Thomas Perry - Blood Money

It took longer to go through the identities she had placed here for runners. If Peter and Renee Moore were never found, then Bernie and Rita would never need more identification than they already had. If they were found and had time to get out, it would be a good idea for both of them to have backup identities. There were birth certificates for people aged three to seventy, and a few blanks. There were full sets that included driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, credit cards, and a few membership cards of the sort that she acquired to give the impression that an identity had depth. She pulled out the best of the sets for elderly men. The name was Michael Daily, and his birth certificate made him sixty-nine years old. It was one of the genuine documents for names that had been planted in the Cook County clerk’s records by a woman who believed Jane would do something worthwhile with them. The picture on the license was a man who didn’t look precisely like Bernie Lupus, but didn’t look so very different either: bald head, glasses, a thin face. In an emergency, Bernie might be able to use it even before Jane substituted the photograph she had taken in New Mexico.

As she stared at the picture, she remembered the man. She had picked him up in an unemployment office in Gary, Indiana. He had agreed to be driven across the state line to Illinois to take the tests for a driver’s license in exchange for three hundred dollars and a day’s excursion. She had paid him five, because she had liked him, and another two hundred as a finder’s fee, because he had introduced her to three other people who were willing to take the same excursion.

She leafed through the cards for young women. The selection was much broader and richer. She had almost decided to give Diane J. Rabel to Rita when she remembered another one. It was a license she had obtained when she had invented Michael Daily. This one was for Karen Daily. It had occurred to her that if she ever had an elderly runner, he might come with a younger companion. She had obtained identification for a younger female the following week, and named her Karen Daily. She hunted through the stack until she found her, and added her to the pack of identities.

Jane arranged the sets of papers and cards into little packets and slipped them into a slit she had cut in the lining of her purse, then looked at the metal box again. She decided that it would be wise to take an extra five thousand dollars with her. The move-in expenses in Santa Fe and buying the Explorer had seriously depleted her credit, and her cash supply was low. She took one thick bundle of hundreds out and slipped that into her purse too. Then she faced the last decision.

There was something at the bottom of this box, wrapped in a cloth. It had been here since the day when she had said good-bye to Bobby Ortiz six years ago. By then he had not been Bobby Ortiz for at least a month: he looked a bit different, he had a different name, and he was living quietly in Cincinnati, far from the troubles he had brought on himself in Modesto, California. She had not even known that he had it until the moment when she was about to leave. He had simply handed her a paper bag and said, “You told me that if I went with you I would have to leave everything from the old days. I kind of forgot something.” When she had gotten into her car, she had opened the bag and confirmed what the weight of it had told her. Inside was a nine-millimeter Beretta Cougar with two extra magazines.

Jane had left the gun in the safe-deposit box all this time for an emergency, but she had known even then that the kind of emergency that could be solved by putting a hole in someone never came with that kind of warning. If she could see it coming, she could probably evade it.

There had been occasions when she had considered it necessary to carry a gun, but she had noticed that guns had an unexpected effect. People—even thoughtful people—behaved differently when they were armed. She had noticed that her eyes remained sharp, her mind alert, but what they were doing was studying and evaluating each change in the configuration of people and events to recognize the one when she would need to pull the gun from its hiding place and fire it. That became the only decision: the gun was suddenly the only strategy.

She decided that this occasion, too, was not right. Her survival depended on unpredictable movement and fading into the scenery. If she could finish the trip without being noticed, she had nothing to worry about, and if she couldn’t, then stopping the car to produce a pistol was not likely to help.

She watched the bank teller slip the box back into its slot, then took her key and walked out of the bank. It was only nine-fifteen, but she felt more impatient than ever to be out of Chicago. She had not put enough distance behind her since her rental car had been traced to Milwaukee, and Chicago had a deep, ugly history of Mafia infestation.

She made her way back to the parking lot, pulled out her ticket, and watched the parking attendant run across the lot toward her. He was a young black man with his hair combed straight back on his head and a blue vest with a button on it that said, DON’T LAUGH. YOU COULD BE CRAZY TOO SOME DAY. He ducked into his little wooden shelter, hung the keys of the car he had just parked on his pegboard, then reached for Jane’s keys just as a car pulled into the lot behind him and honked its horn.

When he involuntarily jerked his head to see who was honking the horn, his eyes widened for an instant, and then the lids came down again. “I’m sorry. Just be a second. Got to get that car right away.” He trotted to the car and opened the door so the driver could get out. Jane stood by the wooden shelter and held the proceedings in the corner of her eye. The driver was a big man about forty years old, wearing a fawn-colored sport coat that was unbuttoned to make room for a premature paunch. He got out and stood for a moment to watch the parking attendant slip behind the wheel, drive the blue Lincoln Town Car twenty feet ahead, then back it up to swing into a space right behind the little shelter.

Jane could see that this was a place of honor: the spot closest to the sidewalk, where the attendant could bring it out in seconds. There was no chance that as the day got busier, another car would be parked in front of it. The attendant couldn’t help having his eyes on it, because he had to pass it to dispense tickets or accept money. Jane watched only long enough to be sure that the attendant didn’t go through the charade of burdening the big man with a ticket, then turned her head away so that even her profile would be hidden while the man walked off down the street. She ached to get out of here. Everything about the man smelled to her like Mafia.

As the attendant returned and reached for her keys on the pegboard, Jane’s eyes fell on the inner wall of the little shelter. The attendant had a collection of pinups pasted to the wall. At the top were two portraits of women lounging on beds with blissful smiles. Beneath them, at eye level, were four snapshots. Two were of a fully dressed young black woman, and the third was of the same woman with the attendant. His wife? Girlfriend? Below the snapshots was an anomaly—a black-and-white drawing. Jane took a step closer. The woman had long, black hair like the others, but it wasn’t his girlfriend. It was Jane. She could see writing beneath. “Five feet eight or nine, 130 pounds, pretty.” Then, scrawled in pencil along the top, she saw a telephone number.

Jane reached into her purse, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and stepped to the left side of the exit as the attendant pulled up. As he got out, she handed him the money without looking at him, muttered, “Thanks,” and got into the car.

The attendant said, “It’s only five.”