Dance for the Dead (39 page)

She had imagined the safe house
would be something big and fancy and in proportion with Barraclough’s
ambitions. But if Barraclough owned such a place, he wasn’t
going to make the mistake of committing crimes there. This house was
small, unobtrusive, and run-down.

He was too smart to have the
fantasy that he could make any building impregnable. This one looked
as though he expected to just walk away from it one day. His
protection wasn’t the delusion that he could keep the police
out if they wanted to get in; it was the high probability that they
would never try.

As soon as Jane saw the van she
knew she was going to have to look inside it. If Mary was dead, they
would not leave her body in the house for long. They would wrap it
and place it in the back of the van so they could clean the house
without any worry that there would be new blood when they moved it.
The inside of a van could be washed with a hose. She moved quietly to
the back of the van and looked in the rear window. The floor was lit
enough by the moonlight through the windshield for her to tell there
was nothing big enough on the floor to be a corpse. She could see the
spare tire fastened with a wing nut on the right side just inside the
rear door. She tried the door handle and found it unlocked, so she
reached inside and searched around the tire by touch. When she found
the tire iron she took it out and slipped it into her belt, then
closed the door quietly and moved back out into the field.

She selected a spot a hundred
feet from the house where the alfalfa had grown to about ten inches.
Since the farm had not been worked for decades, the land had not been
plowed and the thatch from other seasons lay thick on the surface.
The tire iron was thick and heavy, and the chisel end that was
designed for taking off hubcaps dug through it easily and reached
rich, soft, black dirt only an inch down. She broke the earth and
softened it, then took off her black sweatshirt, loaded double
handfuls onto it, and used it as a sack to help her spread the dirt
around the field in the deep grass. When the trench was longer than
she was and ten inches deep, she gathered the tufts of alfalfa and
thatch she had removed, lay down, and began to bury her legs.

The dawn came slowly, while the
low fields were still blanketed with wet fog. It was still half an
hour before sunrise when she heard the front door of the house open.
She lay still in her shallow grave with the blanket of alfalfa and
thatch covering her to her neck, then the sweatshirt above her head
with a layer of cut alfalfa over it. She clutched the tire iron.
There were two sets of heavy footsteps on the front porch. She heard
them clop down the wooden steps, then followed the quiet crunches on
the gravel. She heard one car door slam, then another. Then there was
the hum of an engine. She listened as the wheels rolled on the gravel
toward the highway.

Jane lifted her head only far
enough to see that it was the dark gray car that was gone, then lay
back for a few minutes considering the implications. Two men were
gone. It could mean that they had come to the end of Mary Perkins’s
interrogation and that she was dead. She decided this was not likely.
There would be the body to worry about. Barraclough had more
understanding of human nature than to leave the body and the cleaning
entirely to some underling, and he certainly wouldn’t send his
trainees on an errand while he did the messy, stomach-turning work
himself. He would supervise while at least two of them wrapped the
body, put it in the van, and took it somewhere far from here, then
buried it deep. Mary was alive.

Two men were gone. Jane waited
for twenty minutes, listening for sounds from the house, before she
moved. Jane had to use this time to find out where Mary was and how
many men were still in the house. Quietly she rolled over in her
trench and crawled out the end of it. She slipped to the side of the
house, put her ear against one of the clapboards, and listened. She
heard music. In a moment it stopped and she heard the muffled cadence
of speech, but it was loud and exaggerated like the voice of an
announcer, and then the music came on again. She moved to the front
of the house and checked the window. The living room was almost
empty. There were two chairs, an old couch, and a portable television
set on a coffee table. She followed the sound of the radio around the
house to the kitchen door.

She listened for a few minutes,
but there were no other voices. She slowly stepped up beside the door
and let one eye slide close to the corner of the screened window.
Inside were two young men. They were lying on the floor beside the
kitchen table. One of them was clutching his belly, and his mouth was
open as though he were trying to scream, but his eyes were staring
without moving. The other was facing away from her, but he too was
still. She could see that they had begun to eat breakfast. Cereal and
milk were spilled on the floor, and on the table were two empty
glasses with little bits of orange pulp residue almost to their
brims.

