Runner (20 page)

She looked out at the long, open road, now lined by large houses that had been built in the past forty years since Amherst had gone from farm country to suburb. There was nobody out there, not even a car parked where she could see it. During the winter a car left on
the road was liable to be hit by a snowplow, and even now that summer had come, people stuck to the habit of putting cars away in their garages. There was nobody out there. Her house, her husband, her identity were all safe.

Brent Ketter was on her mind. Even in the old days, she had known there was no question that if she kept being a guide, then one day she was going to walk down the wrong street in some distant city, or go into the wrong building. A face would be waiting for her, and it would acquire a sudden look of recognition, and then hatred. He would be someone she hadn't been thinking about, maybe hadn't thought about in years, but he would have no trouble remembering her. He would open fire before she could move. It had almost happened last night. If Ketter had seen her anywhere but in an airport, she would be dead.

She had taken many people out of terrible lives, and for each of them there was at least one person like this—a professional killer who had not collected, an abuser robbed of his victim, a rival who had been cheated out of his little victory. Each time Jane had gone out with a runner, she had made another chaser aware that she had beaten him. She had gotten through last night, but someday, one of them might be more alert, faster, luckier.

But she was home now. She had made a very brief, necessary return to the old life. Now Jane had returned to the life she had half-chosen and half-invented, the life with Carey. As she stared out the window at the familiar configuration of trees and rooftops arranged on the broad, flat country where she had always lived, everything looked the same as it had been before Christine. But nothing was the same as it had been. The world had a tension to it, an expectation like an indrawn breath.

Carey had told his colleagues that Jane had been referred to the ear clinic at UCLA for treatment of minor hearing damage she had
sustained in the bombing. She supposed that Carey was a better judge than she was about what would satisfy the curiosity of other doctors. She also supposed the nature of the imaginary injury would help. The problem had to be something that a doctor would shrug off as dull, and that didn't require Jane to look or behave differently. Carey had been at work every day since the bombing, telling the necessary lies. It made her feel peculiar—sad, grateful, regretful, guilty—that she had forced her husband, the man she had admired since she'd met him in college, to become a liar.

But the lies were over, at least for now. She would be home with Carey for the summer. She had put the pursuers far behind, and she was almost sure she had left them no way of tracing Christine. At first Jane had maintained a small hope that at least one of the six would be arrested, but after a couple of weeks passed with no news of arrests, she had given that up. People who made a living doing armed kidnappings seldom used their original names. Earlier tonight Carey had said, "I'm really sorry they weren't caught."

Jane said, "That's okay. They're not important anymore."

"They're not?"

"No. I would have loved it if they were caught, or if something bad had happened to them to make them give up. But time will do the same thing. I'm not trying to get revenge on these people for the bombing, or bring justice for the ones who got hurt, or make sure someone gets punished. I don't really know how to accomplish any of those things. All I took on was a pregnant girl who came to me for help. I did what I could, and if she does what I taught her, she'll be safe."

"Was that what it was—the fact that she was pregnant?"

Jane studied him. "You mean is that why I helped her?"

"Well, yes. It wouldn't be so strange. For years now you've thought about having a baby. And one night, here's a young woman
who's pregnant. After five years of staying out of sight, she's the one you decide to risk your life to help. I wondered if that had anything to do with your decision. Just now you said, 'All I took on was a pregnant girl—' "

"'...who came to me for help.' That's what I said."

"Right," said Carey. "But the pregnancy was the only quality you mentioned."

"I helped her because she's the first person to find her way to me needing my help. The pregnancy made it harder for her to run and harder for her to hide. It was only one of the reasons why she needed help."

Carey shrugged, and Jane could see he had noticed she was getting angry. "Fair enough," he said. "I didn't mean to accuse you of anything. I was just trying to understand you because I love you."

Jane closed her eyes for a few seconds, then said carefully, "You're right that what I want most right now is to have a baby. It bothers me a lot that it hasn't happened. We both know that. But what made me take Christine away wasn't a sudden wave of female hormones at the sight of a pregnant woman, or some kind of sentimental craziness brought on by infertility. What I did—putting her out of the way of the people who were after her—was the only thing I could do. I didn't look for her, or tell anyone I was available or anything. I'm not going back to making people disappear."

"Why not? You just did."

"Because I've changed. The world has changed. When I started I was twenty, and running was easy. Whether you get caught or not depends on who's searching for you. In the old days, it was always just creeps, or once in a while somebody who was willing to kill someone for money. Now the whole government is looking for people with false identities, even for people who have blanks in their
histories. Everybody's financial information is passed from one computer to another all day and all night. This country is a harder place to move people around."

"So you're not going to do it again?"

"I can't say that, Carey. I can say it's not practical anymore. There used to be holes in the system, and I was keeping people alive by sneaking through them. Now there are fewer holes. But if Christine Monahan came to me tomorrow, I would have to try."

Jane had said it, and the conversation had ended, and within a few minutes, the tension between them began to fade. What they had been talking about was painful to her, but after all, it was simply that she loved him and wanted to have his baby. He loved her, and wanted her to be safe and happy and understood.

Jane walked back to the bedroom in the dark, then lay on the bed beside him and watched his chest rising and falling peacefully. This was the place where she had always wanted to be. Maybe the growing sense that something was changing, that something was coming near, was just her frayed nerves from the trip home.

Richard Beale was in his office with the door open, staring out over his empty desk, across the lobby. This had been his father's office originally, and Andy Beale considered windows a distraction and a threat to privacy. But with the office door open Richard could look across the lobby with its glass walls opening onto the sunny courtyard. In the courtyard was a captive garden full of green tropical plants—sago palms, huge bromeliads, a few large ficus trees and one exotic eucalyptus with bark that looked like human skin. The receptionist's desk was right in front of the glass wall, so the sunlight always came in above and behind her and made her glow like an angel. Richard thought the view probably had been partly responsible for his troubles with Christine Monahan, and with a few of her predecessors.

