by Thomas Perry
Now things had changed. She had seen the intensity of the search building since she had flown to the Caribbean. Each time she had been in an airport there had seemed to be more big, tough-looking men standing around watching passengers arrive and depart. Jane had not anticipated that they would be doing anything but scrutinizing people for a resemblance to Rita.
In Sea-Tac airport they had not been looking only for Rita. The first two had been stalking a woman who fit Jane’s general description, and who had been carrying a stack of business letters. The third man had ignored a thousand people and gone after Jane. The Mafia—or some part of it, anyway—knew that the money was being moved by mail, and that the way to stop it was by capturing a dark-haired woman.
Jane tried to imagine how they knew about her, but the possibilities were unlimited, and each one that occurred to her had something about it that didn’t fit. If they had found the house in Santa Fe, and Bernie or Rita had talked, then they would know that the way to end the flow of money would be by using the records in the computers to stop payment on the checks. If they had noticed Henry somehow, then they would have made him block the transactions. They wouldn’t need to find Jane.
She gave it up and tried to think about where she was now, and what she should do. Today was the third day. Jane had finished the mailings on the West Coast, picked up her second load of letters, and gotten out. Henry would be nearly up to Washington, D.C., by now, and then he would have his second set of letters in his bags and start dropping them off, hour by hour, as he moved north along the East Coast.
In most parts of the country, today’s mail had already been delivered, so another burst of donations would hit the banks this afternoon. Whoever was watching transactions for the Mafia would have a lot to think about.
As Jane made her plans, certain decisions were inevitable. From now on, she would have to try very hard to stay away from airports. She would have to make a second, more thorough attempt to change her appearance.
She turned onto Interstate 90, and after seventy miles drove over the Mississippi into La Crosse, Wisconsin. All night she drove through the Wisconsin countryside, stopping only to mail letters—first only a mile from the bridge, then 143 miles farther east at Madison, then 54 miles on at Beloit. Then she drove the last 74 miles to Milwaukee.
Jane stopped at a hotel on West Highland Avenue that she judged to be equidistant from the Convention Center, Marquette University, and the Pabst Brewing Company. She brought her bags into her room, then went downstairs, moved her rental car to the other side of the lot, where she could see it from her window, and went to sleep.
In the morning, Jane bought the local newspapers from the gift shop in the hotel lobby and went back to her room to read them. There were no articles that indicated the sudden growth of generosity in the country had come to the attention of the Sentinel or the Journal. There were no wire-service reports of murders in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or stories about the East Coast that she could interpret as harm coming to Henry Ziegler. The meteorological reports even confirmed that he was having clear weather. It was not until she turned to the want ads that she saw something of interest.
“Public Auto Auction, Rain or Shine,” ran the banner above the huge advertisement. “You Inspect the Vehicles Before the Auction!” As though to prove it, the smaller letters said, “Inspection, 10:00, Auction, Noon.” Jane looked at the long list of car models, years, and prices, then realized that they were simply examples of past bargains: it was an auction, after all. Along the bottom, the ad said, “If you don’t have cash we accept all major credit cards for purchase or as a down payment! EZ financing available. Serving Milwaukee since 1993.”
Jane took a taxi to the address at the bottom of the page. She found herself on the edge of a big lot, where a few dozen customers, nearly all of them men, walked up and down staring at rows of cars of all makes and sizes. A few of the men had pads or pieces of paper on which they made notes. Jane concluded that they were involved in some aspect of the used-car business, because anybody who just wanted a cheap car probably wouldn’t need to write anything down to remember the one he liked.
Jane picked one man out and watched him stalk the rows. His hands were clean, but they had a few stubborn black stains on them that he had not been able to scrub off, and the knuckles of the right hand had an angry red look she decided had come from rapping them on something while turning a wrench in a confined space. She made a point of being nearby each time he looked up from his pad. Finally, he said, “You looking for a car?”
“What else have they got?” said Jane with a smile.
“For yourself?”
“Uh-huh.”
He pointed at a black rectangle that rose higher than the line of cars in the next row. “If you like SUVs, there’s a ‘97 Ford Explorer over there with about eight thousand miles on it. She’s a couple of years old, and the finish has a few scratches, so she won’t go for what she’s worth.” He turned and pointed in the other direction at two gray shapes that Jane could barely see. “If you want to go fancy, they have a couple of Mercedes down there. One of them has a dent that you could fix for two hundred, and it’ll knock a thousand or more off the price.”
“I just need to get from point A to point B. Where do the cars come from?”
He shrugged. “Some get confiscated, some are regular repos.”
Jane said, “I don’t know if I want to end up with a car that belonged to a drug dealer or an axe murderer or something. What if he wants it back?”
The man smiled. “They’re not usually that exciting. Usually it’s just the plain old IRS.”
“Thanks,” she said, and walked off to look at the cars he had pointed out.
