Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

Barraclough hurried to the doors, set his spotter scope on the floor, stuck the flashlight in his pocket, slipped the bolt, and tried to slide the door open. He strained against it, but it only wobbled a little on its track. He tried to remember: wasn't this what Farrell had done to open one of these doors? He turned on his flashlight again and ran it around the edges of the door until he spotted another bolt that went into the floor. He lifted it and pushed the door. When it slid open, he tried to feel happy, but the relief only reminded him how frightened he had been only seconds ago.

He stepped out onto the loading dock and jumped down into the snow. He felt a wrenching pain as his ankle turned under him and he fell across something hard and cold. He cursed himself. He had jumped onto railroad tracks. How could he have forgotten the railroad tracks? The loading docks didn't have flat paved surfaces for trucks; they were for loading steel onto freight cars.

Barraclough sat up and tentatively shifted some weight onto his ankle. It hurt, but he could tell it wasn't broken. He was grateful, glad to be alive. He wasn't going to be trapped; he could still make it. He slipped the pistol into his belt and walked to the left, toward the edge of the factory, the tall fence, and the street beyond. Then he saw Jane's car parked near the side of the next building. For an instant he struggled to fathom how he could have come out of the huge building right where he had started, but then understanding settled on him. She had not been running through the building at all. She had driven along the outside to wait for him here.

Barraclough hobbled toward the fence, gasping terror into his chest with each freezing breath. He threw himself against the high fence, clung to the links with both hands, and stepped up. He stretched his arm to clutch higher links, then tried to feel for a footing he could maintain with his injured ankle.

The blast of the shotgun slapped his left arm against the fence and deadened it. He was falling. His back slammed the ground hard and made him gulp air to reinflate his lungs. He tried to push himself up, but his mangled left arm would not respond, and he could see his dark, warm blood soaking into the snow. As he struggled to rise, it occurred to him that he had already heard the snick-chuff of the shotgun slide. "Stop!" he screamed. The weak, pleading sound of his own voice sickened him. He bent his legs under him, bobbed up, and turned to see her standing in the snow ten feet from him. She was only a dark, shadowy shape against the luminous snow. He waited for the roar of the shotgun, the splash of bright sparks, but they didn't come.

He gripped his injured arm with his right hand and pulled it painfully toward the center of his body. "Listen to me!" If he could just hide the right hand behind the left to get a grip on the pistol in his belt, he had a chance. "You need a way out of this as much as I do. The minute you helped your first felon to evade prosecution, you were meat on the hoof. Somebody - local cops, F.B.I. it doesn't matter who - was going to notice you and hunt you down." His fingers closed numbly on the pistol.

"Without a powerful friend, you're going to be somebody's dinner." He swung the pistol upward.

The shotgun blast blew through his chest. His body toppled backward to rattle the links of the fence, then lay still. "But not yours," said Jane. She turned and walked back through the snow to her car, put the shotgun in the trunk, and drove along the side of the building toward the gap in the fence.

31

Judge Kramer awoke from his dream. The house was dark, but the moon shone through the big magnolia tree outside his window, so small patches of gray-blue light fell on the bedspread. Something was wrong.

He heard the little voice and remembered that he had heard it in his dream and tried to ignore it. But it was all right. It was just the boy.

He swung his feet to the floor and walked out of the bedroom and down the hall to the guest room. He reminded himself that this was perfectly normal. A child who had seen what this one had was going to have night terrors. Kramer rubbed his eyes and struggled to wake up. He was going to have to be wise and strong and reliable. That was what this child needed right now. Adults came when you cried out in the night, and they told you everything was all right. If it wasn't all right, they damned well made it all right.

He stepped into the boy's room and said, "It's all right. Here I am, Timmy." He had barely uttered it when he realized he was wrong. The bed was empty. He looked around him. The boy was gone.

Kramer ran to the landing in time to see the triangular slice of moonlight appear on the floor of the foyer. The front door had opened. As he hurried down the first few stairs, he saw her step into the moonlight. "It's just me, Judge," said Jane Whitefield.

"What are you doing here?"

"I've come for Timmy."

"No," he said. He was shaking his head, but he knew she could not see it. "There are procedures for this. The law provides for it. You can't just..."

He could feel, not see, Jane Whitefield's eyes on him. "What does the law provide?" she asked.

"When it's safe, Children's Services will find him a suitable foster home."

"It's never going to be safe," said Jane. "Even if all the money is gone, there will be people who think more might turn up or who know how to get more just by using his name. Barraclough had a lot of people working on these side cases for him. They're still out there." She took a step with Timmy.

"You should know I have a gun." The judge reached into the pocket of his robe.

"So have I," Jane said. "I didn't bring mine either." She turned, took Timmy's hand, and then the slice of moonlight disappeared.

It was after midnight when Carey McKinnon turned his car onto the long gravel drive that ran up behind his old stone house in Amherst and parked his car in the carriage house that had, at some point in his grandfather's time, started being called "the garage." He swung the two doors closed and put the padlock on the hasp, not because anyone had ever tried to steal anything here but because the wind was cold tonight and by morning it would be strong enough to blow the old doors off their hinges if he didn't secure them. He had heard on the car radio that there was going to be another in the series of heavy snowstorms that had blown in, one after another, from the west, and he could already feel the cold front moving in.

Carey walked up the drive toward his house, looking down at his feet and trying to step in the spots where the snow had not drifted. He reached his front steps and stood under the eaves, stamping the snow off his shoes as he stuck his key into the lock, when he heard a car door slam. He looked over his shoulder at the street.

There was a person- - a woman - walking away from her car across his front yard: Jane.

He stepped across the lawn to meet her. "Hey, I know you!" he said. "What happened - did your flight get grounded?"

She smiled as they met, and he tried to get his arms around her, but the brown paper bag she was carrying was between them, so he snatched it away and put his arm around her waist. "No." She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. "I'm home."

They walked together to his front door and he opened it. "Why didn't you call me? I'd have met you at the airport."

"Great idea, Carey," Jane said. "Then tomorrow while you were at work I could walk back there in a blizzard and get my car."

"Oh," he said. "Well, there must be some way that normal people do these things. I know some. I'll ask."

He flicked on the light and they stepped into the little old-fashioned entry. He set the bag on the bench, hung his coat on a hook, slipped hers off her shoulders and hung it beside his, then took her into his arms. They kissed in a slow, gentle, leisurely way, and then Jane put her hands on the sides of his face, held him a few inches away, and looked into his eyes. "You waiting for the wind to close the door?"