Authors: Thomas Perry
She hurried to join a group of people waiting for the traffic
signal to change so they could cross to the short-term lot. Once she was in the little herd, she knew she was safer. When the light turned green she matched her pace to theirs so she would keep them around her, but as soon as she reached the lot, her protectors dispersed rapidly. She searched for space 217, and the worry she had felt in the airport began to fade. She had gotten through the difficult part.
She walked a zigzag path through the long rows of closely parked cars to shield herself from view. Each time she had to cross an empty aisle, she would stop and look in both directions. She kept these glances casual, but she had to give herself time to survey the windows of parked cars. She was certain that the physical caution and the slight awkwardness that women felt during pregnancy would satisfy anyone who noticed her. Whatever else was true about pregnancy, women in their seventh month didn’t seem to feel much like sprinting to avoid speeding cars.
She found the space and looked at the car without approaching it immediately. If anyone had seen her from a distance, it would be dangerous to have him know exactly which car represented her ride out of here. She walked slowly in a course that kept her distance from it constant, but she was behind it now. She looked at the terminal and saw the driver come out of the baggage area, and that made her feel better.
She turned her eyes to the car again. It was almost new. The afternoon sunlight shone on the gleaming black finish of the trunk, and she saw her reflection. The reflection was wrong—a little bit wavy, like a funhouse mirror. She moved closer, but the impression didn’t change. She stepped to the trunk and ran her finger along the finish near the lock. There was a slight depression around the lock, and there was a thin layer of oil on the lock’s surface. She walked close to the driver’s side and peered in. The odometer said three thousand miles. It was possible that a gypsy cab might have had its trunk lock punched in by a thief in the first few thousand miles and had it replaced. She bent over to bring her eye close to the long, shiny side surface of the car.
The finish on the upper parts was perfect, but the paint near
the bottom of the doors was thicker and duller, as though it had been applied in one coat and not rubbed as thoroughly as the upper part. No new car came from the factory that way, and it was unlikely that a car that had been totaled and salvaged would have three thousand miles on the odometer. It was also unlikely that the insurance company that had paid off wouldn’t have gotten the key to the trunk. She surreptitiously removed her pocketknife from her purse and scratched the finish near the bottom of the door. The undercoat was bright green. The car had been stolen and repainted.
Jane straightened and looked toward the terminal. The driver had just crossed the street, and he was entering the lot pulling her two duffel bags. She was fairly sure that he had not yet looked inside. The baggage area would not have been a good place to break the locks, and a slash in the fabric would be difficult to hide. She scanned the lot to see whether any of the driver’s friends were visible yet. He would be confident that he could pick her up and take her somewhere without help, because she would go eagerly. But there had been so many watchers between her gate and the baggage area that he’d had numerous chances to tip them off. They would come because there was no reason not to. If she resisted, they would make it easy to overpower her quickly and quietly without killing her. Even the first man, the one in Sea-Tac airport, had figured out that he needed to take her alive.
As the driver approached the car, Jane kept her eyes on the terminal behind him. At last, she saw two men coming out of the exit together. They walked quickly to the crossing, one of them pounded the button mounted on the pole to change the signal, then they both ran across. She was sure. There was always a reason to run to a terminal, but almost never a reason to run toward the parking lot. She focused on the driver and gave him a false smile.
He came around to the trunk and let go of the bags. “Been waiting long?”
“Not at all,” said Jane. “Did you have trouble with the bags?”
“No,” he said. “They didn’t even hold me up at the door to check the tags.”
