Dance for the Dead (8 page)

She moved to Gate 12, directly
across the open hallway from Gate 10. The sign over the desk at Gate
12 said, arr: northwest flt 907 los angeles. She sat down in the side
row of seats where other people were waiting for Flight 907 to arrive
and put the sign she had made on her lap, where it could be seen if
somebody were looking. It said in big, black letters, mary perkins.

She saw the two men notice her.
They were in the positions they should be in – apart, but
watching the people coming off the Southwest flight from Los Angeles
at Gate 10. They both wore sportcoats that might have covered the
guns they couldn’t have on them now. They noticed Jane within a
few seconds. They kept glancing across the hallway at her, but
neither moved.

At last Jane saw two
stewardesses come out of the tunnel at Gate 10 and walk past the two
watchers. They were wearing their little uniform jackets and were
towing their overnight bags on little carts. Jane’s heart began
to beat more quickly. Whatever Mary Perkins had done to delay getting
off the plane must have been good. If she could only hold out a
little longer, Jane would be able to tie the knot in time.

The two men were staring at each
other now, silently conferring. The departure of the flight
attendants struck them as evidence that they had already watched all
the passengers get off the plane at Gate 10. The two women they had
been told to watch for had not been among them. But there was a
person waiting at Gate 12 holding a sign that said mary perkins. A
second flight from Los Angeles was going to arrive at that gate any
minute. Obviously they had been given the wrong airline and flight
number. The men silently agreed. First one man went to the drinking
fountain. When he came back up the concourse, it was to Gate 12,
where Jane waited. She pretended not to see him. She looked at her
watch, at the clock on the wall, at the carpet.

At last the second man moved. He
walked along the window, pretended to see something out on the
runway, and moved closer to get a better angle. Then, without seeming
to have made a decision, he was in Jane’s waiting area. He
guessed maybe he hadn’t seen anything after all. He looked at
his watch and sat down.

Now there was only one more
thing. If they were trained, or even if they had an instinct for this
sort of work, they would be anxious not to spook her. A woman
limousine driver who picked up strangers at airports probably often
drove alone at night, and she would be careful to avoid being
stalked. The sensible place for them to be was behind her, and fairly
far away.

Jane turned to face Gate 12, so
the men would move to the spots where she wanted them to be. She let
her eyes go up under the brim of her cap and used the reflection in
the darkened window to check. Yes, they were perfect now, watching
her from behind, not able to see the first gate at all.

She picked up movement behind
them. Mary Perkins was not a novice. She was coming out of the
accordion tunnel fast. Ten steps across the waiting area, around the
corner, and gone.

Jane needed to keep their
attention on her, so she stood up and walked toward the gate. She sat
down in the closest seat she could find to the gate and held her sign
in her lap. She felt her heart begin to beat more slowly. Now time
had a little knot in it. and the longer the rest of it took the
better. The men were convinced that Mary Perkins’s plane was
about to arrive, but she was already on her way down to the
car-rental counter.

A woman much like the one who
had presided over the arrival of Jane’s flight announced,
“Flight 907 from Los Angeles will be arriving at Gate 12 in
approximately four minutes.” Jane could already see the lights
of the plane shimmying along at the end of the runway. She kept her
head motionless so the two men wouldn’t get the urge to move
again. She could see that the plane was a big one, and this improved
her chances considerably.

The plane slowly rolled to the
terminal and nuzzled up to the doorway. The ground crew chocked the
wheels, the boarding tunnel extended a few feet to touch the
fuselage, and the engines shut down. People near Jane began to stand
up and congregate near the doorway. Most of the passengers flying
into McCarran were strangers, so the crowd of relatives and friends
was small.

Jane stood among them. She held
up the mary perkins sign while she watched the first few passengers
come out. There were some middle-aged couples, some men traveling
alone, a couple of grandmothers. Then there were about ten people of
both sexes who seemed to be the age of college students, and she
remembered there was a college here. Then she saw a pair of women in
their early thirties, and one of them was blond.

