Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

Even as Jane winced with frustration and disappointment, she knew she had been right. Farrell was the one Barraclough trusted to manage his separate under-the-surface operation. He was the one to select and recruit young thugs, deliver pep talks, and give them the skills to do his hunting. He was the one who talked about potential, initiative, motivation, and all the nonsense that made them think that whatever qualities they had gone to jail for were now going to make them rich. He was the specialist in the psychology of brutality. He would be the one person Barraclough was sure to want with him for the interrogation of Mary Perkins.

24

Mary sat on the bare, ridged, metal floor of a van. The bumps of the pavement were regular, and she was beginning to get used to them now. Her spine was jarred by the ba-bump as the front wheels, then the back, went over each crack, then paused and went ba-bump again. She had felt a moment of relief when they had dragged her out of the car, but before she had taken a step under her own power they had pushed her into the back of the van and put the bag over her head. It was a burlap sack that had been sprayed with several coats of black paint so she couldn't see through it. The bag went over her head and down her arms to her elbows, and then unseen hands cinched it at the neck. It looked like the black hoods convicts wore in old photographs of hangings - no holes for the eyes or nose, just a gap at the mouth for breathing.

Her heart had stutter-started when she saw it, and then just when she had begun to sense that it wasn't what it looked like, she had felt them pulling her wrists together behind her. This made her remember the article in the magazine about doing anything you could before you got into the car, because afterward it was too late. She had struggled then to save the use of her hands, but she knew she had already missed her best chance to accomplish an escape. She resisted only because her fear was jumping around inside her and making her body move. With the black-painted hood over her head, any one of the three men could have tied her hands while the others went away.

The van was white. She had seen that much before the hood went on. For some time thereafter, while the white van turned sharply a couple of times to topple her over onto the floor, then gathered speed, she wondered why she was no longer afraid. It took her more than an hour in the solitude and darkness of the black-painted hood to detect that it was because none of this was happening to her.

The distinction was a delicate, slippery one that had to be grasped carefully and not squeezed too hard. She was here feeling movement and hearing activity, but even before they had put the hood on, the sights had been distant and the sounds hollow. This didn't feel real. She had been afraid this was going to happen for such a long time that she knew the way it should have felt. It wasn't happening to her; it must be happening to someone else.

The van turned off the big road with the regular cracks on it and went more slowly. Now and then there would be a sharper bump, maybe a pothole, and the hard floor of the van would abruptly jolt her. It was not the bumps that bothered her; it was the fact that the van was moving more slowly, the way people drove when a trip was nearly over.

For the first time she became conscious of everything about the hood over her head. It was hot and rough, and the petroleum smell of the black paint was nauseating. She could feel an itch on the side of her cheek, but her hands were fettered behind her. She tried rubbing the side of her face against the metal strut beside her, but the fabric was so rough and prickly that it seemed to spread the itch from her hairline to her chin. Then the van hit another pothole and the jolt knocked the strut hard against her cheekbone. She let out a little cry and felt tears welling in her eyes.

She hoped the men had not heard it. She knew they had, so they must be aware of her weakness now, staring at her with critical, unpitying eyes while her hope deteriorated into a bitter wish that she had not been so stupid. The physical pain in her cheek kept insisting that she examine it, so she stopped resisting. She allowed herself to contemplate it and to wait for it each time her heart beat and then experience the throb. It was a small pain, only one of the bumps that the body was made to take, but it brought her bad news: this wasn't happening to somebody else. It was happening to her. She had filed somewhere in the back of her mind the information that a person in this situation might have to face some physical violence. Now she could not ignore what her common sense told her: that the pain was not going to be incidental, but was the whole purpose of this trip. They were taking her someplace to hurt her profoundly. It wasn't going to be her standing outside of herself and watching the tall man slapping her once across the face so she didn't really feel it. She was in a kind of trouble that made her heart release a flow of heat that went up her throat and got trapped under the hood with her so that it felt as though her head were in an oven. She could barely breathe, gasping in air through her mouth and tightening her neck and shoulders to bring the small mouth hole they had cut in the hood closer. The hood was wet now from the humidity of her breath, but this didn't seem important.

Every sensation was uncomfortable and unpleasant, and her mind couldn't choose only one to think about.

The van turned and tipped her against the wall again, but she didn't dwell on that either. She was consumed by the fear of the pain that was to come.

As Jane watched the office building on Van Nuys Boulevard she searched her mind for other ways to get Mary back. It was mid-morning already, and there had been no further sign of Farrell. She longed to call the police and get them to find Barraclough. The reasons she couldn't do so flooded into her mind. Barraclough would take time to find even if the police did everything right, and usually they didn't. Even then there was no way they could do anything without talking to somebody who worked for Intercontinental or showing up at one of their offices. If Barraclough had a few minutes of advance warning, Mary would disappear forever.

Barraclough would be taking Mary to a safe house somewhere. The property would probably be a place Barraclough owned, but there would be no way to use his name to find it. He had been in the business of kidnapping people for some time now, so his routine would be practiced and efficient, field-tested and refined. The only reasonable way of finding the place where Mary was being held was to get Farrell to lead her there. That was not going to be simple. She thought of trying to find another Intercontinental car with a direction finder installed in it. But this meant figuring out what car Farrell would drive to the safe house, hiding a transponder inside it, and teaching herself how to operate the receiver. Then she would be stuck behind the wheel of a stolen car, probably for some distance. It wasn't a plan; it was a fantasy.

Any preparation she tried to make now would involve taking her eyes off Farrell's door for at least an hour, and in that time he could have a sixty-mile head start in any direction. She would just have to keep him in sight for as long as it took and hope that he would lead her to Mary.

She kept her car parked a block away and around the corner, out of sight of the windows of Enterprise Development. She watched the building, first from the diner across the street, then from the inside of a bookstore two doors away. After she had leafed through every book near the front window twice, she walked to the thrift store across the street and picked over the used clothes. She chose two hats, a tan jacket, a black sweatshirt, and a pair of sunglasses. She put them on the floor of her car and went to eat dinner at the hamburger franchise on the far corner, where she still had a good view of Enterprise Development.