Jane swung her tire iron and
smashed the small window over the door, reached inside and turned the
knob. Neither of the men moved. She walked past them into the living
room and quietly climbed the stairs to the second floor, holding the
tire iron. She looked in the door of each room and saw only four
empty, unmade beds. She descended the stairs again and found a closed
door off the hallway. She tried the knob, but it was locked. She
pushed the flattened end of the tire iron between the jamb and the
door at the knob, lifted her foot to step on the lug end to set it,
then pushed with all her strength. The door gave a loud creak and
then a bang as it popped inward, bringing a piece of the woodwork
with it.

The sight of Mary was worse than
the sight of the two men Jane had poisoned. She was naked and
bruised, one eye swelled so that it was nearly closed, her lips dry
and so chapped that when her mouth moved a clotted wound at the
corner cracked and a thin trickle of blood ran down to her chin. She
didn’t seem to have the strength to stand up, so she started to
crawl across the bathroom floor toward Jane.

Jane stepped to her and put her
arm around her waist to lift her to her feet. “Come on,”
she said.

“They said you were dead.”
Jane could barely hear her.

“I’m not, and you
aren’t either. We have to hurry. Where are your clothes?”

“I don’t know.”
She was seized with tremors, and it was a moment before Jane heard
the rest of what she was trying to say. “Just get me out.”

“Stay here a minute,”
said Jane, and quickly went into the kitchen to search for car keys.
They were lying on the counter. As she snatched them up, she sensed
movement behind her.

Mary was reaching for the bottle
of milk on the table. “No!” Jane said sharply, and
knocked it to the floor. Mary cringed and stared at her without
comprehension.

“I poisoned everything.”

Mary seemed to notice the two
men on the floor for the first time. They had died in terrible pain
and convulsions, and their faces were so contorted that they didn’t
look quite human. She seemed to marvel at them. “They look so
young,” she said. “I thought they were older.” Then
she seemed to remember something she had known before. “The
devil is always exactly your own age.”

“Come on,” said
Jane. “We’ll forget the clothes for now.” She
dragged Mary out of the kitchen and onto the porch. She tried the car
key in the van, but it didn’t fit. It opened the white station
wagon, so she eased Mary into the passenger seat, started the engine,
and drove up the driveway. “Here,” she said, and put the
black sweatshirt on Mary’s lap. “It’s dirty, but
it’s better than nothing. Put it on.”

Jane drove the next mile staring
into her mirrors and up the road ahead for signs of Barraclough and
Farrell. When she reached the place where she had parked the gray
Toyota, she pulled the station wagon up to it, put Mary in the back
seat, and drove up the road. She said, “Keep down on the seat
and rest. Whatever you do, don’t put your head up. Do you need
a doctor right away?”

“I don’t want one,”
said Mary. Her voice was raspy and brittle, but it was beginning to
sound stronger.

“We’ll get you some
clothes and some food as soon as we’re far enough away.
Nothing’s open yet.”

“Just get the clothes. I
can eat on the plane.”

“The plane?”

“I have to go to Texas.”

Jane felt a reflex in her throat
that brought tears to her eyes. She didn’t want to let pictures
form of what they had done to Mary, but there was no way to avoid
thinking about it. She wasn’t dead, because her heart was still
beating and she could form words with her bruised face, but she could
easily spend the rest of her life in a madhouse.

“Ask me why.”

The voice was self-satisfied and
coy, almost flirtatious.

Now Jane was going to have to
follow Mary down whatever path her deranged mind was taking. She owed
her a thousand times more than this tiny courtesy. “All right.
Why?”

“Because I can remember
numbers.”

Jane tried to keep her calm. “I
know, Mary. I noticed you were good with numbers the first time we
talked. You’re an intelligent, strong woman, and you’re
going to be okay.” It was a lie. She was not going to be okay.
Jane had done this to her. Barraclough had taken the bait and chewed
it up.