Jane watched him open the trunk and lift the first heavy duffel bag into it. As he bent down for the second, she looked over the trunk lid toward the two men. They were getting into a dark blue Chevrolet four rows away. She stared down at the driver as he began to lift the second bag. She devoted two seconds to contemplating him. He was feeling very clever and masterful right now. He had managed to get a lone woman who was running for her life to trust him. In a moment she would be in the back seat and he would be driving her someplace where a group of his friends would be gathering. They would torture her until she told them where the rest of the money was, and then kill her. Afterward, maybe tonight, he would laugh about it—probably be very funny describing how stupid she had been. She had called the limo service herself—picked that one. But the details made the story: how he had waited at the gate to be sure that the “Deborah” who had called for a ride was the right woman. Jane converted the dull anxiety of the past few hours, and the growing fear of the past few minutes, into hot rage. As the man leaned into the trunk with the second bag, she felt the adrenaline pump into her veins, then exploded into motion.
Jane brought the trunk lid down hard on the top of the man’s head just as he was rising to meet it. His knees gave way and he fell across the duffel bag, then unsteadily backed out in a crouch.
Her hands gripped his head and pushed it down as her knee came up to meet it. He seemed stunned, unable to pop up, so she brought her knee up again, harder. This time he stood erect, but reeling, his nose bloody. He lunged toward her. She pivoted to throw her leg in front of his feet and got both hands onto the space between his shoulder blades to add her full strength to his momentum. His forehead smashed into the rear bumper, and blood began to run down his face from a cut above the hairline. Jane snatched the keys out of the trunk lock, slammed the lid, and stepped toward the driver’s door.
As Jane moved past the man, he suddenly rose to his knees
and swung hard. His blow caught her in the stomach and the force of it threw her against the side of the car. The man’s eyes shone through the slick of blood streaming down from the cut above his hairline, and there was a kind of glee in them, until he looked at her. Almost instantly, the brows knitted, and Jane could see he was puzzled. He had hit the pillows. The wide eyes blinked and the man’s hand came up to wipe blood out of them. Jane leaned her weight against the side of the car and kicked the face upward. The man’s head jerked back and caromed off the car beside his. Jane unlocked the door, slipped into the driver’s seat, and hammered down the lock button.
As she started the car, she saw the man’s hand grasp the door handle. She threw the car into reverse, and the hand slipped off. She stopped and put the car into forward gear, then drove toward the end of the aisle and turned right at the exit sign.
She had lost track of the two men in the blue Chevrolet. She looked in their direction, but the space was empty. Suddenly a flash of blue appeared directly behind her, filling her rearview mirror. She could see that the car was big and powerful and new. It was so close that she could make out the safety belts across the men’s chests. As she started up the next aisle, the blue car tried to edge up beside her, and she understood the uncharacteristic concern with seat belts. They were going to try to push her into the line of cars and stop her.
The belts reminded her of something she knew about cars. She turned up the next aisle and accelerated, groping beside her for the seat-belt buckle. She drew it across her and clicked it in, tugged it to tighten the lap belt around her hips across the lower pillow, adjusted the chest belt so it lay flat between her breasts and across the upper pillow, then leaned back against the headrest to test the fit. At the end of the aisle she slowed just enough to make the turn, and looked for the exit ahead. There was a small kiosk where people presented tickets and paid. She reached into her purse to pull out a bill without looking at it as she accelerated up the side of the lot. She would have to do this before she was too close.
When she found the money, she slowed a bit. The blue
Chevrolet closed the distance quickly. When the Chevrolet had advanced to within twenty feet of her rear bumper and begun to coast, Jane stopped, threw the Audi into reverse, stomped on the accelerator, and leaned back into her seat with her head pressed against the headrest. She heard a little squeal as the driver of the blue car slammed on his brakes, but it was too late.
Jane’s Audi slammed into the front of the blue Chevrolet with a loud bang. The impact jolted her, and she had a brief impression that everything in her body that was loose had moved: her internal organs, her brain, her blood. She glanced in the mirror as she threw the car into forward gear again.
She had set off the crash sensors in the blue car, and both airbags had burst out in front of the two men and punched them back into their seats. All she could see through their windshield were the two big, inflated bags, barely contained against the glass.
