Two years ago, she had been taking a twelve-year-old boy out of Ohio where two sets of cousins who had let him stay in foster homes all his life had learned he had an inheritance coming. They had put a description of the car on television. She had run the car through a one-hour painting shop and had them put the two-hundred-dollar special on it. Clifford had sometimes thought to mention it during subsequent negotiations.
"Five hundred?" she exclaimed. "You misunderstood. I don’t want to own it. How about two hundred?"
"Four-fifty," he muttered at the television. "It’s a T-bird. It’s loaded."
"Two and a half, and I won’t play with the power seats."
"Hasn’t got them."
"And you said it was loaded?"
"Three-fifty, and I throw in a full tank."
"It’s already on full if it’s sitting back there. You’re afraid it’ll get water vapor in the tank. Three hundred, and I’ll forget about what you owe me for the paint job on the other one."
"Three twenty-five and I’ll take back the rental you got parked out there."
"Done," she said, and handed him a check she had already written.
He looked at the amount and said, "It’s always an education to do business with you, Janie."
"Yeah," she said. "Except I always pay the tuition."
He handed her a ring with two keys on it. "Later, Janie."
"Later," she said, and walked out onto the pavement. She kept going around to the back of the building and found the car sitting on the cracked cement foundation of an old, vanished building that Cliff used as a parking lot. The Ford wasn’t bad to begin with, and when she started it she could hear and feel that he must have just tuned the engine. She let it idle and walked back around to find Felker standing beside the rented car, leaning on the door.
As they got in, she said quietly, "It’s better at this stage of the trip not to stand around under a light unless you have to."
"Why? Did you see somebody?" He checked his impulse to whirl and look behind him.
"I don’t know," she said. "At least fifty cars have gone by here since we stopped, but I don’t know who I’m looking for. They do."
She drove around to the back of the building, where the other car sat running. "Pull that one out so I can put this one in its place."
He got in behind the wheel of the Ford and pulled it out, waited for Jane to stop, and lifted their two bags out of her car, then opened the door of the Ford to set them in.
Jane said, "It’s cash, isn’t it?"
He shrugged. "Well, yeah. I didn’t think I’d be in a position to cash a check or something."
"Put it in the trunk. It won’t be any safer two feet closer to you on the back seat."
He opened the trunk and put the two bags inside, then started to close it, but hesitated. "I don’t want to keep guessing wrong. Is it all right to keep the gun up front with us?"
She was at the rear of the rented car, opening the trunk. She said, "It’s fine with me. Keep the trunk open." When she slammed the trunk and came around to the new car, she was carrying a backpack and a short-barreled shotgun. She put them in beside the bags.
"You still want me to drive?" he asked.
"If you don’t mind. People always take a second look if the woman is driving. It looks like the man is drunk or something." She set the keys on the hood of the rented car and got in beside Felker.
"Drive straight north again. When you come to the intersection with Ridge Road, take a right."
He bumped the car slowly around Clifford’s building and glanced past it to gauge the speed and distance of the next set of headlights coming toward them. She saw that his eyes focused on her for a second before he stepped on the gas.
"What’s wrong?" she said.
"It’s typical Harry. He didn’t bother to tell me what you looked like."
"Why? What do I look like?"
He shrugged. "Well, you don’t look like a bodyguard."
She regretted having asked that way, as though she wanted him to tell her she was pretty. She regretted saying anything at all. She should have ignored it. She hadn’t been given enough time to prepare for that too, the special strain of traveling with a man who wasn’t too old and wasn’t too young and had gotten used to the fact that most of the attention he had given women was welcome. She had to keep him thinking in another way, so she pretended to misunderstand, as though the whole idea had never entered her head. "That’s the way it’s done," she said. "You’ve got to get used to thinking one way and looking another way. Turn right at that light up there."
He made the turn and accelerated onto the eastbound highway. Then he looked at her again. "It’s a beautiful disguise." He seemed to realize he had gone too far. "Very smart."
"Yours has got to be better. It has to come from inside your head. When was the last time you were afraid for your life?"
"That’s easy," he said. "When I was a cop."
"Cops are dogs. Try to think in rabbit."
"What?"
She said it carefully, so he would understand. ’’This is like dogs chasing a rabbit. When the rabbit wins, he doesn’t get to kill the dogs and eat them. He doesn’t get to be a dog. He just gets to keep being a rabbit."
He opened his shirt and held out the pistol. "You mean rabbits don’t need one of these."
"It’s an asset if you think of it as a last resort. Just don’t imagine that a shoot-out with the people who are looking for us is going to help you. Once anybody has discharged a firearm, sooner or later everybody left standing has to talk to the police."
"And we can’t talk to the police."
"A few days in a jail cell won’t hurt me. I’ve done it before. But if these people are any of the things you think they are, then you can’t." She paused for a moment, then said, "Or any of the people you haven’t thought of yet."
"What people?"
"I don’t know."
"Why aren’t you saying it straight out? What is it?"
"Whoever it is wants you killed in jail before a trial. Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it?"
He answered too quickly: "No."
"So you have thought of it."
"I’ve thought of everything. I’ve heard those stories too, but not from anybody who would know. And not in St. Louis."
"The contract on you is being circulated in prisons. Money doesn’t do a lifer much good. Other things do."
"It’s not cops."
"Nobody seems to be afraid that a prisoner who hears about it will take it to the authorities. It does make you wonder."
He was irritated now. "I wasn’t a dirty cop who knew things about other dirty cops. I did my job until the day I quit, and when I left, as far as I know, everybody else did his job too." He simmered for a few minutes while she waited in silence. Then he said quietly, "I’m sorry. I just... my life just kind of blew up. It’s taken a few days to get used to the idea that the last five years, when I was an accountant, were a waste. I was probably just being set up. I’m ready to give up everything I ever was, but I’m not ready to decide that everything I’ve ever done was worthless. Does that make sense?"
"Of course it does," she said. She had gone as far as she could for the moment. Some of the rabbits took to it instantly because they had been hiding and ducking all of their lives. Some took longer.
As they drove along Ridge Road, the dense thickets of bright electric lights along the river faded and threw no illumination in front of them. Ridge Road had been laid out on the northern branch of the Waagwenneyu, the great central trail of the Iroquois that ran from the Hudson to the Niagara. The north branch had been placed just below Lake Ontario on the long, flat escarpment that was the prehistoric edge of the lake.
As she looked out into the darkness past the little pool of light that the headlamps threw, she could feel the Waagwenneyu under them, just below the pavement. In the dark, the road sliced through the middle of the property of some rich guy who thought of himself as a country gentleman. Her view was blocked by a dense second-growth of trees that the owner’s farmer ancestor must have left there to protect his crops from the wind. The thick trunks presented themselves one after the other and swept by, and the overarching branches fifty feet above nearly touched each other in the middle, and looking up at them put Jane a few inches lower, below the pavement on the Waagwenneyu. The path was mostly straight, winding here and there to avoid a thick tree or a muddy depression. It was narrow, only eighteen inches wide, but deep—sometimes worn a foot below the surface by hundreds of years of moccasins. This was the branch of the trail that took the Seneca from the Genesee valley and the Finger Lakes northwest into Canada. The other branch was now Main Street in Buffalo, and it ran to the shore of Lake Erie and continued along it into Ohio and beyond. Those were the paths to war.