Shadow Woman Read Free Page B

not know where
Hatcher was right at this moment – the men’s room,
somewhere in the labyrinth of slot machines, where they had not
looked for him – but they knew where he was going to be in a
few minutes. The few minutes accumulated into a half hour, then
forty-five minutes. The small shadow left to see if Pete Hatcher’s
car was still in the lot and came back to report to his friend that
it was, but they weren’t feeling confident anymore. Something
was wrong, and they weren’t yet sure what it was.
    She glanced at her watch. Katie…
she corrected herself: Miranda… had promised to transport Pete
Hatcher out the stage door near the start of her act, so the show had
given him a full two hours to make the Utah border. Jane’s
little pantomime of being stood up had bought him the third hour to
get to Cedar City. His plane would be loading passengers just about
now. It was time for Jane to start making herself disappear.
    She left a twenty-dollar chip on
the table and stepped out of the bar. The two men hesitated for a
second, then followed. They had to give her plenty of room and try
not to look interested. Jane walked toward the elevators, and she
knew they had no choice but to follow. If they lost her, they had
nothing. She took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, went into her
room, kicked off her shoes, and called the garage. “This is
Miss Seymour in Room 1592. I’d like my car right away, please.”
As she listened to the parking attendant’s answer she was
already stepping out of her gown.
    She heard the doorknob rattle a
little. She looked at the door, but it didn’t budge. She could
see the shadows of feet under the door. Jane kicked the dress under
the bed, slipped on her slacks, pulled the sweater over her head,
then heard a sudden thud. She looked at the door. The double-edged
blade of a knife had pierced through the thin oak veneer of the
hollow door beside the lock. She froze. An unseen hand worked the
blade around a little and withdrew it. There was another dull thud,
and the blade punched through again.
    She snatched her purse, quickly
slipped out through the curtains to the balcony, and quietly slid the
door shut. She had misjudged them. They should not have been willing
to take a chance like this yet. Maybe she had been too eager to get
Pete out of sight and she had missed some sign, forgotten to ask some
question. There was no way to fix it now, no time to think. She had
to get out.
    She had nothing with her. This
was not the hotel where she had been sleeping. It was just the room
she had rented to disappear from. In a few seconds those two would
have the door open. She looked around her at the balconies of the
other rooms. They were narrow and far apart, and even if she somehow
managed to reach one of them without falling, she would only be in
the next room. She leaned out as far as she could and looked down. On
the floor below her there was a balcony just like hers, but it had to
be twelve feet down.
    Jane saw a thin wedge of light
fan into her room as they opened the door as far as the chain would
allow. She unclasped the leather strap of her purse, clasped it
around the bottom of the vertical railing support closest to the wall
of the building, tossed her purse to the balcony below, stepped over
the railing, and lowered herself into the empty air. She was
trembling with fear and awe at what she had done as she dangled
there, six feet above the railing of the fourteenth-floor balcony.
She wanted to drop but found her hands would not obey the command to
open. It looked as though she would fall, scrape the outside of the
balcony, and plummet two hundred feet to the pavement.
    She bent at the hip and began a
gentle swing. The first sweep brought her out away from the balcony
and tipped her down a little so she had to look directly through all
that empty night air at the tiny figures on the lighted concrete
below. After a sickening pause at the end of the arc, she began to
swing forward. When