Blood Money (28 page)

Jane hurried on. When she sensed she had gone a sufficient distance, she began to run, dodging slow walkers and heavily laden passengers. She made it to her gate just as one airline woman was putting a new flight number on the board behind the desk and the other was preparing to close the door to the boarding tunnel. She handed the woman her ticket, heard the door slam behind her, then rushed to take her seat.

Jane fastened her seat belt and willed the plane to move, and almost immediately, it did. She watched the terminal moving backward as the plane was towed away from it. She sat back, letting the fear and exertion wash over her now. She felt the light-headed, jittery weakness and the pounding of
her heart for a full minute. But then the plane stopped and began to move forward. The pilot must have been trying to preserve his place in the takeoff order. His voice came over the speaker and confirmed her theory. A few minutes later the plane was lifting off at the end of the runway and Jane was already reaching out against the exaggerated gravity to take the telephone off the back of the seat in front of her.

A
s the plane passed above the Rocky Mountains, Jane tried again to think of ways to reassure herself. The man who had spotted her in the airport had not gotten up in time to see which gate she had run to. It must have been two hundred yards farther on, and she had made a turn where the concourse did, so she had been out of sight. That was an advantage, but it wasn’t safety. The people he had been with were certainly capable of checking the departure list to find out what planes had taken off at about the time when she had disappeared. The pilot had been in a hurry to get his plane into position, so there must have been a number of flights at that time, but it would be easy to eliminate some of them—ones that had taken off from gates on the other end of the airport, or ones that had been delayed. She had to assume they knew she was on this plane. She had to believe they knew when and where the plane would land, and they would be calling ahead to put friends of theirs into her path.

Jane reviewed her preparations again and again as the plane moved over the immense, flat expanse of geometric patterns of green and tan toward the Mississippi. When the man in the seat beside her stood up to go into the rest room,
Jane used the moment alone. She collected three little pillows the airline had put in the overhead compartment and sat down. She watched and waited to see whether any of the passengers nearby had gotten curious. The young man across the aisle was asleep, lying back in his seat with his long legs in a tangle on the empty seat beside him. The others seemed not to have noticed her movement. She wrapped her jacket around the pillows and kept the bundle in her lap.

A few minutes later the man was back. Jane stood up in the aisle to let him duck and sidestep past her to his seat. Then she walked down the aisle toward the rear of the plane. She found one rest room with its little slot moved to say
VACANT
, so she stepped inside, locked the door, and began to experiment with the pillows in front of the tiny mirror. It took her several tries to get the pillows arranged and the elastic waistband of her skirt over the bottom one to hold them. Then she draped her loose silk blouse over the bulge. The pillows were tightly packed with some synthetic fiber that made them firm, so the visual effect was not bad. It might work, if she was careful not to bend at the waist or let the pillows slip to the side.

Jane worked on ways to hold her jacket to conceal the pillows until she had perfected that obscure skill too. Since the man she had kicked in the Seattle airport had probably described the way her hair had been braided and pinned, she loosened it. She found her nail scissors in her purse, but when she tried to cut her hair, she realized that it would take hours with the tiny tool.

She sensed that the plane was beginning to lose altitude, and there would not be enough time. She combed her hair out and made a ponytail. She took a scarf and tied it around the ponytail so it hung down over her hair. Her reflection in the mirror looked as though she had much more scarf than hair. Since the man at Sea-Tac had seen her tinted glasses, she took them off. She heard the female voice of a flight attendant over the speaker above her head. After the first few garbled words she recognized that it was an announcement that it was time for passengers to return to their seats and buckle up.

When the plane landed, Jane walked out with the same
weary, relieved look that she saw on the faces of the other passengers. In the tunnel she stayed as close as she could to a pair of men who were big enough to partially shield her from sight, put on her jacket, and let her belly show.