When the auction began, Jane joined the gaggle of people who followed the auctioneer along the rows. She watched the bidding while the first few cars were sold. There was a tall, thin man who stood a bit to the side of the auctioneer and watched the bidders. If the auctioneer was getting nowhere, he would turn toward the tall, thin man. He would give a bid, the auctioneer would say, “Sold,” and walk on. Jane decided the man must be the loss stopper, who made sure that nothing went too low.
When the auctioneer reached the Ford Explorer, Jane waited to see the other bidders. There were a few ridiculously low bids, and then her new friend appeared at her shoulder and whispered, “Offer eight.” Jane said, “Eight thousand.” There were bids of eighty-one and eighty-two hundred. Jane waited until the auctioneer turned to the stop-loss man, then yelled, “Nine thousand.” The auctioneer looked at the other bidders, then declared the car sold and walked on.
Before Jane’s friend followed, he whispered, “Good deal.”
Jane grinned, then went off to pay for her car. She gave the man in the little building her Diane Fierstein credit card, received her bill of sale, and drove her car off the lot to register it in the name Diane Fierstein.
The hair was much more complicated than buying a mere car. It took time to find the right salon, then to call for an appointment on short notice. She had to improvise a story about how she was flying to Houston for her sister’s wedding tomorrow, and her regular hairdresser had solemnly promised an appointment, and then gotten into an accident and hurt her hand, and could you please, please.… After her performance, Jane went to a bookstore to leaf through magazines to find the right picture. At four-thirty, Jane was in a shop near the university handing the magazine to the stylist.
Jane knew that the way she felt in the stylist’s chair was idiotic, and found that knowing didn’t help at all. She had always liked her long black hair. It was a peculiar, personal link with who she really was. She liked it because when she looked at it, she could remember her father’s voice telling her it was beautiful, and her mother brushing it, then holding her own auburn hair beside it and smiling. “To think I would ever have a little girl with this thick, gorgeous black hair,” she would say. Jane had kept it long and made the effort to care for it, even in times of her life when she could m
ake no argument for its practicality. Since she and Carey had been together, it had seemed to her to be mingled in some complicated way into their relationship. He had talked about it and run his fingers through it in a way that stood for all of the differences between men and women that made each mysterious and fascinating to the other.
The first long tresses fell on the sheet the stylist had pinned around her neck, and she had to fight the tears—to keep her eyes from closing because that would squeeze them out. But then, after a few minutes, the cutting was over. She still had to endure the hair dye and the wave, but those things had no meaning for her now, because the long black hair was not hers anymore.
Two hours later, she was staring at a woman in the mirror, reminding herself that this woman was the one she had chosen to be. She had short brown hair with a slight curl. The stylist had treated her eyebrows to match the hair, and they made the blue eyes she had inherited from her mother look bigger, but somehow less startling than they had been this morning. She looked like a mildly attractive thirty-year-old who was probably married, probably worked in some kind of office, but lived in the suburbs.
Jane quickly turned away from the mirror. She kept her body turned toward the front of the shop to give the stylist a huge tip while she detested her for her skill, then turned with feigned cheerfulness to go out the back door without looking in the mirrors again. She drove her new Ford Explorer to a big mall, and spent the late afternoon shopping.
In a department store, Jane bought a pair of plain gray soft-sided suitcases that matched the interior of the Explorer, then a supply of makeup, beginning with a foundation that was a shade or two lighter than her skin. Next she selected clothes. When she had been seen in the airport she had been wearing a skirt and jacket she had bought in Beverly Hills and a silk blouse, so she worked to get away from that image. She bought clothes that a married suburban woman might wear while she was doing errands: lots of slacks, comfortable shoes, and oversized tops. She also bought jeans and running shoes, a baseball cap, a pair of designer sunglasses, and a couple of light summer jackets.
She ate dinner in a restaurant in the mall, then drove up the street to a big hardware chain, found her way to the automotive section, and bought big floor mats to match the carpet in the Explorer. She used them to cover her suitcases, and drove to the street behind her hotel and parked.
Before she had left the hotel this morning, she had put up the DO NOT DISTURB sign. On her way out, she had counted the number of doors from the room to the elevator, and established that hers was the fourth from the left end of the building on the third floor. She could see that the curtains were still open, and the dim lamp by the bed was still turned on. The only thing left to check was the car she had rented in Minnesota.
She walked along the street behind the hotel until she found a tall office building with a parking garage beside it. She used the stairs to climb to the fourth floor of the building, then went out the exit door to the upper level of the parking garage, stepped to the edge, and looked down.
The parking lot of the big hotel was filling up for the evening. Most of the curtains on the upper floors of the hotel were closed, but there were lights behind many of them, and some of the small, translucent windows of the bathrooms were lighted. People were beginning the ritual of getting showered and changed for dinner.
Jane studied the people she saw entering and leaving the hotel by the parking lot entrance. It was a weeknight in a city that wasn’t particularly renowned as a tourist attraction, so Jane wasn’t surprised that most of the guests looked as though they were returning from business meetings. Men and women were dressed in suits, and they carried things—briefcases, folders, squarish cases that probably contained computers or samples. A van pulled up and a mixed group of six got out. They were all wearing jeans or casual khaki trousers, but they all had little orange buttons pinned to their chests, and they didn’t divide into male-female pairs when they walked toward the entrance, so this too was business of some kind.
