Blood Money

8

As Jane drove along the highway into Illinois, Bernie’s patience seemed to be slipping away. Finally, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“Chicago.”

Bernie said, “I don’t know about Chicago. If Delfina’s started looking for her, the others will be too. There are people in Chicago who have seen her.”

“Really?” asked Jane. “Who?”

“Tommy DeLuca used to send a bagman down about once a month.”

Jane said, “That’s one out of three million. You can wait for me outside Chicago in case he happens to be at the bank. I have some things in a safe-deposit box there that I’ll need.”

“Look, I don’t know what it is, but—”

“Forged IDs that I can work over to fit the two of you.”

Bernie seemed unable to think of a suitable argument, so he sat in disapproving silence. After a few minutes, Rita said, “Anybody mind if I play the radio?” as she turned it on and punched buttons to flood the car with a rhythmic noise punctuated by a man’s voice chanting incomprehensible words. She turned down the volume to keep it from irritating Jane and Bernie.

Jane glanced at Rita. She was chewing gum in time with the music and rocking slightly as she listened. There was a peculiar innocence to the expression, and Jane wondered if kids still had those conversations she remembered about what the lyrics actually were. They must, she decided. “How about you?” she asked. “Are you afraid of Chicago?”

“Nope,” said Rita distractedly. “I’m afraid of the places I’ve been already. Are you sure the music is okay?”

Bernie answered hastily, “It’s fine, kid.” Jane could tell he was lying. “The silence was getting on our nerves.”

Jane told them no more until she had stopped and rented two rooms at a hotel in Frankfort. She brought Bernie and Rita inside the first of the two rooms, put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, sorted through her purse at the table, and handed each of them a key.

“Here are your keys. I’m going to be gone for a while.”

Rita asked, “Can I go with you?”

“I didn’t mean an hour or two,” said Jane. “It should be a few days.”

Rita looked uncomfortable. “You’re leaving us here?”

Jane looked around her. “It’s a nice enough hotel. If you do as I say, you’ll be fine. Don’t go out. Order your meals from room service. When the waiter comes, take the tray at the door, sign the bill, and send him off.”

“What’s this about?” asked Rita. “Where are you going?”

“First I’m going to my safe-deposit box, then I’m going to shop for a place that’s safer than this one.”

“How do we even know you’re going to come back?”

“You don’t.” She let Rita get used to the idea, then walked toward the door. “If I’m not back in a week, check out. Rita, you’ll have to do it, I’m afraid. The credit card is in the name Katherine Sanders. It’s on the dresser with the receipt. Make your way to Decatur and check in at the Marriott.”

“You going to meet us there?” asked Bernie.

“If I miss you here, I will. If I’m not there within a week after that, something happened to me. Go to a quiet town somewhere and do your best to make it on your own.”

On the fifth day at eleven in the morning, Jane returned to the hotel. She found Bernie sitting on the bed where she had left him, and Rita curled up in a chair in front of the television set. The set was tuned to a music video station, where a girl who didn’t seem much older than Rita was wearing something that looked like the top of an unflattering suit and the bottom of a bikini, and angrily singing words that she emphasized by pointing fingers with inch-long nails at the camera.

Rita said, “Do you think that’s a real tattoo?”

Bernie answered, “Looks real to me. But I don’t remember it from her last album.”

Jane closed the door, and they both looked at her in alarm. Rita recovered, then pretended it had not happened. “Oh, hi,” she said coolly, and turned her attention back to the screen.

Bernie stood up. “Well?”

“I’ve already paid the bill and checked us out. I just have to drop your keys at the desk.” She accepted the two keys and turned to go. “The car is in the third row from the north end of the building.”

When Jane joined Rita and Bernie in the car and they were on the highway, Bernie asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I think I did,” she said. “It’s a little far, but it seems right.”

“Just how far?” he asked.

“New Mexico. You’ll have a couple of days on the road to think about it.”

“Where in New Mexico?”

“Santa Fe. Or, just outside it, really. I found a house. It’s small, but it’s got two stories. That’s something that runners don’t always think about in advance, but it’s worth trying for. You can make it very difficult for anybody to get to you while you’re sleeping. It’s on a sparsely populated road, set back about two hundred feet on a little rise, so you can see people coming from a long way off. The country around it is mostly low brush and rocks.”

Bernie squinted doubtfully. “I don’t know about Santa Fe.”

“Have you been to Santa Fe?” asked Jane patiently.

“No, but it’s famous. People know about it.”

Jane smiled. “That’s right. People go there on vacations. Other people live there for part of the year, and might rent a different house each time. All of it means that strangers don’t rate a second look—even strangers carrying a lot of cash.”

“It also means a lot of pairs of eyes pass through town. What if one of them is—”

“Who?” she interrupted. “You must know a lot about the people who would recognize your face. When they travel, do any of them go to Santa Fe?”

He looked away and said grudgingly, “I never heard of any. But they might stop on the way to Las Vegas or Hawaii or someplace.”

“Santa Fe doesn’t have a major airport. Most people who want to get there fly into Albuquerque and drive the last sixty miles. It’s not on the way to anywhere else except Taos.”