Jane ventured to the edge of the crowd long enough to scan the line of people along the wall for a man holding a sign that said
DEBORAH
. When she spotted him, she said, “Hi, that’s me,” and kept walking. He set off beside her, and she kept her face turned toward him, not looking in either direction. “I’m in a bit of a hurry. I’ve got to make a quick phone call and stop in the ladies’ room. Could you please take my tags and claim my bags?”

The man eyed her belly. “I guess so,” he said. “What are they?”

“Two big green duffel bags with wheels on the bottom.” She tore the two tags off her ticket envelope and held them out. He looked at them without eagerness, so she decided to put an end to his reluctance. “They’re heavy, so I can meet you down there and give you a hand.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he said gruffly. “I can handle them myself. You can meet me at the car. It’s in the short-term lot, space 217. Black Audi with tinted windows.” The man set off, glancing down at the numbers on the receipts.

She was relieved that the call she had made to order a car had actually produced one. She had asked the long-distance operator for the number of the private limo service that was first in the alphabet. She had guessed that it would be one with four or five A’s in a row at the beginning. In her experience, the ones who wanted business that badly weren’t usually luxurious, but they were eager. Now all that remained was to make her way to the car. Keeping her eyes forward, she walked along with the crowd. She had gauged the costume carefully, trying not to overdo it. Doctors always told pregnant women not to fly after the eighth month, so she had seen very few late-term women in airports. She had tried for the seventh month—the belly big enough to be unmistakable, but arranged high and not so large as to make her unusual.

Jane spotted a pair of elderly people waiting by a counter.
The woman had an aluminum walker with wheels on it, and the man looked nearly as frail. Jane’s ears picked up an electronic chirping sound far up the concourse, and she recognized an opportunity. She stepped closer and caught the attention of the woman behind the counter. “Do you suppose there’s room for one more? I’m a little … tired. I don’t want to be a lot of trouble, but—”

The woman smiled her professional smile. “No trouble,” she said. “Do you have a carry-on bag?”

Jane shook her head. The electric cart chirped up to the counter and stopped with a sudden jolt. The tall, thin young man stepped down from the driver’s seat and said, “Three?”

The woman at the counter nodded, and Jane helped the two old people into a bench seat, then sat beside the driver. The cart started with a jerk and picked up speed. The driver weaved in and out around groups of walking travelers, slowing down only when two groups would unexpectedly converge to close his pathway, then beeping his horn.

Jane’s position beside him was not the one she would have chosen, but there had been no other. The cart moved along with a flashing orange light on a pole and the annoying chirp, so there was no hope of not being noticed. She half-turned in her seat to face the old couple, so her belly would be visible from the front of the cart and her face hidden. She tried to start a meaningless conversation. “Thank you very much for sharing your ride with me.”

The old woman glared at her in such apparent disapproval that Jane suspected some kind of dementia. But the old man muttered in a surprisingly cold tone, “We don’t own it. There’s plenty of room.”

Jane sensed that she was missing something, then surmised what it might be. “Something happens in airplanes. It makes my ankles and fingers swell up.” She waved her hand above the seat where they could see it and added, “After the first flight I could hardly get my wedding ring off, so I didn’t wear it on the way home.”

Jane had been right. Both faces brightened. The old lady said, “Oh, that’ll go away soon enough, but by then you’ll be
too busy to notice.” The husband laughed. “But that doesn’t last long either. They grow up and go off on their own, and you’ll wonder where they went.”

Jane saw a pair of watchers over his shoulder. They were walking on opposite sides of the concourse toward the gate she had just left. Now and then they would glance across the open space at each other to keep their courses parallel.

She tried to keep the old people’s attention. “I’ll bet that’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it? Visiting a son or daughter.”

“Wrong,” said the old man. “We’ve been and come back. Been in Los Angeles for two weeks: enjoyed ourselves about as much as we can stand.”

Jane sighed. “I know what you mean. It always feels good to be home.”

“Do you live here?”

Jane said, “Yes,” because there was no choice. If Minneapolis was a stop on the way to somewhere else, the next place would be a small town, and she couldn’t take the chance that they might know it.

