Blood Money

by Thomas Perry

  This was her chance. They might be able to drive long enough and hard enough to catch up with her and bump her off the road, and certainly they could keep her in sight until she had to stop. But she was a runner. She had always run. Every morning since she was twelve, she had gone down to the Niagara River and run along the bank to the Grand Island Bridge and back. She had been on the track team at college, and had won more races than she had lost. The past few weeks had probably left her a little bit out of shape, but she was willing to take the chance.

  She watched the fence posts going by, and then forced her eyes ahead. There it was. There was a road that ran from the highway all the way back to the cluster of barns and outbuildings. She took her foot off the gas pedal without touching the brake, so her taillights would not warn the chasers. She coasted as long as she could, then swung to the right onto the side road.

  She drove for fifty yards, then wrenched the wheel to the left into the cornfield. She put her front wheels into two ruts and ran up the corn rows, watching the big stalks in front of the windshield looming, then falling in front of her. She drove for a full minute, then stopped the Explorer, got out, and slipped quietly into the vast, dark field of tall cornstalks.

  36

  Delfina sat in the front seat of the Suburban beside Cirro, moving his head from side to side to get a better view. “Where’d she go?”

  Cirro craned his neck as he drove. “I can’t tell yet.” Then he said, “It looks like she must have turned off somewhere.”

  Ahead of them, Delfina could see the other cars slowing down, then stopping at the side of the road. Cirro pulled up and stopped. Delfina saw Buccio running along the line of cars, shouting orders into their open windows. As Buccio approached the Suburban, Delfina said, “Now what?”

  Buccio leaned in and said, “Frank, she must have turned off at this farm. There’s an open gate up here, and a road that leads to the farmhouse and stuff.”

  “So what are you doing about it?” asked Delfina.

  “Waiting to see what you think.”

  Delfina’s eyes went cold. “What do I think?”

  “You know. It’s a farm. There are sure to be a bunch of people around. It’s a big place.”

  “Christ,” Delfina muttered. “Go in after her.”

  Buccio ran for his car. In a moment, Delfina saw the car pull out onto the road, then turn onto the smaller road. The other three cars pulled out and followed. Delfina nodded to Cirro, who drove up the road to the entrance. He turned, then Delfina said, “Hold it here, Mike.”

  The cars were stopped just two hundred feet up the road. Delfina climbed down from the Suburban and walked to the line of cars. Other men were getting out and standing on the road. Buccio saw Delfina, and pointed into the cornfield. “It looks like she drove right into the cornfield here.”

  Delfina took Buccio by the arm and led him a few feet from the others. “Look, Carl. I’ve been trying to give you every opportunity I can to handle this. But here we are. There’s a woman with the key to billions of dollars that belongs to us in that cornfield someplace. I’ve committed myself now. There’s no way I can tell the other families I didn’t know where she was, or I was going to cut them in after I got her. Do you understand?”

  “Sure, Frank.”

  “No, I’m not sure you do, even now. When I say I want her, I mean if she isn’t going home with us, you won’t be going home with us.”

  He watched Buccio’s face and waited while Buccio thought about that, then added, “And don’t think that if you lose her, your guys will pop me and say she did it. I already had quiet talks with a few of your crew, and you aren’t going to know which ones.”

  Buccio stood silent for a moment, as though the hand that Delfina had laid lightly on his shoulder weighed hundreds of pounds. Finally, Delfina gave his shoulder a pat. “You’re still in charge. Do what you have to do.” He turned and walked back to the Suburban.

  Buccio’s body filled with energy. He knew that Delfina never spoke until he had thoroughly considered his position from every angle. Buccio glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. It was nearly one A.M., and the sun would come up around five-thirty. He had found a kind of clarity that was rare and precious: it was as though his whole life had been compressed into four and a half hours. As long as the night was dark, he would have absolute power to do as he pleased. When the sun came up, he would either have the woman or die.

  He took four steps up the dirt road toward his men, making a major decision at each step. By the time he reached them, he had his strategy. He said, “I want two men with rifles to cover the front gate and the north-south fence along the road. Don’t let her slip through and start hitchhiking. If anybody else drives in, kill him.”

  He looked at the next two. “You two go down to cover the fences on the ends. Move out.” He waited for a few seconds while his first four men trotted off to take their positions. He turned to the others. “We have three cars. I want two men to each car. Don’t let your car out of your sight. She could be fifty feet away right now, waiting for a chance to sneak in and drive one off. The rest of you, come with me.”

  “Where are you going?” asked one of the men.

  “To secure the farmhouse.” He walked up the farm road, and four men followed.

  Jane crouched among the cornstalks and watched the five men walk past her up the road. There were six still hanging around the cars, so there was no way to slip into one of them. She crawled closer and looked down the farm road toward the highway. The Suburban was still here, too, and it would be impossible to drive past it to the gate.

  Her strategy would have to be dictated by what she couldn’t do. She rose to her feet and made her way between the tall cornstalks, following her own trail until she reached the Explorer. She had hoped the men would leave her some way of disabling their cars while they were hunting her on foot, but that was not possible. She had, however, gotten them out of their cars, and some of them had already moved off on foot. Her best strategy now was to try to outrun them.

