Dance for the Dead

by Thomas Perry

  She snatched her purse, quickly slipped out through the curtains to the balcony, and quietly slid the door shut. She had misjudged them. They should not have been willing to take a chance like this yet. Maybe she had been too eager to get Pete out of sight and she had missed some sign, forgotten to ask some question. There was no way to fix it now, no time to think. She had to get out.

  She had nothing with her. This was not the hotel where she had been sleeping. It was just the room she had rented to disappear from. In a few seconds those two would have the door open. She looked around her at the balconies of the other rooms. They were narrow and far apart, and even if she somehow managed to reach one of them without falling, she would only be in the next room. She leaned out as far as she could and looked down. On the floor below her there was a balcony just like hers, but it had to be twelve feet down.

  Jane saw a thin wedge of light fan into her room as they opened the door as far as the chain would allow. She unclasped the leather strap of her purse, clasped it around the bottom of the vertical railing support closest to the wall of the building, tossed her purse to the balcony below, stepped over the railing, and lowered herself into the empty air. She was trembling with fear and awe at what she had done as she dangled there, six feet above the railing of the fourteenth-floor balcony. She wanted to drop but found her hands would not obey the command to open. It looked as though she would fall, scrape the outside of the balcony, and plummet two hundred feet to the pavement.

  She bent at the hip and began a gentle swing. The first sweep brought her out away from the balcony and tipped her down a little so she had to look directly through all that empty night air at the tiny figures on the lighted concrete below. After a sickening pause at the end of the arc, she began to swing forward. When she judged that the balcony was under her, she let go.

  She dropped and hit the concrete balcony hard, slid a little, and bumped the railing so it gave a low vibrating sound like a tuning fork. She turned and saw that the sliding door into this room was closed. As she stood and reached for the handle, she knew that, whatever else happened, she was not going to put herself outside the railing again. She tugged on the door and it wouldn’t budge. She lay on her back, covered her face with her purse, and kicked out at the glass with both feet.

  The glass gave a loud crack, but it didn’t break inward. She went to her knees, lifted a long jagged shard out, set it beside her, then used her purse to push a bigger one inward. She crawled inside, hurried across the empty room, burst out into the hallway, ran to the elevator, and punched the button. But as she glanced upward she saw that the number lit up was fifteen. The elevator was coming down from above.

  She turned and ran for the sign that said EXIT, slipped inside the door to the stairwell, and waited. The bell rang, the elevator doors parted, and she saw that nobody was inside. She ran for the elevator and got past the doors just as the big man emerged from the stairwell and dashed toward her.

  She rode the elevator down to the garage level. When the bell rang she took a step toward the opening doors, but then the space was filled with a blur of moving flesh and gray fabric as the shorter man with the pink swine face charged inside the elevator. He slapped the button and used his body to block the opening while the doors slid together again, trapping her inside with him.

  Jane predicted his half-formed strategy, because the small space made it inevitable. He had enclosed her in a tiny compartment, so he would sweep her into a corner before she could do much flailing and use the strength of his upper body to keep her there and stifle the screams. She put up both hands in a weak defense, half cringing before the blow, half supplicating that it wouldn’t come. The man lunged toward her.

  Jane’s right hand jabbed out, more to stagger him than to do harm, but he was moving faster than she had expected. Her knuckles glanced off the bridge of his nose and into his left eye. His hands went up, too late, and Jane rocked back against the wall to deliver the kick to his knee that she had planned from the beginning. She felt the knee break; he dropped to the floor, gasping in pain.

  She sidestepped past him and hit the OPEN DOOR button. As the doors slid open his hand shot out to grasp her ankle. His grip was so strong it hurt, tightening like the jaws of an animal as he pulled her toward him. She said quietly, “Think. If you drag me back in there alone with you and your broken leg, are things going to get better for you, or worse?”

  She felt the hand slowly, reluctantly release its grip. The door closed, she stepped away, and hurried toward the valet loitering beside her rented car. She was already chattering. “It’s here already? Gee, you guys are really fast. I’m sorry it took me so long. Thanks a lot.”

  She slipped a ten-dollar bill into the hand of the valet, threw her car into gear, and drove out along Bonanza Road and into the darkness to the west.