Jane saw the second set of watchers walking along like the first, only this time there were three. One was a tall, heavy-set man who forced oncoming travelers to part and go around him toward the others on the wings. As the three receded into the distance, she realized that the cart must have passed so close to him that she could have touched him.

“Whereabouts?” asked the old man.

Jane told him only the name of the street. It was the address of the apartment she had rented while she had watched Sid Freeman’s house for a visit from the people who were trying to kill Richard Dahlman.

The man said, “I know where that is. Are you right above a lake?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “There’s a beautiful park right below our house, with ducks and squirrels and things.” She lowered her eyes to her belly. “It’ll be a good place to play.”

The old lady was suddenly curious. “Did you live there when they had those murders last summer?”

“Hush,” whispered the old man, as though Jane’s belly might hear.

Jane nodded. “It was only a couple of blocks away. We didn’t hear anything, though. We saw it on the news. My husband said, ‘Hey, isn’t that around here somewhere?’ and sure enough, when they showed it, you could practically see our house.”

Jane detected that an unwelcome dose of real feeling had slipped through her defenses unexpectedly. She could see Sid’s body lying in what had once been the big house’s library, the dirty carpet soaked with his blood. She saw that her accurate memory of the neighborhood had soothed the old couple. It occurred to her that she could have done the same performance in a lot of other cities. In each one there were streets she had seen more clearly than the people who lived there because she had studied them for danger, houses where she had hidden runners, and, in far too many of them, she could conjure from her memory sights that the cameras couldn’t show on television.

The old man said, “They ever figure out what that was about?”

Jane shrugged. “If they did, nobody ever told me.”

“Drugs,” said the driver.

“Really?” asked the old man. “I didn’t hear that.”

“I didn’t either,” the driver answered. “But it’s always that.”

His certainty sounded so authoritative that neither of the two elderly passengers seemed to be able to think of anything to say in response, and Jane had no inclination to tell him what had really happened. For a few seconds the insistent chirp of his electric cart was the only sound. He drove past the metal detectors and swung recklessly to the door of the elevator. “End of the line,” he called.

Jane stepped down and held the old lady’s walker while the driver helped both old people off the rear seats. Jane felt the disconcerting sensation that her pillows were slipping. She brought her left arm across her waist and held them in place. “Thanks for the ride,” she said to the driver, and “Nice
meeting you” to the old couple; then she turned and hurried toward the escalator.

At the bottom she walked purposefully to the ladies’ room, went into the farthest stall, and latched the door. She longed to abandon the disguise, but the limo driver she had sent after her luggage was expecting to see a pregnant woman at his car. She carefully rearranged the pillows and secured them once more with the waistband of her skirt, then lingered in front of the mirror to be sure the effect was right. She wondered why the costume was so distasteful to her, but the answer was waiting for her. It felt like bad luck. It made her suspect that she was playing with a force of the universe in order to obtain a small and transient advantage. She might, in some mysterious way, be making a trade that she had not intended. Maybe later, when she wanted desperately to look like this, it would be denied because she had unwittingly spent her chance.

She strode to the door, took a last look in the mirror, then stepped out quickly. Beyond the long row of glass doors she could see travelers of all descriptions moving along or stopping to stare up and down the street for cabs or shuttle buses. A couple of the men had the look that she did not want to see. They were apparently waiting for something that was going to approach along the street, but they seemed to have a lot of fidgety mannerisms that turned their eyes in the direction of the doors, the sidewalk, and the terminal.

Jane walked past the window where she could see the baggage area. She could see her driver waiting at the edge of a crowd where a flashing light was turning and bags had begun to slide down a chute to the stainless steel carousel that turned below. She walked on, out the door into the warm, humid air. She kept her eyes ahead and never let them rest on the faces that came into her line of sight. She had trained herself to use her peripheral vision to watch for changes in the expected cadence of motion—hands rising quickly, a steady walk changing to a run—and to use her ears to warn her of motion behind her.