  She climbed into the Explorer, started the engine, and moved ahead. She kept her wheels in the ruts between the rows of corn, and mowed down the stalks as she drove. She couldn’t see far ahead, because the corn was too thick and she couldn’t turn on her headlights, but it didn’t matter. The ruts would keep her straight. She drove for a minute, then another minute, and another. Each time a stalk fell in front of her hood and went under the Explorer, she expected it to be the last. It had seemed to her that she would reach the end of the field by now, but it was much bigger than she had guessed.

  She looked into the rearview mirror, and she could see that she had cut a swath through the field, but it only consisted of the two rows of stalks between her tires. The Explorer rode so high that even those stalks weren’t flattened, but tipped toward her at about a forty-degree angle. She could not see anyone following her yet, and she was beginning to be afraid that she wouldn’t be able to see them until they were right behind her.

  She kept driving. Her best hope was to choose a course and follow it efficiently and deliberately, without the kind of haste that made noise and drew attention, but was quick enough to keep the men from thinking.

  She thought she heard a dog barking in the distance. She rolled her window down, but either it had stopped or she had imagined it. She kept going, and now the swishing sound of the Explorer moving through the corn seemed loud. Suddenly she heard a loud metallic creaking, and the Explorer stopped moving and strained against an invisible resistance.

  She got out and pushed her way through the cornstalks to the front of the Explorer. She had reached a fence. There were five thick wires stretched across the grille and bowed outward. She followed them with her eyes, and she could see the first fence post on her right. It was being tugged ahead by the five wires, already strained and tilted at an angle by the pressure. She stepped to it and pulled at the wires to see if she could disconnect them, but they were strung in continuous strands from pol
e to pole, held there by big staples hammered deep into the wood.

  She climbed back into the Explorer and gunned the engine. She heard louder creaking, snapping sounds as the vehicle surged forward, but then the wheels began to spin and slip sideways. Jane put the transmission into neutral, then reverse, and tried to back up. She could tell that the tires had already dug into the soft, cultivated soil. She rocked forward, then back again, and felt the Explorer roll up and out. She kept backing up, until she was about fifty or sixty feet from the fence. She put the transmission into drive and gradually built up her speed. She hit the wires fast, heard a loud cracking noise, and the Explorer broke free. As she rolled on, there was a screeching of wires scraping against the front of the Explorer, and then a loud bang that rocked the vehicle. She spun her head to see that the broken fence post had been jerked into the air by the wires and hit the side. She looked around her. She was out of the corn, in another field that was low and grassy, like alfalfa. She stopped for a second to look to her left for the road.

  This time the noise was louder, a bam as the window behind her head exploded inward and showered the cab with sparkling crystals of safety glass. There was another, and she saw a hole appear in the bare metal of the door ahead of her left knee, a tiny flower of bent steel blooming around it, where the bullet had splashed through. Another, and the windshield seemed to disintegrate, like a falling curtain of water.

  Jane rolled between the front seats and hauled herself into the back, then pushed the rear door open and dived into the weeds. As she crawled back toward the cornfield, she heard more rifle shots, but she knew they were not aimed at her. She could hear ringing sounds as pieces of glass and metal were punched off the Explorer and flew against the interior walls.

  When she reached the safety of the tall corn, she tried to see the man firing the rifle, but she couldn’t. He had to be somewhere near the road. She took a last look at the Explorer. The shooter had adjusted his aim to the engine compartment. She saw the hood vibrate a little as the next shot punched through it, and the next. She slipped farther back into the cornfield, rose to her feet, and began to run.

  Jane changed her course to head across the rows of cornstalks. She ran from row to row, then stopped for a moment to listen. She looked to her right in the direction of the farm road, trying to sight along the straight row and detect the approach of men on foot. Then she ran another hundred feet and stopped again. The stalks were tall enough to hide a man or a car, so it was impossible to see precisely where she was going, but she gave herself up to the features of the country. Her feet and legs could tell that she was going up a very gradual slope, and she knew that at the top of it would be the farm buildings.

  She kept up her pace, using her ears and her sense of touch instead of her eyes. But slowly, gradually, she began to acknowledge that she heard noises. They seemed at first to be far behind her. They were engine noises, cars driving along, and she told herself that it was just the occasional vehicle moving along the now distant highway. They seemed to be going in both directions, because she would hear one start somewhere behind her right ear, get louder, and then diminish into the range of her left ear. Then, a few seconds later, she would hear the sound again, in reverse.

  But then, one of them seemed much louder. She stopped and sighted along the corn row to her right, toward the farm road. She saw nothing. Then she turned around, and the fear gripped her chest so she breathed in quick, shallow gasps. She could see lights.

  Only fifty yards behind her, the beams of headlights shone through the tall stalks of corn. They were moving from left to right across the field, the glow of the lights ahead of the engine noises. Then the lights swung around and came back. The three cars were driving back and forth along the rows as she had, flattening the cornstalks so she could not hide. She moved her head, then sidestepped to get a better view. They were halfway up the slope. It was already impossible for her to go back to the highway without being seen.