Receptionists were beautiful. They simply were, just as bouncers at clubs were big and muscular. The physical attributes were part of the job. No skill or training, no other quality would do. The job of a bouncer wasn't to escort the unruly out of the bar and kick the
shit out of them. The job was to scare the potentially unruly out of that train of thought by looking big and fierce. An adequate receptionist was at least pretty. The better she looked, the more substantial and respectable she made the company seem, because beauty was a commodity like anything else on the planet. Straight white teeth, delicate features, shining hair, a thin waist cost extra money, just as comfortable, well-designed waiting room furniture cost more than bad furniture.

Richard's father, Andy Beale, had often hired women who had been in beauty pageants. They had all learned to dress conservatively, walk gracefully in high heels, speak pleasantly, and produce convincing smiles. He had only been interested in those young women who had risen to become either queen of something or runners-up—what he referred to as "win, place, or show"—because they were the ones who had learned the most and tried the hardest. He was quite open about it, too, because the pageants all claimed loudly that they were about character, leadership, and scholarly ability.

The only time he'd had the threat of a lawsuit was an incident when he had been taken by surprise early in the morning. He had come into the building right at opening time and found that the receptionist he had hired only a week before had gotten her hair cut short. Andy Beale had let his disappointment slip out. "I hired you for your hair, damn it. That long, shiny black hair was the one thing that put you ahead of three other applicants."

Andy Beale had made himself into a multimillionaire because he was able to observe human behavior accurately. He had spent forty years noticing that when women cut their hair short, other women would say it was "cute" or "smart" or some such thing, but he had never, in any of the thousand times when he'd seen it, heard anything approaching approval by any male. He also had developed a
clear-eyed view of the competitive nature of women. He knew that when one woman said to another that her hairstyle was "smart," she meant the opposite. The pleasure that could be heard in the woman's voice was delight over the temporary downfall of a rival.

He had stepped inside Richard's office and explained the true dimensions of the girl's mistake. Not only had she diminished her attraction for the Beale family's real estate customers, lenders, clients, and tenants, most of whom were male, she had also persuaded Andy Beale that she did not have the practical, commonsense variety of intelligence that he knew was necessary for success in business. He told Richard, "I had hopes for her, but no more. She was a contest winner, too. Most of these pageant winners are street fighters. We've got eight of them selling condos in that Phoenix development right now. They would never handicap themselves like that. I can't get rid of her, but I want her moved. Have her answer the general company phone number from a cubicle in the big office down the hall. That's all she'll see of this company."

A few weeks later, while the former receptionist was sitting near the back of the building answering phone calls in her cubicle, her lawyer paid Andy Beale a visit. Andy had not threatened to fire the girl, and she had accurately reported that to her lawyer, much to the lawyer's disappointment. But the lawyer felt that she deserved some sort of compensation in exchange for not filing a complaint. Andy Beale declined to pay off, and within a month, the woman resigned.

The reception area became a problem for Richard as soon as his father began to relinquish the daily operation of the business to him. The green plants and the light beyond the glass walls of the lobby made the reception area more inviting than the windowless office his father had insisted he take. As soon as he stepped out there for relief, the sight of the receptionist would distract him. His father
never knew it, but by now Richard had caused half a dozen receptionists to quit. Richard had dated three of them, including a married woman whose husband caught her coming out of a hotel with Richard on the fifth date, one who broke up with Richard and quit on the second date, and one who threatened to charge him with sexual assault on the morning after their first date. A couple of them had refused to go out with Richard at all, and he had bothered them so often that they had begun circulating their résumés within days after accepting the job.

There had also been the case of Tracy Williamson. She had given Richard a slow case of surprise. He had not been careful. She had told him on the second date that she was on the pill, and so he had left birth control to her. But after only a few more weeks, he had realized that his firm belief in her efficiency and dependability had been induced by the way she looked in her glasses. She wore very flattering business suits to work—little tight skirts with matching jackets—and she had glasses with designer frames in about five colors to match the suits. She always looked put-together and organized. The idea that a girl like her would forget to refill her prescription for birth control pills and then forget that she had forgotten simply never occurred to Richard until he began to notice the work she had been doing at the office. There were messages she had forgotten to write down, or written down and given to the wrong rental agent or realtor. There were appointments written in Richard's calendar on the right day of the wrong month. There were letters and bills she had completed so late she'd had to take them out to mail instead of leaving them for the regular pickup, only to find them in her purse or her car a week later. She had gone out with the letters and forgotten why she was out, so she would salvage the trip by going to lunch or shopping.

When he realized how forgetful and disorganized she was, Richard sat her down in his office, locked the door, and tried to have a serious conversation with her about whether or not she had actually been taking the pills. His first attempt was unsuccessful, because when they had gone in and locked the door the other times, it had been so they could have sex in the windowless office during the day, something that they both relished. Richard allowed the click of the bolt in the doorjamb to trigger the impulse again. But the second time, she initiated the conversation. She walked into his office, locked the door, and told him she was pregnant.

Richard offered to pay for her abortion, but she had no interest in that. She wanted Richard to marry her. He refused, she insisted. She threatened to file a paternity suit. Richard knew that he couldn't stand a lawsuit the way his father could. Tracy would demand, and probably win, full support for her and the baby for eighteen years. It was a sum that would be impossible to conceal from his parents. Richard didn't have any serious money of his own. What he had amounted to a house and car that belonged to his parents' company and a pocket full of spending money, essentially a continuation of the allowance he had received as a child.