presented prizes that were better than anything anybody could wish for. Here he was, waiting for any one of two dozen small-time bail jumpers and parole violators to step off a plane and into his custody, when in walks a trophy as rare as the last damned whooping crane. And here is Al Jardine, one of probably twenty bounty hunters in the whole world who would have known what he was looking at or had the slightest idea what to do with it.
He watched her from two hundred feet back as he followed her down the crowded concourse. She still had that long black hair, and the rest of her was exactly the way he remembered—legs that looked as though they went on and on. They reminded him of the tricky nature of the task ahead. She was not entirely defenseless. He remembered that very clearly from the one time when he had happened to see her work.
Jardine had been waiting at the Los Angeles County lockup on Vignes Street, watching the door that opened once each day to emit a few prisoners. A man named Hayward was due to be released any day, and Jardine had a fairly strong opinion that he had been jailed and served ninety days under a name that was not his own. It was Jardine’s theory that Hayward had spent most of his life as Bobby McKay.
McKay was worth fifty thousand dollars to an armored-car company. He was also reputed to be big, violent, and uncomfortable without the weight of a pistol somewhere on his person. The best way in the world to take a man like that was at the jailhouse door. He couldn’t be armed and had no chance to prepare. If he proved to be too much for Jardine, then the sight of Jardine getting pounded into the sidewalk would bring cops from inside.
The steel door opened and the gate was sliding out of the way. That day’s excretion of rehabilitated citizenry was already streaming out into the sunshine. The sparse group of friends and relatives were pushing forward to meet them when Jardine became aware that a car had pulled up behind him. He turned and saw the tall, thin woman with black hair come around the car and open the passenger door. He saw a small, frail-looking woman with stringy blond hair separate from the rest and step toward the car, and he felt better, because that assured him the car wasn’t there for Hayward.
There was a sound that set Jardine on edge. It wasn’t loud—just the sound of feet moving fast on the concrete—but anything sudden or unexpected was out of place here.
Jardine had turned his head just in time to see a tall man in a suit arrive at the car and lean forward to lunge past the woman with long black hair to make a grab for the little blond woman in the seat. But the woman with the long black hair had heard him coming. Her elbow caught his face, and Jardine could still bring back the sound of it. He wasn’t sure if it had been the crack of some facial bone breaking, or if the blow had just clapped the man’s jaws together so the teeth clicked. But his head jerked sideways and his body reeled in approximately the direction she had sent his head. She spun counterclockwise. Jardine’s eye had taken it as a quick pivot to begin a retreat around the front of the car to the driver’s seat before the man could collect himself. It was more. As she turned, she was leaning her weight on the hood, swinging her right leg way too high. Her kick clothes-lined the man at about eye level, dropped him onto his back, and followed through. The momentum helped her roll over the hood of the car and land on her feet on the driver’s side. She was inside and accelerating away before Jardine fully appreciated what he had seen.
Jardine had instantly induced in himself an uncharacteristic concern for the welfare of the man in the suit. He had knelt and used his handkerchief to stanch the flow of blood from the man’s nose, muttering quiet bits of optimistic nonsense about his condition. He had helped him to his feet and driven him to the hospital emergency room.
It was at least an hour before he had managed to get any answers to his sympathetic inquiries about what had brought this poor man to Vignes Street and what had led this woman to drop him on the pavement like a sack of garbage. When Jardine had heard that the man was a bounty hunter from New York, he had begun to feel rather festive about the whole episode. Jardine had no love of outsiders who came into his city to hunt his game.
The blond woman, it seemed, had been doing exactly what Jardine had suspected Bobby McKay of doing. She had gone to jail on a disorderly conduct charge and spent thirty days picking up gum wrappers along the freeway while the people who had been chasing her wore themselves out.
Like many hunters, Jardine had always been a convivial companion and an avid listener to his colleagues’ stories of the chase. It was his main consolation in times when nothing seemed to work, and his best celebration of victory. But it also had a practical purpose, because the tales often carried information he could use. There had been times when he had heard things about a particular fugitive he had been chasing that had helped him make money, and other times he had heard things that had convinced him to turn his attention elsewhere. It was not a good idea to chase a fugitive who had once been convicted of something known to be the exclusive province of organized crime—large-scale gambling, or trafficking in stolen securities, for instance.
But along with the rest of the stories came rumors and tall tales. One of them he had heard several times was about a woman named Jane who made people disappear. He had not taken the Jane stories seriously, because they had always been about the one that got away. Some enormous payday had not come for some hunter, and here’s why it wasn’t his fault.
But on that day three years ago when the little blond woman had gotten away, he had begun to listen to the rumors, and to connect Jane with the names of fugitives who had not been captured. Maybe the stories weren’t all true. Any time there was a ready-made excuse for failure, most people would take it. But he was sure that enough of them were true to make this Jane woman worth some effort. If someone managed to put her in a cage, he’d have the aliases and addresses of all the people she had ever hidden.
Jardine was having a difficult time believing his good fortune tonight as he followed her down the concourse
