Blood Money (14 page)

Rita sat in silence for a long time, thinking. “He doesn’t want to act like it in front of you, but he’s the best friend I ever had. Look at the risk he took to find me. How many people would do that?”

“In his profession? Not many,” said Jane.

“Bernie doesn’t have a profession,” said Rita. “He has a good memory. That’s what’s so horrible about those people. They watch you to see what they can take away.” She fell suddenly silent.

“Did they harm you?” asked Jane.

“You mean did they make me have sex with them, don’t you?”

“I guess that’s what I mean,” said Jane.

“They didn’t. Most of them acted like I wasn’t human. One of them—one of the bodyguards—started talking to me, and I would see him staring at me sometimes. He would ask me questions, like whether I had a boyfriend, and stuff. I could tell he was thinking about it.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him about living with the boy from home in Tampa, only I added some things.”

“Like what?”

“That after I left I heard he had AIDS, so I was a little worried because I got tired so easily. After that he didn’t talk to me much.”

Jane said nothing, but she began to feel more optimistic.
Rita had an instinct for trouble and an ability to think quickly. Some runners had lived for a long time on less than that.

“I never told Bernie. I didn’t want to worry him.” She sighed. “I miss him.”

“I understand.”

“Then we can go back now?”

“No,” said Jane.

J
ane took the key out of her purse and unlocked the door of the apartment, then waited for Rita to push the door inward and enter. When Rita was inside, Jane walked to the refrigerator, opened a can of cola and handed it to her, then sat down to wait.

It was like moving a cat from one house to another. The trick was to put butter on the cat’s forepaws. While the cat licked it off, her keen senses would be working, assuring her with every second that the new place was not worse than the old, and was certainly superior to being in a moving car. By the time the butter was gone, she would have given the place her tentative approval.

Jane watched Rita sipping her cola as she walked the living room, examined the kitchen, then climbed the stairs to explore the bedroom. She heard her push aside the blinds in the upper window, and after a few seconds heard the blinds clack against the sill as she released them.

Rita came halfway down the stairs and sat, still sipping. “What am I supposed to say? You already rented it.”

“It’s not a lifetime lease,” Jane announced. “Unless you make a mistake. I was here a couple of years ago, and I
remembered it as the sort of place for you. The manager told me there are young women in the other apartments in the building right now, most of them older than you, but not by much. You won’t stand out. There are no obvious attractions in the vicinity for people who might be aware that you’re worth money, or how to cash in: no prostitutes, no street drug sales, no bar scene. The draw is the view of the ocean, which you know, since I heard you move the blinds to look at it.”

“But who am I supposed to be?”

Jane said, “You’re Diane Arthur. You’re a young woman who just moved in. You’re looking for a job, but at least for the present, you’re picky, so you won’t do much except circle ads in the paper. If you talk to your neighbors, don’t exaggerate. You graduated from high school, but you haven’t decided what to do with yourself yet. You’re eighteen, not twenty-five. You’re not an heiress traveling incognito, or an Australian tennis champion recovering from a failed love affair.”

“So I’m supposed to stay dull.”

“Not dull, just not unusual enough to get in trouble. You want to be the sort of newcomer who doesn’t make a great topic of conversation. When people mention you, you’re cute, pleasant, funny. You don’t cause any phones to ring. You stay hidden without appearing to be hiding.”

“But what do I do? How do I spend my time?”

“In my experience, if you don’t get found within the first month, your chances go way up. So for the first month, you do very little. You arrange your furniture, look at magazines, watch the local news on TV. You read the newspapers to get to know San Diego. If there’s a stabbing every third night in some neighborhood, then you’ll know enough to stay away from it. Start to form a picture of the city in your mind.”

“And after a month?”

“Then you start going out, but cautiously. You can go to the university, where you won’t stand out, but anyone likely to be looking for you will. You can go to the beach, if you stay close to groups of women your age. You can go to a movie, if it’s an early showing in the right part of town.” Jane glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go out and do some errands.”

