Shadow Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

nothing that their worst fears were aroused.
They suspected he was staying in place because he had made a deal
with some federal agency and had been bullied into collecting
evidence for them. They had watched him for weeks, waiting to find
out which it was so they could clean it up after they killed him.
    Casinos were like a lot of
businesses. A tenth of what went on was disguised by showmanship, and
the rest was invisible. Part of what wasn’t easy to see were
their gigantic security departments. They had people to guard and
transport die vast sums of cash that appeared each day, other people
to watch the dealers, cashiers, and croupiers to be sure that the
nimblest fingers in the world never palmed anything, others to
investigate possible high rollers, still others to find them if they
didn’t pay. They had more to simply protect the casino itself –
people who watched for undesirable visitors who had come to prey on
the guests and quickly, quietly hustled them away before they
disturbed the unreal tranquility of the gambling palace. It had
always struck Jane as ironic that probably the safest place in the
country for a woman traveling alone was inside any of the big Las
Vegas hotels.
    In a way, the security was what
had saved Pete Hatcher. Without that enveloping but unobtrusive
protection, a woman named Paula might not have felt comfortable
enough to go there by herself, and certainly wouldn’t have
dared get friendly with a gambler like him. A year later, when he was
in trouble and trying to think of places to stay that his bosses
wouldn’t know about, he had remembered Paula’s number and
she had remembered Jane’s.
    Jane heard her flight announced
over the loudspeaker, picked up her canvas bag, and walked toward the
gate. She held herself with her spine straight and looked directly
ahead, never allowing her eyes to focus on those of the other
travelers, never turning away to give them permission to study her.
She walked quickly, joined the line after it had begun to move
efficiently but was long enough to include a lot of other people who
would be more interesting for a bored observer to stare at than she
was, and disappeared into the loading tunnel.
    As soon as the plane was in the
air, Jane pushed her seat back as far as it would go and closed her
eyes. She had been anxious for two nights, trying to work out a path
for Pete Hatcher that wouldn’t lead him in front of a gun
muzzle, then spent the third running. She knew she could sleep only
fitfully now, because she had not dreamed in four nights and her mind
was holding a jumbled backlog of jarring impressions that would
plague her sleep. But lying with her eyes closed prevented other
passengers from trying to talk to her, and that was another of her
precautions. The road home was where the worst of the traps were,
because she had already given dangerous people a reason to want her.
That was when they would be making their best attempts to track her
or place friends of theirs in her path.
    Jane got off the plane in
Chicago and found another, under the name Tracy Morgan, that took her
to Rochester, New York. In the airport store she bought a packet of
pipe tobacco, then drove a few miles southeast of the airport to
Mendon.
    Jane parked her car along the
road above the bend of Honeoye Creek and walked to the quiet little
park at Mendon Ponds. She sat where she always sat when she came
here, at a picnic table with a surface scarred with carved initials,
took out her manicure kit, and trimmed and buffed her nails.
    The two little lakes were glassy
and greenish. The tall, thick trees along the bank away from the road
grew out of the water from submerged roots and protected the ponds
from the tiniest breeze. The only ripples came from long-legged water
bugs that skittered across the surface now and then.
    Three hundred feet away, up the
grassy bank, a mother with very white legs and feet sat in the shade
of a sunhat and big dark glasses, watching her two