Blood Money

22

As the plane passed above the Rocky Mountains, Jane tried again to think of ways to reassure herself. The man who had spotted her in the airport had not gotten up in time to see which gate she had run to. It must have been two hundred yards farther on, and she had made a turn where the concourse did, so she had been out of sight. That was an advantage, but it wasn’t safety. The people he had been with were certainly capable of checking the departure list to find out what planes had taken off at about the time when she had disappeared. The pilot had been in a hurry to get his plane into position, so there must have been a number of flights at that time, but it would be easy to eliminate some of them—ones that had taken off from gates on the other end of the airport, or ones that had been delayed. She had to assume they knew she was on this plane. She had to believe they knew when and where the plane would land, and they would be calling ahead to put friends of theirs into her path.

Jane reviewed her preparations again and again as the plane moved over the immense, flat expanse of geometric patterns of green and tan toward the Mississippi. When the man in the seat beside her stood up to go into the rest room, Jane used the moment alone. She collected three little pillows the airline had put in the overhead compartment and sat down. She watched and waited to see whether any of the passengers nearby had gotten curious. The young man across the aisle was asleep, lying back in his seat with his long legs in a tangle on the empty seat beside him. The others seemed not to have noticed her movement. She wrapped her jacket around the pillows and kept the bundle in her lap.

A few minutes later the man was back. Jane stood up in the aisle to let him duck and sidestep past her to his seat. Then she walked down the aisle toward the rear of the plane. She found one rest room with its little slot moved to say VACANT, so she stepped inside, locked the door, and began to experiment with the pillows in front of the tiny mirror. It took her several tries to get the pillows arranged and the elastic waistband of her skirt over the bottom one to hold them. Then she draped her loose silk blouse over the bulge. The pillows were tightly packed with some synthetic fiber that made them firm, so the visual effect was not bad. It might work, if she was careful not to bend at the waist or let the pillows slip to the side.

Jane worked on ways to hold her jacket to conceal the pillows until she had perfected that obscure skill too. Since the man she had kicked in the Seattle airport had probably described the way her hair had been braided and pinned, she loosened it. She found her nail scissors in her purse, but when she tried to cut her hair, she realized that it would take hours with the tiny tool.

She sensed that the plane was beginning to lose altitude, and there would not be enough time. She combed her hair out and made a ponytail. She took a scarf and tied it around the ponytail so it hung down over her hair. Her reflection in the mirror looked as though she had much more scarf than hair. Since the man at Sea-Tac had seen her tinted glasses, she took them off. She heard the female voice of a flight attendant over the speaker above her head. After the first few garbled words she recognized that it was an announcement that it was time for passengers to return to their seats and buckle up.

When the plane landed, Jane walked out with the same weary, relieved look that she saw on the faces of the other passengers. In the tunnel she stayed as close as she could to a pair of men who were big enough to partially shield her from sight, put on her jacket, and let her belly show.

Jane ventured to the edge of the crowd long enough to scan the line of people along the wall for a man holding a sign that said DEBORAH. When she spotted him, she said, “Hi, that’s me,” and kept walking. He set off beside her, and she kept her face turned toward him, not looking in either direction. “I’m in a bit of a hurry. I’ve got to make a quick phone call and stop in the ladies’ room. Could you please take my tags and claim my bags?”

The man eyed her belly. “I guess so,” he said. “What are they?”

“Two big green duffel bags with wheels on the bottom.” She tore the two tags off her ticket envelope and held them out. He looked at them without eagerness, so she decided to put an end to his reluctance. “They’re heavy, so I can meet you down there and give you a hand.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he said gruffly. “I can handle them myself. You can meet me at the car. It’s in the short-term lot, space 217. Black Audi with tinted windows.” The man set off, glancing down at the numbers on the receipts.

