Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

Mary Perkins barely had time to slide to the passenger seat before Jane was inside and wheeling the big car out into the loop. She drove fast to be sure the two men thought it was worthwhile to keep her in sight. She swung to the right on Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip began just past the airport entrance, and already she was gliding past big hotels: Excalibur, Tropicana, Aladdin, Bally's on the right, the Dunes on the left. They stopped for the light at Flamingo Road, but she still couldn't pick out the car that must be following somewhere in the long line of headlights. The light changed and she drove the two hundred yards with the bright moving lights of the Flamingo Hilton on her right and Caesar's parking lot on the left, then pulled into the long approach to the front entrance.

The blonde said, "How do you make any money on four dollars a trip?"

Jane shrugged. "Lots of hotels, lots of flights, and nothing shuts down, so we work long hours. We take turns driving." She turned to Mary Perkins. "That reminds me. If you want to take a nap, this is a good time."

Mary took the hint and leaned back in the big front seat. "Thanks," she said. She arranged herself so that her head didn't show over the headrest.

Jane stopped the car at the Caesar's front entrance and ran to open the trunk. The doorman opened the back door for the two passengers while a bellman picked up their suitcases. The doorman made a move to reach for Mary Perkins's door, but Jane stopped him. "She's not getting out."

The blond woman said "Thanks" to Jane, handed her seven dollars, and followed the suitcases toward the lobby.

Jane said to the doorman, "I saw a couple of creeps pick those two out at the airport and follow us. I didn't want to scare them, but you might want to tell Security."

The doorman said seriously, "Yeah. Thanks. I'll do it." He went to his station at the side of the door and picked up a telephone.

Jane slipped behind the wheel and started the car. "Keep your head down," she said. "No matter what happens, stay down and out of sight." She watched for the two men as she glided back along the driveway to the strip. When she saw a dark blue car stop at the side of the building, she kept it in the mirror until she saw the men from the airport get out. They would waste the next few hours trying to find the two women in the enormous hotel complex, then watch them for a while. They would receive no help from anybody who worked at the hotel, and sooner or later two or three polite men in dark suits who had been watching them through the network of video cameras and the see-through mirrors in the ceilings would ask them what they wanted.

"Can I get up yet?" asked Mary Perkins.

"Yeah," Jane said. "I guess it's okay now."

Mary Perkins sat up and looked through the windshield. "That's the airport up ahead. I thought we were going to drive out."

"We're not."

"Why not? It's dark and empty, and we could go a hundred."

Jane sighed. "It's the logical thing to do."

They returned the car to the rental lot, walked into the terminal, and bought two tickets for the next flight out. It happened to be to New York with a stop in Chicago. They had to walk quickly to get to the gate in time. It was almost three a.m. now, and any watchers would have had to be disguised as furniture to escape Jane's notice.

As soon as they had taken their seats, Mary Perkins whispered, "I can't believe it. By now those guys don't know where they are, let alone where we are."

"We're alive," said Jane quietly. "Now I'm going to sleep. Don't wake me up until we're in Chicago."

She closed her eyes and prepared herself for the unpleasant experience of having the past few days run through her mind all over again. There were a few bright, crackling images that flashed in her vision, but they weren't in order or coherent, so they didn't cause her much pain. After she had dozed for a short time, she saw the fist coming around just before she had flinched to take the force out of it. The spasmodic jerk woke her up, but when she relaxed her muscles again, she dropped into a deeper animal sleep that put her in darkness far out of reach of recent memories.

5

When the plane began to descend, the pressure on Jane's ears increased and she woke up. The engines changed their tone, and she pushed the button to let her seat back pop up again. The sleep had left her feeling stiff in the shoulders, but she was alert. The Old People believed that the place to obtain secret information was in dreams. Sometimes a dream would be an expression of an unconscious desire of the soul, and at other times a message planted there by a guardian spirit. Those were two ways of saying the same thing. If there were such a force as the supernatural, then the soul and the guardian both would be supernatural. If there were no such force, then the soul was the psyche, and the guardian spirit was just the lonely mind's imaginary friend.

This time Jane could not remember any impression that had passed through her mind in three hours. Maybe that was the message from her subconscious: enough. She had stored enough tragedy and violence in her memory during the past few days to trip the circuit breaker and turn the lights out. The rest had helped: she was thinking clearly again. As they walked into the terminal at O'Hare she glanced up at a monitor that had the schedule of arrivals and departures on it.

"More tag?" asked Mary Perkins.

Jane kept her moving. "Once a game starts, you have to play to win. That means remembering all the moves. We sent two men to New York with a stop in Chicago. The two we left in Las Vegas can look at the schedule and see that a plane left for Chicago about the time we did. When you start sending the chasers across your own path, it's time to get off the path."

They walked along with the crowd heading for the baggage claim until it passed the car-rental counters, and then Jane led Mary Perkins aside. Within minutes they were in a white Plymouth moving along the 294 Expressway toward Route 80.

Jane drove fast but kept the pace steady, always in a pack of cars that were going the same speed. She counted as she drove: two men fooled into boarding the flight to New York, three left at the gate in L.A. two following the wrong woman in Las Vegas. Seven. The one who had made a phone call before he had boarded the plane to New York must have been reporting to somebody, so it was more than seven. Who were they, and why was Mary Perkins worth all this trouble?

"Where are we going?" asked Mary Perkins.

"Detroit," said Jane. "It's about three hundred miles." She turned her head and pointedly studied the right-hand mirror to check for headlights coming up in the right lane. "In the airport you said you didn't have time to tell me anything and I didn't have time to listen. We've got about five hours."

Mary Perkins sat in silence for a long time. They passed an exit where a blazing neon sign towered above a building much bigger than the gas stations around it. Mary gave a little snort that was the abbreviation for a laugh. "Jimmy Fugazi's End Zone Restaurant. Did you ever notice that all those guys who get too old to play buy restaurants?"

This time Jane did look at her. Mary was probably in her thirties, but she was already paying too much attention to her hair and skin and clothes. "I guess they have to invest their money somewhere," she said.

"All professional athletes want to own restaurants," Mary Perkins pronounced. "It doesn't have to do with money. It has to do with not being able to give up having people look at them and pay attention. Even the dumbest jock in the world knows he can do better by putting bets on any ten mutual funds, but all professional athletes want a restaurant. Every crook already has one. What he wants is a casino. A crook is basically lazy, and that way people come to him to get robbed, and they bring it in cash so he can take it and screw the government at the same time. There's only one game bigger than that."