“What about you?”
“I’m going to watch the van and the parking lot and the front entrance to see if they go after you. If they don’t, I’ll be at the car before you are. If they do, I’ll meet you somewhere.”
“Where?”
Jane said, “I don’t know … Evansville, Indiana. I’ll be in front of the police station at nine o’clock tomorrow night.” She didn’t wait for him to raise an objection. “Wake her now,” she said, and hung up.
Jane turned away from the hotel and walked another block before she doubled back to the street where she had left the car. She walked briskly to it, bent to slip the keys beside the curb and under the right front tire, and kept going. There was nobody walking on the street, so she was confident that her move had not been seen. The keys would not be picked up by the headlights of a passing car, and the next pedestrian’s view would be blocked by the curb.
Jane turned the corner and kept walking until she was directly across from the hotel again. She stepped into the dark space between a small bookstore and a closed restaurant and stared at the van. She couldn’t see any heads in the windows, so she turned her attention to the other cars in the lot. There were definitely more of them tonight than there had been last night. She was sure that the hotel kitchen closed at ten, and the small bar off the lobby would not have seated more than a dozen people comfortably.
Then Jane saw the van move. It was a small, subtle motion, just a shifting of weight as someone in the back moved from one spot to another, but she was sure. Then she saw another movement in the shadows near the other end of the parking lot. A man stepped to the back of a parked car and opened the trunk. The light in the trunk didn’t go on. It looked like a new car, but the light didn’t work. The man took something out and stepped back into the darkness again.
Jane waited, and time seemed to stop. If Bernie and Rita could only slip out of the building without being seen, she could get them out of here. She stared along the front of the hotel, past the facade to the old-fashioned veranda outside the restaurant. She could see no sign of them. She let her eyes go unfocused and stared toward the garden, waiting for the shapes of Bernie and Rita to stand out from the dim tangle of bushes and twining vines to reassure her.
There was movement in the parking lot. Now there were three men standing near the van. Car doors opened across the lot, and three more men stepped out into the light. They seemed to be looking away from the hotel, in the direction of the big drugstore where Jane had made her telephone call. One of the men lifted his hand to his face, and she could see that there was something in it—a black rectangle. He was talking into a radio as he stared up the street.
A moment later, from that direction, she saw a vehicle appear. It was a big Suburban, and it was moving quickly up the street. It turned into the lot, paused for a second beside the group of men, then swung away and parked near the edge of the lot. There was some more discussion between the man with the radio and someone in the Suburban.
Jane looked anxiously toward the other end of the building. What was taking so long? Where were they? In a moment she detected a moving shadow, then another. They were walking along the outside of the building beside the restaurant.
Jane looked back at the parking lot. The man with the radio in his hand waved his right arm. Three men began to walk toward the side entrance to the hotel, near the Mayfair van. Jane sucked in a breath. In a couple of minutes, they would know the rooms were empty.
She looked at the far end of the building. Rita and Bernie had stopped. They seemed to be standing in the shadow of an arbor, waiting for something. “No,” Jane whispered. “Keep moving.”
Then Jane saw it was the Suburban. It had moved to the back of the lot, then around the service road toward the other side. It seemed to be parked there, right in Rita and Bernie’s path.
Jane turned her attention to the parking lot again. The man with the radio pointed, and the three men he had left began to walk along the outside of the building. Jane realized he must be sending them to watch the other exits. Rita and Bernie were already outside, but they were trapped in the garden. Those men were walking straight toward them.
Jane squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth. She felt a swelling of strong, explosive emotions—anger at these men who had come to shake an old man and a teenaged girl out of their sleep and drag them off, frustration at Bernie and Rita for being too slow, too tentative to survive, shame for not having been smart enough to have avoided this. She felt an overpowering sense of outrage as she pretended to make a decision. But while she was doing it, her hand was in her purse, feeling in the inner pocket for the second ignition key she had gotten when she had bought the Ford Explorer.
She found it, and she moved out from between the two buildings. She stepped across the sidewalk quickly, then off the curb. A strange image floated across her consciousness as she watched the men across the street in the parking lot, staring only at one another and talking into radios.
This was the way hundreds of Senecas had died, the way a Seneca was supposed to die. In the Old Time, raiding parties had consisted of three or four good friends, who had gone quietly and secretly to the territory of their enemies. They would appear out of the forest, do the enemy as much harm as they could, and then disappear into the forest again. They would run along the trail single file, sometimes not stopping for days at a time. But now and then, the strategy would fail. The time would come, somewhere in the wild country hundreds of miles from home, when they would be exhausted, slowing. The enemy warriors assembled to retaliate would be about to catch up. It was then that the strongest and bravest would suddenly stop. He would step back along the trail to a narrow spot, and begin to sing his death song as he waited for the pursuers.
He would fight them, trying to lay as many bodies at his feet as he could. The enemy would fight differently. They would try to wound him with arrows and thrown clubs, attack in waves and retreat, attempt to use up his strength so they could take him down and drag him back alive to be tormented.
Jane’s mind was so clear that she could read the minds of the men around the hotel. She knew what they would think before they did. When they noticed the lone woman hurrying across the street toward them, they turned away, hiding the radios and taking a few tentative steps back toward the darkness. She was still just a woman, someone whom they didn’t want to see their faces. In a moment she would go into the hotel, and they could resume their hunt. She could feel them looking at her when her foot went up on the curb in front of the parking lot. She moved quickly, knowing that each second gave them more time to sense her fear. She walked purposefully ahead, not letting her eyes turn in their direction. She knew that as soon as she made her move, she would transform herself from a low-level threat into prey.
She relished the few seconds while she prepared, savoring their alarm at her sudden interruption of their plans, and their eagerness to see her gone. She walked close to the Mayfair Products van, as though she was going into the hotel. She took a deep breath as she reached the front of the van, then suddenly slipped to the side, hidden for a moment by the bulk of the van. She took two running steps across the front of it, emerged in the next aisle, stuck the key into the door of the Explorer, swung the door open, leapt into the driver’s seat, and pounded the lock button.
She started the Explorer and backed up quickly, then pushed the accelerator nearly to the floor. She saw a man try to step in front of her, but she didn’t vary her course at all. He dived to the pavement to escape, and she thought she heard a bump as though the fender might have clipped his foot. She let the van roar out into the road too fast, then had to accelerate out of the wide turn to get out of the opposite lane.
Jane glanced in the rearview mirror to see men running for cars in the lot. She raised her speed, because she knew that if she didn’t, the big Suburban would try to block the road ahead of her.
She took one last look at the hotel as she turned right, then left. She searched the picture she carried with her in her mind. There had been men running back along the front of the hotel, away from the restaurant garden toward the parking lot. It had worked. In a few minutes the sound of cars would die in the distance, and Bernie and Rita would be able to stroll down the sidewalk to the car she had left them.
Jane felt a curious sense of freedom as she drove. It was after midnight, and she was on the edge of the city already. Ahead of her were hundreds of miles of flat country with good, fast roads. She looked at the gas gauge. The tank was full. If she did this right, she might be able to keep them following her for a long time. Bernie and Rita would have the new start that she had wanted to give them.
She drove fast, but she had no serious hope of outrunning them. She made four quick turns, then found herself moving south on Route 41. She looked back in her rearview mirror and saw three other cars make the turn