She was relieved that the call she had made to order a car had actually produced one. She had asked the long-distance operator for the number of the private limo service that was first in the alphabet. She had guessed that it would be one with four or five A’s in a row at the beginning. In her experience, the ones who wanted business that badly weren’t usually luxurious, but they were eager. Now all that remained was to make her way to the car. Keeping her eyes forward, she walked along with the crowd. She had gauged the costume carefully, trying not to overdo it. Doctors always told pregnant women not to fly after the eighth month, so she had seen very few late-term women in airports. She had tried for the seventh month—the belly big enough to be unmistakable, but arranged high and not so large as to make her unusual.

Jane spotted a pair of elderly people waiting by a counter. The woman had an aluminum walker with wheels on it, and the man looked nearly as frail. Jane’s ears picked up an electronic chirping sound far up the concourse, and she recognized an opportunity. She stepped closer and caught the attention of the woman behind the counter. “Do you suppose there’s room for one more? I’m a little … tired. I don’t want to be a lot of trouble, but—”

The woman smiled her professional smile. “No trouble,” she said. “Do you have a carry-on bag?”

Jane shook her head. The electric cart chirped up to the counter and stopped with a sudden jolt. The tall, thin young man stepped down from the driver’s seat and said, “Three?”

The woman at the counter nodded, and Jane helped the two old people into a bench seat, then sat beside the driver. The cart started with a jerk and picked up speed. The driver weaved in and out around groups of walking travelers, slowing down only when two groups would unexpectedly converge to close his pathway, then beeping his horn.

Jane’s position beside him was not the one she would have chosen, but there had been no other. The cart moved along with a flashing orange light on a pole and the annoying chirp, so there was no hope of not being noticed. She half-turned in her seat to face the old couple, so her belly would be visible from the front of the cart and her face hidden. She tried to start a meaningless conversation. “Thank you very much for sharing your ride with me.”

The old woman glared at her in such apparent disapproval that Jane suspected some kind of dementia. But the old man muttered in a surprisingly cold tone, “We don’t own it. There’s plenty of room.”

Jane sensed that she was missing something, then surmised what it might be. “Something happens in airplanes. It makes my ankles and fingers swell up.” She waved her hand above the seat where they could see it and added, “After the first flight I could hardly get my wedding ring off, so I didn’t wear it on the way home.”

Jane had been right. Both faces brightened. The old lady said, “Oh, that’ll go away soon enough, but by then you’ll be too busy to notice.” The husband laughed. “But that doesn’t last long either. They grow up and go off on their own, and you’ll wonder where they went.”

Jane saw a pair of watchers over his shoulder. They were walking on opposite sides of the concourse toward the gate she had just left. Now and then they would glance across the open space at each other to keep their courses parallel.

She tried to keep the old people’s attention. “I’ll bet that’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it? Visiting a son or daughter.”

“Wrong,” said the old man. “We’ve been and come back. Been in Los Angeles for two weeks: enjoyed ourselves about as much as we can stand.”

Jane sighed. “I know what you mean. It always feels good to be home.”

“Do you live here?”

Jane said, “Yes,” because there was no choice. If Minneapolis was a stop on the way to somewhere else, the next place would be a small town, and she couldn’t take the chance that they might know it.

Jane saw the second set of watchers walking along like the first, only this time there were three. One was a tall, heavy-set man who forced oncoming travelers to part and go around him toward the others on the wings. As the three receded into the distance, she realized that the cart must have passed so close to him that she could have touched him.

“Whereabouts?” asked the old man.

Jane told him only the name of the street. It was the address of the apartment she had rented while she had watched Sid Freeman’s house for a visit from the people who were trying to kill Richard Dahlman.

The man said, “I know where that is. Are you right above a lake?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “There’s a beautiful park right below our house, with ducks and squirrels and things.” She lowered her eyes to her belly. “It’ll be a good place to play.”

The old lady was suddenly curious. “Did you live there when they had those murders last summer?”

“Hush,” whispered the old man, as though Jane’s belly might hear.

