Runner (23 page)

She had asked for a luxury car, and when she got to the rental area she found a Cadillac waiting for her. She had decided she wanted something big and overpowered for the drive up the coast. Lompoc was about an hour north of Santa Barbara, and if something went wrong she didn't want to be easy to outrun or bump off the road. She got into the car and drove out Sandspit Road to Ward Memorial Boulevard, a straight strip of concrete over the protected wetland at Goleta Beach, then turned onto Interstate 101 heading north away from Santa Barbara. After a few minutes, when the traffic thinned and cars were far apart, she pulled off the blond wig and shook out her hair.

She looked in the rearview mirror at the mountains that rose abruptly like a wall above Santa Barbara. She had always liked Santa Barbara in the old days because it was beautiful and warm, a city of white buildings with red tile roofs built between a mountain range and a white sand beach. Now it had become a city of ghosts.

Jane could remember the night when she had broken into the apartment on Ocean View Avenue where Harry Kemple had been living for years as Harry Shaw, the name she had given him. Before she got there, the police had already spent hours in Harry's place, and they had left greasy black fingerprint dust all over the windows, the doorknobs, the smooth surface of the table in the kitchen. Harry's body had been taken away, but there was a huge reddish brown stain in the dirty shag carpet where Harry had bled out after his throat was cut. His heart must have taken a long time to stop, to pump out that much blood.

Harry was the only runner Jane had ever had who had been caught, and he had died because of her. His killer had fooled her into believing he was a friend of Harry's who needed help, so she
had brought him to Vancouver to the shop of Lewis Feng, the man who had made Harry's identification papers. Days later, when Jane had learned Lewis Feng was dead, she had rushed to reach Harry, but she arrived too late. Since then, Harry Kemple had sometimes visited Jane in her dreams.

Santa Barbara wasn't the best place for Jane to stay the night, anyway. It was too close to Los Angeles, and it had become crowded over the past few years. There were too many people from other places on the street, and any of them might be one of the people who hated her, and might see her face before she saw theirs. The best place to stop would be one of the smaller towns to the north—Buellton, or Solvang, or even Lompoc—but when Jane reached them she kept driving.

She chose Santa Maria. Since she had last been there Santa Maria had begun to evolve from a largely blue-collar ranch area to an overflow community for Santa Barbara. The open spaces looked like vanity ranches where rich people rode expensive horses. She selected a motel off the interstate and checked in for the night. The room was small and thin-walled, and there was a sliding pocket door to the bathroom that kept going off its track, but it was adequate and she was tired.

Jane prepared her clothes and belongings for the next day, checking them off against the sheet of prison regulations she had printed out from her computer at home. Visiting hours were eight-thirty to three on Friday, Saturday, and federal holidays. Processing of visitors stopped at two
P.M
. A visitor could carry only a clear plastic change purse, eight inches or smaller, forty dollars, and a comb. Jane would be permitted to wear "a reasonable amount" of jewelry. If she brought a baby she could have a clear plastic diaper bag with "a reasonable amount" of baby food, clothes, bottles, powder, and
lotion. Shorts, halter tops, sheer clothing, skirts more than three inches above the knee, or khaki clothing were prohibited. Khaki clothes were what inmates wore.

She examined the picture ID she had asked Stewart Shattuck to make her the night she had brought Christine to see him. It was a duplicate of a California driver's license with Jane's picture in place of the original. Jane had known from the moment when Christine had told her the story of her family that she might need it one day. Jane put the license on the dresser and then went to bed and let the fatigue of the long day overtake her. In a few minutes she was asleep.

In her dream she was driving into Santa Barbara. She took the Salinas Street exit from the freeway, and then went by the corner of Ocean View Avenue, but didn't dare to take the turn. She couldn't avoid recognizing the tall hedge at the corner—at least twelve feet high and so thick it was opaque. The hedge was one of the first things she had seen when she had gone to Harry's apartment. She kept going and drove through the city, trying to get away from the memory of Harry's death. And then she made a turn and saw the old main building of Mission Santa Barbara ahead.

