"Not bad, eh" he said. "No blood spatter all over, and only one shot in case one of the neighbors came home. They hear one shot and they stop what they're doing for a second, listening. If they don't hear another one, they figure it was nothing-a firecracker, a backfire, a door slam. A squirrel fell on their roof."
"Yeah, and when he hit the shingles, his gun went off," Gorman said.
Wylie looked out the front window, craned his neck to see up and down the street. "Let's go. We'd better get started." He opened the door, and the three men walked across the street to their car. "We've got a long drive ahead of us."
7.
Shelby was waiting for Jane when she returned to the hotel room. She stepped inside and closed, locked, bolted, and chained the door. She smiled. "There's some good news." "What"
"Your sister listened to what I told her. She left her house in Texas, and drove to Ithaca, New York, to wait this out."
"Thank God." His legs seemed to give out and deposit him on the bed. "Is she going to meet us here"
"I'm afraid not," she said. "If she gets on an airplane, the people who are after you might be able to trace her, and the police certainly will. We'll have to drive up there and get her."
"When do we leave"
"I drove here from Las Vegas for most of the night. When I wake up, we'll talk some more."
She took the spare pillow from the closet shelf, lay on the couch, and slept. When Jim Shelby saw the process, he was intrigued. She seemed to move from a state of hyper-awareness to deep sleep in less than a minute. He had found the couch reasonably comfortable, but she had no blanket, and she didn't undress or make any other preparations. This was something he had noticed about her from the beginning. She had control over herself. Her movements were always economical, never aimless or nervous. When she looked at anything-a person, a building-she seemed to pick out instantly the part that was important. When she had looked at the crowd at the courthouse, she had instantly separated the bystanders from the enemies, and both from the police, and had begun to act before anyone else. Her mind was always focused-looking, thinking, noticing.
He intuited that part of the reason she allowed herself to sleep at the moment was that he was here to watch over her. He knew that she had no illusion that while he was still recovering from a knife in the back he could protect her from an intruder, but he could delay one, and he would fight hard enough to make a lot of noise. He understood what she was feeling, and he knew that what she wanted was for him to find something to do that wasn't noisy, look out the window occasionally to check for the men who had caught her in Los Angeles, and stay with her.
He lay on the bed reading the magazines the hotel had left on the coffee table. They were almost entirely ads for women's clothes and jewelry, and for the restaurants where women could wear them. He still couldn't quite imagine ever again having money to spend on a woman, but for now being out of prison was enough. Every surface in the prison was designed to be harder and rougher than a man's bones and skin. It was as though the authorities wanted prisoners to see how small and weak they really were. It was as ugly as they could make it without letting on that they were trying-light green paint over uneven, chipped surfaces of walls and barred windows. Ugly brushed concrete floors.
He dozed at some point. He didn't remember a last impression. The magazine was at his side, his fingers still on it. The woman was across the room, sitting in one of the chairs from the small, round table and staring out the window. He sat up. "How long have you been awake"
"A half hour or so."
"I'm sorry to make you wait. I didn't expect to fall asleep."
"It's fine. Now that I've rested a little, I've been able to think."
"There's something I've been wondering about," he said. "When you came to the prison, and even at the courthouse, you were Kristen Alvarez. I assume that isn't who you are."
"No, I'm not Kristen Alvarez. I just borrowed the name of a real lawyer."
"Now that we're out of the courthouse, do you mind telling me your name"
"That depends," she said. "Whenever I take on a runner, I've got to know certain things that are dangerous to you-your new name, your address. But I will die before I reveal them. If I tell you my secrets, will you do the same for me Will you die before you'll tell anyone else what I tell you"
He looked at her for a moment. She was leaning back on two legs of the chair, both feet resting on the sill.
He said, "The knife I got in my back was just the first attempt. I would be dead by now if you hadn't taken me out. I owe you a life already."
She met his eyes and nodded. "Jane Whitefield."
"Pleased to meet you."
"I'm glad you're pleased, because we'll be spending some time together."
"We will"
"There are tricks to changing who you are and living as a new person. I've got to start getting you ready to live a nice, quiet life somewhere as John Robert Leland. It takes preparation to do it well, but we didn't have time for that."
"Are you warning me that I'll get caught if I try to do this myself"
She looked at him thoughtfully. "Not getting caught is partly luck, partly attitude, and partly premeditation. But it depends mostly on who's looking and how hard. There are something like twelve million illegal aliens in this country right now. Nobody finds them because nobody's looking. Men convicted of murders are on the other end of the spectrum. Lots of people are searching, and they tend to be the last people you'd want after you-experienced homicide detectives, federal and state agencies, and all the miscellaneous invisible security companies that protect credit cards, give people ratings, make sure nobody runs out on debts."
"What do I do-stay in this room"
"We'll try to stay invisible as long as we can, but not here. Most people called escapees have walked away from work-release programs. The ones who actually break out are usually caught within hours a few miles from the prison. You've already lasted longer than most. But if you stay in a hotel too long, the staff people get curious about you because you're not behaving like an ordinary customer. You have to either give them an explanation that satisfies them and doesn't raise other questions, or go. We need to pick up your sister, so we'll leave as soon as we're ready to travel."
"What do we do"
"First we work on our appearance."
"You mean change"
"There are lots of things that help. The clothes I left in the car for you at the courthouse were all expensive and neat-tailored pants, dress shirts, sport coats, a couple of good ties in subdued patterns. When people picture an escaped convict, they think of a guy with a three-day growth of beard, dirty, torn clothes, and a haunted expression. So we play against that expectation. You have short hair, and we can't lengthen it, but we can dye it. Your hair is blond, and most of the men in the country have brown hair. You can't shave it, because a shaved head practically screams prison. We want the observer's mind to see you and automatically think, `Respectable, prosperous.'"
"What if somebody has seen my picture"
"People are far more likely to see someone who looks a bit like you, but isn't, and turn him in. Whenever there's a famous fugitive, the police get thousands of calls. What we want to do is make sure none of them is about you. We make people's expectations censor their vision."
"That works"
"More often than not. The first part of the game is adding one layer after another of changes, all designed to make you less like you and less like a convict. The second is making a plan for the day when something goes wrong."
"If the police find me, then they'll come for me in a way that won't let me just talk my way out of it."