Dance for the Dead

by Thomas Perry

  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 Some time in the past hour the signs marking ways to go east to Bakersfield and Tulare had ended and been replaced by signs for Fresno.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 taillights 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 MENDOTA 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.

  An hour after dawn she saw the doorknob turn. When the door opened she saw it was Barraclough. He was naked too this time. He unlocked her handcuff and left the key in it, turned on the shower, and held her under it for a long time, turning her this way and that as though he wanted to be sure she was clean enough. Then he turned her face to the wall. He never spoke. He just put his foot between hers and kicked each of her feet outward a little so she would know, and put a hand on her back. This time she did not struggle. She stood stiff and still like a dead person while he forced himself into her. After a few moments he slapped her buttock hard with one hand, then grasped her wet hair in the other and gave it three hard tugs. Slowly, a little at a time, she understood what he wanted and began to move her hips with him.

  After he had finished with her, he turned on the shower again, washed himself as though she were not there, then turned the water off, refastened her handcuff, and left the room. As soon as the door closed, she began to cry. She had no idea how long it went on, because time was no longer something that had meaning. Finally the tears simply stopped and she was gripped by a fully formed, uncontrollable anger. She wanted them to come in. Her fingers clutched at the air, wanting to claw their eyes. Her jaw clenched, her mouth salivating at the thought of biting a throat and clinging to the man while the others tried to tear her loose.

  The anger left her as abruptly as it had come, but as she leaned against the wall in the shower again she discovered that the anger had left something inside her. It was small and hard and clean like the scar from a burn. She studied it, touching it the way her tongue might touch a little sore in her mouth, over and over until it knew the place and the pain and the shape. She knew what she was going to do. Of all the people this might happen to, Mary had the best chance of carrying it off. She had a good head for numbers.

  A few hours later Barraclough returned with the tape recorder. He plugged it in at the outlet by the sink for electric shavers, then turned it on. Mary watched him warily. Now must be the time when he was going to get her to talk. But then she heard a sound like the swish of a car going by, then several of them at once, then Jane’s voice saying “You’ve been chasing Mary Perkins, I’ve been hiding her. Now I’m ready to sell her.”

  “Why?” That was Barraclough.

  “I’ve been at this a long time. A lot of people would be dead without me.”

  “I’ve heard that. Sometime I’ll get you to give me a list.”

  “No, you won’t. Mary Perkins isn’t the sort of person I want to risk my life for. She’s not worth it. I gave her a chance and she disappointed me. I know that she’s got a lot of money. You seem to think you can get it. I’m not interested in that kind of work.”

  “You know what will happen when I have her?”

  “You’ll end up with her money. I also know that if you have her, she’s not coming back to ask me how it happened.”

  Barraclough stared at Mary for a moment, then turned and walked away into the rest of the house, the part where people who were free could walk.

  Mary tried to laugh. She wanted Barraclough to hear her laugh, but it was so low and empty that he couldn’t have heard it. She knew why he had played the tape. She was supposed to think that Jane had really been selling her. But how could he expect her to believe that? She had been in on the plan from the beginning.

  But then she thought about what she had heard, and she knew. He was playing it to let her know that Jane had caught him on tape, and that she had thrown the evidence away. She was so stupid that she had forgotten to leave the tapes in the car when she had gone to him. She had forgotten there were any tapes. He would have been caught and convicted of her kidnapping, rape, and murder except for her unbelievably stupid mistake. She felt burning humiliation and shame. She was going to die a horrible, slow, degrading, painful death and the last thing she would remember was that she had let her killer go free.

  It was another hour before she moved beyond herself and thought about Jane. “Mary Perkins isn’t the sort of person I want to risk my life for.… I gave her a chance and she disappointed me.” The reason Jane sounded so convincing on the tape was that she was telling the truth. Mary knew how to lie, and she had lied the same way. “She’s not worth it.” Even Barraclough, who caught liars for a living, was fooled because the words were literally true. Then the last part came back to her. “I know if you have her she isn’t coming back …” That was true too. She was here, chained, injured, and hungry, and it was going to go on and on until she was dead.

