Shadow Woman by Thomas Perry Page A

let his eyebrows
bounce up once for emphasis. Linda hated that.
    “How’s it going?”
    “According to Seaver, he
had lots of friends. He was one of those guys who had everything.
Everybody loved Pete Hatcher. Especially women.” The contempt
and envy in Earl’s voice made Linda feel almost sorry for him.
“He may have changed his name, but that isn’t going to
change. He’s not the sort that’s going to be lying low
for long. He’ll need company. He’ll be out shaking hands
and telling lies about himself.” He looked at Linda and she
seemed to remind him of something. “He’ll be looking for
women. According to Seaver, he’s a regular old snatch-hound.”
    “That doesn’t
exactly limit his movements,” said Linda. “Sex he can
find anyplace. It would be better if there was one woman he couldn’t
live without. Her we could find.”
    “No sense thinking about
what we don’t have. What we do have has got to be enough to get
us there.” He consulted his notes. “He used a pro to get
out of here. She had him drive out in a car instead of getting on a
plane in Las Vegas. It wasn’t a rented car, because then he’d
turn it in wherever he ends up. So she bought it for him. If she’s
any good at all, she wouldn’t let him stay in Nevada, right?
It’s too small.”
    “Right.”
    “So he’s out of
state, with the car. He’s got to do something with it. If he
sells it, keeps it, or abandons it, then it gets new plates and the
old plates get returned to the Nevada D.M.V. There are only a
million, two hundred thousand people in the whole state. How many
cars? About half that many. How many of them are going to have their
plates turned in this month?”
    “I have no idea, do you?”
    “No, but not many.”
    “What if it’s in her
name?”
    “If it was, it won’t
be. He has to insure it in the new state, be able to get pulled over
and ticketed without getting hauled in.”
    “He’ll need a
license to do any of that.”
    “If she didn’t get
him anything else, she got him a new license and birth certificate
and Social Security card. Those I can’t start with. But the new
car registration I can probably get at the end of the month.”
    “Suppose he just drove it
to an airport outside of Las Vegas? That’s what I’d do.”
    “Yeah,” said Earl.
“We’ll have to cover that possibility too. It’s not
going to be simple. This woman is a problem. She didn’t let him
make a lot of mistakes. There’s nothing easy left: no personal
letters, no pictures, not even any old credit card bills. Oh, that
reminds me. Where’s the bank statement we got? He just might
have written a check to his new name.”
    “In my purse.”
    He snatched her purse off the
doorknob where she had hung it, pulled out the statement, and opened
it. He quickly shuffled through the checks, then sighed. “Jesus
Christ,” he muttered, then slapped the checks down on the
table.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “He had a balance of
sixty-two thousand bucks. He wrote a check for sixty to ‘Cash.’
You want to know who took it and gave him the sixty in cash?”
    “No bank I ever heard of
would…. Oh, don’t tell me.”
    “Yep. Pleasure Island
Casino. The stupid bastards had him under surveillance, and they let
him walk up to a cashier and write a check for his fuck-you money.”
    “That’s got to be
his idea,” said Linda. “I’m sure he’s seen
them do it for gamblers. But he wrote it for less than his balance,
so he doesn’t have the bank and the police looking for him too.
That’s her.”
    Earl shrugged. “Her again.
Yeah.” He stared into space for a few seconds. Slowly, his jaw
began to work, the knotted muscles grinding his teeth together.
“Let’s think about her. She sees, probably before he
does, that his time is coming. They’ve watched him enough so if
they were just going to fire him, he’d be gone already. She
knows they’re not going to take their eyes off him while he’s
alive unless she makes them.