Jane nodded. “It was only a couple of blocks away. We didn’t hear anything, though. We saw it on the news. My husband said, ‘Hey, isn’t that around here somewhere?’ and sure enough, when they showed it, you could practically see our house.”

Jane detected that an unwelcome dose of real feeling had slipped through her defenses unexpectedly. She could see Sid’s body lying in what had once been the big house’s library, the dirty carpet soaked with his blood. She saw that her accurate memory of the neighborhood had soothed the old couple. It occurred to her that she could have done the same performance in a lot of other cities. In each one there were streets she had seen more clearly than the people who lived there because she had studied them for danger, houses where she had hidden runners, and, in far too many of them, she could conjure from her memory sights that the cameras couldn’t show on television.

The old man said, “They ever figure out what that was about?”

Jane shrugged. “If they did, nobody ever told me.”

“Drugs,” said the driver.

“Really?” asked the old man. “I didn’t hear that.”

“I didn’t either,” the driver answered. “But it’s always that.”

His certainty sounded so authoritative that neither of the two elderly passengers seemed to be able to think of anything to say in response, and Jane had no inclination to tell him what had really happened. For a few seconds the insistent chirp of his electric cart was the only sound. He drove past the metal detectors and swung recklessly to the door of the elevator. “End of the line,” he called.

Jane stepped down and held the old lady’s walker while the driver helped both old people off the rear seats. Jane felt the disconcerting sensation that her pillows were slipping. She brought her left arm across her waist and held them in place. “Thanks for the ride,” she said to the driver, and “Nice meeting you” to the old couple; then she turned and hurried toward the escalator.

At the bottom she walked purposefully to the ladies’ room, went into the farthest stall, and latched the door. She longed to abandon the disguise, but the limo driver she had sent after her luggage was expecting to see a pregnant woman at his car. She carefully rearranged the pillows and secured them once more with the waistband of her skirt, then lingered in front of the mirror to be sure the effect was right. She wondered why the costume was so distasteful to her, but the answer was waiting for her. It felt like bad luck. It made her suspect that she was playing with a force of the universe in order to obtain a small and transient advantage. She might, in some mysterious way, be making a trade that she had not intended. Maybe later, when she wanted desperately to look like this, it would be denied because she had unwittingly spent her chance.

She strode to the door, took a last look in the mirror, then stepped out quickly. Beyond the long row of glass doors she could see travelers of all descriptions moving along or stopping to stare up and down the street for cabs or shuttle buses. A couple of the men had the look that she did not want to see. They were apparently waiting for something that was going to approach along the street, but they seemed to have a lot of fidgety mannerisms that turned their eyes in the direction of the doors, the sidewalk, and the terminal.

Jane walked past the window where she could see the baggage area. She could see her driver waiting at the edge of a crowd where a flashing light was turning and bags had begun to slide down a chute to the stainless steel carousel that turned below. She walked on, out the door into the warm, humid air. She kept her eyes ahead and never let them rest on the faces that came into her line of sight. She had trained herself to use her peripheral vision to watch for changes in the expected cadence of motion—hands rising quickly, a steady walk changing to a run—and to use her ears to warn her of motion behind her.

She hurried to join a group of people waiting for the traffic signal to change so they could cross to the short-term lot. Once she was in the little herd, she knew she was safer. When the light turned green she matched her pace to theirs so she would keep them around her, but as soon as she reached the lot, her protectors dispersed rapidly. She searched for space 217, and the worry she had felt in the airport began to fade. She had gotten through the difficult part.

She walked a zigzag path through the long rows of closely parked cars to shield herself from view. Each time she had to cross an empty aisle, she would stop and look in both directions. She kept these glances casual, but she had to give herself time to survey the windows of parked cars. She was certain that the physical caution and the slight awkwardness that women felt during pregnancy would satisfy anyone who noticed her. Whatever else was true about pregnancy, women in their seventh month didn’t seem to feel much like sprinting to avoid speeding cars.

