Blood Money

21

Jane awoke slowly, listening for the clacking of the keys on Ziegler’s keyboard, then opened her eyes to look for the light under the door. When she found it, the crack of light wasn’t where it was supposed to be. She sat up in bed and remembered. The light under the door was the hotel hallway. This was the Olympic Hotel, and it was in Seattle.

The five-hundred-mile trip up the Pacific coast from San Diego to San Francisco had taken her a full day. The only stops she had made had been near mailboxes and post offices, sometimes to drop a single envelope in a slot. She had stayed one night in San Francisco, then spent most of the next day flying to Portland and Seattle, mailing more letters.

So far, everything had gone exactly as she had planned. California was a tenth of the population of the country, so there had been many stops. Portland and Seattle were smaller, so on her last flight she had been able to fold one empty duffel bag and put it inside the other with the rest of the mail. She had used the name Wendy Stein to rent the car, then been Katherine Webster in San Francisco, and Diane Finley on the flight to Seattle. When she had arrived at the hotel, the boxes of new letters had been waiting for her.

She had taken two hours emptying the boxes and packing the letters in her two duffel bags in the proper order, so the first bundles would be at the top. Then she had flattened the cardboard boxes, torn the mailing stickers off them, and carried them to the Dumpster in the little enclosure behind the building. After that, she had tried to go to sleep, but couldn’t. From the moment when she had dropped the first envelopes in Albuquerque, she had been aware that she had started the clock. It would take only a day or two before the first checks arrived at the offices of charities. She had tried to make those two days count, but now she was stopped. She had to wait until morning for her flight to Minneapolis to begin her run through the Midwest. It was only when the clock by the bed said two A.M. that she was able to assuage the feeling of nervous eagerness. The bags were ready, the tickets were in her purse on the table, and the reservations were confirmed for the rest of the trip. It was now five o’clock in the East, and she knew that while she slept, Henry Ziegler would already be in the car she had reserved for him, driving up the coast dropping envelopes in places like Orlando, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston. Even if the least likely of the possible disasters had already happened, and someone had connected the sudden dispersal of big money with Bernie Lupus, it was almost impossible that anyone would connect the event with Henry Ziegler. Probably no wiseguy had ever heard of him. And Henry would be traveling in the safest, most anonymous way, staying out of airports.

Jane slept for four hours, then woke up to discover that she had regained her strength and alertness. She called the desk downstairs to have a bellman pick up her two large bags and summon a taxi for Sea-Tac airport. She showered and dressed quickly and hurried down to settle her bill. In a few days it would be over.

At the airport, Jane dragged her two bags a few feet to the end of the line of passengers waiting to check their luggage at the curb. When the skycaps had taken them, she entered the terminal, walked through the row of metal detectors, and began to assess the crowds of people in the waiting areas. She was trying to pick out the two or three men who would be watching for Rita Shelford, but she saw immediately that things had changed. There seemed to be more of them than there had been in San Diego. The man near the end of the first aisle studying something in his briefcase was a strong candidate. He kept dipping his eyes to stare down at the open case, then looking up at people walking past him on the concourse. At first she thought it was possible that he was a police officer of some kind, but she dismissed the thought. His shoes were too nice. Cops never forgot that they were likely to spend a lot of time on their feet before the end of the shift, and might even have to chase someone down who was younger and faster, then wrestle with him. They didn’t like leather soles and pointed toes.

She knew the man couldn’t be looking for her, but she was glad to get past him. A few minutes later her eyes settled on a man walking along ahead of her. He turned his head to the right, and Jane followed his eyes. He had looked directly at a man sitting in the waiting area. The man stood up and began to walk too.

Jane kept going at the same pace, stepped closer to the middle of the concourse, where people at the sides wouldn’t get as good a look at her, and watched the two men work. She tried to figure out whether they had spotted someone who looked like Rita, but it was difficult to tell. Ahead of her there were lots of people of all sizes and shapes.

