Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"I’m trying to save your ass. I sense that there’s a misunderstanding here. If she didn’t know he was a killer, maybe we got something to talk about. Now I lost where I was."

"Jail," said Jane. Her voice was hollow.

"Jail. Right. Martin was Harry’s cellmate in Marion. A guy like Harry, he just can’t defend himself. His only hope is if there’s somebody around like Martin, who likes him but not too much, if you know what I mean. That’s the way it was. So Mr. C. figures it’s just possible that when Martin gets out, he’s going to look up his old cellmate, Harry. Who else has he got after eight years?"

"And then somebody found out he had money?" asked Jane.

"The money," said Ron eagerly. "He gets out after eight years of unemployment, and he’s got a lot of money. He is walking up to every bank in Chicago, and the tellers are coming up with, like, wads of it. Sometimes the manager has to come and match his signature and stuff."

Sam said, "So where’s this money coming from? Who is going to give this guy who has only one skill all this money? And who’s the mark that’s worth that much? The guy that nobody else has been able to find for five years."

"So you followed him from St. Louis?"

"Hell, no," said Sam. "We followed him all the way from Chicago. We were all set to hang around St. Louis. We figured if he was there, that was where Harry must be. We got a room, changed cars so Martin wouldn’t notice there’s this car with Illinois plates. With four guys to switch off, we figured we could probably keep going long enough to see where Harry was, and keep Martin from killing him."

"Then he gets on a bus," said Ron, outraged at the memory of it. "What the hell is a guy with a suitcase full of money doing getting on a bus? We didn’t have any choice but to drop everything, pile into one car, and follow the bus."

"All the way to Buffalo," said Sam. "We lost him after he hooked up with you." He gave a sour little nod. "As you know."

"And he got to Harry," said Ron.

For the first time Jake spoke. "Where is he now?"

"That is the question, isn’t it?" sneered Sam.

Jane said, "Did he kill Jerry Cappadocia?"

"No," said Ron. "I told you he was in jail. He just got out."

She stared at them for a moment. "What is his full name?"

"James Michael Martin."

Jake was touching Jane’s elbow. After a moment she glanced at him. He whispered, "What do you want to do with them?"

She could see that the two men in the pit knew exactly what she and Jake were whispering about. They exchanged anxious looks, as though each one was trying to get the other to agree on what desperate effort they should try. She said to them, "Before you leave, cover up poor Harry."

She turned and walked across the open lawn. Jake hurried after her. "Shouldn’t we call the police or something? They’ll come after us."

"No, they won’t," she said. "They know I don’t know anything. Never did." She walked on. Now and then her foot would light on a flat metal marker, but she paid no attention. If the dead could feel anything, it wouldn’t be anger at a foolish girl far from home, stumbling in the darkness.

22

Later that night, Jane didn’t agree to Jake’s proposal to move out of Harry’s apartment building. She just didn’t resist. She didn’t seem to care where her body was, just so there was no distraction while she stared at the opaque surfaces of walls and at the reflections in darkened windows. He picked out a small, cheap motel on Cabrillo Boulevard across the street from the ocean that he had discovered earlier that day. He parked the car and went inside while she sat motionless in the passenger seat. She walked into the room he rented, lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes. The next afternoon when Jake went out alone, she might have noticed that he had taken both of the shotguns with him, locked in the trunk of the car, but she didn’t show any interest in what he did or where he went.

When he came back and knocked on the door after the sun had set, she let him in. She didn’t ask where he had been. When she saw that he had brought dinner from a take-out fish restaurant, she sat down at the little table across from him and ate. When they were finished eating, as Jake stood up to take their two plates out to the trash bin in the parking lot, she looked up at him with a curious alertness.

"How good a friend is Dave Dormont?"

Jake was surprised to hear her voice after so many hours, and relieved to have a chance to talk to her, to be able to look at her and see her eyes. "A good friend," he said. "I’ve known him for close to sixty years."

"I want you to call him."

Jake felt a little uneasy, an intuition that her voice didn’t sound right. She didn’t sound like a young woman who knew she had gotten in too deep and was ready to turn the whole thing over to the police. Her eyes glittered as though there were something hot behind them. "I think that’s a good idea."

"It is," she said. "Call him at home. Tonight."

Jake smiled. "There are times when you have to step back and turn things over to the people who get paid for doing it." He waited for her to agree.

She didn’t appear to be listening. "Those men said he had been in jail. If he was, there would be a file. I want you to get it."

"A file? What kind of file?"

"Police have a system for sharing information about criminals. The federal government gives them money for a network called the N.C.I.C. Some of it is computerized, but that’s not what I want. I want a copy of his file from the prison at Marion, Illinois." She glanced over at the telephone expectantly.

Jake sat down at the table and studied her. "If Dave Dormont could get something like that, it would be privileged information. Why would he give it to me?"

"Because you pulled him out of Ellicott Creek fifty years ago," said Jane. She wasn’t smiling. "And you’ve spent the next fifty telling everybody in Deganawida what a great guy he is, and paid your tickets instead of asking him to fix them."

"What do you want to do with it?" said Jake.

She looked at him, and her eyes had not changed. They were still sharp and clear and unblinking. "I want to know who he really was—who did this to Harry and to a man you don’t know in Vancouver and to me. I have a right to know."

"I can’t argue with that," said Jake, warily. He looked up at her again. "It just doesn’t feel right." Then he added, "So I can’t ask Dave to do it."

"Okay," she said. She picked up the paper plates and plastic spoons, pushed them back into the bag, and headed for the door.

Jake could see the wall coming down between them. "I managed to get a full refund on those two shotguns," he said, watching her face.

She didn’t flinch. "I should think so," she said. "They’ve never been fired."

"And wait until you see the deal I got on the plane tickets back to Buffalo."

She seemed completely normal now. "How much?"

"Three twenty-two."

"Great," she said. She set down the plates, picked up her purse, sat down and wrote rapidly, then tore the check out of her wallet and handed it to him. "Thanks, Jake. Thanks for everything."

"You didn’t have to pay me back now," he said, staring at the check.

"It’s the best way to do things," she said as she stuffed the wallet back into her purse. "If I forgot, you’d get all uncomfortable about reminding me, wouldn’t you?"

"I don’t know," he admitted.

She walked to the door with the plates and garbage. "And don’t feel bad about the file. I’m not mad about it."

She stepped out the door and closed it behind her. Jake sat at the table and thought about it. He tried to tell himself it was right. Hell, he knew it was right. You didn’t leave a loaded shotgun lying around in the same room with a woman who had just learned that the man she thought she loved was using her so he could kill somebody. The file was the same thing as the shotguns.