Thomas Perry - Blood Money

She had set off the crash sensors in the blue car, and both airbags had burst out in front of the two men and punched them back into their seats. All she could see through their windshield were the two big, inflated bags, barely contained against the glass.

Jane accelerated again and glided up to the kiosk. She pushed the button on her door and the window slid down. The parking attendant was standing up from her stool, craning her neck to look out at the lot. Jane said, “Wow! Did you hear that noise? What was it?”

The woman seemed to return from a reverie. She shrugged and said, “Sounded like an accident.”

Jane was already holding out a twenty-dollar bill. She spotted the parking ticket sticking out of the ashtray, so she snatched it and stuck it out the window with the money. The attendant accepted it, counted out fifteen in change, and tripped a switch to raise the barrier that blocked the exit. If the woman saw the damage to the rear of Jane’s car as it drifted out past her, she apparently did not consider investigating accidents to be part of her job description. She was already back on her stool, looking the other way, while Jane accelerated up the street.

23

As Jane drove, she tried to calm herself enough to watch the rearview mirrors, maneuver through traffic as quickly as possible, and still devote most of her consciousness to the time beyond the next minute or two. She had to get rid of this car. It was stolen, and that meant it had probably been intended to be used for one occasion only and then dumped. The new paint job they had given it and whatever they had done to prevent the license plates from being spotted would have bought her some time, but the rear bumper and trunk were enough of a mess to attract attention. She couldn’t park it and walk off down the street dragging her two duffel bags, and she couldn’t stay in Minneapolis long enough to rent a clean, anonymous new car. Before she did anything else, she had to get out of town. She slipped the pillows out of her clothes and tossed them on the seat beside her, and after a few minutes she began to feel a bit less panicky.

Jane noticed a mailbox on a corner and remembered the letters. She had letters that needed Minneapolis postmarks. She stifled the impulse to go on, then turned into the parking lot of a restaurant, pulled in between two pickup trucks, and opened the trunk. She unlocked the two bags, found the one she would need first, and took out the letters. She forced herself to walk at a normal pace to the mailbox, put the letters inside, then walk back to the parking lot. As she unlocked the car, she heard behind her the sound of an engine accelerating slightly louder than the rest of the traffic. She turned her head in time to see the blue car speeding up the street in the direction she had been going, both men in the front seat staring intently at the road ahead. She felt her shoulders give an involuntary shiver. She got into the driver’s seat, started the car, and drove off the other way.

She headed due south on Route 35, then left the interstate and turned east at Owatonna. When she reached Byron, she turned south on a rural road, then east again to the Rochester Municipal Airport. As she drove along the driveway to the long-term parking lot she studied the cars, the people waiting outside the terminal, and the road behind her. She saw nothing that frightened her, so she decided not to give something frightening time to arrive. She parked the car, walked to the terminal carrying one of her duffel bags and towing the other behind her, and stopped at the rental counter looking as though she had just stepped off a plane.

While she waited for the woman behind the counter to produce the forms and contracts, Jane studied the people around her. There seemed to be no watchers in this part of the airport. It was possible that any watchers here would have been sent to wait for her at the Minneapolis airport, but she had no impulse to go upstairs to the departure gates to test the theory.

Jane used the Katherine Webster credit card and driver’s license to rent the car, then accepted the keys. In ten minutes she was outside again, driving down the street in a new dark green Pontiac with one of the duffel bags on the seat beside her. As soon as she saw a mailbox she mailed the Rochester letters, then drove off again.

Jane tried to appraise her situation. All of her care and her precautions had not prevented something from going wrong. People were looking for her, and they were looking in the right places. The seven days she had allotted to getting the mailing done was no longer a real number. She would have to forget numbers and concentrate on what she had to accomplish. The idea had been to mail each check from the place where it supposedly had been written, and to have all the checks arrive at their destinations within a few days of one another. The bosses would hear of the sudden boom in charitable giving when everyone else did, and probably not suspect what it meant. Even if they figured out that the money was theirs, by then it would be too late for them to do anything. The letters would already be at their destinations, the checks cashed, and the money safely deposited in the accounts of thousands of organizations all over the country.

Now things had changed. She had seen the intensity of the search building since she had flown to the Caribbean. Each time she had been in an airport there had seemed to be more big, tough-looking men standing around watching passengers arrive and depart. Jane had not anticipated that they would be doing anything but scrutinizing people for a resemblance to Rita.

In Sea-Tac airport they had not been looking only for Rita. The first two had been stalking a woman who fit Jane’s general description, and who had been carrying a stack of business letters. The third man had ignored a thousand people and gone after Jane. The Mafia—or some part of it, anyway—knew that the money was being moved by mail, and that the way to stop it was by capturing a dark-haired woman.

Jane tried to imagine how they knew about her, but the possibilities were unlimited, and each one that occurred to her had something about it that didn’t fit. If they had found the house in Santa Fe, and Bernie or Rita had talked, then they would know that the way to end the flow of money would be by using the records in the computers to stop payment on the checks. If they had noticed Henry somehow, then they would have made him block the transactions. They wouldn’t need to find Jane.

She gave it up and tried to think about where she was now, and what she should do. Today was the third day. Jane had finished the mailings on the West Coast, picked up her second load of letters, and gotten out. Henry would be nearly up to Washington, D.C., by now, and then he would have his second set of letters in his bags and start dropping them off, hour by hour, as he moved north along the East Coast.

In most parts of the country, today’s mail had already been delivered, so another burst of donations would hit the banks this afternoon. Whoever was watching transactions for the Mafia would have a lot to think about.

As Jane made her plans, certain decisions were inevitable. From now on, she would have to try very hard to stay away from airports. She would have to make a second, more thorough attempt to change her appearance.

She turned onto Interstate 90, and after seventy miles drove over the Mississippi into La Crosse, Wisconsin. All night she drove through the Wisconsin countryside, stopping only to mail letters—first only a mile from the bridge, then 143 miles farther east at Madison, then 54 miles on at Beloit. Then she drove the last 74 miles to Milwaukee.

Jane stopped at a hotel on West Highland Avenue that she judged to be equidistant from the Convention Center, Marquette University, and the Pabst Brewing Company. She brought her bags into her room, then went downstairs, moved her rental car to the other side of the lot, where she could see it from her window, and went to sleep.