Thomas Perry: Dance for the Dead

She looked down at the ticket. "Las Vegas? How does this change anything?"

"Just listen. When it's time to board, one of them will go to a telephone to tell somebody at the other end that you're on the plane. It's a five-hour flight with a stop in Chicago, and that gives them time to do everything but dig your grave before we get there. The other will sit tight until the last minute."

"But what are we going to do? What's the plan?"

Jane looked at her wearily. "The plan is to go to Las Vegas and make them think you've gone to New York. Now give me about the time it takes to sing the national anthem before you come out. Then go sit where you sat before."

Jane swung the door open. Instead of looking toward the waiting area, she glanced behind her for the one watching the exit. The man with the paper was loitering a few yards away at the water fountain. She turned and saw that the other one had taken a seat where he could watch his friend. There was a certain comfort in seeing that they were predictable.

Jane sat a few yards behind the man with the briefcase and studied him. He couldn't be armed with anything worse than a pocketknife. Three inches or less, if she remembered the regulation correctly. They weren't going to do anything in an airport anyway. People you didn't know wouldn't commit suicide to kill you. These were hired help for somebody.

The woman at the boarding desk was joined by a second woman, who said something to her. Then the one who had given Jane her boarding pass picked up a microphone and cooed into it, "Flight 419 for New York is now ready for boarding." People all over the waiting area stood up. "Will those passengers with small children, or who need help boarding, please come to the gate now...."

That invitation seemed to apply to no one, so as the woman went on - "Passengers in rows one through ten may board now" - the taller man walked to the row of telephones beside the men's room.

Mary Perkins stirred, but Jane gave her head a little shake and picked up a newspaper someone had left on a seat near her. The woman went on calling out rows of seats, then said, "Passengers in the remaining seats may board now." Still Jane sat and stared at the newspaper. There were four minutes left. When there were three minutes, she closed the newspaper and began to walk toward the gate.

In her peripheral vision she saw Mary Perkins stand up and follow, then saw the taller man hurriedly punch some numbers into the telephone. Jane stopped to glance up at the clock on the wall, and saw the smaller man walking along behind Mary Perkins. The man at the telephone had hung up, and he walked straight to the gate, handed the woman his ticket, and entered the tunnel. Jane walked a few feet past the last set of seats in the waiting area slowly, letting Mary Perkins catch up with her. At the last second, she turned to her.

"Why, Mary," she said. "It is you."

Mary Perkins stopped and stared at her in genuine shock. "Well... yes."

"You don't remember me, do you?"

The man who had been following Mary Perkins stopped too, standing almost behind them. Jane seemed to notice him for the first time. "Oh, don't mind us. Go ahead." She pulled Mary Perkins aside. "It's me, Margaret Cerillo. I thought I recognized you before, but I wasn't sure..."

The man hesitated. He obviously had orders to follow Mary Perkins onto the airplane, but he also had been instructed to be sure he wasn't caught doing it. He could think of no reason to stand and wait for these two women while they talked, so he stepped forward, handed his ticket to the woman at the door, and stepped past her into the boarding tunnel.

Jane moved Mary Perkins away from the gate casually. "Slowly, now, and keep talking," Jane whispered. "You seem to be worth a lot of expense."

"I guess they think I am," said Mary Perkins.

"If you have something they want, you'll never have a better time to come up with it. We can go right into the plane and make a deal. The lights are on and everybody's been through metal detectors. There's no chance of other people we can't see."

"If I had anything to buy them off with, what would I need you for?"

Jane stopped and looked at her. "I'll still help you shake them afterward in case there are hard feelings."

"Thanks, but I can't get rid of them that way."

"What did you do?"

Mary Perkins turned to look at Jane, leaning away from her as though she had just noticed her there and found it displeasing. "Why do you assume I did something?"

"I know you did. If you didn't, what would you need me for?"

Jane began to walk again. Any woman whose claim to trust was that she had picked up some gossip in the L.A. county jail didn't inspire much confidence, and this one struck her as a person who had done some lying professionally. But Jane could see no indication of what she was lying about. She was being followed by two men who had not taken the sorts of steps that anybody would take if they wanted to stop her from jumping bail or catch her doing something illegal. They had seen her waiting for a flight to a distant state, and they had gotten aboard. The local cops couldn't do that, the F.B.I, wouldn't be prepared to do it on impulse, and if none of them had stopped her from leaving the county jail, then they didn't know of any reason to keep her there.

Jane had to admit to herself that the only possibility that accounted for the way these men were behaving was that they wanted to keep her in sight until there weren't any witnesses. "A little faster now," she said. "We've got a plane to catch."

They started across the waiting area and Jane caught a peculiar movement in the edge of her vision. A man sitting at the far end of the waiting area stood up, and two men who had been conferring quietly at a table in the coffee shop did the same. It wasn't that any of them would have seemed ominous alone. It was the fact that their movements coincided with Jane's and Mary's starting to walk fast. "Did you hear them announce a flight just now?"

Mary winced. "Please don't tell me you hear voices."

"I don't. There were two men on that flight. Do you have some reason to believe there wouldn't be others?"

"Well... no."

Jane's jaw tightened. "Let me give you some advice. Whatever it is you've been doing that makes people mad at you, cut it out. You're not very good at getting out of town afterward."

Mary Perkins let Jane hurry her along the concourse in silence until they reached Gate 36. They slipped into the tunnel with the last of the passengers, just as the man at the gate was preparing to close the door. Jane heard running footsteps behind her, so she stopped at the curve and listened.

"I'm sorry, sir," said the airline man's voice. "You'll need a ticket. We aren't permitted to accept cash."

"Can't I buy one?"

"Yes, sir, but you'll have to go to the ticket counter. I have no way to issue a ticket."

"But that's way the hell on the other end of the airport. Can you hold the plane?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but passengers have to catch connecting flights, and we have a schedule. There are five flights a day from LAX to McCarran. You could - "

Jane walked the rest of the way up the tunnel and through the open hatch, and she and the woman took their seats. Mary Perkins said, "What do you call that?"

"Airport tag," said Jane. "I haven't played it in years." She sat back, fastened her seat belt, and closed her eyes. "I hope I never do again."

4

"What are you thinking?" asked Mary Perkins.

"I'm not thinking. I'm resting," said Jane.

"Does resting mean you've already thought, and you have a plan? Because if it does, I'd sure like to know what it is."

"No, it means I want you to be quiet."

Jane closed her eyes again. The plane was flying over the Southwest now, toward the places where the desert people lived: Mohave, Yavapai, Zuni, Hopi, Apache, Navajo. Some of them believed that events didn't come into being one after another but existed all at once. They were simply revealed like the cards a dealer turned over in a blackjack game: they came off the deck one at a time, but they were all there together at the beginning of the game.