Dance for the Dead (35 page)

Mary
sat on the bare, ridged, metal floor of a van. The bumps of the
pavement were regular, and she was beginning to get used to them now.
Her spine was jarred by the
ba-bump
as the front wheels, then
the back, went over each crack, then paused and went
ba-bump
again. She had felt a moment of relief when they had dragged her
out of the car, but before she had taken a step under her own power
they had pushed her into the back of the van and put the bag over her
head. It was a burlap sack that had been sprayed with several coats
of black paint so she couldn’t see through it. The bag went
over her head and down her arms to her elbows, and then unseen hands
cinched it at the neck. It looked like the black hoods convicts wore
in old photographs of hangings – no holes for the eyes or nose,
just a gap at the mouth for breathing.

Her heart had stutter-started
when she saw it, and then just when she had begun to sense that it
wasn’t what it looked like, she had felt them pulling her
wrists together behind her. This made her remember the article in the
magazine about doing anything you could before you got into the car,
because afterward it was too late. She had struggled then to save the
use of her hands, but she knew she had already missed her best chance
to accomplish an escape. She resisted only because her fear was
jumping around inside her and making her body move. With the
black-painted hood over her head, any one of the three men could have
tied her hands while the others went away.

The van was white. She had seen
that much before the hood went on. For some time thereafter, while
the white van turned sharply a couple of times to topple her over
onto the floor, then gathered speed, she wondered why she was no
longer afraid. It took her more than an hour in the solitude and
darkness of the black-painted hood to detect that it was because none
of this was happening to her.

The distinction was a delicate,
slippery one that had to be grasped carefully and not squeezed too
hard. She was here feeling movement and hearing activity, but even
before they had put the hood on, the sights had been distant and the
sounds hollow. This didn’t feel real. She had been afraid this
was going to happen for such a long time that she knew the way it
should have felt. It wasn’t happening to her; it must be
happening to someone else.

The van turned off the big road
with the regular cracks on it and went more slowly. Now and then
there would be a sharper bump, maybe a pothole, and the hard floor of
the van would abruptly jolt her. It was not the bumps that bothered
her; it was the fact that the van was moving more slowly, the way
people drove when a trip was nearly over.

For the first time she became
conscious of everything about the hood over her head. It was hot and
rough, and the petroleum smell of the black paint was nauseating. She
could feel an itch on the side of her cheek, but her hands were
fettered behind her. She tried rubbing the side of her face against
the metal strut beside her, but the fabric was so rough and prickly
that it seemed to spread the itch from her hairline to her chin. Then
the van hit another pothole and the jolt knocked the strut hard
against her cheekbone. She let out a little cry and felt tears
welling in her eyes.

She hoped the men had not heard
it. She knew they had, so they must be aware of her weakness now,
staring at her with critical, unpitying eyes while her hope
deteriorated into a bitter wish that she had not been so stupid. The
physical pain in her cheek kept insisting that she examine it, so she
stopped resisting. She allowed herself to contemplate it and to wait
for it each time her heart beat and then experience the throb. It was
a small pain, only one of the bumps that the body was made to take,
but it brought her bad news: this wasn’t happening to somebody
else. It was happening to her. She had filed somewhere in the back of
her mind the information that a person in this situation might have
to face some physical violence. Now she could not ignore what her
common sense told her: that the pain was not going to be incidental,
but was the whole purpose of this trip. They were taking her
someplace to hurt her profoundly. It wasn’t going to be her
standing outside of herself and watching the tall man slapping her
once across the face so she didn’t really feel it. She was in a
kind of trouble that made her heart release a flow of heat that went
up her throat and got trapped under the hood with her so that it felt
as though her head were in an oven. She could barely breathe, gasping
in air through her mouth and tightening her neck and shoulders to
bring the small mouth hole they had cut in the hood closer. The hood
was wet now from the humidity of her breath, but this didn’t
seem important.

Every sensation was
uncomfortable and unpleasant, and her mind couldn’t choose only
one to think about.

The van turned and tipped her
against the wall again, but she didn’t dwell on that either.
She was consumed by the fear of the pain that was to come.

As Jane watched the office
building on Van Nuys Boulevard she searched her mind for other ways
to get Mary back. It was mid-morning already, and there had been no
further sign of Farrell. She longed to call the police and get them
to find Barraclough. The reasons she couldn’t do so flooded
into her mind. Barraclough would take time to find even if the police
did everything right, and usually they didn’t. Even then there
was no way they could do anything without talking to somebody who
worked for Intercontinental or showing up at one of their offices. If
Barraclough had a few minutes of advance warning, Mary would
disappear forever.

Barraclough would be taking Mary
to a safe house somewhere. The property would probably be a place
Barraclough owned, but there would be no way to use his name to find
it. He had been in the business of kidnapping people for some time
now, so his routine would be practiced and efficient, field-tested
and refined. The only reasonable way of finding the place where Mary
was being held was to get Farrell to lead her there. That was not
going to be simple. She thought of trying to find another
Intercontinental car with a direction finder installed in it. But
this meant figuring out what car Farrell would drive to the safe
house, hiding a transponder inside it, and teaching herself how to
operate the receiver. Then she would be stuck behind the wheel of a
stolen car, probably for some distance. It wasn’t a plan; it
was a fantasy.

Any preparation she tried to
make now would involve taking her eyes off Farrell’s door for
at least an hour, and in that time he could have a sixty-mile head
start in any direction. She would just have to keep him in sight for
as long as it took and hope that he would lead her to Mary.

