Thomas Perry - Blood Money

Jane could see now that what the woman was carrying in her free hand was not an airline’s envelope with tickets in it. She had a little packet of business-size envelopes with stamps on them. The woman veered to the side of the concourse and Jane adjusted her course a few degrees to watch her more closely. The woman stopped at a steel panel with several horizontal slots in it and the eagle logo of the U.S. Postal Service. She dropped the letters in a slot and turned to go back to some gate she had already passed. Jane studied the woman’s face. First the woman’s eyes were unfocused, merely aimed ahead so she could see where she was going. Then she noticed Jane, and her eyes shot to Jane’s face: her hair, her eyes, then down at the floor. A slight smile played on her lips for a fraction of a second. She had seen the resemblance too.

Jane looked away and walked faster. Jane had seen a dozen women of almost the same general description since she had stepped onto the curb outside the terminal. Women of her age and size with dark hair—even coal-black hair—weren’t unusual. It must have been the letters the woman had been carrying that had made her worth a closer look.

Jane felt a chill moving up from the base of her spine and settling in her shoulder blades. They knew already. The first letters couldn’t have arrived more than two days ago. How could they have picked up the pattern already? It occurred to her that maybe Henry Ziegler wasn’t safe. Maybe they had caught him somehow, and made him tell them everything. She forced herself to think about her immediate problem.

She stepped into the first ladies’ room she came to and waited to let the two men come back up the concourse. She looked at her face in the mirror and was startled by the haunted look in her eyes. She composed her features, then tried to think. She opened her purse and began to freshen her makeup as the door opened and another woman walked past her.

The two men watching the departure gates could hardly be the only ones in the airport. She had never heard that Seattle was a place where organized crime had a big foothold, but Sea-Tac was a big airport, and they could easily have flown a few men in from some city where they were redundant. No, she thought, not easily. It didn’t have to be easy: they were after billions of dollars.

Jane glanced at her watch. It was a half hour before flight time. She had to calm herself and consider her options. She had already checked her two big bags onto the flight to Minneapolis. If she walked away now, the airline would delay the flight and take the bags off. They never flew bags without a passenger anymore. Stopping the flight, with its implication of bombs and airplane crashes, would attract attention from panicky passengers. It might even draw some of the watchers, if only because watching airports was dull work. The airport security people would certainly open the two big duffel bags and find nothing but envelopes inside. She tried to give a size to that loss. There was no way of knowing exactly how much the checks in this load were worth, but it couldn’t be less than a billion dollars a bag. Some of the corporate foundations Henry had invented had been given names that sounded like midwestern agricultural conglomerates, and they would be in this load. A number of the names of individual families had been designed to sound like old fortunes from automobile companies, railroads, and department stores. But the sums of money weren’t the worst problem. Giving the FBI a few thousand of these checks to study and trace was unthinkable.

She couldn’t walk away from her bags. She would have to get on the flight to Minneapolis to claim them. She could wait here in the ladies’ room until the second boarding call, then make a determined walk to the gate to join the travelers crowding together to get aboard.

Jane looked at her hair. Wearing it long and loose was probably not the best she could do. She pulled it tight, braided it, then twisted the braid and pinned it up in back. She searched her purse for the pair of tinted glasses she had picked up for herself when she had bought Rita’s and put them on. She heard the first call for the flight to Minneapolis, then touched up her lipstick and heard the second call.

She took one last look at herself, turned, and walked to the door. Jane swung the door open and stepped out into the alcove. There was a jolt as a big body bumped against hers and slammed her into a side wall. There was the sharp sting of a pointed object pressed against her spine, and a strong forearm around her neck. The voice was low and nervous, so close behind her left ear that she could feel the damp, hot breath. “You’re going to walk with me. The reason is that I can push this blade between the disks of your spine before you could get a word out.”

Jane felt him tighten his grip with his left arm and push the blade a little harder to scare her. She couldn’t tell from the feel what shape it was, or what it was made of, but she could tell it was short—an inch or two—because part of the hand that held it seemed to be resting against the back of her jacket. It could be a sharpened key. It could even be a pocketknife, if it looked short and harmless enough to the security woman at the metal detectors.

“Now walk back toward the escalators.”

Jane struggled to sort out the sensations. The pressure against her back was strong enough to pierce the skin, if her jacket had not been there for padding. The man was standing behind her now, but when they stepped out in the open, he would have to move slightly to the side, as though he had his arm around her—his left side, because he held the knife in his right hand. That was a weak position, good for slashing, but not for stabbing. He would have to lean toward her if he wanted to stab.

He pushed Jane forward and she heard him take a step to move ahead to her left side. Jane’s next step was slightly to her left to reassure him that she was heading toward the exit, and to trigger the reflex in his feet to move that way faster to keep from tripping over her. As he began to lean to the left, Jane started her third step, dropped to the floor just to her right, and rolled. Her legs came up to her chest, then kicked out together.

The man did as she had hoped. He finished his step to the left, then lunged to the right with the knife. His weight shifted to his right foot, and he was off-balance. Jane’s two-footed kick caught his right ankle and swept his leg out from under him. He hit the slippery floor hard on his right hip and shoulder. His first impulse was to roll to his belly and go after her, so his hand came up, and he remembered that the little knife was in it and that people must be looking. He awkwardly rose to his right elbow to slip the knife into the inner pocket of his jacket.

His eyes rolled to survey the area around him to determine whether anyone had seen the knife. He needed to take his eyes off Jane for an instant. If his peripheral vision detected that Jane was still moving, his mind interpreted it as an attempt to stand and run. But Jane was already bringing her left leg toward him, exerting the strong muscles at the back of the thigh and calf that the body used to push off when it ran. Her heel pounded into the bridge of his nose and snapped his head backward.

Strong hands grasped Jane and lifted her to her feet. People were muttering the useless words that Jane knew would make them feel foolish. “Are you okay?” “Did you trip?”

“I’m okay,” she said. Then, more angrily, like a woman who resented the embarrassment, she added, “I wish people would watch where they’re going.” She was already moving toward the gate again. As she slipped into the river of people heading in the same direction, she ventured a last, irritated glance back. The man was still lying there. She couldn’t tell whether he had lost consciousness or simply couldn’t think of a way to shake off the people surrounding him and run after her without being caught. Then the crowd gathering around him blocked her view.