Blood Money (45 page)

She drove fast, but she had no serious hope of outrunning them. She made four quick turns, then found herself moving south on Route 41. She looked back in her rearview mirror and saw three other cars make the turn after her, then the Suburban. She nudged her speed up some more, but they were still coming.

She saw signs indicating she was passing Farmersburg, Shelburn, Sullivan. The names meant nothing. The world seemed to be a black sky and a slightly lighter line of land below it, as
though her life had simplified into two stripes with a road down the middle. Now and then she would see a tiny red glow of taillights ahead, but after a few minutes the car would pull off and the lights would be gone. Then she would see white headlights, and they would slowly grow and brighten. She would hope for a police car, but by the time the lights were close enough to show that it wasn’t, they would flash past and be gone.

After a few minutes, she realized that flagging down a single patrol car would do her no good. It would be one rural cop against—what—four carloads of heavily armed men? There was little point in recruiting somebody to die with her. She considered instead trying to make a run for one of the big east-west interstates. Route 64 must be ahead of her. At any hour of the night there would be long-distance truckers and tourists who were pushing themselves, and at each exit there would be lighted gas stations and fast-food places. Maybe these men wouldn’t dare to take her in a public place in front of witnesses.

She knew it wasn’t true. They had flown here from somewhere with the intention of pulling an armed assault on a hotel to kidnap people. She thought about them, and began to grow angrier. There was some special quality about what they were doing that made her feel heat at the back of her neck. It was their arrogance. They felt invincible. They always had everyone overwhelmingly outnumbered. They relied on people being afraid of them. She found herself thinking about the shotgun she had carried in the New Mexico desert. She had reached the edge of the city, dropped it in the dirt, and buried it. She wished she could go back in time, dig it up, and throw it into the back of the Explorer before she drove east.

She was moving as fast as she dared. Whenever she reached the crest of an incline, she would feel the Explorer leave the ground a little, pulling up on the springs, the seat belt tightening across her hips to keep her down. Then it would come down, and her arms would seem to grow heavier for a few seconds. Each bump in the road threatened to wrench the steering
wheel to the side. She glanced back in the mirror, and she could see that she had gained a little ground.

When she returned her eyes to the windshield, she saw the farm. It was enormous, by the standards she had grown up with in western New York, a small cluster of buildings in the middle of a vast expanse of fields. It looked like an oasis in the desert, because big trees had been left around the buildings to provide the only shade for miles, and in front of one of the buildings was a lawn.

There were no lights on in any of the buildings. As she came down the incline toward the place, she could see the fields better. They were filled with corn. It was late July now, so the stalks near the road seemed to her to be higher than the roof of the Explorer.

This was her chance. They might be able to drive long enough and hard enough to catch up with her and bump her off the road, and certainly they could keep her in sight until she had to stop. But she was a runner. She had always run. Every morning since she was twelve, she had gone down to the Niagara River and run along the bank to the Grand Island Bridge and back. She had been on the track team at college, and had won more races than she had lost. The past few weeks had probably left her a little bit out of shape, but she was willing to take the chance.

She watched the fence posts going by, and then forced her eyes ahead. There it was. There was a road that ran from the highway all the way back to the cluster of barns and outbuildings. She took her foot off the gas pedal without touching the brake, so her taillights would not warn the chasers. She coasted as long as she could, then swung to the right onto the side road.

She drove for fifty yards, then wrenched the wheel to the left into the cornfield. She put her front wheels into two ruts and ran up the corn rows, watching the big stalks in front of the windshield looming, then falling in front of her. She drove for a full minute, then stopped the Explorer, got out, and slipped quietly into the vast, dark field of tall cornstalks.

D
elfina sat in the front seat of the Suburban beside Cirro, moving his head from side to side to get a better view. “Where’d she go?”

Cirro craned his neck as he drove. “I can’t tell yet.” Then he said, “It looks like she must have turned off somewhere.”

