Runner

'It's big. And impersonal.'

'Two wonderful qualities that we really want right now.'

'I was thinking of maybe a small, private kind of place where everybody knows me and stuff.'

'I know this seems as though it ought to be about your preferences, but it isn't. When you're having a baby, you've got to prepare for the possibility that things are not going to go smoothly. If they don't, the place you want to be is a big urban hospital with lots of really good surgeons and pediatricians and specialists and fancy equipment and superbly trained staff. We'll go in and interview Dr. Molinari. If you don't love him, we'll keep looking.'

Jane drove up Harvard Street until she came to the parking structure for the hospital. They parked and walked to the main building, then rode the elevator up with a pretty woman about thirty years old who looked about six months pregnant. The woman said to Linda, 'When are you due?'

Linda shrugged. 'Early fall. Late September, early October.'

The woman said, 'Are you with Dr. Kwan?'

'Molinari.'

Jane stood with a fixed smile on her face. The woman craned her neck to look across her at Linda as though she were some obstacle like a piece of furniture. Even the way the woman held herself when she spoke, leaning close to Linda, made it clear she was speaking only to Linda. The elevator door opened, and Jane led the way down the hall to Dr. Molinari's office.

Inside the waiting room, Jane saw that there were five women in various stages of pregnancy waiting for Dr. Molinari or one of his partners. While Jane waited, she found herself studying them, wondering what made it so easy for them to conceive, when it didn't seem to be possible for her. Had she simply waited too long? That didn't seem to be it. Two of them were about Linda's age, but the other three looked older than Jane. As the nurse came to the doorway and called them, one by one, to go back to the examining rooms with her, Jane watched them and compared her body to theirs. Maybe it was all the exercise she had done for the past twenty years, the running and martial arts. Maybe the stress on her body had stimulated some receptor, released some unnoticed chemical, that told the body not to reproduce. There were all of those teenaged gymnasts who never got their periods. Maybe—

'Linda Welles?'

After they had met with Dr. Molinari, Linda Welles decided he was the one. She officially selected him as her doctor, and made her first set of appointments.

When they got to the car, Linda said, 'Now we're done with doctors for today. Can you show me some self- defense moves?'

Jane nodded. 'I'll show you something that will work for you.' Jane drove them out of the city into the nearly flat, empty land to the north. When they had driven for about an hour, she slowed down, looking for a particular spot. Finally, she turned off the road and guided the car along a barely visible unpaved road consisting of a pair of tire tracks winding through a forest of second-growth trees. She stopped in a place that looked as though it had been used as a turnaround. 'This ought to be the right sort of place.'

'For what?'

Jane pulled the car around so it was facing out again, then turned off the engine. She picked up her purse, opened it, and took out a small snub-nosed revolver.

Linda gasped, 'Oh, my God. A gun?'

Jane swung out the cylinder, showed Linda that it was empty, and closed it again.

'Where did it come from?'

'When we stopped at the house in Amherst, this is one of the things I picked up. When I go, I'll leave it with you. It's a tricky thing to have a gun in the house at the best of times. When you expect to have a curious baby crawling around, it definitely has to be both locked up and well hidden. I have mixed feelings about doing this, but I don't see any other way for you to be safe.'

'You don't? I thought you would teach me something from martial arts.'

'You're pregnant. Even if you weren't, it takes years of practice to learn enough to do you any good at all. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all the practice does for a woman is to make her think she can stand her ground against some male attacker who takes her apart in a second. This works.'

'But I've never even fired a gun. And I heard experts on TV say having one is more dangerous than not having one.'

'The only experts whose opinions mean much are cops. Every cop in the country has one strapped to him right this minute.'

Christine looked at the gun warily. 'What do I do with it?'

'We'll buy you a purse that has a center compartment, and you'll keep it there, where you can reach it instantly, but you can also open the other parts of your purse without showing it.'

'But how do I use it?'

'That's why we drove way out here. Come on.' Jane got out of the car and set off into the woods. 'This used to be a farm once. Now it's part of a huge piece of land that's been put together. The Manitou Paper Company owns all of it. Nobody lives around here anymore.'

When they had walked far into the woods, they came to a clearing. It looked like a meadow, but the ground was too soft and swampy to walk on. 'Stay here.' Jane skirted the meadow, walking among the exposed roots of trees. She picked a tree twenty-five feet from Linda, took a white handkerchief from her purse, and hung it on a pair of thorny twigs. Then she made her way back.

Jane stood beside Linda, and opened the cylinder of the gun. 'Notice how I open the cylinder. The barrel is away from us, pointed down at the dirt. I don't have a finger inside the trigger guard.'

She took a box of bullets out of her purse. 'Here. Hold this. It's .38 caliber ammunition. It's what police used to use in most towns until nine millimeter automatics became popular. This load is a little hotter than I would have chosen for you, but people send things to me with the idea that I'll be the one to use them. If you ever fire at anybody, you'll wish it were more powerful.' Jane began to load the gun.

'If I lose it or something, will the police trace it to you?'

'No. This one was part of the inventory of a gun dealer who died. Before his death was reported, his suppliers were all paid in full, and a lot of guns and the records that came with them disappeared mysteriously. If somebody asks you, this one was in a trunk you bought at a garage sale in Oregon.'

Jane closed the cylinder, stepped to the side, and aimed the gun with a two-hand stance. 'This is probably the easiest for you. Shooting a pistol is like pointing a finger. Holding it with two hands doesn't change that. You point, line up the sights on the target. You don't close one eye. Then you squeeze the trigger so the barrel doesn't get dragged off target. This is a double action, so pulling the trigger cocks and fires.' She handed Linda the gun. 'Do what I did, but don't pull the trigger.'

Linda assumed a stance, and Jane adjusted her limbs to make it right. 'Your arms should be out ahead a bit more, and your knees flexed, not locked. If you're aiming that at somebody, he's going to want to be moving, so you may have to move, too. Open your other eye, Linda.'

'Sorry.'

'You're fighting for your life. You can't afford to lose depth perception or peripheral vision. You're not going to be firing at something a hundred feet away. You'll be fifteen at the outside.'

'It feels weird to me.'

'It won't if you get used to doing it right. Now, some preparation. It's going to be much louder than you expect. There will be a bit of a kick that will make the gun jump back a little, and the natural tendency is for the barrel to jerk upward. Be ready for it by keeping a good, firm grip on it so you don't drop it. Instead, you want to bring it back down to aim again. Can you remember all that?'

'I think so.'

'Then hand me the gun, but keep it aimed downrange.' Jane took the gun. Then she handed Linda a set of earplugs. 'I picked these up for us at the drugstore. The best would have been to get real ear protectors that look like earphones, but these will do.' She put hers into her ears and waited for Linda. 'Now I'm going to fire one round, so you can see what I mean.'

She aimed and there was a sharp bang, and the handkerchief jumped.

'You were right. That was loud.'

'It's worse in an enclosed space. Your turn.'