Thomas Perry - Blood Money

She found it, and she moved out from between the two buildings. She stepped across the sidewalk quickly, then off the curb. A strange image floated across her consciousness as she watched the men across the street in the parking lot, staring only at one another and talking into radios.

This was the way hundreds of Senecas had died, the way a Seneca was supposed to die. In the Old Time, raiding parties had consisted of three or four good friends, who had gone quietly and secretly to the territory of their enemies. They would appear out of the forest, do the enemy as much harm as they could, and then disappear into the forest again. They would run along the trail single file, sometimes not stopping for days at a time. But now and then, the strategy would fail. The time would come, somewhere in the wild country hundreds of miles from home, when they would be exhausted, slowing. The enemy warriors assembled to retaliate would be about to catch up. It was then that the strongest and bravest would suddenly stop. He would step back along the trail to a narrow spot, and begin to sing his death song as he waited for the pursuers.

He would fight them, trying to lay as many bodies at his feet as he could. The enemy would fight differently. They would try to wound him with arrows and thrown clubs, attack in waves and retreat, attempt to use up his strength so they could take him down and drag him back alive to be tormented.

Jane’s mind was so clear that she could read the minds of the men around the hotel. She knew what they would think before they did. When they noticed the lone woman hurrying across the street toward them, they turned away, hiding the radios and taking a few tentative steps back toward the darkness. She was still just a woman, someone whom they didn’t want to see their faces. In a moment she would go into the hotel, and they could resume their hunt. She could feel them looking at her when her foot went up on the curb in front of the parking lot. She moved quickly, knowing that each second gave them more time to sense her fear. She walked purposefully ahead, not letting her eyes turn in their direction. She knew that as soon as she made her move, she would transform herself from a low-level threat into prey.

She relished the few seconds while she prepared, savoring their alarm at her sudden interruption of their plans, and their eagerness to see her gone. She walked close to the Mayfair Products van, as though she was going into the hotel. She took a deep breath as she reached the front of the van, then suddenly slipped to the side, hidden for a moment by the bulk of the van. She took two running steps across the front of it, emerged in the next aisle, stuck the key into the door of the Explorer, swung the door open, leapt into the driver’s seat, and pounded the lock button.

She started the Explorer and backed up quickly, then pushed the accelerator nearly to the floor. She saw a man try to step in front of her, but she didn’t vary her course at all. He dived to the pavement to escape, and she thought she heard a bump as though the fender might have clipped his foot. She let the van roar out into the road too fast, then had to accelerate out of the wide turn to get out of the opposite lane.

Jane glanced in the rearview mirror to see men running for cars in the lot. She raised her speed, because she knew that if she didn’t, the big Suburban would try to block the road ahead of her.

She took one last look at the hotel as she turned right, then left. She searched the picture she carried with her in her mind. There had been men running back along the front of the hotel, away from the restaurant garden toward the parking lot. It had worked. In a few minutes the sound of cars would die in the distance, and Bernie and Rita would be able to stroll down the sidewalk to the car she had left them.

Jane felt a curious sense of freedom as she drove. It was after midnight, and she was on the edge of the city already. Ahead of her were hundreds of miles of flat country with good, fast roads. She looked at the gas gauge. The tank was full. If she did this right, she might be able to keep them following her for a long time. Bernie and Rita would have the new start that she had wanted to give them.

She drove fast, but she had no serious hope of outrunning them. She made four quick turns, then found herself moving south on Route 41. She looked back in her rearview mirror and saw three other cars make the turn after her, then the Suburban. She nudged her speed up some more, but they were still coming.

She saw signs indicating she was passing Farmersburg, Shelburn, Sullivan. The names meant nothing. The world seemed to be a black sky and a slightly lighter line of land below it, as though her life had simplified into two stripes with a road down the middle. Now and then she would see a tiny red glow of taillights ahead, but after a few minutes the car would pull off and the lights would be gone. Then she would see white headlights, and they would slowly grow and brighten. She would hope for a police car, but by the time the lights were close enough to show that it wasn’t, they would flash past and be gone.

After a few minutes, she realized that flagging down a single patrol car would do her no good. It would be one rural cop against—what—four carloads of heavily armed men? There was little point in recruiting somebody to die with her. She considered instead trying to make a run for one of the big east-west interstates. Route 64 must be ahead of her. At any hour of the night there would be long-distance truckers and tourists who were pushing themselves, and at each exit there would be lighted gas stations and fast-food places. Maybe these men wouldn’t dare to take her in a public place in front of witnesses.

She knew it wasn’t true. They had flown here from somewhere with the intention of pulling an armed assault on a hotel to kidnap people. She thought about them, and began to grow angrier. There was some special quality about what they were doing that made her feel heat at the back of her neck. It was their arrogance. They felt invincible. They always had everyone overwhelmingly outnumbered. They relied on people being afraid of them. She found herself thinking about the shotgun she had carried in the New Mexico desert. She had reached the edge of the city, dropped it in the dirt, and buried it. She wished she could go back in time, dig it up, and throw it into the back of the Explorer before she drove east.

She was moving as fast as she dared. Whenever she reached the crest of an incline, she would feel the Explorer leave the ground a little, pulling up on the springs, the seat belt tightening across her hips to keep her down. Then it would come down, and her arms would seem to grow heavier for a few seconds. Each bump in the road threatened to wrench the steering wheel to the side. She glanced back in the mirror, and she could see that she had gained a little ground.

When she returned her eyes to the windshield, she saw the farm. It was enormous, by the standards she had grown up with in western New York, a small cluster of buildings in the middle of a vast expanse of fields. It looked like an oasis in the desert, because big trees had been left around the buildings to provide the only shade for miles, and in front of one of the buildings was a lawn.

There were no lights on in any of the buildings. As she came down the incline toward the place, she could see the fields better. They were filled with corn. It was late July now, so the stalks near the road seemed to her to be higher than the roof of the Explorer.

This was her chance. They might be able to drive long enough and hard enough to catch up with her and bump her off the road, and certainly they could keep her in sight until she had to stop. But she was a runner. She had always run. Every morning since she was twelve, she had gone down to the Niagara River and run along the bank to the Grand Island Bridge and back. She had been on the track team at college, and had won more races than she had lost. The past few weeks had probably left her a little bit out of shape, but she was willing to take the chance.