Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead

by Perry, Thomas

  Maybe the footsteps had been behind her when she came out of the restaurant and she had been so distracted that she simply had not heard them. She began to walk and listened carefully; there were three sets of shoes. She felt as though she had put her foot on a step and it had fallen through. She had been so busy watching the office that it had not occurred to her mat Farrell might have a few trainees on the streets outside. She walked along more quickly until she could use the darkened window of a store to get a look at their reflection. The three didn’t fit the pattern at all. One of them wore a baseball cap backward and all three wore baggy pants and oversized jackets. They looked about seventeen or eighteen years old, and not seasoned or desperate enough for Farrell.

  She had told Carey she had been mugged in Los Angeles, and now here she was, being considered and evaluated for a mugging in Los Angeles. It was simply out of the question tonight. It was not going to happen.

  She took a moment to collect her thoughts, then suddenly turned on her heel and walked toward the three boys. They slowed down and spread apart on the sidewalk. When she stepped directly up to the one in the center, he stopped, not sure what he was going to do, but certain he didn’t want to bump into her. “Hold it, all three of you,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

  The other two stopped, looking at her warily with half-averted faces. “What?” said the one on her left.

  As she looked at the three unpromising young men, the idea came to her fully formed. The only question was whether she could convince them. “Are you doing anything tonight?” she asked.

  The one on her right said, “We’re not doing anything,” with no inflection. He didn’t know whether she was accusing or inviting, but either way that was the right answer.

  Jane reached into her purse and they all tensed to move, as though they expected her to douse them with tear gas, an event that was probably not out of the question on these streets at night. She ran her fingers along the lining of her purse and found the Katherine Webster identification packet. She flashed the business card at them. “Katherine Webster, Treasury Department,” she said.

  “We didn’t do nothing,” said the one in the center.

  “I didn’t ask,” she said. “I want to know if you’re interested in working for a few hours.”

  “Doing what?” He was very suspicious now.

  She pointed up at the lighted window of the Enterprise Development office. “There’s a man in that office who’s a suspect. In a while he’s going to get into a car and drive out of town. You follow him, I follow you. If he spots you, turn off and go home. If he doesn’t, you follow him to wherever he’s going, you call a number, leave the address on the answering machine, and go home.”

  “Why us?” said the one on the left.

  Jane quoted from an imaginary field manual. “If in the judgment of the investigating agent it is useful to deputize or otherwise employ private citizens in order to avoid detection by the surveillant, he or she is authorized to do so.” She waited for a moment while they deciphered this, then said, “You don’t have to do it. I can pay you per diem and a performance bonus if you work out.”

  “What does that mean?” asked the one on the right.

  “A hundred dollars each to cover your expenses on the drive. That’s the per diem. It means ‘per day,’ and you don’t declare it on your tax return.” She caught the amused glance from the one in the middle to the one on the left when he heard that. “Another two hundred each if he doesn’t see you. You could each make three hundred before the sun comes up.”

  “What makes it worth that?”

  “He’s armed, he’s dangerous, and he’s smart. If he stops, you’ve got to keep going. Don’t get yourself into a spot where his car is stopped and so is yours. He’ll probably kill you.”

  The three looked at each other. There were a few shrugs and head tilts, but no smirks. The part about killing seemed to have raised their level of interest considerably. She had forgotten for a moment about seventeen-year-old boys. There had never been a moment in human history when anybody hadn’t been able to recruit enough of them for a war. She reached into her purse again and said, “The per diem is in advance.” She started to count the bills in front of them.

  The one in the middle said to the one on the right, “You want to use your car or mine?”

  “You have two?” asked Jane.

  “Yeah,” said the one in the middle.

  “Use them both and you each get an extra hundred.”

  Mary was leaning against the tiled wall of the shower stall in the big first-floor bathroom of the farmhouse. They had finally left her alone, her right wrist handcuffed to the shower head so that she could never quite sit down. She tried to stand on her own, but she felt faint and unsteady. This was probably why they had chained her that way. If she fell she would hurt her arm, but she probably couldn’t kill herself by hitting her head on the tiles.

  When she looked down at her legs she could see the bruises were already a deep purple, and the welts were red and swelling. She had tried to kick out at them, but they had not grabbed her or tried to wrestle with her; they had simply clubbed the leg that came up at them, and when she kicked out again they would hit it again, until finally she couldn’t get the leg to kick.

  The two men had not spoken, even to each other. They went about it in a cold, impersonal silence, like people in a slaughterhouse working on an animal. They left the hood on her head the first time, but not because they didn’t want her to see their faces; it was because they had no desire to see hers. Desire had nothing at all to do with it. The next time, when she was thinking that maybe it was better that she couldn’t breathe, because dying was just going to sleep and being awake was every nightmare she had ever had, they took the hood off. She could see them doing it, their faces intent but detached, whatever they were feeling not comprehensible to her as emotion. Their faces were not like the faces of men having intercourse, but unselfconscious and empty, as though no other human being were present. She had always thought of rape as a crime of hatred, or the sick pleasure of exerting power over somebody who was helpless. But this didn’t seem to bring them even that feeling of triumph; they were just using what was there because it was there.

