Authors: Thomas Perry
“But what goes on there?” asked Rita. “What do people do?”
“Nothing we have to worry about. It’s the state capital, but states in the Southwest don’t take much governing—lots of land, not many people.”
“But what about him?” asked Rita protectively. “He’s got to be happy.”
Bernie said, “I’ll be happy just to get out of the damned car.”
But for the next two days, he would suddenly stir and a question would come from nowhere. “What am I supposed to be doing there?”
“You’re pretty much what you really are. You worked for a large company for fifty years, then retired. You’ve been living in Florida but didn’t like it, so you moved. You shouldn’t have
any trouble learning all about some legitimate business. Just read a book and you’ll be able to recite it. But you should still avoid specific questions about it. If somebody asks, talk about the people from those days. That’s all they’re interested in anyway: people stories.”
They arrived in Santa Fe in the evening. The route Jane chose through the city was calculated to give her two passengers a good impression. She drove in on Federal Place, past the post office and the Federal Courthouse, then down Lincoln Avenue between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Palace of the Governors, skirted the seventeenth-century Plaza, where they could see the lighted shops and restaurants, then went along East San Francisco Street to Saint Francis Cathedral.
Before she turned right to reach Canyon Road, she was sure she had given Rita and Bernie enough of a taste of the place to reassure them a little. It wasn’t the sort of city they were used to, where enormous corporations elbowed their forty-story steel-and-glass towers onto the main streets. But it wasn’t a desert outpost with one stop light and a gas station either.
She kept up a running commentary as she drove. “The Plaza is a great place, but it would be best to go in the evening.”
“Why?” asked Rita.
“Cameras. Most of the time, the picture ends up in a family album in Dubuque, Iowa. But if it gets blown up on the cover of
Travel & Leisure
, Bernie’s face could be on a lot of newsstands. There are a dozen restaurants on all sides of the Plaza. Just go down any of these smaller streets leading away from it.” Then she added, “But the places that will be safest are the ones that don’t interest tourists: grocery stores, dry cleaners, and so on. Any time you find yourself surrounded by Navajo rugs, silver jewelry, or Zuni pots, be alert and get ready to move on.”
She drove out on Canyon Road for four miles, then turned up a gravel drive between two wooden posts. She turned around the house, pushed a remote control to open the garage, and pulled the car into it.
Bernie looked glum as he got out of the car and stretched.
Jane stood close to him and whispered, “Go out, walk about two hundred feet that way, and then watch me from there. If somebody is in there waiting to blow my head off, go to the riverbank and follow it back into town. Don’t try to walk on the road.”
“Jesus, honey,” he whispered. “If you’re not sure, then what are we doing here?”
“I do it because this is the way the game is played. You take all of the precautions the first time. Right now I need to see that the house is the way I left it, and I can’t do it if you two are making footprints and moving things. So go.”
She exerted light pressure on his shoulder and watched him take a couple of steps, then stop. But Rita quickly took his hand and led him off into the darkness.
Before Jane had settled on this house, she had been careful to visit it at night as well as in daylight. There were no street lamps, no neighbors close enough to throw light on the surrounding land. That gave her control. If she needed to light the yard up, she could do it from a switch inside the house. If it was time to run, she could get Rita and Bernie out in darkness.
Jane took a flashlight out of the car and bent low as she walked the long way around the house to the front door, studying the ground. Three times she knelt close to the dirt and switched the flashlight on, but none of the variations on the surface were footprints. As Jane moved silently beside the house she passed close to each window to be sure the glass was intact, the latch still closed, and the layer of windblown dust still on the sill. By the time she had reached the front door she was reasonably sure nobody had been here.
She used her key to open the door, stepped inside, and turned on the light. Before she had left, she had poured some talcum powder into the palm of her hand and blown it over the hardwood floor inside the entrance, so it formed a thin, nearly invisible film. She bent and examined it, but it had not been disturbed.
