by Thomas Perry
Jane waited and studied the second set of watchers. They either felt less hesitation, or had less time for it. If Jane’s car was gone, and their colleagues had gone off after it, then they were parked in the street watching nothing. They swung away from the curb and went off after their companions.
Jane pivoted and ran. She reached the door, swung it open, and dashed to the elevator. When she emerged on the street she slowed her pace to a purposeful walk, but she arrived at her Explorer quickly, pulled it to the front entrance of the hotel, opened the tailgate, and hurried into the building. The bellman had already recognized her. He had the bags out of the little storeroom beside the door, and he carried them to the Explorer. She handed him a ten-dollar bill, slammed the tailgate, and drove off.
Jane made the first right turn, then a left, and pulled over beside the curb to study her rearview mirror. After three minutes, she was sure that nobody had managed to follow her. She opened her bag, looked at her road map, and headed for the entrance to Interstate 94 south.
For the first time since morning, she began to breathe more easily. She had changed her appearance, traded cars, and later on, when she had gotten tired of driving, she would fold up the distinctive green duffel bags and keep the rest of the letters in the gray suitcases with the carpet over them. The night was just beginning, and Wisconsin wasn’t used up yet. She still had to hit Racine and Kenosha.
24
Jane worked her way through the stops north of Chicago—Waukegan, Lake Forest, Winnetka, Evanston—as the night was showing signs of ending. The sky to the east was lightening into a luminous gray that wasn’t yet bright enough to reveal the true colors of the dark houses or the parked cars, and the trees were still black shadows against the sky. During the night she had changed her itinerary. She had expected to save Chicago for the end of her swing through the Midwest, but she was very close now, driving a clean car that she had come by honestly. She had cut and dyed her hair, bought clothes that made her look like a different sort of person, and helped the new image with a little makeup. She had decided that she had better face Chicago now.
She approached the city during the morning rush, with carloads of commuters in the lanes on both sides of her, crawling slowly toward jobs and schools. She spent the slow stretches looking at the cars and the faces of her neighbors. In a single mile she counted twenty-two cars that looked a lot like hers—high, oversized utility vehicles with the small heads and narrow shoulders of women behind their steering wheels, their little faces peering down from above at the traffic ahead. On this road, there was not even a shortage of Wisconsin license plates.
Jane drove along the lake until the road became Lake Shore Drive. She stopped at mailboxes near Loyola University and Wrigley Field, and then kept going toward the center of the city. She left Lake Shore Drive at North Michigan Avenue and made her way south to Van Buren, then turned right to drive to the big central post office. The service windows would not be open until eight-thirty, but she entered the building with one of her two suitcases and put all of the remaining Chicago letters into the slots.
She retraced her route on Van Buren and turned north on Franklin, then found a public parking lot near the Sears Tower, and parked her Explorer. As she walked up West Adams Street toward the Dirksen Building, she studied the other pedestrians. There were more of them at seven-thirty than she had expected, and there were a few—maybe one per block—who she felt deserved a bit of extra scrutiny. They had the thick-necked look of men who wouldn’t be surprised to have to duck a punch, and noses or eyebrows that showed signs that they had not always perceived the need in time. She watched their eyes without appearing to, but saw no flicker of excitement appear in any of them. By the time each of them had moved out of her line of sight, she had exonerated them all. As the hour moved closer to nine o’clock, when many offices opened, she began to see more and more women.
Jane waited anxiously until nine, then walked up the street to the bank. It had only been open a few minutes, so most of the people waiting in line for the tellers were shopkeepers holding big cash pouches or check ledgers. Jane walked past them to the counter for the safe-deposit boxes, where there were no other customers. A few weeks ago, she had visited the safe-deposit box to take out the passport she kept here, and this time, the woman at the counter remembered her. “Hello again,” she said as she handed Jane the card to sign. “I love your hair.”
“Thanks.” Jane followed her to the vault, where the woman climbed a stepladder, took Jane’s key, and handed Jane the box.
Jane went into one of the cubicles and let the door lock behind her, then sat down at the little desk. Before she opened the box, she looked up and to the sides. This bank had never installed surveillance cameras in places where they could tape what went on in the cubicles, and neither had the other banks where Jane rented boxes. She didn’t know whether there was some federal bank regulation that ensured privacy, or if it was merely that people who rented safe-deposit boxes objected. But she had averted danger a great many times by looking for things where they weren’t supposed to be, so she looked.
She opened the box, returned the Donna Parker passport to its place, and selected three fresh identities from the supply she had stored there: Mary Corticelli, Karen Pappas, and Elizabeth Moody. She chose those three because the photographs on the driver’s licenses had all been taken when she’d had her hair braided or drawn back in a ponytail, so even with her short hair, she was still incontestably the same person. The credit cards in those names were all at least two years old and unexpired, so she was not worried about having them refused. She put away all of the identities she had already used on this trip except Diane Fierstein, because that was the name she had used to buy the Explorer, and Renee Moore, who had rented the house in Santa Fe. When this was over, she would change the pictures on the Renee Moore documents and give the identity to Rita.
