Thomas Perry - Blood Money

The old woman glared at her in such apparent disapproval that Jane suspected some kind of dementia. But the old man muttered in a surprisingly cold tone, “We don’t own it. There’s plenty of room.”

Jane sensed that she was missing something, then surmised what it might be. “Something happens in airplanes. It makes my ankles and fingers swell up.” She waved her hand above the seat where they could see it and added, “After the first flight I could hardly get my wedding ring off, so I didn’t wear it on the way home.”

Jane had been right. Both faces brightened. The old lady said, “Oh, that’ll go away soon enough, but by then you’ll be too busy to notice.” The husband laughed. “But that doesn’t last long either. They grow up and go off on their own, and you’ll wonder where they went.”

Jane saw a pair of watchers over his shoulder. They were walking on opposite sides of the concourse toward the gate she had just left. Now and then they would glance across the open space at each other to keep their courses parallel.

She tried to keep the old people’s attention. “I’ll bet that’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it? Visiting a son or daughter.”

“Wrong,” said the old man. “We’ve been and come back. Been in Los Angeles for two weeks: enjoyed ourselves about as much as we can stand.”

Jane sighed. “I know what you mean. It always feels good to be home.”

“Do you live here?”

Jane said, “Yes,” because there was no choice. If Minneapolis was a stop on the way to somewhere else, the next place would be a small town, and she couldn’t take the chance that they might know it.

Jane saw the second set of watchers walking along like the first, only this time there were three. One was a tall, heavy-set man who forced oncoming travelers to part and go around him toward the others on the wings. As the three receded into the distance, she realized that the cart must have passed so close to him that she could have touched him.

“Whereabouts?” asked the old man.

Jane told him only the name of the street. It was the address of the apartment she had rented while she had watched Sid Freeman’s house for a visit from the people who were trying to kill Richard Dahlman.

The man said, “I know where that is. Are you right above a lake?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “There’s a beautiful park right below our house, with ducks and squirrels and things.” She lowered her eyes to her belly. “It’ll be a good place to play.”

The old lady was suddenly curious. “Did you live there when they had those murders last summer?”

“Hush,” whispered the old man, as though Jane’s belly might hear.

Jane nodded. “It was only a couple of blocks away. We didn’t hear anything, though. We saw it on the news. My husband said, ‘Hey, isn’t that around here somewhere?’ and sure enough, when they showed it, you could practically see our house.”

Jane detected that an unwelcome dose of real feeling had slipped through her defenses unexpectedly. She could see Sid’s body lying in what had once been the big house’s library, the dirty carpet soaked with his blood. She saw that her accurate memory of the neighborhood had soothed the old couple. It occurred to her that she could have done the same performance in a lot of other cities. In each one there were streets she had seen more clearly than the people who lived there because she had studied them for danger, houses where she had hidden runners, and, in far too many of them, she could conjure from her memory sights that the cameras couldn’t show on television.

The old man said, “They ever figure out what that was about?”

Jane shrugged. “If they did, nobody ever told me.”

“Drugs,” said the driver.

“Really?” asked the old man. “I didn’t hear that.”

“I didn’t either,” the driver answered. “But it’s always that.”

His certainty sounded so authoritative that neither of the two elderly passengers seemed to be able to think of anything to say in response, and Jane had no inclination to tell him what had really happened. For a few seconds the insistent chirp of his electric cart was the only sound. He drove past the metal detectors and swung recklessly to the door of the elevator. “End of the line,” he called.

Jane stepped down and held the old lady’s walker while the driver helped both old people off the rear seats. Jane felt the disconcerting sensation that her pillows were slipping. She brought her left arm across her waist and held them in place. “Thanks for the ride,” she said to the driver, and “Nice meeting you” to the old couple; then she turned and hurried toward the escalator.

At the bottom she walked purposefully to the ladies’ room, went into the farthest stall, and latched the door. She longed to abandon the disguise, but the limo driver she had sent after her luggage was expecting to see a pregnant woman at his car. She carefully rearranged the pillows and secured them once more with the waistband of her skirt, then lingered in front of the mirror to be sure the effect was right. She wondered why the costume was so distasteful to her, but the answer was waiting for her. It felt like bad luck. It made her suspect that she was playing with a force of the universe in order to obtain a small and transient advantage. She might, in some mysterious way, be making a trade that she had not intended. Maybe later, when she wanted desperately to look like this, it would be denied because she had unwittingly spent her chance.

She strode to the door, took a last look in the mirror, then stepped out quickly. Beyond the long row of glass doors she could see travelers of all descriptions moving along or stopping to stare up and down the street for cabs or shuttle buses. A couple of the men had the look that she did not want to see. They were apparently waiting for something that was going to approach along the street, but they seemed to have a lot of fidgety mannerisms that turned their eyes in the direction of the doors, the sidewalk, and the terminal.

Jane walked past the window where she could see the baggage area. She could see her driver waiting at the edge of a crowd where a flashing light was turning and bags had begun to slide down a chute to the stainless steel carousel that turned below. She walked on, out the door into the warm, humid air. She kept her eyes ahead and never let them rest on the faces that came into her line of sight. She had trained herself to use her peripheral vision to watch for changes in the expected cadence of motion—hands rising quickly, a steady walk changing to a run—and to use her ears to warn her of motion behind her.

She hurried to join a group of people waiting for the traffic signal to change so they could cross to the short-term lot. Once she was in the little herd, she knew she was safer. When the light turned green she matched her pace to theirs so she would keep them around her, but as soon as she reached the lot, her protectors dispersed rapidly. She searched for space 217, and the worry she had felt in the airport began to fade. She had gotten through the difficult part.

She walked a zigzag path through the long rows of closely parked cars to shield herself from view. Each time she had to cross an empty aisle, she would stop and look in both directions. She kept these glances casual, but she had to give herself time to survey the windows of parked cars. She was certain that the physical caution and the slight awkwardness that women felt during pregnancy would satisfy anyone who noticed her. Whatever else was true about pregnancy, women in their seventh month didn’t seem to feel much like sprinting to avoid speeding cars.

She found the space and looked at the car without approaching it immediately. If anyone had seen her from a distance, it would be dangerous to have him know exactly which car represented her ride out of here. She walked slowly in a course that kept her distance from it constant, but she was behind it now. She looked at the terminal and saw the driver come out of the baggage area, and that made her feel better.