Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

She went into her room and slept in her clothes. The call came in the evening. When she picked up the receiver there was nobody on the other end. He must be in the office, so the boy could do nothing but press the button for her room. She was on her feet instantly, standing by the window. His station wagon was still in the lot in front of Room 4. She slipped out her door, turned away from the office, walked around the building, got into her car, and followed Farrell down the street past the freeway entrance. He pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket, got out of his car, and walked into the store.

Jane looked at her watch. Some of the mystery of his movements was dispelled. It was eight-thirty p.m. He had left his office in a clean car at midnight and driven through the rest of the night. When he was positive he had not been followed, he had slept through the day in the motel room under a fake name. If he was wrong about being followed, probably the pursuers would have made a move of some kind while he slept. If they had lost him somewhere during the long drive, he would have been invisible for a whole day, while they were forced to widen their search to places he had never been, dispersing and exhausting themselves.

Now he was sure he had nothing to worry about, and he was going grocery shopping. That made sense too. They could not have known they were going to be using the safe house. They probably didn't visit it often enough to keep fresh food there. When Barraclough had gotten Mary, he had simply changed cars and driven her up here.

There was another side to what Farrell was doing, and it made her feel anxious again. He had efficiently changed himself into a nocturnal creature. Jane had taken a few people out of the world who had been held by someone who wanted information, and they had told her what it was like. The captors would wear them down for days, alternately abusing and ignoring them, depriving them of sleep and food until some chemical imbalance occurred and they began to lose themselves in a depressive psychosis that seemed to bounce erratically from guilt to anger, but hopeless guilt and anger. The tormentors who understood the process would begin their final interrogation when the mind was weakest and most vulnerable, between two and five in the morning. Tonight when Mary woke up, starved, exhausted, and probably injured, there would be a new face. He would be fresh and sharp and tireless, and by now it would seem to her that he could read her mind.

Jane could see Farrell through the front window of the store filling a shopping cart. The moment was going by, and when it was gone there would not be another. She got out of her car and walked toward the station wagon. She could see his overnight bag on the seat, the crumpled receipt from the motel on the dashboard. She moved out of sight behind the truck parked beside the station wagon and watched the window of the store until she saw him move around the shelves at the end of the aisle. Then she walked to the front of his car, pretended to drop her keys, and knelt down to pick them up. While she was kneeling she slipped her hand under the front bumper and stabbed the lower radiator hose with her pocketknife, stood up, and walked on to the corner of the building where she could see the checkout aisles.

She watched while the clerk ran Farrell's groceries along the conveyor belt and past the cash register, then put them into bags. The first had quart-sized bottles on the top. The second had round bulges of fruits and vegetables, double-bagged in smaller sacks inside. The third had cartons of orange juice, milk in a plastic jug, and a box of cereal. She turned and made her way back to the truck parked by Farrell's car.

She waited while he slipped his key into the driver's door lock and electronically released the rest of the locks so he could load his groceries, then put the three bags in the cargo bay. He finished, then turned to push his cart back to the collection rack, twenty paces away.

Jane moved along the right side of the car to the back seat door, slipped the rubber band off her ponytail, doubled it, opened the door, slipped the rubber band over the catch in the door lock, then eased it shut again. Then she moved back around the truck out of sight and made her way back to her own car.

Farrell drove out of the lot and turned east across the flat farm country toward Mendota. Jane glanced at her watch, walked into the store, and bought a can of cola and a box of plastic straws. Then she got into her car, waited three minutes, and drove out after him. She could picture what was happening. When the station wagon's engine started, the water pump began to circulate the coolant, taking the water from the leaky bottom radiator hose, while some of it drained from the hole. As soon as the engine reached its optimum temperature, the thermostat would open. He would go a few miles before his temperature gauge went wild, because the expansion tank would empty, keeping the engine cool until that coolant too drained out the hose onto the road.

She drove down the dark road until she saw the car pulled over on the right shoulder. She turned off the road, killed her lights, and watched. There was no sign of him. Far ahead along the road a truck pulled over to the side and she could see him caught in its lights for a moment, waving it down. He climbed into the truck and it drove toward her. She turned on her lights, pulled back onto the road, and passed it, but as soon as it was out of sight she turned around and drove back to Farrell's car.

She opened the backseat door, took the rubber hair band off the latch, and pulled up the button on the driver's side to unlock the tailgate. She had thought it through carefully on her drive, so she had no decisions to make. She put a tiny slit in the plastic milk jug, stuck a plastic straw into her perfume bottle of water hemlock and mayapple, put her finger over the end, inserted the straw into the milk bottle, and let it drain into the milk. Then she moved the gummed price tag to cover the slit.

She did the same to the cartons of orange juice. The flat packages of meat were an experiment because she had no idea what cooking would do to the chemical composition of the clear liquid, but the holes in the cellophane wrappings were easy to hide, so she used them. She was confident about the bottle of scotch because the alcohol would hide any taste. She found the cap could be opened and reclosed by peeling the blue tax stamp off with her knife instead of tearing it, then pasting it down with a little spit. She was certain that even if a bit of the food was intended to reward Mary for talking, the scotch was for the men. Alcohol made people too reckless to be afraid and too stupid to remember, and it dulled pain. She left the vegetables alone because they would be washed and boiled, but she made a tiny incision in each of the apples and pushed the straw far enough into the depression at the bottom to reach the almost-hollow core, so the poison would come out as juice and the white of the apple would not be discolored by contact with the air.

When the perfume bottle was empty Jane closed the tailgate, went to the driver's side, pushed down the button to relock all the doors, and then drove her own car a mile down the road to wait for Mary Perkins's interrogator to return with a new hose for his radiator.

26

It had been nearly forty-eight hours since Mary had walked across five lanes of the Ventura Freeway and gotten into the car. She did not know this because time had already become one more thing that had to do with other people. Sometimes so much happened in a very short time. If one of the men hit her, the bright sharp suddenness seemed to explode into pain and wonder, then bleed on into the next several hours, slowly tapering down into something she knew but didn't feel.