Ahead of them, Delfina could see the other cars slowing down, then stopping at the side of the road. Cirro pulled up and stopped. Delfina saw Buccio running along the line of cars, shouting orders into their open windows. As Buccio approached the Suburban, Delfina said, “Now what?”

Buccio leaned in and said, “Frank, she must have turned off at this farm. There’s an open gate up here, and a road that leads to the farmhouse and stuff.”

“So what are you doing about it?” asked Delfina.

“Waiting to see what you think.”

Delfina’s eyes went cold. “What do I think?”

“You know. It’s a farm. There are sure to be a bunch of people around. It’s a big place.”

“Christ,” Delfina muttered. “Go in after her.”

Buccio ran for his car. In a moment, Delfina saw the car pull out onto the road, then turn onto the smaller road. The other three cars pulled out and followed. Delfina nodded to Cirro, who drove up the road to the entrance. He turned, then Delfina said, “Hold it here, Mike.”

The cars were stopped just two hundred feet up the road. Delfina climbed down from the Suburban and walked to the line of cars. Other men were getting out and standing on the
road. Buccio saw Delfina, and pointed into the cornfield. “It looks like she drove right into the cornfield here.”

Delfina took Buccio by the arm and led him a few feet from the others. “Look, Carl. I’ve been trying to give you every opportunity I can to handle this. But here we are. There’s a woman with the key to billions of dollars that belongs to us in that cornfield someplace. I’ve committed myself now. There’s no way I can tell the other families I didn’t know where she was, or I was going to cut them in after I got her. Do you understand?”

“Sure, Frank.”

“No, I’m not sure you do, even now. When I say I want her, I mean if she isn’t going home with us, you won’t be going home with us.”

He watched Buccio’s face and waited while Buccio thought about that, then added, “And don’t think that if you lose her, your guys will pop me and say she did it. I already had quiet talks with a few of your crew, and you aren’t going to know which ones.”

Buccio stood silent for a moment, as though the hand that Delfina had laid lightly on his shoulder weighed hundreds of pounds. Finally, Delfina gave his shoulder a pat. “You’re still in charge. Do what you have to do.” He turned and walked back to the Suburban.

Buccio’s body filled with energy. He knew that Delfina never spoke until he had thoroughly considered his position from every angle. Buccio glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. It was nearly one
A.M.
, and the sun would come up around five-thirty. He had found a kind of clarity that was rare and precious: it was as though his whole life had been compressed into four and a half hours. As long as the night was dark, he would have absolute power to do as he pleased. When the sun came up, he would either have the woman or die.

He took four steps up the dirt road toward his men, making a major decision at each step. By the time he reached them, he had his strategy. He said, “I want two men with rifles to cover the front gate and the north-south fence along the road.
Don’t let her slip through and start hitchhiking. If anybody else drives in, kill him.”

He looked at the next two. “You two go down to cover the fences on the ends. Move out.” He waited for a few seconds while his first four men trotted off to take their positions. He turned to the others. “We have three cars. I want two men to each car. Don’t let your car out of your sight. She could be fifty feet away right now, waiting for a chance to sneak in and drive one off. The rest of you, come with me.”

“Where are you going?” asked one of the men.

“To secure the farmhouse.” He walked up the farm road, and four men followed.

Jane crouched among the cornstalks and watched the five men walk past her up the road. There were six still hanging around the cars, so there was no way to slip into one of them. She crawled closer and looked down the farm road toward the highway. The Suburban was still here, too, and it would be impossible to drive past it to the gate.

Her strategy would have to be dictated by what she couldn’t do. She rose to her feet and made her way between the tall cornstalks, following her own trail until she reached the Explorer. She had hoped the men would leave her some way of disabling their cars while they were hunting her on foot, but that was not possible. She had, however, gotten them out of their cars, and some of them had already moved off on foot. Her best strategy now was to try to outrun them.