It took Jane another minute to identify the watchers. There were two men in a car at the end of the lot, and two more on the street beyond the parking lot, but she wasn’t sure that what they were watching was her car. She waited to see one of them move, but they waited too.
She walked back into the office building and tried to assess what she had seen. She had run from Minneapolis to Rochester in a stolen car. It would not have been difficult for the ones in Minneapolis to learn that a stolen car had been found in the lot of the Rochester airport, or even to find it themselves. She had hoped that when they did, they would assume she had gone there to board an airplane.
If they knew she had not taken a flight out of Rochester, then they would guess that probably what she had done was rent a car. If a man came to the rental counter—maybe a man pretending to be a cop, and maybe just a man who had a plausible reason and a roll of money—he might have been able to find out what kind of car a particular woman had rented a few hours before. That was simple. But Rochester, Minnesota, was a distance from Milwaukee. Could they have seen her at the airport and followed her all this way? It didn’t seem possible. Even if she had been spectacularly unobservant and not seen them, she had given them plenty of chances to grab her on lonely roads. Somebody in Milwaukee had probably been told to look for a green Pontiac with Minnesota plates, and found it here in the hotel parking lot.
The fact that they were not waiting for her in her room didn’t prove anything. If what they wanted was to capture her, they would not want her in a busy hotel. She descended to the lobby of the office building, found a telephone booth, and studied the phone book. A minute later, she was talking to the local office of Victory Car Rentals.
“I’ve got a problem. I rented a car from your agency at the Rochester, Minnesota, airport, and drove it to Milwaukee. Now it won’t start.”
“What’s it doing?” the man asked.
“What’s it doing?” she repeated. “Nothing.”
“I mean, when you turn the key, does the starter turn over, or does it just sit there?”
“It goes ‘Errr, errr, errr,’ then nothing happens.”
“It’s probably flooded. Turn everything off. Just let it sit for fifteen minutes and try again. It should be fine.”
“I tried that.”
“Oh,” said the man. “Well, then this time, push the pedal all the way down and hold it there while you turn the key.”
Jane sighed loudly. “I’ve done all of those things. I’m running late. I’ve already called a cab to take me to the airport, and I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my plane. I’ve got a client waiting to pick me up at the other end. The car is at the Columbia Hotel on Highland. I’m going to leave the keys at the desk for you.”
The man’s voice sounded forlorn. “There’s probably nothing wrong with the car, ma’am,” he said. “Maybe you’re jumping the gun.”
“Since you work in Milwaukee and the car is from Minnesota, you have no way of knowing, do you? If you want the car, it’s at the Columbia Hotel. My cab just pulled up outside, and I’ve got to go.”
Jane hung up, walked out of the building, and circled two blocks to approach the hotel front entrance from the other direction. She waited up the street until the right moment came. A cab pulled up and let a man out. Jane timed her arrival at the entrance to coincide with the cab’s departure, and fell into step with the man. “Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” she said.
The man, a tall, gangling guy with big feet, a suitcase in one hand, and a useless raincoat draped over his other arm, was startled. He turned toward her quickly, then recovered. “Sure is,” he said.
They reached the door at the same time, and while he was trying to move the suitcase to the other hand, she pulled the door open for him. They walked to the desk together. Jane used the time to search the lobby for watchers, but saw no candidates. The desk clerk looked at both of them attentively and held his hands poised over his computer.
Jane spoke before the ma
n did. “I’m checking out. My name is Stevens. I have two bags in my room ready to go. Can you send somebody up for them?” She held out her key card.
The clerk summoned a bellman, then sent him off with the card while he computed Jane’s bill. She handed him her Lisa Stevens credit card and signed, then said, “I’d like to leave these keys with you. A man from Victory Rentals will be here to pick up my car.”
“Certainly,” said the man. He accepted the keys, slipped a piece of paper onto the ring, and wrote something on it before he put them into a drawer. “Anything else we can do for you?”
“Can you please check to see if anyone has come to the desk to leave a message for me?”
He looked through a small pile of notes. “Nobody’s been here, ma’am.”
“That changes my plan a little,” said Jane. “Can you hold my bags down here for a while? I’ll be back for them later.”
“We’d be happy to,” he said. She could tell he was beginning to dread her next request.
“Thanks,” she said, then hurried out the front door. She took a different route back to her spot on the parking structure. If there had been a watcher inside the hotel, she had not seen him. If he had found her room, he had not done it by pretending to leave a note and following someone upstairs to her door.
Jane returned to her post at the edge of the parking structure and looked down at the hotel lot. The two sets of men were still down there. As the time went by, she reviewed what she had said and done. She had tried to sound rushed, angry, and breathless to the man at the car rental, so with any luck he would stick to his theory that she had simply flooded the carburetor and gotten too flustered to know it.