She found the space and looked at the car without approaching it immediately. If anyone had seen her from a distance, it would be dangerous to have him know exactly which car represented her ride out of here. She walked slowly in a course that kept her distance from it constant, but she was behind it now. She looked at the terminal and saw the driver come out of the baggage area, and that made her feel better.

She turned her eyes to the car again. It was almost new. The afternoon sunlight shone on the gleaming black finish of the trunk, and she saw her reflection. The reflection was wrong—a little bit wavy, like a funhouse mirror. She moved closer, but the impression didn’t change. She stepped to the trunk and ran her finger along the finish near the lock. There was a slight depression around the lock, and there was a thin layer of oil on the lock’s surface. She walked close to the driver’s side and peered in. The odometer said three thousand miles. It was possible that a gypsy cab might have had its trunk lock punched in by a thief in the first few thousand miles and had it replaced. She bent over to bring her eye close to the long, shiny side surface of the car.

The finish on the upper parts was perfect, but the paint near the bottom of the doors was thicker and duller, as though it had been applied in one coat and not rubbed as thoroughly as the upper part. No new car came from the factory that way, and it was unlikely that a car that had been totaled and salvaged would have three thousand miles on the odometer. It was also unlikely that the insurance company that had paid off wouldn’t have gotten the key to the trunk. She surreptitiously removed her pocketknife from her purse and scratched the finish near the bottom of the door. The undercoat was bright green. The car had been stolen and repainted.

Jane straightened and looked toward the terminal. The driver had just crossed the street, and he was entering the lot pulling her two duffel bags. She was fairly sure that he had not yet looked inside. The baggage area would not have been a good place to break the locks, and a slash in the fabric would be difficult to hide. She scanned the lot to see whether any of the driver’s friends were visible yet. He would be confident that he could pick her up and take her somewhere without help, because she would go eagerly. But there had been so many watchers between her gate and the baggage area that he’d had numerous chances to tip them off. They would come because there was no reason not to. If she resisted, they would make it easy to overpower her quickly and quietly without killing her. Even the first man, the one in Sea-Tac airport, had figured out that he needed to take her alive.

As the driver approached the car, Jane kept her eyes on the terminal behind him. At last, she saw two men coming out of the exit together. They walked quickly to the crossing, one of them pounded the button mounted on the pole to change the signal, then they both ran across. She was sure. There was always a reason to run to a terminal, but almost never a reason to run toward the parking lot. She focused on the driver and gave him a false smile.

He came around to the trunk and let go of the bags. “Been waiting long?”

“Not at all,” said Jane. “Did you have trouble with the bags?”

“No,” he said. “They didn’t even hold me up at the door to check the tags.”

Jane watched him open the trunk and lift the first heavy duffel bag into it. As he bent down for the second, she looked over the trunk lid toward the two men. They were getting into a dark blue Chevrolet four rows away. She stared down at the driver as he began to lift the second bag. She devoted two seconds to contemplating him. He was feeling very clever and masterful right now. He had managed to get a lone woman who was running for her life to trust him. In a moment she would be in the back seat and he would be driving her someplace where a group of his friends would be gathering. They would torture her until she told them where the rest of the money was, and then kill her. Afterward, maybe tonight, he would laugh about it—probably be very funny describing how stupid she had been. She had called the limo service herself—picked that one. But the details made the story: how he had waited at the gate to be sure that the “Deborah” who had called for a ride was the right woman. Jane converted the dull anxiety of the past few hours, and the growing fear of the past few minutes, into hot rage. As the man leaned into the trunk with the second bag, she felt the adrenaline pump into her veins, then exploded into motion.

Jane brought the trunk lid down hard on the top of the man’s head just as he was rising to meet it. His knees gave way and he fell across the duffel bag, then unsteadily backed out in a crouch.