  The headlights were moving quickly. The men had discovered, as she had, that the ruts and mounds of the cornfield were perfectly regular, and that the only obstruction was visual—the tall, frail cornstalks. They seemed to be driving back and forth at twenty or thirty miles an hour. They would reach her in a minute or two.

  Jane whirled and began to run. She had to try to make it to the cluster of farm buildings. There would be shelter there, of some sort. There would be a telephone. There might even be a gun. This was a huge farm, after all, in the middle of agricultural country. You could fire a rifle in any direction without much fear of hitting anybody by accident, and there was no neighbor to annoy with the sound of it. There had to be a gun. Please, she thought. Let there be a gun.

  The sounds of the cars seemed to her to grow louder. She lengthened her strides and dug into the soft earth to gain speed. She gave up pausing to look along the corn rows. Nothing she could possibly see there would be worse news than what was already behind her, and pausing would just give somebody a chance to aim.

  She could tell she was still a long way from the buildings. They had seemed tiny from the highway, like a little village in some remote, forgotten place. But there had been a building shaped like a barn, and she knew that anything as tall as a barn would be visible above the stalks ahead long before she reached it. She ran on, hearing her own breaths now, her mouth open to bring in more air.

  But the first thing that Jane saw was a tree. It was a high, old chestnut, and its dark cloud of leaves blocked out the stars. Jane slowed her pace and moved forward between the rows, then stopped at the last line of vertical stalks that stood like a palisade between her and the buildings.

  She looked between them. She could see a barn, and it was as big as she had imagined. It had a wide white door that was closed, and she could see that a branch of the farm road ran right into it. This wasn’t the kind of farm that raised animals, she decided. The barn must be just a huge garage for all the machinery.

  She leaned forward a little and looked at the house. It was a two-story white clapboard structure with a long, roofed-over porch that had several chairs and a table on it, and a wicker love seat. There were no lights glowing behind any of the windows. She looked farther to the left and saw a high, broad shape that she couldn’t interpret at first, but then it came into focus. It was an above-ground swimming pool.

  Jane waited a few more seconds, trying to interpret each variation in the darkness, attempting to pick out anything that might be a man. She thought she had heard a dog some time ago, but it could not have been here, or it would already have sensed her presence and come to investigate. The place seemed to be deserted. Then the noise of the car engines seemed to grow louder as they passed once again, and Jane stepped forward.

  She moved away from the corn onto the edge of a lawn. She stepped quietly and quickly, hoping that if someone she had not seen was nearby, her shape would merge in his vision with the wall of tall stalks behind her. She hurried toward the house.

  Jane had no time to formulate even her hopes in any orderly way. She hoped there was a gun, she hoped there was a telephone, another road in the fields beyond the house that led away. She climbed the steps to the porch quietly, but decided that pounding on the door was not the right way to do this.

  Jane looked along the porch and saw movement. She froze and looked harder. It was an open window, and the motion had been the curtain inside, swinging a little in the breeze. She stepped to the window, pushed her car key through the screen, unlatched it, slipped inside, and latched it again.

  Jane could see that she was in an old-fashioned parlor that had been taken over by someone with modern tastes. There was a new leather couch beside her, and ahead of her a glass-topped coffee table with a stone sculpture as a base. In the far corner of the room was a big-screen television set. She looked down at the floor to see whether it was likely to creak. She couldn’t see it very well, but when she knelt to feel it, she could pick up a little of the pattern in the moonlight. It was a new bleache
d hardwood floor.

  She moved away from the window into the room, then found her way to the staircase. Somebody could be asleep up there. She supposed the sound of the rifle dismantling her Explorer could not have been as loud here as it had been to her. It was a half mile away. She began to climb the stairs quickly and quietly, then noticed that something looked odd under her feet. There seemed to be a long black shadow that fell like a stripe on each step—the railing? She waved her hand by the railing, but she could see no difference.

  With growing discomfort, Jane reached down and touched a step. It was wet. She raised her fingers in front of her face, and saw that it was dark. It felt a little sticky, as though it were drying. She stared upward, and saw the dog.

  He was lying on his side at the top of the stairs, his eyes open and staring with the dull gaze of the dead. She moved closer, and she could see that the blood was his, seeping from a wound in his mouth. She stepped to the top of the stairs and edged past him. She took a step toward the first open door, dreading what she was going to see.

  She peered into the room. There was a double bed with a man and a woman lying on it—the woman in a blood-soaked nightgown, and the man in a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt that had three holes in the chest. She stepped backward out of the room and went to the next. It was an empty guest room, all made up with a flowered bedspread and lace covers over the dresser and nightstand. She moved along the second-floor hallway looking for more victims, but she found none.

  She tried to stop thinking about what she had just seen and concentrate on what she had to do. She forced herself to go back into the master bedroom. There was a telephone on the low table by the woman’s side of the bed. She stepped to it and picked it up. There was no dial tone.

  She closed her eyes and replaced the receiver. Of course they would have cut the line before they came in. The dog must have met them at the top of the stairs and barked. They had shot the dog, rushed into the master bedroom before the farmer and his wife could get up, and killed them.