"And I’m sorry about Harry," said the woman.
"Thanks." She hung up and took three deep breaths. What now? Could she wait until she got home to call the airlines? Yes. She had to go home anyway, and it would be quicker because she could pack while she was talking. She hurried to her car, started it, and drove. The ripe cantaloupe in the back seat smelled like garbage, so strong it made her feel queasy. She rolled down her window and drove faster.
She pulled into her driveway too fast and heard a bag fall over and some cans rolling around on the floor. She ran into the house, took the steps three at a time to the second floor, and looked at the answering machine. The message light wasn’t blinking, and the counter still said zero.
Quickly, she looked up the airlines section of the Yellow Pages and started at the top, with American Airlines. "When is the first flight out of Buffalo that will get me to Medford, Oregon?" There was a flight to Chicago, then Portland, with a hop down to Medford/ Jackson County airport that would take until 7:00 A.M. Pacific time.
As she accepted her reservation, she heard the door-bell ringing downstairs. She nearly screamed in frustration, but clenched her teeth, read off her credit card number, and waited until she had heard the woman distinctly say, "You’re confirmed," before she relinquished the telephone.
She ran down the stairs and flung the door open. It was Jake. "Sorry, Jake, but I’ve got to leave in a minute."
"That’s why I’m here," he said. He stepped in, and she had to fight an impulse to give him a hard push in the chest and slam the door.
Instead, she pivoted and hurried up the stairs. "I’ve got to pack." She was already thinking about what to take. There was no good way to bring a firearm aboard an airplane. It would have to be the matching manicure kit and jewelry box and makeup kit. There was a thick, heavy gold chain in the jewelry box that clasped to two screw-on handles of the hairbrushes, and those screwed into two lead-filled lipstick tubes. When the parts were assembled that way she had two long, weighted handles connected by a chain, and that made a very ugly set of nunchaku. There was also a big nail file with an ivory handle and a blade that was stainless steel and sharpened like a razor.
She was vaguely aware that Jake was following her upstairs. "I saw you roar in, so I figured you planned to leave right away. He’s not safe after all, is he?"
"Right," she snapped, and wondered instantly why she had let that out. The frustration was driving her to madness.
"Have you warned him?"
"I tried, but I don’t know if he got the message or—" Saying it out loud was not what she wanted to do, so she didn’t. "I’ve got to go there."
"I’ll go with you," he said. "I’ll be ready before you are."
"No."
"I saw those men. Did you?"
"Yes." Then she admitted, "Not close."
"I did. I’d know them anywhere. And if they followed you to where he is, they must have seen you. They didn’t see me."
"Look," she said. "This is crazy. Why am I arguing with you? It’s none of your business. I’m going, you’re not."
He said, "I know you’re wishing I’d fall in a hole. But I can see them coming and you can’t. I can even report them to the police and you can’t, or you would have already. They don’t know me, but they know you, and no matter how good you are or how smart or how young, you can’t be in two places at the same time and watch your own back. If you’re going because you think you have to save that fellow’s life, then you ought to think in practical terms and take the help that’s available. You think about that, and I’ll be waiting for you."
He walked off down the stairs and Jane kept packing. It was awful. Why she had ever admitted it, told this old man her secret, she couldn’t imagine now. But as she worked, she knew she was denying things she had no right to dismiss. There was no getting around the fact that Jake was the only one who could recognize the four men.
She closed the suitcase and ran downstairs. She started to activate the alarm system, then changed her mind and turned it off. If John came here, he would try to break in again.
She hurried to the car, and there was Jake sitting in the passenger seat with a sportcoat on and his suitcase lying on the back seat. She got in beside him. "Please listen," she said. "This isn’t the Rowland boys throwing Dave Dormont into Ellicott Creek. John and I both knew a nice, gentle man named Harry. He and John helped each other at different times. I took them both to another nice man named Lewis Feng, who helped them to hide. Today Lew Feng is dead. Harry is dead. John may be dead. If those men think you’re a problem, you’ll be dead."
"I’m old," he said, "but I’m not feebleminded. I know what I’m doing. I’m just waiting to see if you do."
She started the engine and backed out of the driveway. "Just don’t talk," she said quietly. "I’ve got to think."
19
Jane Whitefield sat in the airplane seat and stared out the double pane of glass into the darkness. She had killed Harry. She just had not made the right connections. When she forced herself to look at John Felker objectively, he was a nobody, just an ex-policeman, no different from thousands of others, content doing some dull job because he’d had enough excitement to last the rest of his life.
He had assumed that somebody had chosen him because he had once been a cop. Every cop has a lot of enemies who are criminals, and they don’t retire just because he does. And being an ex-cop who went to night school instead of getting a Harvard M.B.A. made him the sort of outsider who could easily be made to take a fall in a big accounting firm. Either explanation had sounded plausible, and she had accepted his assumption without really examining it.
What made John special enough to be worth some gigantic paranoid’s nightmare of a conspiracy? She had been stupid. John could be excused for assuming that his enemies were his own, because no human being could be expected to imagine that when his life was destroyed, that wasn’t the main event. Jane couldn’t be excused. She stated it to herself: Jane is presented with an ordinary guy who tells her that one day, without warning, enormous resources have been brought into play by extremely cunning enemies he can’t even identify, all designed to destroy his ordinary life, and the one who warns him is one of the most wanted fugitives in the world. Who are these people really after? Just the mention of Harry’s name should have been enough to make it obvious to her.
She had even said it that night. Why would they spread the word all over the prison system so just about everybody in the whole country who wasn’t eligible for jury duty would know? That was no way to kill an ex-cop. It was a way to be sure he heard he was in a kind of danger he couldn’t hope to fight off. They had wanted to get him running.
Then the four men had followed John’s bus all the way from St. Louis to Buffalo. If they had wanted to kill him, surely they could have found some way before he got to Deganawida. They hadn’t wanted to kill him. They just wanted to see where he went.
Later that night, when they had come upon the abandoned car on Ridge Road, they had pulled their guns. What were they trying to do—kill him? No. If they had wanted to do that, they could have stood around the car and fired through the doors. They were trying to capture him. When she had seen that they weren’t going to shoot, for an instant she had thought they might even be cops.
John had made one mistake, but it hadn’t been the one he thought. It was that one night, years ago, he had decided that the three men arrested with Harry had not been after him because of Cappadocia. That had to be the mistake, because nobody but those three men would have known that he had ever met Harry. Why had he assumed that a man who was running from one problem had gotten attacked for something unrelated? Because that was what Harry had told him. If only he had known Harry better, things would be different now.