Thomas Perry - Blood Money

Jane hurried on. When she sensed she had gone a sufficient distance, she began to run, dodging slow walkers and heavily laden passengers. She made it to her gate just as one airline woman was putting a new flight number on the board behind the desk and the other was preparing to close the door to the boarding tunnel. She handed the woman her ticket, heard the door slam behind her, then rushed to take her seat.

Jane fastened her seat belt and willed the plane to move, and almost immediately, it did. She watched the terminal moving backward as the plane was towed away from it. She sat back, letting the fear and exertion wash over her now. She felt the light-headed, jittery weakness and the pounding of her heart for a full minute. But then the plane stopped and began to move forward. The pilot must have been trying to preserve his place in the takeoff order. His voice came over the speaker and confirmed her theory. A few minutes later the plane was lifting off at the end of the runway and Jane was already reaching out against the exaggerated gravity to take the telephone off the back of the seat in front of her.

22

As the plane passed above the Rocky Mountains, Jane tried again to think of ways to reassure herself. The man who had spotted her in the airport had not gotten up in time to see which gate she had run to. It must have been two hundred yards farther on, and she had made a turn where the concourse did, so she had been out of sight. That was an advantage, but it wasn’t safety. The people he had been with were certainly capable of checking the departure list to find out what planes had taken off at about the time when she had disappeared. The pilot had been in a hurry to get his plane into position, so there must have been a number of flights at that time, but it would be easy to eliminate some of them—ones that had taken off from gates on the other end of the airport, or ones that had been delayed. She had to assume they knew she was on this plane. She had to believe they knew when and where the plane would land, and they would be calling ahead to put friends of theirs into her path.

Jane reviewed her preparations again and again as the plane moved over the immense, flat expanse of geometric patterns of green and tan toward the Mississippi. When the man in the seat beside her stood up to go into the rest room, Jane used the moment alone. She collected three little pillows the airline had put in the overhead compartment and sat down. She watched and waited to see whether any of the passengers nearby had gotten curious. The young man across the aisle was asleep, lying back in his seat with his long legs in a tangle on the empty seat beside him. The others seemed not to have noticed her movement. She wrapped her jacket around the pillows and kept the bundle in her lap.

A few minutes later the man was back. Jane stood up in the aisle to let him duck and sidestep past her to his seat. Then she walked down the aisle toward the rear of the plane. She found one rest room with its little slot moved to say VACANT, so she stepped inside, locked the door, and began to experiment with the pillows in front of the tiny mirror. It took her several tries to get the pillows arranged and the elastic waistband of her skirt over the bottom one to hold them. Then she draped her loose silk blouse over the bulge. The pillows were tightly packed with some synthetic fiber that made them firm, so the visual effect was not bad. It might work, if she was careful not to bend at the waist or let the pillows slip to the side.

Jane worked on ways to hold her jacket to conceal the pillows until she had perfected that obscure skill too. Since the man she had kicked in the Seattle airport had probably described the way her hair had been braided and pinned, she loosened it. She found her nail scissors in her purse, but when she tried to cut her hair, she realized that it would take hours with the tiny tool.

She sensed that the plane was beginning to lose altitude, and there would not be enough time. She combed her hair out and made a ponytail. She took a scarf and tied it around the ponytail so it hung down over her hair. Her reflection in the mirror looked as though she had much more scarf than hair. Since the man at Sea-Tac had seen her tinted glasses, she took them off. She heard the female voice of a flight attendant over the speaker above her head. After the first few garbled words she recognized that it was an announcement that it was time for passengers to return to their seats and buckle up.

When the plane landed, Jane walked out with the same weary, relieved look that she saw on the faces of the other passengers. In the tunnel she stayed as close as she could to a pair of men who were big enough to partially shield her from sight, put on her jacket, and let her belly show.

Jane ventured to the edge of the crowd long enough to scan the line of people along the wall for a man holding a sign that said DEBORAH. When she spotted him, she said, “Hi, that’s me,” and kept walking. He set off beside her, and she kept her face turned toward him, not looking in either direction. “I’m in a bit of a hurry. I’ve got to make a quick phone call and stop in the ladies’ room. Could you please take my tags and claim my bags?”

The man eyed her belly. “I guess so,” he said. “What are they?”

“Two big green duffel bags with wheels on the bottom.” She tore the two tags off her ticket envelope and held them out. He looked at them without eagerness, so she decided to put an end to his reluctance. “They’re heavy, so I can meet you down there and give you a hand.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he said gruffly. “I can handle them myself. You can meet me at the car. It’s in the short-term lot, space 217. Black Audi with tinted windows.” The man set off, glancing down at the numbers on the receipts.

She was relieved that the call she had made to order a car had actually produced one. She had asked the long-distance operator for the number of the private limo service that was first in the alphabet. She had guessed that it would be one with four or five A’s in a row at the beginning. In her experience, the ones who wanted business that badly weren’t usually luxurious, but they were eager. Now all that remained was to make her way to the car. Keeping her eyes forward, she walked along with the crowd. She had gauged the costume carefully, trying not to overdo it. Doctors always told pregnant women not to fly after the eighth month, so she had seen very few late-term women in airports. She had tried for the seventh month—the belly big enough to be unmistakable, but arranged high and not so large as to make her unusual.

Jane spotted a pair of elderly people waiting by a counter. The woman had an aluminum walker with wheels on it, and the man looked nearly as frail. Jane’s ears picked up an electronic chirping sound far up the concourse, and she recognized an opportunity. She stepped closer and caught the attention of the woman behind the counter. “Do you suppose there’s room for one more? I’m a little … tired. I don’t want to be a lot of trouble, but—”

The woman smiled her professional smile. “No trouble,” she said. “Do you have a carry-on bag?”

Jane shook her head. The electric cart chirped up to the counter and stopped with a sudden jolt. The tall, thin young man stepped down from the driver’s seat and said, “Three?”

The woman at the counter nodded, and Jane helped the two old people into a bench seat, then sat beside the driver. The cart started with a jerk and picked up speed. The driver weaved in and out around groups of walking travelers, slowing down only when two groups would unexpectedly converge to close his pathway, then beeping his horn.

Jane’s position beside him was not the one she would have chosen, but there had been no other. The cart moved along with a flashing orange light on a pole and the annoying chirp, so there was no hope of not being noticed. She half-turned in her seat to face the old couple, so her belly would be visible from the front of the cart and her face hidden. She tried to start a meaningless conversation. “Thank you very much for sharing your ride with me.”