The first man stepped into the stream of people ahead, stopped abruptly in front of the one he suspected, and stared up at the sign hanging from the ceiling above his head that had an arrow and the words GATES 10–22. The second man stopped behind, hemming the victim in. He had his hand in his pocket, and in it, Jane knew, would be something he wasn’t supposed to have in an airport—maybe a blade made of sharpened plastic. But when the man who had caused the jam pivoted awkwardly and took a close look into the face of the victim, he muttered an apology and stepped quickly aside.

The victim stepped off again, pulling her rolling suitcase by its extended handle. Jane hurried to catch up with the woman before the two men had time to circle back to their positions, where Jane would have to pass them.

Jane could see now that what the woman was carrying in her free hand was not an airline’s envelope with tickets in it. She had a little packet of business-size envelopes with stamps on them. The woman veered to the side of the concourse and Jane adjusted her course a few degrees to watch her more closely. The woman stopped at a steel panel with several horizontal slots in it and the eagle logo of the U.S. Postal Service. She dropped the letters in a slot and turned to go back to some gate she had already passed. Jane studied the woman’s face. First the woman’s eyes were unfocused, merely aimed ahead so she could see where she was going. Then she noticed Jane, and her eyes shot to Jane’s face: her hair, her eyes, then down at the floor. A slight smile played on her lips for a fraction of a second. She had seen the resemblance too.

Jane looked away and walked faster. Jane had seen a dozen women of almost the same general description since she had stepped onto the curb outside the terminal. Women of her age and size with dark hair—even coal-black hair—weren’t unusual. It must have been the letters the woman had been carrying that had made her worth a closer look.

Jane felt a chill moving up from the base of her spine and settling in her shoulder blades. They knew already. The first letters couldn’t have arrived more than two days ago. How could they have picked up the pattern already? It occurred to her that maybe Henry Ziegler wasn’t safe. Maybe they had caught him somehow, and made him tell them everything. She forced herself to think about her immediate problem.

She stepped into the first ladies’ room she came to and waited to let the two men come back up the concourse. She looked at her face in the mirror and was startled by the haunted look in her eyes. She composed her features, then tried to think. She opened her purse and began to freshen her makeup as the door opened and another woman walked past her.

The two men watching the departure gates could hardly be the only ones in the airport. She had never heard that Seattle was a place where organized crime had a big foothold, but Sea-Tac was a big airport, and they could easily have flown a few men in from some city where they were redundant. No, she thought, not easily. It didn’t have to be easy: they were after billions of dollars.

Jane glanced at her watch. It was a half hour before flight time. She had to calm herself and consider her options. She had already checked her two big bags onto the flight to Minneapolis. If she walked away now, the airline would delay the flight and take the bags off. They never flew bags without a passenger anymore. Stopping the flight, with its implication of bombs and airplane crashes, would attract attention from panicky passengers. It might even draw some of the watchers, if only because watching airports was dull work. The airport security people would certainly open the two big duffel bags and find nothing but envelopes inside. She tried to give a size to that loss. There was no way of knowing exactly how much the checks in this load were worth, but it couldn’t be less than a billion dollars a bag. Some of the corporate foundations Henry had invented had been given names that sounded like midwestern agricultural conglomerates, and they would be in this load. A number of the names of individual families had been designed to sound like old fortunes from automobile companies, railroads, and department stores. But the sums of money weren’t the worst problem. Giving the FBI a few thousand of these checks to study and trace was unthinkable.

She couldn’t walk away from her bags. She would have to get on the flight to Minneapolis to claim them. She could wait here in the ladies’ room until the second boarding call, then make a determined walk to the gate to join the travelers crowding together to get aboard.

Jane looked at her hair. Wearing it long and loose was probably not the best she could do. She pulled it tight, braided it, then twisted the braid and pinned it up in back. She searched her purse for the pair of tinted glasses she had picked up for herself when she had bought Rita’s and put them on. She heard the first call for the flight to Minneapolis, then touched up her lipstick and heard the second call.

