Thomas Perry - Blood Money

Rita sat in silence for a long time, thinking. “He doesn’t want to act like it in front of you, but he’s the best friend I ever had. Look at the risk he took to find me. How many people would do that?”

“In his profession? Not many,” said Jane.

“Bernie doesn’t have a profession,” said Rita. “He has a good memory. That’s what’s so horrible about those people. They watch you to see what they can take away.” She fell suddenly silent.

“Did they harm you?” asked Jane.

“You mean did they make me have sex with them, don’t you?”

“I guess that’s what I mean,” said Jane.

“They didn’t. Most of them acted like I wasn’t human. One of them—one of the bodyguards—started talking to me, and I would see him staring at me sometimes. He would ask me questions, like whether I had a boyfriend, and stuff. I could tell he was thinking about it.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him about living with the boy from home in Tampa, only I added some things.”

“Like what?”

“That after I left I heard he had AIDS, so I was a little worried because I got tired so easily. After that he didn’t talk to me much.”

Jane said nothing, but she began to feel more optimistic. Rita had an instinct for trouble and an ability to think quickly. Some runners had lived for a long time on less than that.

“I never told Bernie. I didn’t want to worry him.” She sighed. “I miss him.”

“I understand.”

“Then we can go back now?”

“No,” said Jane.

10

Jane took the key out of her purse and unlocked the door of the apartment, then waited for Rita to push the door inward and enter. When Rita was inside, Jane walked to the refrigerator, opened a can of cola and handed it to her, then sat down to wait.

It was like moving a cat from one house to another. The trick was to put butter on the cat’s forepaws. While the cat licked it off, her keen senses would be working, assuring her with every second that the new place was not worse than the old, and was certainly superior to being in a moving car. By the time the butter was gone, she would have given the place her tentative approval.

Jane watched Rita sipping her cola as she walked the living room, examined the kitchen, then climbed the stairs to explore the bedroom. She heard her push aside the blinds in the upper window, and after a few seconds heard the blinds clack against the sill as she released them.

Rita came halfway down the stairs and sat, still sipping. “What am I supposed to say? You already rented it.”

“It’s not a lifetime lease,” Jane announced. “Unless you make a mistake. I was here a couple of years ago, and I remembered it as the sort of place for you. The manager told me there are young women in the other apartments in the building right now, most of them older than you, but not by much. You won’t stand out. There are no obvious attractions in the vicinity for people who might be aware that you’re worth money, or how to cash in: no prostitutes, no street drug sales, no bar scene. The draw is the view of the ocean, which you know, since I heard you move the blinds to look at it.”

“But who am I supposed to be?”

Jane said, “You’re Diane Arthur. You’re a young woman who just moved in. You’re looking for a job, but at least for the present, you’re picky, so you won’t do much except circle ads in the paper. If you talk to your neighbors, don’t exaggerate. You graduated from high school, but you haven’t decided what to do with yourself yet. You’re eighteen, not twenty-five. You’re not an heiress traveling incognito, or an Australian tennis champion recovering from a failed love affair.”

“So I’m supposed to stay dull.”

“Not dull, just not unusual enough to get in trouble. You want to be the sort of newcomer who doesn’t make a great topic of conversation. When people mention you, you’re cute, pleasant, funny. You don’t cause any phones to ring. You stay hidden without appearing to be hiding.”

“But what do I do? How do I spend my time?”

“In my experience, if you don’t get found within the first month, your chances go way up. So for the first month, you do very little. You arrange your furniture, look at magazines, watch the local news on TV. You read the newspapers to get to know San Diego. If there’s a stabbing every third night in some neighborhood, then you’ll know enough to stay away from it. Start to form a picture of the city in your mind.”

“And after a month?”

“Then you start going out, but cautiously. You can go to the university, where you won’t stand out, but anyone likely to be looking for you will. You can go to the beach, if you stay close to groups of women your age. You can go to a movie, if it’s an early showing in the right part of town.” Jane glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go out and do some errands.”

Rita stood and started up the stairs. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

“I said I was going out, not we. I’ll be back around dark.”

When Jane returned, Rita wasn’t visible, but Jane could hear music coming from the bedroom upstairs. Jane was putting away groceries when Rita appeared. “Hi,” she said.

Jane glanced at her and returned to her work. “Hi.”

“I hate this place.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because it’s not mine. I didn’t do it.”

Jane looked at the can in her hand, set it on the counter, and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed. “It’s always like this.”

“It is?”

“It’s not much fun to be a runner. First you have to give up whoever you were—your job, your friends, even your name. Then you have to hand over your freedom. You have to let a total stranger tell you what to do, how to act, where to live. Some of the people I’ve taken out over the years have felt worse about it than you do. They were quite a bit older, and were used to ordering other people around—making decisions for them. All I can tell you is what I told them.”

“What did you tell them?”

“It’s temporary. I’m temporary. I’m pretty good at one small, narrow function. I put big blank spaces between the place where you were last recognized and the place where you end up. I stay long enough to be sure it’s the right place, and to help you fit in quietly. Then, one morning, you’ll wake up and I’ll be packed and ready to leave. After that, you’ll be the one making all of the decisions. And you have a lot of advantages most of my other runners didn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“You’re young. You’re not a company president who’s going to start cleaning hotel rooms. You’re a hotel maid who might end up as a company president. That’s a distinction that’s bigger than you can imagine. And time will help.”

“What good is it?”

“You’re an eighteen-year-old who’s a late maturer. In a year, you’ll look very different. In five, you could be a different person. You’re just at the age when society starts paying attention to you—caring about your identity. You won’t start out with a long history—credit, work, education, and so on—but neither does any other eighteen-year-old girl. Your history will be as solid as most of theirs, even to an expert. In three years, nobody in the world will be able to pick it apart, because it won’t be fake. All of the things I made up will be backed up by a real record: real years of driving with that license and using those credit cards and paying the bills with that bank account.”

“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

“No,” said Jane. “I’ve thought of everything that has come up before, and everything that I know is likely to come up this time. That’s what I do. You can never think of everything. But you have a lot of advantages. The whole structure of society ensures that forty-year-old criminals don’t have much access to eighteen-year-old girls. You’re the perfect runner.”