It took longer to go through the identities she had placed here for runners. If Peter and Renee Moore were never found, then Bernie and Rita would never need more identification than they already had. If they were found and had time to get out, it would be a good idea for both of them to have backup identities. There were birth certificates for people aged three to seventy, and a few blanks. There were full sets that included driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, credit cards, and a few membership cards of the sort that she acquired to give the impression that an identity had depth. She pulled out the best of the sets for elderly men. The name was Michael Daily, and his birth certificate made him sixty-nine years old. It was one of the genuine documents for names that had been planted in the Cook County clerk’s records by a woman who believed Jane would do something worthwhile with them. The picture on the license was a man who didn’t look precisely like Bernie Lupus, but didn’t look so very different either: bald head, glasses, a thin face. In an emergency, Bernie might be able to use it even before Jane substituted the photograph she had taken in New Mexico.
As she stared at the picture, she remembered the man. She had picked him up in an unemployment office in Gary, Indiana. He had agreed to be driven across the state line to Illinois to take the tests for a driver’s license in exchange for three hundred dollars and a day’s excursion. She had paid him five, because she had liked him, and another two hundred as a finder’s fee, because he had introduced her to three other people who were willing to take the same excursion.
She leafed through the cards for young women. The selection was much broader and richer. She had almost decided to give Diane J. Rabel to Rita when she remembered another one. It was a license she had obtained when she had invented Michael Daily. This one was for Karen Daily. It had occurred to her that if she ever had an elderly runner, he might come with a younger companion. She had obtained identification for a younger female the following week, and named her Karen Daily. She hunted through the stack until she found her, and added her to the pack of identities.
Jane arranged the sets of papers and cards into little pa
ckets and slipped them into a slit she had cut in the lining of her purse, then looked at the metal box again. She decided that it would be wise to take an extra five thousand dollars with her. The move-in expenses in Santa Fe and buying the Explorer had seriously depleted her credit, and her cash supply was low. She took one thick bundle of hundreds out and slipped that into her purse too. Then she faced the last decision.
There was something at the bottom of this box, wrapped in a cloth. It had been here since the day when she had said good-bye to Bobby Ortiz six years ago. By then he had not been Bobby Ortiz for at least a month: he looked a bit different, he had a different name, and he was living quietly in Cincinnati, far from the troubles he had brought on himself in Modesto, California. She had not even known that he had it until the moment when she was about to leave. He had simply handed her a paper bag and said, “You told me that if I went with you I would have to leave everything from the old days. I kind of forgot something.” When she had gotten into her car, she had opened the bag and confirmed what the weight of it had told her. Inside was a nine-millimeter Beretta Cougar with two extra magazines.
Jane had left the gun in the safe-deposit box all this time for an emergency, but she had known even then that the kind of emergency that could be solved by putting a hole in someone never came with that kind of warning. If she could see it coming, she could probably evade it.
There had been occasions when she had considered it necessary to carry a gun, but she had noticed that guns had an unexpected effect. People—even thoughtful people—behaved differently when they were armed. She had noticed that her eyes remained sharp, her mind alert, but what they were doing was studying and evaluating each change in the configuration of people and events to recognize the one when she would need to pull the gun from its hiding place and fire it. That became the only decision: the gun was suddenly the only strategy.
She decided that this occasion, too, was not right. Her survival depended on unpredictable movement and fading into the scenery. If she could finish the trip without being noticed, she had nothing to worry about, and if she couldn’t, then stopping the car to produce a pistol was not likely to help.
She watched the bank teller slip the box back into its slot, then took her key and walked out of the bank. It was only nine-fifteen, but she felt more impatient than ever to be out of Chicago. She had not put enough distance behind her since her rental car had been traced to Milwaukee, and Chicago had a deep, ugly history of Mafia infestation.
She made her way back to the parking lot, pulled out her ticket, and watched the parking attendant run across the lot toward her. He was a young black man with his hair combed straight back on his head and a blue vest with a button on it that said, DON’T LAUGH. YOU COULD BE CRAZY TOO SOME DAY. He ducked into his little wooden shelter, hung the keys of the car he had just parked on his pegboard, then reached for Jane’s keys just as a car pulled into the lot behind him and honked its horn.
When he involuntarily jerked his head to see who was honking the horn, his eyes widened for an instant, and then the lids came down again. “I’m sorry. Just be a second. Got to get that car right away.” He trotted to the car and opened the door so the driver could get out. Jane stood by the wooden shelter and held the proceedings in the corner of her eye. The driver was a big man about forty years old, wearing a fawn-colored sport coat that was unbuttoned to make room for a premature paunch. He got out and stood for a moment to watch the parking attendant slip behind the wheel, drive the blue Lincoln Town Car twenty feet ahead, then back it up to swing into a space right behind the little shelter.
Jane could see that this was a place of honor: the spot closest to the sidewalk, where the attendant could bring it out in seconds. There was no chance that as the day got busier, another car would be parked in front of it. The attendant couldn’t help having his eyes on it, because he had to pass it to dispense tickets or accept money. Jane watched only long enough to be sure that the attendant didn’t go through the charade of burdening the big man with a ticket, then turned her head away so that even her profile would be hidden while the man walked off down the street. She ached to get out of here. Everything about the man smelled to her like Mafia.