  For the next six
hours Mary tried to work out a way to kill herself. The shower door had been taken out, and they had been too smart to leave the hinges. She experimented with the handcuff to see if there was a way she could get the chain across her throat to hang from the shower head, but the effort hurt her wrist terribly and there was no way to bring any pressure on her windpipe. At some point they would have to feed her, and there would be something—a glass, a knife, or even a china plate—that she could use to slash and stab herself.

  But in the end she realized that she was not going to do it. If she killed herself, she would leave the hard, cold, perfect nugget of hatred inside her dead body, stranded like a virus. She had to stay alive to use it.

  Jane waited until she was positive that Farrell was asleep, drove the mile back to the gas station to fill the tank of her own car, and returned to the motel. She was so exhausted that she was afraid she would doze off and wake up hours later to find Farrell’s station wagon gone. She walked close to his car and looked in the windows. For a moment she considered hiding in the cargo section in the back and letting him drive her to Mary, but dismissed the idea. He would have a gun, and she would probably wake up about the time he flipped off the safety to fire it into her head.

  Then she saw something lying on the dashboard, a yellow, crumpled piece of paper. She moved closer and recognized that it was a receipt from an American Express card. It was so wrinkled that she could barely read the machine printing on it. She took her pen and a receipt from her purse and wrote down the information—the name David R. King, the expiration date, and the thirteen-digit number—then walked to the pay telephone at the convenience store across the street.

  She looked at the back of Catherine Snowdon’s American Express card and dialed the number printed on it.

  “Customer Service,” said the voice. “May I help you?”

  Jane said, “Yes. I’m afraid I have a problem and I guess you can tell me what to do. My husband’s wallet has been lost, and his American Express card was in it.”

  “Account number?”

  Jane read it off her receipt.

  “Expiration date?”

  “Next August. He’s in the hospital. There was an accident and they brought him in, and his wallet somehow disappeared. I don’t know if—”

  “I understand,” said the woman gently. “We’d better not take a chance. I’m going to cancel the card as of now. He’ll be receiving a new one in the mail in a couple of days with a new number.”

  “But what happens if somebody else has it?”

  “That’s all explained in detail on the back of your statement. Basically you have nothing to worry about. You did the right thing by calling. Thank you very much. I hope your husband recovers quickly.”

  “Thank you,” said Jane. She took some time walking back to the motel, formulating the details of her story.

  She opened the office door with an air of authority and looked around. It was a bright morning already, but the young man behind the desk looked as exhausted as she felt. The hair on the back of his head was standing out in tufts from lying back in his chair while he watched a dreadful dubbed movie on the small television set beside him. At the moment several muscular men in fur kilts were swinging clumsily at each other with swords and taking a terrible toll on the columns of the Parthenon. He stood up and leaned his elbows on the counter. “May I help you?”

  “I’m Kit Snowdon,” Jane said. “American Express Fraud Division. I’m afraid we’ve got a little problem.”

  The young man switched off the swordsmen behind him and looked as though he were glad she had come along. “How can I help?”

  “You have a gentleman staying in Room 4 who is in possession of a stolen American Express card. He would be registered under the name David R. King.”

  The young man was shocked. “But I ran his card on the machine. There’s got to be some mistake.”

  “Run the numbers again.” She allowed her voice to betray a tiny portion of the impatience she was feeling.

  He picked the receipt out of the drawer, pushed a few buttons to get onto the phone line, then punched the numbers in. After a few seconds the machine rattled off a message from the central computers in North Dakota or someplace. He looked sick. “They want me to confiscate the card.”

  “The computer always says that. We haven’t had a computer beat up yet,” she said. “Ignore it.”

  “But—”

  “If you ran the card before, you must have gotten a look at him. Did he look like somebody you want to take a card from?”

  “No.” He shook his head solemnly, then looked at the telephone on the counter. “Should I call the police?”

  Jane sighed wearily. “I’ll lay it out for you. He’s been traveling for two days. He has two other cards and he’s got some charges—maybe fifteen hundred by now. If I apprehend him, he gets charged with petty larceny. If I can get him without making a legal mistake and if the company lawyers follow through, he gets ninety days—tops. If I follow him another day or two and he gets the bill up over three thousand, then it’s grand theft, forgery, maybe possession of stolen property, and the judge gets to swing hard. In fact, he has to.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I’ve been following him for two days,” said Jane. “I’m asleep on my feet. I want you to check me into a room and watch his door while I get some sleep. The minute you know he’s awake, ring my room.”