Rita stood and started up the stairs. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

“I said I was going out, not we. I’ll be back around dark.”

When Jane returned, Rita wasn’t visible, but Jane could hear music coming from the bedroom upstairs. Jane was putting away groceries when Rita appeared. “Hi,” she said.

Jane glanced at her and returned to her work. “Hi.”

“I hate this place.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because it’s not mine. I didn’t do it.”

Jane looked at the can in her hand, set it on the counter, and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed. “It’s always like this.”

“It is?”

“It’s not much fun to be a runner. First you have to give up whoever you were—your job, your friends, even your name. Then you have to hand over your freedom. You have to let a total stranger tell you what to do, how to act, where to live. Some of the people I’ve taken out over the years have felt worse about it than you do. They were quite a bit older, and were used to ordering other people around—making decisions for them. All I can tell you is what I told them.”

“What did you tell them?”

“It’s temporary. I’m temporary. I’m pretty good at one small, narrow function. I put big blank spaces between the place where you were last recognized and the place where you end up. I stay long enough to be sure it’s the right place, and to help you fit in quietly. Then, one morning, you’ll wake up and I’ll be packed and ready to leave. After that, you’ll be the one making all of the decisions. And you have a lot of advantages most of my other runners didn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“You’re young. You’re not a company president who’s going to start cleaning hotel rooms. You’re a hotel maid who might end up as a company president. That’s a distinction that’s bigger than you can imagine. And time will help.”

“What good is it?”

“You’re an eighteen-year-old who’s a late maturer. In a year,
you’ll look very different. In five, you could be a different person. You’re just at the age when society starts paying attention to you—caring about your identity. You won’t start out with a long history—credit, work, education, and so on—but neither does any other eighteen-year-old girl. Your history will be as solid as most of theirs, even to an expert. In three years, nobody in the world will be able to pick it apart, because it won’t be fake. All of the things I made up will be backed up by a real record: real years of driving with that license and using those credit cards and paying the bills with that bank account.”

“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

“No,” said Jane. “I’ve thought of everything that has come up before, and everything that I know is likely to come up this time. That’s what I do. You can never think of everything. But you have a lot of advantages. The whole structure of society ensures that forty-year-old criminals don’t have much access to eighteen-year-old girls. You’re the perfect runner.”

“I don’t want to be the perfect runner. I don’t want to be a runner at all.”

“What do you want to be—dead?”

“No,” said Rita. She began to pace, agitated and angry. “I told you what I want. I want to be somebody who does things, not somebody who goes where people tell her, just to keep breathing. This is my chance to do something that matters, and I’m hiding.”

“What would you do?”

“Fight them.”

Jane stared at the floor and shook her head sadly. “I admire you. Really, I do. What you’re thinking isn’t wrong. It’s just not a strategy that can work this time. You can’t fight these people just by saying you’re not afraid and standing your ground. They would happily scoop you up and torture you to death while they asked you questions about Bernie that you can’t answer. If you were to fight them, here’s how you would go about it. We would drive to the local FBI office. There’s sure to be one in San Diego. You would tell them you want to testify against the people you met at Bernie’s. Let’s pretend you’re there now.”

“All right.”

“I’m the FBI agent. Tell me their names.”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me the crimes you saw them commit.”

“Money laundering. Hiding money from the government, and not paying taxes on it.” Rita seemed proud of herself.

“What money? Did you see any money?”

“Well, no. But I saw them. And I know that’s what they were doing at Bernie’s.”

“So does the FBI, probably, but they didn’t catch them at it, and neither did you. Thank you very much for your help, Miss Shelford. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

“You’re saying they won’t believe me?”

“Do you remember the day I met you? I asked you a lot of questions that probably didn’t make much sense to you at the time. As soon as I heard the name Delfina, I was hoping that you had seen something or found some evidence. But you never saw him, and didn’t even know who he was. You’re not lying, but you’re not a witness to anything.”

“I was there when they broke in and searched Bernie’s house.”