She took one last look at herself, turned, and walked to the door. Jane swung the door open and stepped out into the alcove. There was a jolt as a big body bumped against hers and slammed her into a side wall. There was the sharp sting of a pointed object pressed against her spine, and a strong forearm around her neck. The voice was low and nervous, so close behind her left ear that she could feel the damp, hot breath. “You’re going to walk with me. The reason is that I can push this blade between the disks of your spine before you could get a word out.”

Jane felt him tighten his grip with his left arm and push the blade a little harder to scare her. She couldn’t tell from the feel what shape it was, or what it was made of, but she could tell it was short—an inch or two—because part of the hand that held it seemed to be resting against the back of her jacket. It could be a sharpened key. It could even be a pocketknife, if it looked short and harmless enough to the security woman at the metal detectors.

“Now walk back toward the escalators.”

Jane struggled to sort out the sensations. The pressure against her back was strong enough to pierce the skin, if her jacket had not been there for padding. The man was standing behind her now, but when they stepped out in the open, he would have to move slightly to the side, as though he had his arm around her—his left side, because he held the knife in his right hand. That was a weak position, good for slashing, but not for stabbing. He would have to lean toward her if he wanted to stab.

He pushed Jane forward and she heard him take a step to move ahead to her left side. Jane’s next step was slightly to her left to reassure him that she was heading toward the exit, and to trigger the reflex in his feet to move that way faster to keep from tripping over her. As he began to lean to the left, Jane started her third step, dropped to the floor just to her right, and rolled. Her legs came up to her chest, then kicked out together.

The man did as she had hoped. He finished his step to the left, then lunged to the right with the knife. His weight shifted to his right foot, and he was off-balance. Jane’s two-footed kick caught his right ankle and swept his leg out from under him. He hit the slippery floor hard on his right hip and shoulder. His first impulse was to roll to his belly and go after her, so his hand came up, and he remembered that the little knife was in it and that people must be looking. He awkwardly rose to his right elbow to slip the knife into the inner pocket of his jacket.

His eyes rolled to survey the area around him to determine whether anyone had seen the knife. He needed to take his eyes off Jane for an instant. If his peripheral vision detected that Jane was still moving, his mind interpreted it as an attempt to stand and run. But Jane was already bringing her left leg toward him, exerting the strong muscles at the back of the thigh and calf that the body used to push off when it ran. Her heel pounded into the bridge of his nose and snapped his head backward.

Strong hands grasped Jane and lifted her to her feet. People were muttering the useless words that Jane knew would make them feel foolish. “Are you okay?” “Did you trip?”

“I’m okay,” she said. Then, more angrily, like a woman who resented the embarrassment, she added, “I wish people would watch where they’re going.” She was already moving toward the gate again. As she slipped into the river of people heading in the same direction, she ventured a last, irritated glance back. The man was still lying there. She couldn’t tell whether he had lost consciousness or simply couldn’t think of a way to shake off the people surrounding him and run after her without being caught. Then the crowd gathering around him blocked her view.

Jane hurried on. When she sensed she had gone a sufficient distance, she began to run, dodging slow walkers and heavily laden passengers. She made it to her gate just as one airline woman was putting a new flight number on the board behind the desk and the other was preparing to close the door to the boarding tunnel. She handed the woman her ticket, heard the door slam behind her, then rushed to take her seat.

Jane fastened her seat belt and willed the plane to move, and almost immediately, it did. She watched the terminal moving backward as the plane was towed away from it. She sat back, letting the fear and exertion wash over her now. She felt the light-headed, jittery weakness and the pounding of her heart for a full minute. But then the plane stopped and began to move forward. The pilot must have been trying to preserve his place in the takeoff order. His voice came over the speaker and confirmed her theory. A few minutes later the plane was lifting off at the end of the runway and Jane was already reaching out against the exaggerated gravity to take the telephone off the back of the seat in front of her.