“But what goes on there?” asked Rita. “What do people do?”

“Nothing we have to worry about. It’s the state capital, but states in the Southwest don’t take much governing—lots of land, not many people.”

“But what about him?” asked Rita protectively. “He’s got to be happy.”

Bernie said, “I’ll be happy just to get out of the damned car.”

But for the next two days, he would suddenly stir and a question would come from nowhere. “What am I supposed to be doing there?”

“You’re pretty much what you really are. You worked for a large company for fifty years, then retired. You’ve been living in Florida but didn’t like it, so you moved. You shouldn’t have any trouble learning all about some legitimate business. Just read a book and you’ll be able to recite it. But you should still avoid specific questions about it. If somebody asks, talk about the people from those days. That’s all they’re interested in anyway: people stories.”

They arrived in Santa Fe in the evening. The route Jane chose through the city was calculated to give her two passengers a good impression. She drove in on Federal Place, past the post office and the Federal Courthouse, then down Lincoln Avenue between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Palace of the Governors, skirted the seventeenth-century Plaza, where they could see the lighted shops and restaurants, then went along East San Francisco Street to Saint Francis Cathedral.

Before she turned right to reach Canyon Road, she was sure she had given Rita and Bernie enough of a taste of the place to reassure them a little. It wasn’t the sort of city they were used to, where enormous corporations elbowed their forty-story steel-and-glass towers onto the main streets. But it wasn’t a desert outpost with one stop light and a gas station either.

She kept up a running commentary as she drove. “The Plaza is a great place, but it would be best to go in the evening.”

“Why?” asked Rita.

“Cameras. Most of the time, the picture ends up in a family album in Dubuque, Iowa. But if it gets blown up on the cover of Travel & Leisure, Bernie’s face could be on a lot of newsstands. There are a dozen restaurants on all sides of the Plaza. Just go down any of these smaller streets leading away from it.” Then she added, “But the places that will be safest are the ones that don’t interest tourists: grocery stores, dry cleaners, and so on. Any time you find yourself surrounded by Navajo rugs, silver jewelry, or Zuni pots, be alert and get ready to move on.”

She drove out on Canyon Road for four miles, then turned up a gravel drive between two wooden posts. She turned around the house, pushed a remote control to open the garage, and pulled the car into it.

Bernie looked glum as he got out of the car and stretched. Jane stood close to him and whispered, “Go out, walk about two hundred feet that way, and then watch me from there. If somebody is in there waiting to blow my head off, go to the riverbank and follow it back into town. Don’t try to walk on the road.”

“Jesus, honey,” he whispered. “If you’re not sure, then what are we doing here?”

“I do it because this is the way the game is played. You take all of the precautions the first time. Right now I need to see that the house is the way I left it, and I can’t do it if you two are making footprints and moving things. So go.”

She exerted light pressure on his shoulder and watched him take a couple of steps, then stop. But Rita quickly took his hand and led him off into the darkness.

Before Jane had settled on this house, she had been careful to visit it at night as well as in daylight. There were no street lamps, no neighbors close enough to throw light on the surrounding land. That gave her control. If she needed to light the yard up, she could do it from a switch inside the house. If it was time to run, she could get Rita and Bernie out in darkness.

Jane took a flashlight out of the car and bent low as she walked the long way around the house to the front door, studying the ground. Three times she knelt close to the dirt and switched the flashlight on, but none of the variations on the surface were footprints. As Jane moved silently beside the house she passed close to each window to be sure the glass was intact, the latch still closed, and the layer of windblown dust still on the sill. By the time she had reached the front door she was reasonably sure nobody had been here.

She used her key to open the door, stepped inside, and turned on the light. Before she had left, she had poured some talcum powder into the palm of her hand and blown it over the hardwood floor inside the entrance, so it formed a thin, nearly invisible film. She bent and examined it, but it had not been disturbed.

Jane wandered through the house turning on lights and searching for other signs. The five drawers she had left slightly open had not been opened and reclosed. None of the carpets she had vacuumed to raise the pile had been pushed down by shoes. She went to the front door and stood in the lighted space for a moment, waved the others in, then closed the door to keep the light from illuminating them.

When Rita and Bernie came inside, they found Jane spreading a blanket on a couch in the living room. She said, “The upstairs is yours. There are two bedrooms up there, each with its own bath.”

“This is nicer than I thought it would be,” said Rita. That didn’t sound good to her, so she amended it. “It’s really nice.” She looked at Bernie.

Bernie had been gazing at the stairs, but he seemed to take the cue. “Yeah, nice,” he said. “You shouldn’t sleep down here. Take my room.”

Rita looked at Jane and decided she must have made another mistake. “We could share a bed. I don’t snore or anything.”

“No thanks,” Jane answered. “I want to be down here, and I want Bernie to get settled and begin getting used to the place.”

Rita started up the stairs, but Bernie stood and glared down at Jane for a moment. “You’re keeping watch, aren’t you?”

Jane sighed wearily. “If you hear a loud noise, don’t come looking for me. Turn off the light on your way up.”