Thomas Perry - Blood Money

“How many?”

“In twenty-four hours, everybody, with all their crews. In half an hour, I don’t know. Maybe fifty, probably less. We kept the good earners at home, not the guns. We’ve even got some of them out running down bank accounts and addresses and stuff.”

“Mixed right in with people from the other families, right? Molinari’s guys, Langusto’s guys … ”

Pescati and Cotrano began to look increasingly uneasy. Even Mosso seemed uncomfortable.

“See what I mean?” said Catania. “It’s like this was designed to sucker people like me. I figure, if I keep my guys at home and the rest of them find our money, are we going to get it? No. So I send my soldiers away, so I don’t lose out. But what if that was the whole point? The families that go along with the program like they already work for the Langustos … well, pretty soon, they’re going to find out that they do. But the ones the Langustos know will be trouble can be handled. Like me. Instead of having to face my four hundred guys with his four hundred and fifty, they just have to face the fifty guys we kept home because they were good at arithmetic, but not so good in an alley on a dark night.”

“You think Phil Langusto is making his move like Castiglione did?” asked Mosso.

Catania shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought from the beginning that if somebody killed Bernie the Elephant and got his hands on the money, the place we’d find it wasn’t going to be the March of Dimes. The only thing I’m sure of now is that this is a hell of an easy way to take over another family.” His eyes were sad and wistful as he stared down at the street outside the window of the Rivoli Social Club. “I wish I had thought of it myself.”

26

As Jane drove west out of Chicago on Interstate 90, her constant glances into the rearview mirror and her careful appraisals of each car that appeared beside her gave her a chance to study the women that she was trying to impersonate. That one ahead and to the right had probably dropped somebody off in the city—a husband at work, a child at school—and she was driving her Land Rover back to the suburbs. Jane read the frame around the license plate: Valley Imports, Elk Grove Village. Jane pushed a bit harder on the accelerator to pull closer to the woman. The hair looked almost exactly like Jane’s. A lot of women with babies cut their hair to keep little fingers from tangling in it. As Jane drew abreast of the woman, she could see a child strapped in a car seat behind her.

Jane pulled ahead. She had to keep looking for danger, not finding new ways of telling herself it was gone. She had verified that the changes she had made had lowered her profile—made her look like a million other women—and proving it to herself over and over was pointless. She was doing what she had decided to do, and she had known exactly what the risks would be before she had made the choice. There were lots of people who had been dazzled by the sums of money the Mafia took in, and had concocted some clever scheme to divert some of it. There were skimmers and embezzlers and hijackers and con men, young members of gangs who got into grown-up rackets without considering who had been making all that money before they were born. The graveyards of big cities were full of them.

The half disguise she had assumed was not bad, but it was best in situations like this: if all anyone could see were brief glances from a distance, she was difficult to distinguish from the people around her. At close quarters, she was still Jane. She spent a few seconds thinking her way through the rest of her original itinerary, and decided it was not good enough. They had her picture, they knew that she was mailing letters. The only way to fight them was to try to do it quickly.

Jane stopped at mailboxes in Hoffman Estates, Elgin, Rockford. From there she took 39 south until she came to a tollway rest stop just west of De Kalb. After she had mailed her letters she filled the gas tank, spent a few minutes rearranging her boxes of letters in the Explorer to bring the next ones up to the front, and went into the little store to buy a pile of road maps.

Then Jane began to drive. She kept moving across the long, straight highways, always just fast enough to cheat the speed limit a little but not enough to be pulled over by the highway patrol. She drove to Moline, crossed the bridge over the Mississippi into Iowa, and stopped in Davenport, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids. She turned west again on Route 30 and reached Ames at six, then went south to Des Moines. She didn’t stop for dinner until she had approached the southern edge of the city.

She ate quickly, spent five minutes moving the next boxes of letters to the front of the Explorer, collapsed the empties and stuffed them into a Dumpster, then drove onto Interstate 35. She reached Kansas City after dark, and found a big central post office just west of the junction with Interstate 70. She was fairly confident that even the most thorough search for her wouldn’t include any surveillance of closed post offices, so she drove up, dropped her mail in the box outside, and headed for the entrance to Interstate 70.

She stopped in Columbia, reached St. Louis just before dawn, and slipped into the city just ahead of the wave of commuters. She made five stops on her way through St. Louis, and as the traffic around her began to crowd and slow, she got back on 70 and crossed the Mississippi again into East St. Louis.

Jane’s nervous energy was beginning to leave her after the night of headlights on nearly empty highways. She considered her options. She didn’t feel ready to settle into a hotel, because it would take too much time, so she pulled off the big highway, made her way back to the park with a little patch of green grass and shady trees she had seen from the road, parked the Explorer, climbed into the back seat, and slept.

When she awoke, it was to the sound of voices. She lay still and listened for a second, then verified that they were the voices of children. She raised her head and looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was noon, and there were other cars in the lot. As she got back into the driver’s seat, she could see that there were three families at the picnic tables, the parents laying out food and drinks, the children running around in that aimless way they did after they had been confined in a car—first chasing one another, then rushing back, then just running. Jane backed out of her parking space and headed for the interstate.

The noon sun was bright, the day was clear, and the stops were far apart. She stopped at Vandalia and Effingham to mail letters, then followed Interstate 70 into Indiana at four o’clock.

She stopped just over the border at Terre Haute, then at Indianapolis, then Fort Wayne. She ate in a truck stop, where she knew there would be little competition for the ladies’ room. She locked the door, washed herself as well as she could, and worked on changing her appearance again.

It was great to be a young suburban matron driving her SUV around during the daytime, but it wasn’t daytime anymore. Tonight she wasn’t going to be driving across long, sparsely populated stretches. She knew that in some of the areas where she was going tonight, suburban matrons were going to be scarce. She tucked her short hair up under her baseball cap, put her thin windbreaker on over a loose sweatshirt, and laced up her running shoes. She evaluated herself in the mirror. She didn’t look like a man, precisely, but she was as tall as many men, and on a dark city street, her silhouette wouldn’t scream out, “What am I doing here alone?” She slipped her wallet into her back pocket like a man, and wondered how they could stand the way that felt. But when she stepped back from the mirror far enough to see herself at full length, she was pleased. It disguised the female shape of her backside pretty well, if she kept the windbreaker down to her hips.