to ring. You stay hidden without appearing to be hiding.”
“But what do I do? How do I spend my time?”
“In my experience, if you don’t get found within the first month, your chances go way up. So for the first month, you do very little. You arrange your furniture, look at magazines, watch the local news on TV. You read the newspapers to get to know San Diego. If there’s a stabbing every third night in some neighborhood, then you’ll know enough to stay away from it. Start to form a picture of the city in your mind.”
“And after a month?”
“Then you start going out, but cautiously. You can go to the university, where you won’t stand out, but anyone likely to be looking for you will. You can go to the beach, if you stay close to groups of women your age. You can go to a movie, if it’s an early showing in the right part of town.” Jane glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go out and do some errands.”
Rita stood and started up the stairs. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“I said I was going out, not we. I’ll be back around dark.”
When Jane returned, Rita wasn’t visible, but Jane could hear music coming from the bedroom upstairs. Jane was putting away groceries when Rita appeared. “Hi,” she said.
Jane glanced at her and returned to her work. “Hi.”
“I hate this place.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because it’s not mine. I didn’t do it.”
Jane looked at the can in her hand, set it on the counter, and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed. “It’s always like this.”
“It is?”
“It’s not much fun to be a runner. First you have to give up whoever you were—your job, your friends, even your name. Then you have to hand over your freedom. You have to let a total stranger tell you what to do, how to act, where to live. Some of the people I’ve taken out over the years have felt worse about it than you do. They were quite a bit older, and were used to ordering other people around—making decisions for them. All I can tell you is what I told them.”
“What did you tell them?”
“It’s temporary. I’m temporary. I’m pretty good at one small, narrow function. I put big blank spaces between the place where you were last recognized and the place where you end up. I stay long enough to be sure it’s the right place, and to help you fit in quietly. Then, one morning, you’ll wake up and I’ll be packed and ready to leave. After that, you’ll be the one making all of the decisions. And you have a lot of advantages most of my other runners didn’t have.”
“Like what?”
“You’re young. You’re not a company president who’s going to start cleaning hotel rooms. You’re a hotel maid who might end up as a company president. That’s a distinction that’s bigger than you can imagine. And time will help.”
“What good is it?”
“You’re an eighteen-year-old who’s a late maturer. In a year, you’ll look very different. In five, you could be a different person. You’re just at the age when society starts paying attention to you—caring about your identity. You won’t start out with a long history—credit, work, education, and so on—but neither does any other eighteen-year- old girl. Your history will be as solid as most of theirs, even to an expert. In three years, nobody in the world will be able to pick it apart, because it won’t be fake. All of the things I made up will be backed up by a real record: real years of driving with that license and using those credit cards and paying the bills with that bank account.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“No,” said Jane. “I’ve thought of everything that has come up before, and everything that I know is likely to come up this time. That’s what I do. You can never think of everything. But you have a lot of advantages. The whole structure of society ensures that forty-year-old criminals don’t have much access to eighteen-year-old girls. You’re the perfect runner.”
“I don’t want to be the perfect runner. I don’t want to be a runner at all.”
“What do you want to be—dead?”
“No,” said Rita. She began to pace, agitated and angry. “I told you what I want. I want to be somebody who does things, not somebody who goes where people tell her, just to keep breathing. This is my chance to do something that matters, and I’m hiding.”
“What would you do?”
“Fight them.”
Jane stared at the floor and shook her head sadly. “I admire you. Really, I do. What you’re thinking isn’t wrong. It’s just not a strategy that can work this time. You can’t fight these people just by saying you’re not afraid and standing your ground. They would happily scoop you up and torture you to death while they asked you questions about Bernie that you can’t answer. If you were to fight them, here’s how you would go about it. We would drive to the local FBI office. There’s sure to be one in San Diego. You would tell them you want to testify against the people you met at Bernie’s. Let’s pretend you’re there now.”
“All right.”
“I’m the FBI agent. Tell me their names.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me the crimes you saw them commit.”
“Money laundering. Hiding money from the government, and not paying taxes on it.” Rita seemed proud of herself.
“What money? Did you see any money?”
“Well, no. But I saw them. And I know that’s what they were doing at Bernie’s.”
“So does the FBI, probably, but they didn’t catch them at it, and neither did you. Thank you very much for your help, Miss Shelford. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
“You’re saying they won’t believe me?”
“Do you remember the day I met you? I asked you a lot of questions that probably didn’t make much sense to you at the time. As soon as I heard the name Delfina, I was hoping that you had seen something or found some evidence. But you never saw him, and didn’t even know who he was. You’re not lying, but you’re not a witness to anything.”
“I was there when they broke in and searched Bernie’s house.”
“Eight or nine nameless men you’d never seen before were in the house, probably with a key. That’s not even good evidence of breaking and entering, even if they didn’t all have alibis, which they certainly will, if anybody ever asks.”
“They tried to keep me from leaving.”
“Not hard enough to make it a crime.”
“They said they were taking me to Mr. Delfina.”
“Which proves nothing, because they didn’t do it.” Jane sighed. “Enough. The only way to fight them is to let the cops do it for you. If you haven’t got any evidence, you run.”
“But you’re not running.”
“I plan to. I’m just delaying it long enough to take away some of their motivation for chasing us. The second the money is gone, I’ll be running as hard as anyone.”
Rita stared at her for a few seconds, then turned, went upstairs, and quietly closed the door.
After midnight, Jane went to the door and heard soft, even breathing. She quietly opened the door and walked to the side of Rita’s bed. On the sheet around Rita, arranged against her sides from her armpits to her thighs, were a clutter of objects.
There was a small coin purse that had been thickened by a few folded bills. There was a dog-eared, smudged envelope with a flap that had come open to reveal part of an official paper with scrollwork around it like birth certificates and diplomas had. The cheap blue windbreaker Rita had retrieved from the hotel in Niagara Falls was folded neatly and placed with the other things, and there was a photograph in a plastic frame. Jane knelt by the bed to look at it.
It was a picture of Rita at the age of about twelve, sitting on a white beach bordered by palm trees, and