She climbed into the Explorer, started the engine, and moved ahead. She kept her wheels in the ruts between the rows of corn, and mowed down the stalks as she drove. She couldn’t see far ahead, because the corn was too thick and she couldn’t turn on her headlights, but it didn’t matter. The ruts would keep her straight. She drove for a minute, then another minute, and another. Each time a stalk fell in front of her hood and went under the Explorer, she expected it to be the last. It had seemed to her that she would reach the end of the field by now, but it was much bigger than she had guessed.

She looked into the rearview mirror, and she could see that
she had cut a swath through the field, but it only consisted of the two rows of stalks between her tires. The Explorer rode so high that even those stalks weren’t flattened, but tipped toward her at about a forty-degree angle. She could not see anyone following her yet, and she was beginning to be afraid that she wouldn’t be able to see them until they were right behind her.

She kept driving. Her best hope was to choose a course and follow it efficiently and deliberately, without the kind of haste that made noise and drew attention, but was quick enough to keep the men from thinking.

She thought she heard a dog barking in the distance. She rolled her window down, but either it had stopped or she had imagined it. She kept going, and now the swishing sound of the Explorer moving through the corn seemed loud. Suddenly she heard a loud metallic creaking, and the Explorer stopped moving and strained against an invisible resistance.

She got out and pushed her way through the cornstalks to the front of the Explorer. She had reached a fence. There were five thick wires stretched across the grille and bowed outward. She followed them with her eyes, and she could see the first fence post on her right. It was being tugged ahead by the five wires, already strained and tilted at an angle by the pressure. She stepped to it and pulled at the wires to see if she could disconnect them, but they were strung in continuous strands from pole to pole, held there by big staples hammered deep into the wood.

She climbed back into the Explorer and gunned the engine. She heard louder creaking, snapping sounds as the vehicle surged forward, but then the wheels began to spin and slip sideways. Jane put the transmission into neutral, then reverse, and tried to back up. She could tell that the tires had already dug into the soft, cultivated soil. She rocked forward, then back again, and felt the Explorer roll up and out. She kept backing up, until she was about fifty or sixty feet from the fence. She put the transmission into drive and gradually built up her speed. She hit the wires fast, heard a loud cracking noise, and the Explorer broke free. As she rolled on, there was a screeching of wires scraping against the front of the
Explorer, and then a loud
bang
that rocked the vehicle. She spun her head to see that the broken fence post had been jerked into the air by the wires and hit the side. She looked around her. She was out of the corn, in another field that was low and grassy, like alfalfa. She stopped for a second to look to her left for the road.

This time the noise was louder, a
bam
as the window behind her head exploded inward and showered the cab with sparkling crystals of safety glass. There was another, and she saw a hole appear in the bare metal of the door ahead of her left knee, a tiny flower of bent steel blooming around it, where the bullet had splashed through. Another, and the windshield seemed to disintegrate, like a falling curtain of water.

Jane rolled between the front seats and hauled herself into the back, then pushed the rear door open and dived into the weeds. As she crawled back toward the cornfield, she heard more rifle shots, but she knew they were not aimed at her. She could hear ringing sounds as pieces of glass and metal were punched off the Explorer and flew against the interior walls.

When she reached the safety of the tall corn, she tried to see the man firing the rifle, but she couldn’t. He had to be somewhere near the road. She took a last look at the Explorer. The shooter had adjusted his aim to the engine compartment. She saw the hood vibrate a little as the next shot punched through it, and the next. She slipped farther back into the cornfield, rose to her feet, and began to run.

Jane changed her course to head across the rows of cornstalks. She ran from row to row, then stopped for a moment to listen. She looked to her right in the direction of the farm road, trying to sight along the straight row and detect the approach of men on foot. Then she ran another hundred feet and stopped again. The stalks were tall enough to hide a man or a car, so it was impossible to see precisely where she was going, but she gave herself up to the features of the country. Her feet and legs could tell that she was going up a very gradual slope, and she knew that at the top of it would be the farm buildings.