She had been cradling the mary
perkins sign under her chin, and now she flipped the sign over
without letting the move be visible from behind. She stepped out
where the two women could not help seeing her, and tried to look at
them winningly. They read her new sign:

PRIVATE LIMO: ANY HOTEL, THREE
DOLLARS.

The blond woman stopped and
asked, “Three dollars for both of us, or three each?”

Jane smiled. “If you’re
both going to the same place, I’ll take you for four.”

The blonde said, “Caesar’s.”

“No sweat,” said
Jane.

The three women walked down the
concourse quickly.

Jane didn’t look behind
her to see if the men were following. She knew they were. She said,
“You’ve been to Vegas before?”

The blonde had appointed herself
to do the talking. “Once in a while. Just when we get really
sick of behaving ourselves. We gamble, stay up late, and never grade
a single paper.”

“You’re teachers?”

“Yes,” said the
other one, who had curly brown hair. “As if you couldn’t
tell by looking.”

Jane felt guilty about what she
was going to do next, but the truth was that both of them were
attractive in a scrubbed-and-deodorized way. “No,” she
said. “Everybody comes to Vegas. I just drive them around. Once
you’re here, you’re whoever you say you are – at
least until your money’s gone. I wouldn’t have guessed
teachers, though. Most people wouldn’t.”

“Sure,” said the
blonde.

“Really. Those two guys
who gave you the wall-to-wall and roof-to-foundation when you got off
the plane. I bet they don’t think you’re teachers.”

The quiet one said, “That’s
a laugh.” As though to prove it, she laughed.

Jane had put the itch in them,
and that was enough. At some point in their walk to the baggage area,
each of them would turn and look at the two men, trying very hard and
very clumsily to be sure she wasn’t caught at it. Looking had
nothing to do with real interest. It didn’t matter if they were
nuns, or lesbians in the tenth year of a lifelong relationship. If
they were human, they would look. The idea that they were being
watched might frighten them or disgust them or make their weekend,
but they would look, and when they did, the two men would be sure.

Jane led them to the baggage
claim and waited while they tried to spot their suitcases. The dark
one said, “Are those the ones? Don’t look.”

Jane didn’t look. She
said, “Tall, muscular guy with dark hair and cowboy boots.
Shorter one with curly hair. Both in coats, no ties.”

“Yes,” said the
blonde. “The very ones.”

Her companion turned to her in
surprise. “You looked?”

“Of course I did,”
said the blonde. “As soon as I heard about it. But I have a
feeling they’re not our type. Worse luck.”

There was more to the quiet one
than Jane had expected. “Maybe my type in Las Vegas isn’t
the same as my type in Woodland Hills.” She was joking, but
some part of her mind was agitated.

Jane decided not to let them get
too curious. “A lot of ugly things happen in this town. Nobody
you want to know hangs around in airports looking for a nice date.”

The two bags came down and the
blonde soberly scooped them both off the track. Jane picked them up
and walked toward the exit with the two women at her back. She used
the seconds to prepare herself. If Mary Perkins had failed to rent
the car in time, or more likely, had rented it and decided not to
drive it back into the light and danger of the airport, Jane was
going to be left at the curb with two innocents and some men who
might consider this a good opportunity to push them into the back of
a car.

She stepped out the door into
the cool desert air, set the bags down on the sidewalk, and looked
around her. She was careful not to look behind her for the two men,
but she knew they must be coming closer. Then a car swung out from
the loading zone for United Airlines a hundred yards away and glided
toward them. It was a black Lincoln Town Car, and as it drew nearer,
she could see Mary Perkins behind the wheel, her face set in an
expression of intense discomfort. She stopped two feet from the curb
in front of Jane.

The order and economy of Jane’s
movements were critical now. As soon as the car stopped she swung
open the back door and said, “Hop in.” As soon as the two
women were inside she pushed the button down and slammed the door.
Scooping somebody off a curb was easy, but dragging them out of a
locked car took time and force. She snatched the suitcases off the
pavement, scurried to the back of the car, and banged on the trunk.
Mary Perkins leaned out the window and tossed her the key. She set
the suitcases inside, closed the lid, and looked around her as she
ran to the driver’s side. She couldn’t see them anywhere,
which meant they were somewhere nearby getting into their own car.
“I’ll drive,” she said.