Her hands gripped his head and pushed it down as her knee came up to meet it. He seemed stunned, unable to pop up, so she brought her knee up again, harder. This time he stood erect, but reeling, his nose bloody. He lunged toward her. She pivoted to throw her leg in front of his feet and got both hands onto the space between his shoulder blades to add her full strength to his momentum. His forehead smashed into the rear bumper, and blood began to run down his face from a cut above the hairline. Jane snatched the keys out of the trunk lock, slammed the lid, and stepped toward the driver’s door.

As Jane moved past the man, he suddenly rose to his knees and swung hard. His blow caught her in the stomach and the force of it threw her against the side of the car. The man’s eyes shone through the slick of blood streaming down from the cut above his hairline, and there was a kind of glee in them, until he looked at her. Almost instantly, the brows knitted, and Jane could see he was puzzled. He had hit the pillows. The wide eyes blinked and the man’s hand came up to wipe blood out of them. Jane leaned her weight against the side of the car and kicked the face upward. The man’s head jerked back and caromed off the car beside his. Jane unlocked the door, slipped into the driver’s seat, and hammered down the lock button.

As she started the car, she saw the man’s hand grasp the door handle. She threw the car into reverse, and the hand slipped off. She stopped and put the car into forward gear, then drove toward the end of the aisle and turned right at the exit sign.

She had lost track of the two men in the blue Chevrolet. She looked in their direction, but the space was empty. Suddenly a flash of blue appeared directly behind her, filling her rearview mirror. She could see that the car was big and powerful and new. It was so close that she could make out the safety belts across the men’s chests. As she started up the next aisle, the blue car tried to edge up beside her, and she understood the uncharacteristic concern with seat belts. They were going to try to push her into the line of cars and stop her.

The belts reminded her of something she knew about cars. She turned up the next aisle and accelerated, groping beside her for the seat-belt buckle. She drew it across her and clicked it in, tugged it to tighten the lap belt around her hips across the lower pillow, adjusted the chest belt so it lay flat between her breasts and across the upper pillow, then leaned back against the headrest to test the fit. At the end of the aisle she slowed just enough to make the turn, and looked for the exit ahead. There was a small kiosk where people presented tickets and paid. She reached into her purse to pull out a bill without looking at it as she accelerated up the side of the lot. She would have to do this before she was too close.

When she found the money, she slowed a bit. The blue Chevrolet closed the distance quickly. When the Chevrolet had advanced to within twenty feet of her rear bumper and begun to coast, Jane stopped, threw the Audi into reverse, stomped on the accelerator, and leaned back into her seat with her head pressed against the headrest. She heard a little squeal as the driver of the blue car slammed on his brakes, but it was too late.

Jane’s Audi slammed into the front of the blue Chevrolet with a loud bang. The impact jolted her, and she had a brief impression that everything in her body that was loose had moved: her internal organs, her brain, her blood. She glanced in the mirror as she threw the car into forward gear again.

She had set off the crash sensors in the blue car, and both airbags had burst out in front of the two men and punched them back into their seats. All she could see through their windshield were the two big, inflated bags, barely contained against the glass.

Jane accelerated again and glided up to the kiosk. She pushed the button on her door and the window slid down. The parking attendant was standing up from her stool, craning her neck to look out at the lot. Jane said, “Wow! Did you hear that noise? What was it?”

The woman seemed to return from a reverie. She shrugged and said, “Sounded like an accident.”

Jane was already holding out a twenty-dollar bill. She spotted the parking ticket sticking out of the ashtray, so she snatched it and stuck it out the window with the money. The attendant accepted it, counted out fifteen in change, and tripped a switch to raise the barrier that blocked the exit. If the woman saw the damage to the rear of Jane’s car as it drifted out past her, she apparently did not consider investigating accidents to be part of her job description. She was already back on her stool, looking the other way, while Jane accelerated up the street.