Jane wandered through the house turning on lights and searching for other signs. The five drawers she had left
slightly open had not been opened and reclosed. None of the carpets she had vacuumed to raise the pile had been pushed down by shoes. She went to the front door and stood in the lighted space for a moment, waved the others in, then closed the door to keep the light from illuminating them.
When Rita and Bernie came inside, they found Jane spreading a blanket on a couch in the living room. She said, “The upstairs is yours. There are two bedrooms up there, each with its own bath.”
“This is nicer than I thought it would be,” said Rita. That didn’t sound good to her, so she amended it. “It’s really nice.” She looked at Bernie.
Bernie had been gazing at the stairs, but he seemed to take the cue. “Yeah, nice,” he said. “You shouldn’t sleep down here. Take my room.”
Rita looked at Jane and decided she must have made another mistake. “We could share a bed. I don’t snore or anything.”
“No thanks,” Jane answered. “I want to be down here, and I want Bernie to get settled and begin getting used to the place.”
Rita started up the stairs, but Bernie stood and glared down at Jane for a moment. “You’re keeping watch, aren’t you?”
Jane sighed wearily. “If you hear a loud noise, don’t come looking for me. Turn off the light on your way up.”
I
n the morning, Rita tried out the shower, and found it much better than she had hoped. For the past few days she had been in bad hotels, where the shower always produced a misty trickle, and that made her feel big and dumb, like a cow
standing in the rain. She dressed and ventured to the top of the stairs to look down.
Jane was sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee. She didn’t look up and notice Rita: her eyes had been fixed on the spot where Rita stood before she arrived to fill it.
“Good morning,” said Rita.
“Good morning. The coffee is on the counter, and the cups are in the cupboard above it.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” said Rita. Her tone made it sound as though she suspected she should.
“There’s orange juice, if you like that, cereal, milk, eggs, bacon, and a few other things.”
Rita walked into the kitchen. A short time later Jane heard Bernie upstairs, then waited until he was downstairs before she repeated the instructions. He mumbled, “Thanks,” and went into the kitchen.
After twenty minutes, Rita and Bernie came into the living room looking more alert. Bernie glanced around him. “I was expecting this place to be empty. Where did all this furniture and food and stuff come from?”
“Everything in the house is here because I picked it and brought it here. I went to the real estate office that was handling the place and got the key. I looked it over and signed a three-year lease. I drove down to Albuquerque and spent an afternoon picking out furniture from a used-furniture store so it would look as though it had been moved from somewhere, then had it delivered to a storage warehouse. The next day I had a moving company truck it all up here and put it into the house. The appliances came from three different stores down there. The pots and pans, dishes, sheets, and blankets I bought here. Nothing I did should raise any eyebrows.”
“Whose name is the lease in?”
“Renee Moore and Peter Moore. I’m Renee. You’re Peter.” She walked into the coat closet, turned around, and reached above the door. She took down a large manila envelope that had been taped there. She brought it into the kitchen, emptied it on the table, and sat down.
“What’s that?” asked Rita.
“Bernie’s birth certificate.”
“I suppose you went out reading gravestones for this one?” asked Bernie, as he studied the paper.
“The police figured that one out a while ago, so it doesn’t work very well anymore. This one’s not a forgery. A man I knew used to work in the county clerk’s office in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. He added about fifty names to the records and sold me their birth certificates a few years ago. I couldn’t get the age perfect—I don’t have that many left—but your birth is officially registered. You’re sixty-seven.”
Bernie nodded and set the certificate aside.
“Here is your driver’s license,” said Jane. “It’s real too. I had a man use the birth certificate to apply and take the driving test. It’s from New Jersey, because they don’t require a photograph. You can take it to the Motor Vehicles office in town and trade it in for a New Mexico one.”
“Today?” asked Rita.
Jane shook her head. “We have other things to do first. This one will be good for a long time, and the longer he waits, the less dangerous it will be.” She set an American Express card, a Visa, and a MasterCard on the table in front of Bernie. “Over the years, I grew Mr. Moore some credit. The limits aren’t high, but you won’t need much.”
Bernie said, “Anything else?”
Jane said, “Social Security card. That’s fake.”
