Thomas Perry - Blood Money

She was confident about the identification she had picked up from her safe-deposit box in Chicago because it was real. Once, six years ago, she had helped a little girl disappear from Ohio. There were three people who had known she had done it—the girl, Jane, and a social worker from Children’s Services.

The woman had been frantic with worry, so Jane had needed to explain to her all of the steps in advance: the way she would slip the girl out of town, how she would get her across the country, even where the girl’s new birth certificate had come from. She had told her about the man in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, who had invented people and registered their births.

Later, when it was over, Jane had come back to tell her the little girl was safe. The social worker had begged Jane to accept money. Jane had said, “Send me a present,” then forgotten what she had said until a few months later, when the present had arrived. It had been the birth certificate of a woman named Donna Parker. The social worker had a friend in the county clerk’s office. About once a year for the five years since, the woman would send other presents. Sometimes the certificates were for girls, sometimes for boys, sometimes for men or women. But Jane had already begun to cultivate Donna Parker. She had applied for a driver’s license and Social Security card under that name, obtained credit cards, and then a passport.

Jane kept her head down, pretending to read a magazine until her flight to Dallas–Fort Worth was announced. She boarded with the crowd, then closed her eyes and tried to relax through the flight. The wait for the second flight was shorter, and she felt a temporary relief, but as soon as the plane landed in Miami, the feeling that she was being watched grew more oppressive. Jane had long been aware that no airport was a good place for her.

Jane checked the television screens above the concourse to find out which gate her next flight would be departing from, then walked to it. She still had a half hour before her flight was ready for boarding, and she had a feeling that the waiting area here was too exposed. It was midway along the concourse, and the seats all faced the open floor, where she could be seen by hundreds of people walking back and forth. She kept going until she reached the gate at the end of the concourse, where the traffic was much thinner, found a seat, and stared out over the darkened runways.

The woman’s voice on the loudspeaker announced Jane’s flight to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. She stood up and walked toward her gate. She did not feel foolish for having walked a few hundred extra feet. It had used up some of the time, and had cost her nothing.

She was nearly to her gate when she saw the man. He was sitting in one of the seats that faced the open walkway, holding a newspaper in his lap and watching the passengers disappear into the boarding tunnel across the concourse. He didn’t show any sign of getting up to join them, and he made no move to see anyone off. He looked at each of them in turn, then returned to his newspaper.

Jane turned to the right and walked up to a little cluster of pay telephones placed in a hexagon. She took a phone off the hook and kept her eyes on the man. She was sure she recognized him. He was one of the men who had been hunting Nancy Carmody a few years ago. There had been a moment, after Jane had gotten Nancy into a car, when the three men had been running to keep them from driving off. Jane had stood still for five or six seconds with the car door open, looking at their faces as they ran toward her. She had done it because Nancy Carmody’s life might be in jeopardy if she was unable to recognize the faces the next time she saw them.

The next time had not come until now. This man was definitely one of the three. He had worked for Frank Delfina, so tonight, he was probably in the airport watching for Rita. But that was not a problem, because Rita was safe in San Diego. The problem was that if Jane had seen this man’s face so clearly that day, how could he not have seen hers? He was sitting in a seat between Jane and her departure gate. She studied the area behind him, to see if there was any way she could slip past, but there was not. There was a wall that screened the side of his waiting area, and trying to get around it would bring her within ten feet of him.

She heard the announcement repeated. “Passengers on TWA Flight 6645 to Tortola, please report to the boarding area.” Maybe she could slip past him if she could insert herself into the middle of a crowd. She looked behind her to see if there were any large groups of passengers coming in her direction. There were not. She had prevented that by going to the most sparsely populated corner of the airport. She looked back toward the man.

He watched the last of the passengers disappear into the tunnel to board the flight across the concourse, looked down at his newspaper, and sighed. He stood up, stepped to the nearest trash can, and stuffed the newspaper inside. Then he looked up the concourse and began to walk.

Jane hung up her telephone and stepped slowly, warily after him. She watched him walk into the wide entrance of a store that sold magazines, books, and newspapers. As he turned to face the big magazine rack along the wall, she hurried past him to her gate. There were only a few passengers ahead of her at the doorway. She kept her eyes straight ahead while she waited, and when her turn came she handed the airline man her ticket and walked quickly into the tunnel with the others.

It was only after she was in her seat and the hatch had closed that she was finally able to breathe normally. She pushed the man to the back of her mind and tried to think about what she was going to say.

It was after midnight when Jane walked beside the long seven-foot wrought-iron fence and stopped at the high ornamental gate. She pressed the intercom button on the left gatepost and waited. She had expected to have to ring many times, but a woman’s voice said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t receive visitors at this time of the evening.”

Jane said, “Please tell George that my name is Jane, and I need to speak to him now.”

“Mr. Hawkes has retired.” The voice had an edge to it now that was more than annoyance. There was a tightness in the throat that sounded a bit like jealousy. Servants might get irritated, they might be self-important and officious, but they didn’t get jealous.

“I’m sorry to come to your house so late,” said Jane. That was a good start—“your” house. “But my business really is urgent.” She hoped that the use of the word “business” might help dispel the tension.

This time it was his voice. “Jane?”

“Yes, George?”

The intercom cut off, there was a beeping sound, and the gate swung inward. Jane started walking up the long, curving cobblestone driveway. She could see the tile roof of the huge three-story white villa beyond a distant stand of trees. A bright light went on at a spot that she judged must be the front entrance.

Jane followed the driveway across the middle of a flat lawn the size of a golf course fairway, then between tall, umbrella-shaped trees with flowers blooming among the leaves that she could smell but not quite make out, through a zone of short, bushy citrus trees, and then into the open again. When she could see the lighted entrance, she smiled. There were a couple of twisty baroque pillars that looked as though they had been stolen from Saint Peter’s in Rome, and between them, a pair of doors that were a full two stories high. One of them had a man-size door cut into the bottom of it, and that was what was open.

George stepped out wearing white shorts, a pair of sandals, and a striped T-shirt. His merely human size and the childlike clothes he wore made him look ridiculous next to the imposing building he lived in. The little figure began to walk toward her quickly, the sandals slapping on the cobblestones. Jane thought of Richard Dahlman’s comment on the place. “It was the sort of villa you would expect to find on the Mediterranean, but wouldn’t.” Dahlman had been summoned here in the middle of the night, led here by a waitress from his hotel because Dahlman was a surgeon and George was in pain. He had taken out George’s appendix at the local hospital. Since Dahlman wouldn’t accept money, George had insisted on giving him the name and address of a woman who could make him disappear if he should ever have the need.