Authors: Thomas Perry
“I’ve got a problem. I rented a car from your agency at the Rochester, Minnesota, airport, and drove it to Milwaukee. Now it won’t start.”
“What’s it doing?” the man asked.
“What’s it doing?” she repeated. “Nothing.”
“I mean, when you turn the key, does the starter turn over, or does it just sit there?”
“It goes ‘Errr, errr, errr,’ then nothing happens.”
“It’s probably flooded. Turn everything off. Just let it sit for fifteen minutes and try again. It should be fine.”
“I tried that.”
“Oh,” said the man. “Well, then this time, push the pedal all the way down and hold it there while you turn the key.”
Jane sighed loudly. “I’ve done all of those things. I’m running late. I’ve already called a cab to take me to the airport, and I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my plane. I’ve got a client waiting to pick me up at the other end. The car is at the Columbia Hotel on Highland. I’m going to leave the keys at the desk for you.”
The man’s voice sounded forlorn. “There’s probably nothing wrong with the car, ma’am,” he said. “Maybe you’re jumping the gun.”
“Since you work in Milwaukee and the car is from Minnesota, you have no way of knowing, do you? If you want the car, it’s at the Columbia Hotel. My cab just pulled up outside, and I’ve got to go.”
Jane hung up, walked out of the building, and circled two blocks to approach the hotel front entrance from the other direction. She waited up the street until the right moment came. A cab pulled up and let a man out. Jane timed her arrival at the entrance to coincide with the cab’s departure, and fell into step with the man. “Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” she said.
The man, a tall, gangling guy with big feet, a suitcase in one hand, and a useless raincoat draped over his other arm, was startled. He turned toward her quickly, then recovered. “Sure is,” he said.
They reached the door at the same time, and while he was trying to move the suitcase to the other hand, she pulled the door open for him. They walked to the desk together. Jane used the time to search the lobby for watchers, but saw no candidates. The desk clerk looked at both of them attentively and held his hands poised over his computer.
Jane spoke before the man did. “I’m checking out. My name is Stevens. I have two bags in my room ready to go. Can you send somebody up for them?” She held out her key card.
The clerk summoned a bellman, then sent him off with the card while he computed Jane’s bill. She handed him her Lisa Stevens credit card and signed, then said, “I’d like to leave these keys with you. A man from Victory Rentals will be here to pick up my car.”
“Certainly,” said the man. He accepted the keys, slipped a piece of paper onto the ring, and wrote something on it before he put them into a drawer. “Anything else we can do for you?”
“Can you please check to see if anyone has come to the desk to leave a message for me?”
He looked through a small pile of notes. “Nobody’s been here, ma’am.”
“That changes my plan a little,” said Jane. “Can you hold my bags down here for a while? I’ll be back for them later.”
“We’d be happy to,” he said. She could tell he was beginning to dread her next request.
“Thanks,” she said, then hurried out the front door. She took a different route back to her spot on the parking structure. If there had been a watcher inside the hotel, she had not seen him. If he had found her room, he had not done it by pretending to leave a note and following someone upstairs to her door.
Jane returned to her post at the edge of the parking structure and looked down at the hotel lot. The two sets of men were still down there. As the time went by, she reviewed what she had said and done. She had tried to sound rushed, angry, and breathless to the man at the car rental, so with any luck he would stick to his theory that she had simply flooded the carburetor and gotten too flustered to know it.
It was an hour before she saw her expectation confirmed. A Pontiac that was the same year, model, and color as her rental car pulled into the parking lot and stopped near the door. A young man wearing a blue work shirt and jeans got out of the passenger seat and trotted into the hotel. Jane watched the men at the rear of the parking lot. They turned their heads to confer, but she couldn’t tell whether the coincidence meant anything to them. The man at the wheel of the new Pontiac sat with his window open and his elbow on the door, looking gloomy. He was clearly the boss—probably the man she had talked to. The younger man came out, trotted to Jane’s rental car, unlocked it, and sat in the driver’s seat without closing the door. The two watchers conferred again. This time, their heads turned back and forth in jerky movements.
