Blood Money

by Thomas Perry

  As Mary Ellen ate her dinner, she felt a little bit guilty about her good fortune. The flyers had implied that “Find This Girl” was some sort of runaway child. Sometimes what that meant was that there was some terrible story involving abuse. Either that was the reason why they left home, or what everybody feared had happened to them since. It would be a shame to get rich and then find out that her windfall and John’s had been based on something like that. She tried to reassure herself with thoughts about “Woman Missing.” She looked quite a bit older, and what was said about her implied that she was a criminal, not a victim. Maybe Mary Ellen would be the one who saved the girl and put the criminal in jail.

  Mary Ellen was all the way through her dessert—an apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream—and she still could see no sign of policemen or detectives. Maybe John had given them directions that were too vague, or completely wrong. Maybe they had heard his voice and thought he was a nut.

  The waiter brought the girl her check in a leather folder. She signed it, got up, and left. Mary Ellen looked at her husband in horror. “She’s leaving.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “But if they don’t get here, she’ll be gone, and we won’t get the reward.”

  “Sure we will,” he said. “Didn’t you see the way she signed the bill?”

  Mary Ellen was sure her husband had lost his mind. “What was I supposed to see?”

  “She didn’t give him a credit card. She just signed it, and wrote a room number. She’s not leaving. She’s staying at the hotel.”

  35

  Jane reached Terre Haute at eleven-thirty at night. She felt a kind of exhaustion that was strangely pleasant. At some point, a week or a month from now, she would think back on all of the driving and the tension and the endless watchfulness, and it would probably be difficult to reconstruct how it had all happened. Right now, she knew that the pleasure of a long, hot bath and a soft bed would be enough.

  She drove past the car rental agency, and she could see that it would be possible to leave the car now and drop the key in a lockbox, but she drifted past the entrance and sped up again. It didn’t look as though there was anyone on duty to give her a ride to the hotel. She drove toward the hotel, but resisted the temptation to simply park in the lot and step into the lobby. The money was gone, but she, Rita, and Bernie weren’t finished yet. Having a car that nobody knew about was not a small advantage if something had gone wrong while she was away. She drove up the street one block west of the hotel and parked.

  Jane walked to the end of the block and turned toward the hotel. It was a warm, humid summer night, and even in this commercial part of town, she could hear crickets. She supposed the lawns and gardens of the hotel were part of the reason, but she could hear the sounds coming from a row of low rosebushes along the facade of an insurance agency to her right, then from a patch of azaleas in front of a women’s clothing store.

  Jane reached the street where the hotel entrance was, but she didn’t cross at the intersection. Instead, she turned and walked up the sidewalk across from the hotel. When she had achieved the proper angle, she could see the reflection of the chandelier on the shiny floor of the brightly lit lobby. When she had gone thirty paces farther, she knew that she would be able to see the parking lot.

  She knew that it was unlikely that she would see that Rita and Bernie had taken the Explorer and run, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth checking. The Explorer was still there, exactly where she had parked it when they’d arrived. She half-turned to go back to the intersection and cross the street, but something made her stop.

  There was a van in the guest parking area. It was nearly midnight, a bit late for deliveries, and this wasn’t a van that somebody used as a car, because the back door had printing that said, “How am I driving? Call (800) 555-1100.” She kept walking on, trying to achieve the proper angle to read the name of the company on the side. When she had reached the right spot, she could see the name: Mayfair Products. She knew she might be letting weeks of extreme caution overrule her sense of proportion, but she decided to satisfy herself.

  Jane kept walking until she found a pay telephone on the front of a discount drugstore a block away. She pulled from her purse the little folder the clerk had handed her at check-in to hold the key cards, read the telephone number, and dialed. When the operator answered, she said, “Room 224, please.”

  The telephone rang three times before she heard a click and the sound of breathing. She didn’t wait for Bernie to speak. “Bernie? It’s me.”

  His voice was hoarse from sleep. “What? Where are you?”

  “I’m across the street and down one block at a pay telephone. I was on my way in, but I saw something that worried me. Has anything gone wrong since I left?”

  “I haven’t seen anything. We haven’t left the place. The only time either of us has been out of the room was when Rita went down to eat dinner. She said there was nobody but old codgers. What did you see?”

  “There’s a delivery van in the parking lot. It might be fine, but it’s parked in kind of an odd place—not near a loading zone, but close to the side door where the first-floor rooms are. It says ‘Mayfair Products’ on it. I remembered Trafalgar Flowers, and—”

  “Trafalgar Square Flowers, Parliament Park grocery stores, Belgravia Broadcasting.”

  “Then it is Delfina?”

  “I don’t keep track of everything the bastard owns, but do you want to bet it’s just some schmuck who misses London?”

  “No,” said Jane. “Wake Rita up. If they know we’re here, then they know the Explorer’s ours. I’ve got the rental car parked on a street parallel to the front of the hotel, one block over. Do you remember what it looks like?”