  At first she cried and screamed. She said, “No, please. You’re hurting me.” The one who was holding her tightened his grip, but the one who was doing it to her didn’t pay any attention at all. He didn’t seem to be able to understand. Her voice was the call of a bird or the bark of a dog, something he could hear but that carried no meaning at all.

  When they left they chained her to the shower, still naked. She tried to take what was left of herself and put it back together, but she couldn’t. She was torn apart, a lot of fragments that she couldn’t seem to collect. After a long time she started to think again. Her mind kept ticking off an automatic inventory of hurts and injuries that kept being the same over and over, as though it were establishing the boundaries. Then she began to imagine herself telling Barraclough what they had done to her, and saw him decide to kill them for it. She was valuable. But even while she thought about it, there was a small, nagging voice somewhere just below hearing to remind her that she wasn’t important. She wasn’t really worth anything at all.

  It was midnight when Farrell emerged from the back door of the building. He walked a hundred feet to the rear of the parking lot, opened the trunk of a dark sedan at the rear of the lot, took out a large hard-sided briefcase, and then turned and walked back into the building.

  Jane waved to her lookout and pointed at the front entrance, then started her car. A moment later, Farrell came out the front door. A young man drove up to the curb in a white station wagon, got out, and stood on the sidewalk while Farrell took his place behind the wheel. Jane watched the boys she had hired. The lookout had been in the narrow space between two buildings, and already he was gone. He had waited long enough to see the car Farrell was driving, and now he was in the back of the building getting into
his companion’s car.

  When Farrell started off and turned right, she saw the boys’ black Trans-Am already on the right street, crossing the intersection after him. The second car, a sedate-looking brown Saturn, only joined in after she had counted to eight. She turned around in order to avoid passing the office building, went down the side street, and joined the convoy three blocks later.

  She followed the three cars onto the freeway, fell back a quarter mile, and watched the Saturn’s taillights. She had given the boys a short course on following cars while they waited for Farrell to move, and now she watched them work. On a freeway all they had to watch Farrell for was an exit. They stayed well back from him. When there were packs of cars on the road ahead they moved up and hid among them. They didn’t change lanes when he did. They waited, showing a clear preference for the right lane, where it was difficult for him to notice them, and other cars entered the freeway and slipped in to put a new set of headlights in his mirror for a few minutes.

  After they were north of the city and the traffic thinned out a bit, the second car passed the one in front and stayed there until it was possible that Farrell was getting used to the new set of headlights, and then it dropped to the rear again. Jane drove conservatively, watching the taillights of her decoys and holding herself in reserve. She was beginning to feel a little more hopeful now. Every minute that passed, Farrell would come closer to accepting the conclusion that he had not been followed.

  Mary had been left alone in the shower stall for hours. She had begun to spend long periods trapped in her own mind. She would try to strengthen herself. “I did this. I chose to trade my life for the life of a little boy. This is the best thing that I have ever done. It’s the best that any human being ever does. I’m past the decision, the part where I’d have been weak if I had thought about it, so no matter what happens to me now, I can’t fail. I can do this.” But there was another feeling, one that didn’t respond in its own words. It was just like an echo that revealed the hollowness of the sounds Mary was making. She was a fraud. She was not brave enough. It was self-deception. She had stepped off a cliff and now as she was falling she was regretting it more every second. Then she would wonder. Priests said that if a person made a pure unselfish act of contrition at the very last moment, she would be forgiven, her whole life validated retroactively. But what if she did make the promise, the sacrifice, and then wanted to take it back much more sincerely with every single breath? She wished she had died before she had ever had that moment of madness.

  Then there were sounds outside the door, men’s voices, big heavy feet on the floorboards, and she tried to stand without holding on to the wall, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t that she was hurt, but her muscles didn’t want to contract when her mind willed them to. They were quivering and weak.

  When the door swung open she felt an impulse to scream, but even her throat was paralyzed. Just a harsh, raspy “Huh” came out. The man came into the room and closed the door. It was Barraclough. She cringed and tried to disappear into the corner of the shower as he walked toward her. She tried to cover herself with the one arm she could use.

  After a moment she realized that he was paying no attention to her. He walked across the tile floor, looked around, and stopped. He seemed only to be making sure she was alive. Then to her surprise he turned to go.

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t you want to talk?” She was fighting the fear that he was going out to let the other two come in again.

  He said, “What do you want?”

  “They raped me,” she tried to say, but her face seemed to collapse and shrivel inward, and she couldn’t control her voice, so it broke into a sob.

  “Don’t waste my time,” he said. It sounded like a warning. It didn’t matter what they did to her because she wasn’t a regular person anymore, a being who had the right to keep anything as hers, even her body. She had thrown her rights away. She was a criminal and she had been caught. She longed to change that, or at least hide it from him.