“They finally made me give
them the money I stole.”

“I know,” said Jane.
“There’s nobody who wouldn’t have done what you
did. Forget the money.”

“Let me finish,”
said Mary impatiently. “They knew I had stolen it from banks,
but they thought I did it by being an insect or a rat or something
who crawled in and took it. It didn’t even occur to them that
the reason I could do it was that I know all about the business, and
that I was smarter than the people I took it from. They filled out
bank-transfer slips. They listed my bank account numbers and the
number of the account where the money was supposed to go. I signed
them all, one after another, so I saw it six times.”

“Saw what six times?”

“There’s no need to
write it down. I can close my eyes and read it any time I want.
08950569237. He’s transferring all the money into his bank
account at Credit Suisse in Zurich. He has a numbered account, and
that’s the number. I captured it.”

As
Jane drove, Mary lay on the back seat talking at the roof of the car.
“It has to be Dallas.”

“Why Dallas? You told me
once that you couldn’t go there because people knew you.”

“And I know them,”
said Mary. “They have you, and you have them. It’s like
the tar baby.”

Jane tried to choose her words
carefully. There would be nothing accomplished if she managed to
nudge her own agitation into hysteria, but Mary had to know that it
wasn’t over. “I killed those two men back there.
Barraclough wasn’t there.”

“Yes,” said Mary.
“He’s in San Francisco.”

“How do you know that?”

“That’s where the
big West Coast banks have their main offices. What he’s doing
right now is riding the jet stream, and you can’t get on it
very easily in some branch office in Stinkwood, Minnesota. All they
can do for you is to ask the big offices to do it for them, and he
can’t fool around all day and let all those people know what
he’s doing.”

“What do you mean by
‘riding the jet stream’? Is he flying to Switzerland?”

“No,” said Mary.
“That’s way too slow. Stock exchanges, bond markets,
commodities, currency, the treasury securities of a hundred countries
go up and down a hundred times a day. Some tyrant is shot in South
America, and before the ambulance reaches the hospital, billions of
dollars from Hong Kong are already buying up copper and coffee beans
in London and New York. Barraclough isn’t going to travel to
Europe and then to the Caribbean to hand six tellers withdrawal slips
and collect fifty-two million dollars. He’s got to move the
money the way big money moves – electronically, in thin air.
Bonn, Paris, London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A. Zurich,
Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong.” After a breath she added,
“Dallas.”

Jane tilted the rearview mirror
to get a glimpse of Mary on the back seat. She was bloody, bruised,
and exhausted, but she seemed to be describing something that was
real. “You mean you want to try to get your money back? Is that
what this is about?”

Mary Perkins gave a quiet cough,
and Jane realized that it had been a kind of mirthless laugh. “You
told me before and I didn’t get it, did I? You have to strip
yourself clean. Lose everything: friends, clothes, medical records,
your name, even your hair. The money was the last thing to go. That’s
gone, Jane. I had to give it to him, and I put it right in his hands
so I could see which pocket he stashed it in.”

Jane dressed Mary in a pair of
blue jeans because the welts and bruises on her legs were so bright
and angry that a dress would not have covered enough of them, and it
was impossible in the small store in Gilroy to buy any other kind of
women’s pants in a length that fit an actual, living woman. The
blouse was off another rack in the same store, a plain blue shirt
that would attract no attention and was big enough to let her shrink
inside it without having much of the fabric touch her skin.

Jane left the car in the
long-term lot in San Jose because Mary insisted there was no time for
a more elaborate arrangement. “Get me to Dallas,” she
said. “After that I don’t care.”

“What don’t you care
about?”

“Anything.”

Mary ate and drank on the plane,
then slept the rest of the way to Dallas. At the Dallas-Fort Worth
airport, Jane rented a car. As she drove it out of the lot, she
asked, “Where is it?”