  “Remembering things isn’t my problem. White Chevy, license number—”

  “Enough,” she interrupted. “I’ll leave the keys on the ground behind the right front tire. You and Rita come down the stairwell, then out the door by the swimming pool. Go through the garden by the restaurant, and out to the street on that side. Go one block up before you cut over to the street where the car is.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going to watch the van and the parking lot and the front entrance to see if they go after you. If they don’t, I’ll be at the car before you are. If they do, I’ll meet you somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  Jane said, “I don’t know … Evansville, Indiana. I’ll be in front of the police station at nine o’clock tomorrow night.” She didn’t wait for him to raise an objection. “Wake her now,” she said, and hung up.

  Jane turned away from the hotel and walked another block before she doubled back to the street where she had left the car. She walked briskly to it, bent to slip the keys beside the curb and under the right front tire, and kept going. There was nobody walking on the street, so she was confident that her move had not been seen. The keys would not be picked up by the headlights of a passing car, and the next pedestrian’s view would be blocked by the curb.

  Jane turned the corner and kept walking until she was directly across from the hotel again. She stepped into the dark space between a small bookstore and a closed restaurant and stared at the van. She couldn’t see any heads in the windows, so she turned her attention to the other cars in the lot. There were definitely more of them tonight than there had been last night. She was sure that the hotel kitchen closed at ten, and the small bar off the lobby would not have seated more than a dozen people comfortably.

  Then Jane saw the van move. It was a small, subtle motion, just a shifting of weight as someone in the back moved from one spot to another, but she was sure. Then she saw another movement in the shadows near the other end of the parking lot. A man stepped to the back of a parked car and opened the trunk. The light in the trunk didn’t go on. It looked like a new car, but the light didn’t work. The man took something out and stepped back into the darkness again.

  Jane waited, and time seemed to stop. If Bern
ie and Rita could only slip out of the building without being seen, she could get them out of here. She stared along the front of the hotel, past the facade to the old-fashioned veranda outside the restaurant. She could see no sign of them. She let her eyes go unfocused and stared toward the garden, waiting for the shapes of Bernie and Rita to stand out from the dim tangle of bushes and twining vines to reassure her.

  There was movement in the parking lot. Now there were three men standing near the van. Car doors opened across the lot, and three more men stepped out into the light. They seemed to be looking away from the hotel, in the direction of the big drugstore where Jane had made her telephone call. One of the men lifted his hand to his face, and she could see that there was something in it—a black rectangle. He was talking into a radio as he stared up the street.

  A moment later, from that direction, she saw a vehicle appear. It was a big Suburban, and it was moving quickly up the street. It turned into the lot, paused for a second beside the group of men, then swung away and parked near the edge of the lot. There was some more discussion between the man with the radio and someone in the Suburban.

  Jane looked anxiously toward the other end of the building. What was taking so long? Where were they? In a moment she detected a moving shadow, then another. They were walking along the outside of the building beside the restaurant.

  Jane looked back at the parking lot. The man with the radio in his hand waved his right arm. Three men began to walk toward the side entrance to the hotel, near the Mayfair van. Jane sucked in a breath. In a couple of minutes, they would know the rooms were empty.

  She looked at the far end of the building. Rita and Bernie had stopped. They seemed to be standing in the shadow of an arbor, waiting for something. “No,” Jane whispered. “Keep moving.”

  Then Jane saw it was the Suburban. It had moved to the back of the lot, then around the service road toward the other side. It seemed to be parked there, right in Rita and Bernie’s path.

  Jane turned her attention to the parking lot again. The man with the radio pointed, and the three men he had left began to walk along the outside of the building. Jane realized he must be sending them to watch the other exits. Rita and Bernie were already outside, but they were trapped in the garden. Those men were walking straight toward them.

  Jane squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth. She felt a swelling of strong, explosive emotions—anger at these men who had come to shake an old man and a teenaged girl out of their sleep and drag them off, frustration at Bernie and Rita for being too slow, too tentative to survive, shame for not having been smart enough to have avoided this. She felt an overpowering sense of outrage as she pretended to make a decision. But while she was doing it, her hand was in her purse, feeling in the inner pocket for the second ignition key she had gotten when she had bought the Ford Explorer.

  She found it, and she moved out from between the two buildings. She stepped across the sidewalk quickly, then off the curb. A strange image floated across her consciousness as she watched the men across the street in the parking lot, staring only at one another and talking into radios.

  This was the way hundreds of Senecas had died, the way a Seneca was supposed to die. In the Old Time, raiding parties had consisted of three or four good friends, who had gone quietly and secretly to the territory of their enemies. They would appear out of the forest, do the enemy as much harm as they could, and then disappear into the forest again. They would run along the trail single file, sometimes not stopping for days at a time. But now and then, the strategy would fail. The time would come, somewhere in the wild country hundreds of miles from home, when they would be exhausted, slowing. The enemy warriors assembled to retaliate would be about to catch up. It was then that the strongest and bravest would suddenly stop. He would step back along the trail to a narrow spot, and begin to sing his death song as he waited for the pursuers.