The sight of the Mission made Jane feel sick. It was an old adobe church with a tower and a long, low wing continuing to the left of it, the whole complex situated at the top of a vast sloping green lawn set off by big rose gardens. There was a small parking lot and a fountain, and to the right of the church was a high wall. It was what was behind the wall that was important. That was where the truth was hidden.

When the Jesuit missionaries came to the Senecas, they were promptly sent to their heaven. But the people who once inhabited this part of California coast weren't like the people of the eastern forests. They hadn't been fighting for a thousand years like the
Iroquois. It took only a few Spanish soldiers on horseback to round them up and make them live in captivity. They died in such numbers that the cemetery filled up and the bodies had to be dug up and re-buried elsewhere over and over to make room for the new deaths. Jane couldn't help walking out through the side door of the church into the cemetery. There were old stone markers here, with names and dates worn away. And there were green plants and flowers growing with the vigor of Santa Barbara's perpetual May. There was a melancholy silence here, interrupted about once every two minutes by the whispery sound of a car passing beyond the wall.

"So you're back."

Jane shut her eyes tightly, but she knew she had to turn around, so she did. She opened her eyes, knowing. There he was, the way he always was in her dreams. "Hello, Harry," she said. He was wearing the moss green sport coat that had always seemed slightly too big for him. It made her wonder if he'd bought it that way to hide cards in poker games, or if he had begun to age and get smaller before she had even met him. Harry was leaning on the high stone cemetery wall, his sad brown eyes fixed on her. She added, "I was thinking of you when I flew into the Santa Barbara airport today. I can't come here without thinking of you."

"I'm hard to forget even after all this time."

"You are. I'm so sorry, Harry." She could feel the tears beginning to well in her eyes.

"I know, I know. It doesn't matter to me anymore. Dying was one nasty surprise on one night of my life, the big hand in my hair jerking my head back, and then the knife going right across my throat, as quick as that. The experience was really all over before I even figured out what had happened. The result was determined, I mean. He let go of me, and I was already dead, while I was stand
ing up." Harry tilted his head back, and she could see the mortician's crude stitching across his throat. "Looks like a baseball, doesn't it?"

"A little."

"It doesn't matter. By now I could be dead from a bad piece of meat. Don't waste time blaming yourself. This was just the twins, the grandsons of Sky Woman. Hawenneyu the right-handed twin creates, and Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin destroys. We're all just part of the battle they've always fought with each other, and we don't even know what part we're playing. Hawenneyu creates a bright little boy who grows up to be an anesthesiologist, but Hanegoategeh has already given him a blind spot in his peripheral vision so he won't notice that the dial on the meter is too high and so he'll kill a patient. But maybe Hawenneyu has made sure the patient is the one who would have grown up to kill whole countries. Each move has a countermove, and only the twins know which is which."

"That example is pretty far-fetched."

"Is it?" he said.

"Why are you here?"

Harry looked around at the old cemetery with exaggerated interest. "Somebody belongs here more than me? Somebody deader than I am?"

"You know what I mean. Why tonight?"

"I'm here to warn you, Janie," he said. "You've been living a quiet life for a long time. You don't get to know why you were allowed to do that. Hawenneyu raises his right hand to strike, but Hanegoategeh raises his left to grasp his wrist, just like a mirror image. Maybe he blocked the blow, but maybe Hawenneyu was just keeping him from moving."

"Meaning what?"

"It's over. They're moving. You're out again."

"I know that."

"But do you know which twin is doing it—day or night? Creator or Destroyer? The good twin or the bad one?"

"You just reminded me that I don't get to know."

"There are always results. Somebody lives. Or dies. Think about the woman."

"What about her? She's just a kid."

"Woman. There are a lot of questions you never asked. You accepted her because she said Sharon sent her, but you never talked to Sharon."

"There were men with guns waiting in the parking lot. They persuaded me."

"What were they going to do with the guns—kill her? Kill you?"