“Eight or nine nameless men you’d never seen before were in the house, probably with a key. That’s not even good evidence of breaking and entering, even if they didn’t all have alibis, which they certainly will, if anybody ever asks.”

“They tried to keep me from leaving.”

“Not hard enough to make it a crime.”

“They said they were taking me to Mr. Delfina.”

“Which proves nothing, because they didn’t do it.” Jane sighed. “Enough. The only way to fight them is to let the cops do it for you. If you haven’t got any evidence, you run.”

“But you’re not running.”

“I plan to. I’m just delaying it long enough to take away some of their motivation for chasing us. The second the money is gone, I’ll be running as hard as anyone.”

Rita stared at her for a few seconds, then turned, went upstairs, and quietly closed the door.

After midnight, Jane went to the door and heard soft, even
breathing. She quietly opened the door and walked to the side of Rita’s bed. On the sheet around Rita, arranged against her sides from her armpits to her thighs, were a clutter of objects.

There was a small coin purse that had been thickened by a few folded bills. There was a dog-eared, smudged envelope with a flap that had come open to reveal part of an official paper with scrollwork around it like birth certificates and diplomas had. The cheap blue windbreaker Rita had retrieved from the hotel in Niagara Falls was folded neatly and placed with the other things, and there was a photograph in a plastic frame. Jane knelt by the bed to look at it.

It was a picture of Rita at the age of about twelve, sitting on a white beach bordered by palm trees, and above her, a blond woman who must be her mother. The mother had been in the process of walking away, then had half-turned to look when the photographer had called to her. She seemed no more than thirty, but her eyes were squinted into the sun to reveal the beginning of a collection of crow’s-feet beside the blue eyes. At first Jane thought there was a smudge on the picture, but then she saw it was part of a tattoo of a rose. The petals began just above the waistband of the bikini and extended downward, so the process of getting it must have been less an embellishment than a relationship.

Jane slowly retreated without waking Rita and closed the door. As she walked toward the stairway, she told herself that this was just because of Rita’s recent troubles, but she could tell that was not true. She knew that the girl must have slept like this always, placing her few, pitiful treasures around her body so they could not be taken from her in the night.

J
ane brought the clothes into Rita’s room and began laying each hanger on the bed without speaking. She held Rita’s face in the corner of her eye. At first Rita appeared unaware, then indifferent, then intrigued. Jane laid the fourth outfit across the bed and went into the hallway to get the fifth, then returned to find Rita slowly running her hand along the crease of a new pair of pants.

Rita quickly withdrew her hand, then conceded, “I always wished that I was the kind of person who had clothes like this.”

“It doesn’t take anything important,” said Jane. “Courage, intelligence, even taste. If you don’t know what to buy, go to the best store in town, then pick out a clerk who looks terrific. She’ll tell you. All you need is enough money to feed the cash register.”

“Am I supposed to be rich?”

Jane said, “Not rich. Just a single working woman who’s too young to care about saving, and has nothing to spend it on but herself, like the rest of the girls in this complex.”

Rita’s eyes stayed on the clothes, but they had a soft focus. “At the hotel, I would sometimes look.”

“Look at what?”

“I would be cleaning a room, and it would be late enough so the people weren’t just downstairs having breakfast, so I figured they’d be gone at least until lunch. I would open a suitcase and look at everything inside. Not to take anything, just to look.”

“Did you see anything interesting?”

“Rich people are old-fashioned. They don’t want to own anything that’s plastic, unless it’s the kind that looks like ivory. Or maybe it was ivory. I probably wouldn’t know. Everything is leather, wool, silk, silver, wood. I would look at it, especially the clothes, and wonder about the women who owned it. When people travel, they always have a lot of new clothes. I would find something, and half the time the tags would still be on it.” She looked up at Jane in wonder. “I remember one time it was just a pair of jeans, and I saw the price and swallowed my gum. They cost more than I took home in a week. Just jeans.” She frowned, and her shoulders crept up as though she were preparing to endure a blow. “I got caught once.”