  Jane drove out of the desert into Los Angeles while the morning traffic was still moving and the glaring sunlight was on the back of her car instead of in her eyes. The car was rented on a MasterCard that said she was Wendy Aguilar, so if someone in Las Vegas had seen the license number, then asking the right questions would lead the chasers to a fictitious woman who had disappeared in Los Angeles.

  As she drove the rented car up Century Boulevard to return it to the agency, she spotted a convenient place to acquire a small extra measure of safety. She turned off the street beneath the tall white sign that towered above the car wash and stopped at the entrance to the tunnel lined with spraying nozzles and whirling brushes. She slipped out of the car and let the two men loitering nearby climb into the front and rear seats, steer it forward until the conveyor track caught the front wheel, then ride it through the tunnel to wipe the prints off every window and piece of chrome and vacuum the inner surfaces to pick up hairs and threads. Even if these men overlooked some trace of her and the clean-up crew at the rental lot missed it too, the process put two more people with their own clothes and hair and prints into the car. She used her ten minutes away from the car to stand in the shelter of the cashier’s kiosk and watch the street to satisfy herself that no other car was idling nearby to wait for her.

  When the men had finished, she pulled forward to the full-serve gas pump to have the tank filled, so any prints on the gas door or cap would belong to still another man. She drove the car around several blocks to dry it, crossed her own trail after a few minutes, and returned to the lot where she had rented it two weeks ago.

  She took the shuttle van to the airport with six other people. It was always crowded in the morning at LAX because anybody who wanted to be on the East Coast by the end of the business day had to be in the air by eight. The shuttle van stopped at the loading zone, so she was only in the open for five quick steps, surrounded by men and women who were in as much of a hurry as she was. She had nothing but the canvas carry-on bag she had kept in her trunk.

  Jane shopped for a flight on the television monitors on the wall as she walked. This time she decided that American Airlines Flight 653 to Chicago was the right one. From there she could go anywhere without much delay. Until a few years ago she would have paid cash for the ticket, because that gave her the option of making up a name. Now they checked identification on every flight. She rummaged in her purse and selected Terry Rosenberg’s driver’s license and credit card, because the name was common enough and wasn’t definitely female. Years ago, when she had just begun as a guide and had seen these trips as a series of brief adventures rather than an accumulating succession of risks, she had sometimes made up names like those of heroines in romance novels. Dahlia Van Sturtevant had been one, as had Melinda-Gail La Doucette. Over the years she had slowly, painfully refined the whimsy out of her routines. A name like Terry Rosenberg might actually send a tracker off in the wrong direction: Destiny Vaucluse was a taunt.

  She went through the metal detectors and walked to one of the more distant ladies’ rooms because they were less heavily frequented than the ones near the entrances and because nobody she met after the secur
ity check was likely to be carrying anything that would make killing her a neat, quiet task.

  Jane washed off her makeup in front of the sink, dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a black silk blouse with a print of bright chrysanthemums, put on a pair of sneakers, threw her old clothes in the trash, and covered them with a newspaper she found on the counter. She let her long black hair hang loose and brushed it out, then put on fresh makeup and a pair of sunglasses. She inspected herself in the mirror, decided she looked as different from the woman who had been in Las Vegas as she needed to, and went out.

  She bought breakfast and waited for her flight in the cafeteria, because fewer people could pass close by and look at her face here than in the waiting area. Every move Jane made while she was working was calculated to shift the odds a little more into her favor. Taking Pete Hatcher out of the world from a standing start had presented special problems and forced her to accept special risks.

  Jane heard her flight announced over the loudspeaker, picked up her canvas bag, and walked toward the gate. She held herself with her spine straight and looked directly ahead, never allowing her eyes to focus on those of the other travelers, never turning away to give them permission to study her. She walked quickly, joined the line after it had begun to move efficiently but was long enough to include a lot of other people who would be more interesting for a bored observer to stare at than she was, and disappeared into the loading tunnel.

  As soon as the plane was in the air, Jane pushed her seat back as far as it would go and closed her eyes. She had been anxious for two nights, trying to work out a path for Pete Hatcher that wouldn’t lead him in front of a gun muzzle, then spent the third running. She knew she could sleep only fitfully now, because she had not dreamed in four nights and her mind was holding a jumbled backlog of jarring impressions that would plague her sleep. But lying with her eyes closed prevented other passengers from trying to talk to her, and that was another of her precautions. The road home was where the worst of the traps were, because she had already given dangerous people a reason to want her.