  He would fight them, trying to lay as many bodies at his feet as he could. The enemy would fight differently. They would try to wound him with arrows and thrown clubs, attack in waves and retreat, attempt to use up his strength so they could take him down and drag him back alive to be tormented.

  Jane’s mind was so clear that she could read the minds of the men around the hotel. She knew what they would think before they did. When they noticed the lone woman hurrying across the street toward them, they turned away, hiding the radios and taking a few tentative steps back toward the darkness. She was still just a woman, someone whom they didn’t want to see their faces. In a moment she would go into the hotel, and they could resume their hunt. She could feel them looking at her when her foot went up on the curb in front of the parking lot. She moved quickly, knowing that each second gave them more time to sense her fear. She walked purposefully ahead, not letting her eyes turn in their direction. She knew that as soon as she made her move, she would transform herself from a low-level threat into prey.

  She relished the few seconds while she prepared, savoring their alarm at her sudden interruption of their plans, and their eagerness to see her gone. She walked close to the Mayfair Products van, as though she was going into the hotel. She took a deep breath as she reached the front of the van, then suddenly slipped to the side, hidden for a moment by the bulk of the van. She took two running steps across the front of it, emerged in the next aisle, stuck the key into the door of the Explorer, swung the door open, leapt into the driver’s seat, and pounded the lock button.

  She started the Explorer and backed up quickly, then pushed the accelerator nearly to the floor. She saw a man try to step in front of her, but she didn’t vary her course at all. He dived to the pavement to escape, and she thought she heard a bump as though the fender might have clipped his foot. She let the van roar out into the road too fast, then had to accelerate out of the wide turn to get out of the opposite lane.

  Jane glanced in the rearview mirror to see men running for cars in the lot. She raised her speed, because she knew that if she didn’t, the big Suburban would try to block the road ahead of her.

  She took one last look at the hotel as she turned right, then left. She searched the picture she carried with her in her mind. There had been men running back along the front of the hotel, away from the restaurant garden toward the parking lot. It had worked. In a few minutes the sound of cars would die in the distance, and Bernie and Rita would be able to stroll down the sidewalk to the car she had left them.

  Jane felt a curious sense of freedom as she drove. It was after midnight, and she was on the edge of the city already. Ahead of her were hundreds of miles of flat country with good, fast roads. She looked at the gas gauge. The tank was full. If she did this right, she might be able to keep them following her for a long time. Bernie and Rita would have the new start that she had wanted to give them.

  She drove fast, but she had no serious hope of outrunning them. She made four quick turns, then found herself moving south on Route 41. She looked back in her rearview mirror and saw three other cars make the turn after her, then the Suburban. She nudged her speed up some more, but they were still coming.

  She saw signs indicating she was passing Farmersburg, Shelburn, Sullivan. The names meant nothing. The world seemed to be a black sky and a slightly lighter line of land below it, as though her life had simplified into two stripes with a road down the middle. Now and then she would see a tiny red glow of taillights ahead, but after a few minutes the car would pull off and the lights would be gone. Then she would see white headlights, and they would slowly grow and brighten. She would hope for a police car, but by the time the lights were close enough to show that it wasn’t, they would flash past and be gone.

  After a few minutes, she realized that flagging down a single patrol car would do her no good. It would be one rural cop against—what—four carloads of heavily armed men? There was little point in recruiting somebody to die with her. She considered instead trying to make a run for one of the big east-west interstates. Route 64 must be ahead of her. At any hour of the
night there would be long-distance truckers and tourists who were pushing themselves, and at each exit there would be lighted gas stations and fast-food places. Maybe these men wouldn’t dare to take her in a public place in front of witnesses.

  She knew it wasn’t true. They had flown here from somewhere with the intention of pulling an armed assault on a hotel to kidnap people. She thought about them, and began to grow angrier. There was some special quality about what they were doing that made her feel heat at the back of her neck. It was their arrogance. They felt invincible. They always had everyone overwhelmingly outnumbered. They relied on people being afraid of them. She found herself thinking about the shotgun she had carried in the New Mexico desert. She had reached the edge of the city, dropped it in the dirt, and buried it. She wished she could go back in time, dig it up, and throw it into the back of the Explorer before she drove east.

  She was moving as fast as she dared. Whenever she reached the crest of an incline, she would feel the Explorer leave the ground a little, pulling up on the springs, the seat belt tightening across her hips to keep her down. Then it would come down, and her arms would seem to grow heavier for a few seconds. Each bump in the road threatened to wrench the steering wheel to the side. She glanced back in the mirror, and she could see that she had gained a little ground.

  When she returned her eyes to the windshield, she saw the farm. It was enormous, by the standards she had grown up with in western New York, a small cluster of buildings in the middle of a vast expanse of fields. It looked like an oasis in the desert, because big trees had been left around the buildings to provide the only shade for miles, and in front of one of the buildings was a lawn.

  There were no lights on in any of the buildings. As she came down the incline toward the place, she could see the fields better. They were filled with corn. It was late July now, so the stalks near the road seemed to her to be higher than the roof of the Explorer.