"It doesn't much matter. I couldn't let them do either. I couldn't let them take her. I couldn't ignore the fact that they set off a bomb to get to her."

"You couldn't. You couldn't. Somebody put you in a position where you couldn't make any choices. Or maybe they were just making the right choices unthinkable. Who was it?"

"I don't know."

"Make sure you're doing what you think you're doing."

"I think I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm keeping my word."

Harry shrugged. "I can't hang around here all night. You hid the woman. Now you're going to see her only living connection, the only person who seems to give a shit if she lives or dies. The boyfriend must know about him, right? Would you send somebody else there?" He gave her a compassionate look, then reached out and touched her cheek.

The hand was cold, with a texture like wax. She shuddered and jerked her head back involuntarily, and awoke. She lay in the bed
staring up at the cottage-cheese ceiling above her. There seemed to be light behind the curtain, so she sat up. The clock said it was five
A.M
., but she didn't want to go back to sleep. She was afraid that she would see Harry in her dreams again. She showered and dressed, then packed, checked out of the hotel, and drove to Lompoc for an early breakfast.

Jane hated jails. Twice she had gone in because that was the only way to get to a woman and talk to her privately before she was released into danger again. Two other times she had allowed herself to be arrested because the alternative would have been to injure a police officer. Every surface in a jail seemed to her to have its own special cruelty—the bars, which were mostly symbolic in women's jails, but also the beds, the toilets, the showers, all of them rough, cheap, nasty versions of things that existed on the outside, as though someone wanted every instant of life to be a reminder that the prisoner was in a different world where everything was bad.

She drove around the perimeter of the parking lot as though she were undecided about where she was supposed to park, and looked at the cars, trying to detect a watcher. The cars all appeared to be empty. As she parked the car and began to walk toward the main building of the complex, she felt an instinctive urge to run, but she steadied herself and walked on.

About half the prisoners at Lompoc were assigned to the federal prison, the United States Penitentiary, a high-security section that had all the usual architectural reminders that the government had no intention of letting any of these men decide to leave—fences, towers, bars. The other half were in the Federal Correction Institution, the low-security section. She had checked in advance on her computer, and learned that Robert Monahan was one of these inmates.

She went to the front lobby and saw that things were less ugly than she had expected. The place reminded her of a military base. But she knew what she was seeing was a gloved fist. It might seem smooth and not terribly threatening, but inside was still a fist. Jane told the first person in a uniform, a young man, that she had an appointment, and he told her to show her ID to a woman called the Front Entrance Officer, who checked her off the visitor list.

The man held a metal detector and moved it up and down her body, and the woman patted her down. Jane had brought only the plastic see-through change purse to hold her driver's license and sunglasses and money, but the male officer opened it and searched it anyway. Then she was directed to a waiting room consisting of bare painted walls and rows of chairs, where another officer handed her a copy of the rules that she had already read. One rule was that a violation of the rules could result in a sentence of twenty years for the visitor.

Jane sat on a chair in the nearly bare waiting room for an hour and a half, watching the other visitors. Most of them were women, some with babies or toddlers, others apparently mothers whose babies had grown up and gotten convicted of federal crimes. At nine, and then at ten, a man announced that he was the Visitation Duty Officer, then called names from a list on a clipboard and let the visitors into the visiting room. When the man called the name Jane was listening for, she stood up and followed the Duty Officer into the room, where the Visiting Room Officer showed her to a seat at a long counter.

Across from Jane was a man in his fifties with graying hair cut short and a khaki uniform. On his feet were a pair of white socks and plastic sandals. When he saw Jane he stared at her in shock and disappointment. His mouth gaped open.

Jane stepped quickly to him, her arms extended. "Bobby, give me a hug." She glared at him. "I've missed you so much."

"You're—"

"Really glad to see you. Christine wishes she could come, but today it has to be just me."

The man allowed her to throw her arms around him. She held him tightly in that awkward position with the counter between them and whispered, "Christine asked me to do this." She sensed that the guard was moving in their direction, so she released him and sat down across from him. The guard moved off.