Jane accelerated again and glided up to the kiosk. She pushed the button on her door and the window slid down. The parking attendant was standing up from her stool, craning her neck to look out at the lot. Jane said, “Wow! Did you hear that noise? What was it?”
The woman seemed to return from a reverie. She shrugged and said, “Sounded like an accident.”
Jane was already holding out a twenty-dollar bill. She spotted the parking ticket sticking out of the ashtray, so she snatched it and stuck it out the window with the money. The attendant accepted it, counted out fifteen in change, and tripped a switch to raise the barrier that blocked the exit. If the woman saw the damage to the rear of Jane’s car as it drifted out past her, she apparently did not consider investigating accidents to be part of her job description. She was already back on her stool, looking the other way, while Jane accelerated up the street.
A
s Jane drove, she tried to calm herself enough to watch the rearview mirrors, maneuver through traffic as quickly as possible, and still devote most of her consciousness to the time beyond the next minute or two. She had to get rid of this car. It was stolen, and that meant it had probably been intended to be used for one occasion only and then dumped. The new paint job they had given it and whatever they had done to prevent the license plates from being spotted would have bought her some time, but the rear bumper and trunk were enough of a mess to attract attention. She couldn’t park it and walk off down the street dragging her two duffel bags, and she couldn’t stay in Minneapolis long enough to rent a clean, anonymous new car. Before she did anything else, she had to get out of town. She slipped the pillows out of her clothes and tossed them on the seat beside her, and after a few minutes she began to feel a bit less panicky.
Jane noticed a mailbox on a corner and remembered the letters. She had letters that needed Minneapolis postmarks. She stifled the impulse to go on, then turned into the parking lot of a restaurant, pulled in between two pickup trucks, and opened the trunk. She unlocked the two bags, found the one she would need first, and took out the letters. She forced herself to walk at a normal pace to the mailbox, put the letters inside, then walk back to the parking lot. As she unlocked the car, she heard behind her the sound of an engine accelerating slightly louder than the rest of the traffic. She turned her head in time to see the blue car speeding up the street in the direction she had been going, both men in the front seat staring
intently at the road ahead. She felt her shoulders give an involuntary shiver. She got into the driver’s seat, started the car, and drove off the other way.
She headed due south on Route 35, then left the interstate and turned east at Owatonna. When she reached Byron, she turned south on a rural road, then east again to the Rochester Municipal Airport. As she drove along the driveway to the long-term parking lot she studied the cars, the people waiting outside the terminal, and the road behind her. She saw nothing that frightened her, so she decided not to give something frightening time to arrive. She parked the car, walked to the terminal carrying one of her duffel bags and towing the other behind her, and stopped at the rental counter looking as though she had just stepped off a plane.
While she waited for the woman behind the counter to produce the forms and contracts, Jane studied the people around her. There seemed to be no watchers in this part of the airport. It was possible that any watchers here would have been sent to wait for her at the Minneapolis airport, but she had no impulse to go upstairs to the departure gates to test the theory.
Jane used the Katherine Webster credit card and driver’s license to rent the car, then accepted the keys. In ten minutes she was outside again, driving down the street in a new dark green Pontiac with one of the duffel bags on the seat beside her. As soon as she saw a mailbox she mailed the Rochester letters, then drove off again.
Jane tried to appraise her situation. All of her care and her precautions had not prevented something from going wrong. People were looking for her, and they were looking in the right places. The seven days she had allotted to getting the mailing done was no longer a real number. She would have to forget numbers and concentrate on what she had to accomplish. The idea had been to mail each check from the place where it supposedly had been written, and to have all the checks arrive at their destinations within a few days of one another. The bosses would hear of the sudden boom in charitable giving when everyone else did, and probably not suspect what it meant. Even if they figured out that the money was
theirs, by then it would be too late for them to do anything. The letters would already be at their destinations, the checks cashed, and the money safely deposited in the accounts of thousands of organizations all over the country.