She kept her car parked a block
away and around the corner, out of sight of the windows of Enterprise
Development. She watched the building, first from the diner across
the street, then from the inside of a bookstore two doors away. After
she had leafed through every book near the front window twice, she
walked to the thrift store across the street and picked over the used
clothes. She chose two hats, a tan jacket, a black sweatshirt, and a
pair of sunglasses. She put them on the floor of her car and went to
eat dinner at the hamburger franchise on the far corner, where she
still had a good view of Enterprise Development.

She knew that every thought she
had, every movement she made that wasn’t directed toward
Farrell was a waste and a danger, but she couldn’t keep Mary in
the back of her mind where she should be. Each time she thought she
had her mind focused on Farrell, a few seconds would tick away and
the mere passing of time would remind her. A lot could happen to a
person like Mary in thirty seconds, enough horror to last an
eternity.

Each hour passed so slowly that
she couldn’t remember what she might have been thinking or
doing before the last one, and the meeting on the freeway seemed to
have happened weeks ago. She had stared at the office doors and
windows for twelve hours, and still Farrell had not emerged.

Something must have happened
that she had missed. At ten p.m. she began to prepare herself to
enter the building. He might have walked out the door while she was
in the ladies’ room of the diner hours ago and gotten into a
car that someone had brought to the curb for him. That could be why
none of the cars parked near the building had been gone when she
returned to the window. Maybe she had seen him go. He could have
changed clothes with one of his trainees – something simple and
rudimentary like that – and fooled her. He had spent his life
perfecting the skills of searching and following, and there was no
reason to imagine he had not seen all the ways of hiding and
deceiving.

This was the other thought that
she couldn’t seem to get out of her mind. The reason
Barraclough had Mary was that he had known what she would do and Jane
had not. No, it was even worse. Mary had never met Timmy. He couldn’t
have known that she would walk into a fire for him. What Barraclough
had known was how Jane would react. He had known that she would have
to choose one of them, and the one she would choose was the one he
had no further use for, the one he could kill.

She dumped her unfinished food
and wrappers into the trash can by the door, slid her tray onto the
stack, and walked across the parking lot toward the dark stretch of
the street where she could cross without coming under any lights. She
could hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind her as she stepped into
the street, but she had to use this chance to see the building from a
new angle, so she ignored them for the moment. She looked up at the
building as she crossed, and through the window she saw Farrell. He
was sitting behind his desk talking on the telephone. She reached the
sidewalk on the other side of the street, stopped walking, and felt
her calm return for a second before she remembered the footsteps.

Maybe the footsteps had been
behind her when she came out of the restaurant and she had been so
distracted that she simply had not heard them. She began to walk and
listened carefully; there were three sets of shoes. She felt as
though she had put her foot on a step and it had fallen through. She
had been so busy watching the office that it had not occurred to her
mat Farrell might have a few trainees on the streets outside. She
walked along more quickly until she could use the darkened window of
a store to get a look at their reflection. The three didn’t fit
the pattern at all. One of them wore a baseball cap backward and all
three wore baggy pants and oversized jackets. They looked about
seventeen or eighteen years old, and not seasoned or desperate enough
for Farrell.

She had told Carey she had been
mugged in Los Angeles, and now here she was, being considered and
evaluated for a mugging in Los Angeles. It was simply out of the
question tonight. It was not going to happen.

She took a moment to collect her
thoughts, then suddenly turned on her heel and walked toward the
three boys. They slowed down and spread apart on the sidewalk. When
she stepped directly up to the one in the center, he stopped, not
sure what he was going to do, but certain he didn’t want to
bump into her. “Hold it, all three of you,” she said. “I
want to talk to you.”

The other two stopped, looking
at her warily with half-averted faces. “What?” said the
one on her left.

As she looked at the three
unpromising young men, the idea came to her fully formed. The only
question was whether she could convince them. “Are you doing
anything tonight?” she asked.

The one on her right said,
“We’re not doing anything,” with no inflection. He
didn’t know whether she was accusing or inviting, but either
way that was the right answer.

Jane reached into her purse and
they all tensed to move, as though they expected her to douse them
with tear gas, an event that was probably not out of the question on
these streets at night. She ran her fingers along the lining of her
purse and found the Katherine Webster identification packet. She
flashed the business card at them. “Katherine Webster, Treasury
Department,” she said.

“We didn’t do
nothing,” said the one in the center.

“I didn’t ask,”
she said. “I want to know if you’re interested in working
for a few hours.”

“Doing what?” He was
very suspicious now.

She pointed up at the lighted
window of the Enterprise Development office. “There’s a
man in that office who’s a suspect. In a while he’s going
to get into a car and drive out of town. You follow him, I follow
you. If he spots you, turn off and go home. If he doesn’t, you
follow him to wherever he’s going, you call a number, leave the
address on the answering machine, and go home.”

“Why us?” said the
one on the left.

Jane quoted from an imaginary
field manual. “If in the judgment of the investigating agent it
is useful to deputize or otherwise employ private citizens in order
to avoid detection by the surveillant, he or she is authorized to do
so.” She waited for a moment while they deciphered this, then
said, “You don’t have to do it. I can pay you per diem
and a performance bonus if you work out.”

“What does that mean?”
asked the one on the right.

“A hundred dollars each to
cover your expenses on the drive. That’s the per diem. It means
‘per day,’ and you don’t declare it on your tax
return.” She caught the amused glance from the one in the
middle to the one on the left when he heard that. “Another two
hundred each if he doesn’t see you. You could each make three
hundred before the sun comes up.”

“What makes it worth
that?”

“He’s armed, he’s
dangerous, and he’s smart. If he stops, you’ve got to
keep going. Don’t get yourself into a spot where his car is
stopped and so is yours. He’ll probably kill you.”