Mary Perkins barely had time to
slide to the passenger seat before Jane was inside and wheeling the
big car out into the loop. She drove fast to be sure the two men
thought it was worthwhile to keep her in sight. She swung to the
right on Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip began just past the airport
entrance, and already she was gliding past big hotels: Excalibur,
Tropicana, Aladdin, Bally’s on the right, the Dunes on the
left. They stopped for the light at Flamingo Road, but she still
couldn’t pick out the car that must be following somewhere in
the long line of headlights. The light changed and she drove the two
hundred yards with the bright moving lights of the Flamingo Hilton on
her right and Caesar’s parking lot on the left, then pulled
into the long approach to the front entrance.

The blonde said, “How do
you make any money on four dollars a trip?”

Jane shrugged. “Lots of
hotels, lots of flights, and nothing shuts down, so we work long
hours. We take turns driving.” She turned to Mary Perkins.
“That reminds me. If you want to take a nap, this is a good
time.”

Mary took the hint and leaned
back in the big front seat. “Thanks,” she said. She
arranged herself so that her head didn’t show over the
headrest.

Jane stopped the car at the
Caesar’s front entrance and ran to open the trunk. The doorman
opened the back door for the two passengers while a bellman picked up
their suitcases. The doorman made a move to reach for Mary Perkins’s
door, but Jane stopped him. “She’s not getting out.”

The blond woman said “Thanks”
to Jane, handed her seven dollars, and followed the suitcases toward
the lobby.

Jane said to the doorman, “I
saw a couple of creeps pick those two out at the airport and follow
us. I didn’t want to scare them, but you might want to tell
Security.”

The doorman said seriously,
“Yeah. Thanks. I’ll do it.” He went to his station
at the side of the door and picked up a telephone.

Jane slipped behind the wheel
and started the car. “Keep your head down,” she said. “No
matter what happens, stay down and out of sight.” She watched
for the two men as she glided back along the driveway to the strip.
When she saw a dark blue car stop at the side of the building, she
kept it in the mirror until she saw the men from the airport get out.
They would waste the next few hours trying to find the two women in
the enormous hotel complex, then watch them for a while. They would
receive no help from anybody who worked at the hotel, and sooner or
later two or three polite men in dark suits who had been watching
them through the network of video cameras and the see-through mirrors
in the ceilings would ask them what they wanted.

“Can I get up yet?”
asked Mary Perkins.

“Yeah,” Jane said.
“I guess it’s okay now.”

Mary Perkins sat up and looked
through the windshield. “That’s the airport up ahead. I
thought we were going to drive out.”

“We’re not.”

“Why not? It’s dark
and empty, and we could go a hundred.”

Jane sighed. “It’s
the logical thing to do.”

They returned the car to the
rental lot, walked into the terminal, and bought two tickets for the
next flight out. It happened to be to New York with a stop in
Chicago. They had to walk quickly to get to the gate in time. It was
almost three a.m. now, and any watchers would have had to be
disguised as furniture to escape Jane’s notice.

As soon as they had taken their
seats, Mary Perkins whispered, “I can’t believe it. By
now those guys don’t know where they are, let alone where we
are.”

“We’re alive,”
said Jane quietly. “Now I’m going to sleep. Don’t
wake me up until we’re in Chicago.”

She closed her eyes and prepared
herself for the unpleasant experience of having the past few days run
through her mind all over again. There were a few bright, crackling
images that flashed in her vision, but they weren’t in order or
coherent, so they didn’t cause her much pain. After she had
dozed for a short time, she saw the fist coming around just before
she had flinched to take the force out of it. The spasmodic jerk woke
her up, but when she relaxed her muscles again, she dropped into a
deeper animal sleep that put her in darkness far out of reach of
recent memories.