“Who gives a—”
“Bernie … ” Rita cautioned.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Is that it?”
“Not quite,” said Jane. “Here’s your DD-214.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an honorable discharge from the army. It’s a fake. There’s a company that advertises in magazines. If you lost your discharge papers, they’ll sell you what they call a ‘Deluxe Memento Replica, Suitable for Framing.’ This doesn’t do anything for you except help build a deeper cover.” She was coming close to the bottom of the pile. “I have other things like that too. They don’t have any legal status, but everybody has a few: auto club membership, library card, and so on. You carry
them around in your wallet, and it helps make Peter Moore a person, not a flat picture of a person.”
She left the rest of the cards and papers on the table and stood up. She swung the refrigerator door open. “There’s enough food in this house to live on for a week or two. The freezer is stuffed, and the cupboards are full of canned goods.”
She walked to the kitchen door. “Keep the doors locked and bolted, of course,” she said. “I put an extra dead bolt into the floor, so you have to bend over to free it. That way nobody can just break the glass and let himself in.”
They followed her back into the living room. She stopped at the couch where she had slept, and lifted the telephone so they could hear the dial tone. “I ordered phone service because everybody has a phone. Obviously you won’t get much use out of it for now.”
She led the way up the stairs. “I put all the clothes and things into this room.” She opened the top drawer of the dresser. “I bought clip-on sunglasses to go over your glasses if you have to go out.”
Bernie slipped them over his glasses and glanced in the mirror. “Not much of a disguise.”
Jane said, “They’re not looking for you. You’re dead. If you get spotted, it will be because the wrong person happens to be here and gets a very good look at you close up. You can’t completely avoid that possibility, but you can make it a bit less likely.” She reached into the drawer again. “Hats. People here wear hats in the summer because the sun is fierce, and in the winter because it’s cold.”
She opened two more drawers. “Clothes. I got them in stores in Santa Fe, so you’ll fade in a little better.”
“You know what size I am?” asked Bernie.
“I searched your luggage in Niagara Falls,” said Jane. She moved into the bathroom. “I see you found the toothbrushes and things.”
Jane left the bathroom and went down the stairs. “Now for your money.”
“What about it?” asked Bernie.
Jane walked back into the kitchen and opened a drawer.
“I’ve opened a joint checking account. The names are Peter James Moore and Renee Moore. You do have to keep the checking account supplied. You can deposit up to a thousand or so in cash now and then without anyone noticing. You can convert a few thousand in cash into traveler’s checks, or money orders, and deposit those. Just don’t transfer any money from any old accounts, or write yourself any checks. That will be one of the things they’re looking for.”
Rita looked at the checkbook. “There’s already ten thousand in the account. How did you do that?”
“By check.”
“Whose check?”
“None of your business. Just use checks when you need to, for mailing in bills and things. You can buy almost anything small with cash.”
“I understand all of this stuff,” said Bernie. “I knew it before you were born.”
“Sorry,” Jane said. “The last thing is the car. You get the one in the garage. I had already signed the pink slip, so I signed the other half and transferred it to myself—Renee Moore—so I could get New Mexico plates. You just sign the line below as Peter Moore.”
“What happened to our deal?” asked Bernie. “When are we going to get started?”
“Soon.”
“I just want to remind you, we’ve got a little time problem,” said Bernie. “At a lousy six and a half percent, we’d be making two million a day. We’re making more. It’s like crabgrass. If you want to get rid of it, the sooner you get started, the less there is.”
Jane felt the beginning of a headache. “I know that,” she said patiently.
“We’re safe, right? You did it already. This place is great. It’s comfortable, but nothing about it says ‘money.’ The town is not too big, not too small. I don’t think God knows where we are. Now what’s the holdup?”
Jane sighed. Her eyes rested on Rita for a moment.
“No,” said Rita.
“I’m afraid it’s time,” Jane said. She turned to Bernie. “Get used to the place. If you’re up to it, begin writing down the information we’ll need to retrieve the money. When I get back, we’ll need all of it.”