  “Look, this has been a mistake. You seem to think I’m somebody I’m not. I didn’t do anything or hurt anybody.” She pointed to the door. “They hurt me. But I can understand; they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to. I’ll just forget that it ever happened. Like a bad dream. We’ll never mention it again. You let me go – anywhere you like. Drive me someplace so I don’t know where this house was.”

  He looked at her with an expression that froze her. It came from a vast distance. It seemed to detect everything at once: her abject fear, her guilt, her lying – no, not just that she was lying but that she was a liar. His expression showed that he knew all of it, and that it inspired disgust and contempt. For the first time he even seemed to contemplate her naked body, but not with lust. It was the way a god would look down at it from a great height. She was dirty, bruised, covered with sweat, and throbbing with pain, a small, unremarkable female creature who would have been unappetizing at any time but was now filthy and cowering.

  It made her desperate, as though she were standing alone on a shore and the ship was drifting farther away.

  “I’m not naive, and I know you aren’t. Sure, I have money. That’s what you want, and I’ve got it. You seem to forget, I didn’t get caught. I came to you. Why do you suppose I did that? I know you want some money from me, but I also want something from you. I took lots of banks for lots of money while the time was right. And I wasn’t alone. I know people you haven’t even heard of who took a whole lot more than I did. I can bring them to you. I can deliver them here.”

  His expression didn’t change, and it made her more desperate.

  “You’d really be making a mistake to waste a resource like me.” She was sweating and horrified at how unconvincing she sounded, but she couldn’t stop, could only go on like a drowning swimmer. “I took the Bank of Whalen for six million dollars on a piece of land I’d bought for half a million a month before. I’m a moneymaker. When I bought out Harrison Savings, I used their own money to leverage an option on a controlling interest and then made the bank pay back the loan as an operating cost. I can do all of it again.” His face didn’t change. “I can do new things because a person who knows how to make money will always know.”

  When he turned toward the door and took a step, she tried to stop talking, but she couldn’t. “If you don’t want to get into business, I understand. You want it quick and clean and simple. So take me to a bank. Any major bank can do an electronic transfer. I’ll get the money, hand it over, and everybody can go away.”

  He was at the door now, and she waited for him to turn and look back at her so that she could read his features. Maybe there would be something false in his expression to let her know that he didn’t really intend to kill her. He opened the door without hesitation and walked out.

  Jane drove through the night thinking about the station wagon far ahead of her. She knew all of the reasons Farrell had chosen it. There was something benign about station wagons. The drivers were people who hauled kids around and had houses in the suburbs. They were also useful because if you put a good tarp down in the cargo bay you could carry a fairly stiff corpse without breaking any joints or doing any cutting.

  Maybe Mary had already broken and told them how to get her money. It took time to do that to a person, but she wasn’t coming into this fresh. She was already exhausted and disoriented when she first saw Barraclough. She had been in prison for a month, and then spent the next month running and hiding, getting burned out of a house, and then running some more. The belief that had been nurtured in the human brain that a person could endure physical and psychological torture without revealing secrets was probably accurate. The notion that more than one person in a thousand could do it was idiotic.

  Mary had one advantage. She was smart enough to know that within an hour of the moment when Barraclough had her money, she would die. It might make her hold out for an extra couple of hours. There was no doubt in Jane’s mind that at some point Barraclough would make
dying seem like an attractive alternative to whatever was happening to Mary, but first she would offer all of the stalls that she could imagine – lies, promises, con games. As long as she kept trying new ones instead of giving in and telling the truth, she would keep breathing.

  Farrell had driven deep into the San Joaquin Valley.

  Some time in the past hour the signs marking ways to go east to Bakersfield and Tulare had ended and been replaced by signs for Fresno. Suddenly Jane caught the flashing of tail lights ahead as the two follower cars tried to slow down without getting closer to Farrell’s station wagon. They slowed to forty and Jane let herself glide up behind them in time to see Farrell turning off the highway.

  She watched the first car take the exit ramp to go up the road after Farrell. The sign at the top of the ramp said men-dota 20. When Farrell stopped at the lighted island of a gas station, the boys drove past, then pulled over to wait a quarter mile down the road while he filled up his tank. Jane drove up the road, stopped ahead of the boys, and kept her eyes on Farrell’s car as she hurried to the driver’s window. She held out a handful of hundred-dollar bills. “Here,” she said. “This is far enough. Pay your buddies.”

  The boy protested. “This can’t be the end of the road.”

  “For you it is.” she said, and stepped back to her car.

  When Farrell had paid the gas station attendant and gotten back into his car, he drove a mile down the road to a motel. Jane watched him go into the lighted office, then come out with a key and go into a room. She pounded the steering wheel in frustration. This wasn’t it. He was going to sleep Two hours before dawn Mary almost fell asleep. She woke up with a start, gripped by the feeling that she was falling, and slapped her hand against the side of the shower stall to hold herself up. The second day began for her at that moment. She was feeling a dread so deep that there was no difference between the dream and what was happening. The ground was coming up faster and faster, and when she hit she would be dead.