  “What if he checks out? Should I slow him down?”

  “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t normally do, except this time buzz my room. That’s all.” She handed him the Catherine Snowdon credit card.

  The kid slid it across the slot of his machine and handed it back to her with the key. “I’m sorry I messed up with the authorization. I was positive—”

  “You didn’t mess up,” said Jane. “He altered the magnetic strip to change one digit, or the machine would have said ‘Tilt.’ The real pros know how to do that. Just be sure he doesn’t slip away. If you go off duty, make sure the next guy knows what to do.”

  She went into her room and slept in her clothes. The call came in the evening. When she picked up the receiver there was nobody on the other end. He must be in the office, so the boy could do nothing but press the button for her room. She was on her feet instantly, standing by the window. His station wagon was still in the lot in front of Room 4. She slipped out her door, turned away from the office, walked around the building, got into her car, and followed Farrell down the street past the freeway entrance. He pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket, got out of his car, and walked into the store.

  Jane looked at her watch. Some of the mystery of his movements was dispelled. It was eight-thirty P.M. He had left his office in a clean car at midnight and driven through the rest of the night. When he was positive he had not been followed, he had slept through the day in the motel room under a fake name. If he was wrong about being followed, probably the pursuers would have made a move of some kind while he slept. If they had lost him somewhere during the long drive, he would have been invisible for a whole day, while they were forced to widen their search to places he had never been, dispersing and exhausting themselves.

  Now he was sure he had nothing to worry about, and he was going grocery shopping. That made sense too. They could not have known they were going to be using the safe house. They probably didn’t visit it often enough to keep fresh food there. When Barraclough had gotten Mary, he had simply changed cars and driven her up here.

  There was another side to what Farrell was doing, and it made her feel anxious again. He had efficiently changed himself into a nocturnal creature. Jane had taken a few people out of the world who had been held by someone who wanted information, and they had told her what it was like. The captors would wear them down for days, alternately abusing and ignoring them, depriving them of sleep and food until some chemical imbalance occurred and they began to lose themselves in a depressive psychosis that seemed to bounce erratically from guilt to ang
er, but hopeless guilt and anger. The tormentors who understood the process would begin their final interrogation when the mind was weakest and most vulnerable, between two and five in the morning. Tonight when Mary woke up, starved, exhausted, and probably injured, there would be a new face. He would be fresh and sharp and tireless, and by now it would seem to her that he could read her mind.

  Jane could see Farrell through the front window of the store filling a shopping cart. The moment was going by, and when it was gone there would not be another. She got out of her car and walked toward the station wagon. She could see his overnight bag on the seat, the crumpled receipt from the motel on the dashboard. She moved out of sight behind the truck parked beside the station wagon and watched the window of the store until she saw him move around the shelves at the end of the aisle. Then she walked to the front of his car, pretended to drop her keys, and knelt down to pick them up. While she was kneeling she slipped her hand under the front bumper and stabbed the lower radiator hose with her pocketknife, stood up, and walked on to the corner of the building where she could see the checkout aisles.

  She watched while the clerk ran Farrell’s groceries along the conveyor belt and past the cash register, then put them into bags. The first had quart-sized bottles on the top. The second had round bulges of fruits and vegetables, double-bagged in smaller sacks inside. The third had cartons of orange juice, milk in a plastic jug, and a box of cereal. She turned and made her way back to the truck parked by Farrell’s car.

  She waited while he slipped his key into the driver’s door lock and electronically released the rest of the locks so he could load his groceries, then put the three bags in the cargo bay. He finished, then turned to push his cart back to the collection rack, twenty paces away.

  Jane moved along the right side of the car to the back seat door, slipped the rubber band off her ponytail, doubled it, opened the door, slipped the rubber band over the catch in the door lock, then eased it shut again. Then she moved back around the truck out of sight and made her way back to her own car.