As the attendant returned and reached for her keys on the pegboard, Jane’s eyes fell on the inner wall of the little shelter. The attendant had a collection of pinups pasted to the wall. At the top were two portraits of women lounging on beds with blissful smiles. Beneath them, at eye level, were four snapshots. Two were of a fully dressed young black woman, and the third was of the same woman with the attendant. His wife? Girlfriend? Below the snapshots was an anomaly—a black-and-white drawing. Jane took a step closer. The woman had long, black hair like the others, but it wasn’t his girlfriend. It was Jane. She could see writing beneath. “Five feet eight or nine, 130 pounds, pretty.” Then, scrawled in pencil along the top, she saw a telephone number.
Jane reached into her purse, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and stepped to the left side of the exit as the attendant pulled up. As he got out, she handed him the money without looking at him, muttered, “Thanks,” and got into the car.
The attendant said, “It’s only five.”
She said, “Keep it,” pushed the button to raise the tinted window, and drove out of the lot. She put three blocks behind her, then took last-minute turns at the next three corners, watching her mirror. She found the entrance to Interstate 90, drove north for ten minutes, and got off at North Avenue.
Jane drove west for a few blocks toward the strip mall. She was sure that she had not been followed, but the drawing still frightened her. It was a fairly good likeness—good enough for the man in the Seattle-Tacoma airport, anyway. She knew that she had just been seen by two men who had looked at the drawing, and neither had apparently recognized her, with her haircut and glasses. But the sheer reach of the families terrified her.
The little delay at the parking lot had reminded her of how completely the Mafia was built into people’s everyday lives. Unless there was a fresh scandal, people didn’t even think about them. Maybe they were involved in this business or that one, and their extortion added ten cents to the price of a product. But maybe that was just a rumor, and the increase was just because of a strike, or a rise in the price of raw materials. You were never going to find out, and you couldn’t do anything about them any more than you could control the weather, so you bought the product at the new price and didn’t waste any time thinking about it.
Jane drove past the little strip mall and studied it. The stores were still the same: the doughnut shop, the hair-and-nail salon, the small hardware store, the dry cleaner, the mailing service, and the ever-changing restaurant. This time, the restaurant was Chinese. Last time, it had been Cuban, and before that, barbecued ribs and chicken. There was something about the building’s position on the planet that made each tenant open a restaurant and fail, always to be replaced by another tenant with a restaurant.
Jane was used to coming here once or twice a year to visit the rented mailbox of the Furnace Company and pay her bill. The Furnace Company was a genuine corporation she had formed eleven years ago. She was neither the sole owner nor the sole officer, but none of the others happened to be made of flesh. When the Furnace Company received mail, it was forwarded to another box in Buffalo.
The Furnace Company had been a useful entity. It allowed her to request credit checks and background information on people without raising eyebrows, gave her another mailing address with an extra layer of anonymity, and had given her a few easy ways of providing histories for runners. Sometimes she requested references or school records for employees of other companies, changed the names, and passed them on. Sometimes she had presented the Furnace Company as an executive-search service that had already checked all references.
Jane drove around the block and pulled into her favorite parking space on the little strip of asphalt. She stepped into the mailing service and waved to Dave, the owner.
“Hey, Mary!
” he said. “About time you got here. What the hell did you do with your hair?”
“Why, did you want it?” she asked.
Dave rubbed his bald head thoughtfully. “Nah. Doesn’t go with my body. You got a shipment back here.”
She moved to the counter and watched as he walked to the corner of the back room. She could see the ten boxes bearing the labels she had made in Santa Fe. “Gee, that’s good time. I didn’t think they’d get here so soon.”
“Not so fast,” said Dave. “Forgetting something? I’m a businessman, not your relative.”
“What do I owe you?”
“Fifteen a month for the box is 180, plus 205 for forwarding, that’s what? Three eighty-five.”
Jane pulled out four of the hundred-dollar bills from her visit to the bank. Then, on an impulse, she handed him two more. “Here’s for the next year,” she said. “In case I don’t get here again … for a while.”
He counted out her change, then pulled a sheet of paper from under the counter and gazed at it, then at Jane. “I was saving this for you, but it’s not as good as I thought now that you cut your hair.” He spun it around quickly, staring into her eyes for a reaction.
It was the same drawing Jane had seen at the parking lot. This time it said, “Woman missing since July 20. Large reward.” She couldn’t recall whether the telephone number was the same. Jane said, “Are you saying that looks like me?”
He looked at it again. “I thought you’d get a kick out of it.”
“ ‘Large reward,’ ” Jane mused. “Maybe I should try to turn myself in and collect. Where did you get it—the police?”
He shrugged. “Some guy came in and stuck it on my bulletin board. He didn’t hang around long enough to hear about how my board space ain’t free. I mean, this isn’t the post office. Am I wrong?”
“You know me,” said Jane. “The world’s most rabid capitalist. Hey, you mind if I take that picture?”