The young man started Jane’s car. He half-stood, stuck his head over the roof, and waved at his boss in the identical Pontiac. The man looked even gloomier, gave a halfhearted wave back, and drove out of the lot. The young man adjusted the driver’s seat in Jane’s car, pulled his long legs in, shut the door, and drove off after him.
The two watchers were confused. They were upset. Jane held her breath and watched them for a few seconds, until they did what she had expected them to do. They started their car and drove up the row after Jane’s car. They could not ignore the possibility that what the young man was doing was bringing the car to Jane. If that wasn’t it, and she no longer needed her car, then she was gone. Maybe she had been gone for hours.
Jane waited and studied the second set of watchers. They either felt less hesitation, or had less time for it. If Jane’s car was gone, and their colleagues had gone off after it, then they were parked in the street watching nothing. They swung away from the curb and went off after their companions.
Jane pivoted and ran. She reached the door, swung it open, and dashed to the elevator. When she emerged on the street she slowed her pace to a purposeful walk, but she arrived at her Explorer quickly, pulled it to the front entrance of the
hotel, opened the tailgate, and hurried into the building. The bellman had already recognized her. He had the bags out of the little storeroom beside the door, and he carried them to the Explorer. She handed him a ten-dollar bill, slammed the tailgate, and drove off.
Jane made the first right turn, then a left, and pulled over beside the curb to study her rearview mirror. After three minutes, she was sure that nobody had managed to follow her. She opened her bag, looked at her road map, and headed for the entrance to Interstate 94 south.
For the first time since morning, she began to breathe more easily. She had changed her appearance, traded cars, and later on, when she had gotten tired of driving, she would fold up the distinctive green duffel bags and keep the rest of the letters in the gray suitcases with the carpet over them. The night was just beginning, and Wisconsin wasn’t used up yet. She still had to hit Racine and Kenosha.
J
ane worked her way through the stops north of Chicago—Waukegan, Lake Forest, Winnetka, Evanston—as the night was showing signs of ending. The sky to the east was lightening into a luminous gray that wasn’t yet bright enough to reveal the true colors of the dark houses or the parked cars, and the trees were still black shadows against the sky. During the night she had changed her itinerary. She had expected to save Chicago for the end of her swing through the Midwest, but she was very close now, driving a clean car that she had come by honestly. She had cut and dyed her hair, bought clothes that made her look like a different sort of person, and
helped the new image with a little makeup. She had decided that she had better face Chicago now.
She approached the city during the morning rush, with carloads of commuters in the lanes on both sides of her, crawling slowly toward jobs and schools. She spent the slow stretches looking at the cars and the faces of her neighbors. In a single mile she counted twenty-two cars that looked a lot like hers—high, oversized utility vehicles with the small heads and narrow shoulders of women behind their steering wheels, their little faces peering down from above at the traffic ahead. On this road, there was not even a shortage of Wisconsin license plates.
Jane drove along the lake until the road became Lake Shore Drive. She stopped at mailboxes near Loyola University and Wrigley Field, and then kept going toward the center of the city. She left Lake Shore Drive at North Michigan Avenue and made her way south to Van Buren, then turned right to drive to the big central post office. The service windows would not be open until eight-thirty, but she entered the building with one of her two suitcases and put all of the remaining Chicago letters into the slots.
She retraced her route on Van Buren and turned north on Franklin, then found a public parking lot near the Sears Tower, and parked her Explorer. As she walked up West Adams Street toward the Dirksen Building, she studied the other pedestrians. There were more of them at seven-thirty than she had expected, and there were a few—maybe one per block—who she felt deserved a bit of extra scrutiny. They had the thick-necked look of men who wouldn’t be surprised to have to duck a punch, and noses or eyebrows that showed signs that they had not always perceived the need in time. She watched their eyes without appearing to, but saw no flicker of excitement appear in any of them. By the time each of them had moved out of her line of sight, she had exonerated them all. As the hour moved closer to nine o’clock, when many offices opened, she began to see more and more women.
Jane waited anxiously until nine, then walked up the street to the bank. It had only been open a few minutes, so most of
the people waiting in line for the tellers were shopkeepers holding big cash pouches or check ledgers. Jane walked past them to the counter for the safe-deposit boxes, where there were no other customers. A few weeks ago, she had visited the safe-deposit box to take out the passport she kept here, and this time, the woman at the counter remembered her. “Hello again,” she said as she handed Jane the card to sign. “I love your hair.”
“Thanks.” Jane followed her to the vault, where the woman climbed a stepladder, took Jane’s key, and handed Jane the box.
Jane went into one of the cubicles and let the door lock behind her, then sat down at the little desk. Before she opened the box, she looked up and to the sides. This bank had never installed surveillance cameras in places where they could tape what went on in the cubicles, and neither had the other banks where Jane rented boxes. She didn’t know whether there was some federal bank regulation that ensured privacy, or if it was merely that people who rented safe-deposit boxes objected. But she had averted danger a great many times by looking for things where they weren’t supposed to be, so she looked.
She opened the box, returned the Donna Parker passport to its place, and selected three fresh identities from the supply she had stored there: Mary Corticelli, Karen Pappas, and Elizabeth Moody. She chose those three because the photographs on the driver’s licenses had all been taken when she’d had her hair braided or drawn back in a ponytail, so even with her short hair, she was still incontestably the same person. The credit cards in those names were all at least two years old and unexpired, so she was not worried about having them refused. She put away all of the identities she had already used on this trip except Diane Fierstein, because that was the name she had used to buy the Explorer, and Renee Moore, who had rented the house in Santa Fe. When this was over, she would change the pictures on the Renee Moore documents and give the identity to Rita.
It took longer to go through the identities she had placed here for runners. If Peter and Renee Moore were never found,
then Bernie and Rita would never need more identification than they already had. If they were found and had time to get out, it would be a good idea for both of them to have backup identities. There were birth certificates for people aged three to seventy, and a few blanks. There were full sets that included driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, credit cards, and a few membership cards of the sort that she acquired to give the impression that an identity had depth. She pulled out the best of the sets for elderly men. The name was Michael Daily, and his birth certificate made him sixty-nine years old. It was one of the genuine documents for names that had been planted in the Cook County clerk’s records by a woman who believed Jane would do something worthwhile with them. The picture on the license was a man who didn’t look precisely like Bernie Lupus, but didn’t look so very different either: bald head, glasses, a thin face. In an emergency, Bernie might be able to use it even before Jane substituted the photograph she had taken in New Mexico.
As she stared at the picture, she remembered the man. She had picked him up in an unemployment office in Gary, Indiana. He had agreed to be driven across the state line to Illinois to take the tests for a driver’s license in exchange for three hundred dollars and a day’s excursion. She had paid him five, because she had liked him, and another two hundred as a finder’s fee, because he had introduced her to three other people who were willing to take the same excursion.
She leafed through the cards for young women. The selection was much broader and richer. She had almost decided to give Diane J. Rabel to Rita when she remembered another one. It was a license she had obtained when she had invented Michael Daily. This one was for Karen Daily. It had occurred to her that if she ever had an elderly runner, he might come with a younger companion. She had obtained identification for a younger female the following week, and named her Karen Daily. She hunted through the stack until she found her, and added her to the pack of identities.
Jane arranged the sets of papers and cards into little packets and slipped them into a slit she had cut in the lining of her
purse, then looked at the metal box again. She decided that it would be wise to take an extra five thousand dollars with her. The move-in expenses in Santa Fe and buying the Explorer had seriously depleted her credit, and her cash supply was low. She took one thick bundle of hundreds out and slipped that into her purse too. Then she faced the last decision.