Dance for the Dead (29 page)

As Jane walked up Huron in the
cold, still air, listening to her feet crunching the snow, she began
to hear another sound, far off behind her. It started low and quickly
moved up an octave a second until she recognized it as a siren. She
walked along, listening to it grow louder and closer, until she heard
it pass her on a parallel street. A minute later, she heard another
set of sirens coming toward her from somewhere ahead and to her
right.

She watched the intersections
ahead and saw the blinking lights of a fire engine swing around a
corner and head out Huron Street. After another block she began to
smell the smoke in the air. It was a thin, hanging haze like the
smoke from somebody’s fireplace in the windless night. She
began to walk faster, and at the next corner she turned down a side
street. It was a two-alarm fire so far, and there was no point in
walking into the middle of a lot of firemen and policemen after
midnight carrying shopping bags. At the first corner she turned right
along the street behind Huron and hurried on.

When she was still two blocks
from the big old house where Mary lived, she could see the sky
suddenly begin to glow. She dropped her bags and broke into a run. It
must be the house. As she ran up the quiet residential street, she
began to see other people coming out of apartments and houses and
walking toward the fire.

When Jane turned back onto
Huron, she could see the trucks lined up in front of Mary’s
house. The coats of the firemen were glowing, their wet helmets
reflecting the flames that were now coming out of the lower windows
and licking up the wooden clapboards toward the upper floor.

Jane forced herself to slow her
pace to a fast walk, looking carefully at every human shape
illuminated by the fire. She tried to recognize one that might be
Mary, already almost certain that she would not see her. The fire
didn’t make sense unless they had made a mistake and killed
her. They had set a fire not because it would fool a coroner –
Farrell, the training officer, would have taught them that much –
but because fire got rid of fingerprints and fibers, and because
water and firemen’s boots obliterated footprints.

She moved into the curious crowd
and began to study the faces of the people who had gathered in a big
circle around the fire. She wasn’t looking for Mary anymore;
she was looking for any face that she had seen before.

She heard the loud
blip-blip
of another siren and saw another set of lights sweep around the
corner and stop at the curb thirty feet behind a fire truck. The new
vehicle was an ambulance. Jane moved toward it, weaving her way
between spectators who were so intent on the fire that they seemed to
be unaware of her passing.

She edged closer to the
ambulance and watched the two paramedics haul their collapsible
stretcher out the back and rush, not to Mary’s house but up the
other side of the hedge to the lawn of the house next door. Jane felt
a tiny resurgence of hope that she could not suppress. Maybe that was
where the firemen had taken the victims – out of their way and
out of danger – and if the paramedics were in a hurry, they
must believe they had a patient waiting for them, not a corpse.

Jane followed the paramedics.
They hurried up the lawn until they reached a pair of firemen in gas
masks who were kneeling over somebody lying prone on the snow beyond
the hedge. One of the firemen had an oxygen tank on his back like a
scuba diver, and he was holding the mask over the face of the person
on the ground. Jane held her breath as the four men slid the victim
onto the stretcher. When they lifted it to unfold the legs, she let
her breath out in disappointment. The person on the stretcher was
wearing a black rubber turnout coat and high boots. One of the
firemen must have collapsed from the smoke.

She turned away and looked at
the house. The top floor had caught now, and she could see the flames
eating their way through the inner walls. In a few minutes the roof
would collapse into Mary Perkins’s apartment and the killers
would have accomplished what Barraclough’s training officer had
taught them to do when things went wrong.

She watched the firemen
straining to hold the hoses steady while they sprayed enormous
streams of water into the upper windows. She glanced at a couple of
firemen coming around the house carrying long pike poles. Their faces
had dark, grimy smoke stains around the eyes and on the foreheads
where their masks had not covered, their coats and pants glistened
with water and dripped on the snow as they trotted toward their
truck. She whirled around in time to see the four men pushing the
stretcher toward the back of the ambulance. The injured fireman’s
turnout coat wasn’t wet. He had been in there long enough to
succumb to the smoke, but he didn’t have a drop on him. The two
firemen who had been kneeling over him were dry too.

Jane moved quickly in a diagonal
path toward the ambulance, keeping her eyes on the stretcher. They
had the tie-down restraints strapped over a blanket they’d
draped over the turnout coat, and the mask still over the face. She
couldn’t see the hair because they had a pillow under the head
and their bodies shielded it from view. As they reached the lighted
street she stared hard at the side of the blanket, where a couple of
the victim’s fingers protruded an inch. The red, whirling light
from the fire truck just ahead passed across them and glinted off a
set of tapered, polished fingernails. It was Mary Perkins.

Jane stepped around the front of
the ambulance, slipped into the driver’s door, and crouched on
the floor. She heard the back doors open, the sliding of the metal
wheels of the stretcher, and then the back doors slammed. She climbed
into the seat, threw the transmission into gear, stepped on the gas
pedal, and veered away from the curb to avoid the fire engine parked
thirty feet ahead.

Then she straightened her wheels
and roared down the block. She glanced in the rearview mirror. The
four men took a couple of steps after her, then seemed to see the
futility of it and stopped in the street. Before she turned the
corner at the first traffic signal she looked again, but she couldn’t
see them anymore.

She drove fast for five blocks,
letting the siren clear the way for her, and then turned into a
smaller street, flipped off the flashing lights and siren, and went
faster.

“Mary!” she called.
There was no answer. It occurred to her that the gas in the fireman’s
tank had probably not been oxygen. It could as easily have been
medical anesthetic. If it was, Mary was about as likely to die as
recover. Jane drove on for another minute, then pulled the van to a
stop in the lot behind a school. She ran to the back of the
ambulance, opened the door, climbed inside, and looked down at Mary.
She could see that her eyes were wide open, and then they blinked.

“You’re alive after
all,’” said Jane. She pulled at the oxygen mask and saw
that it was held by a piece of elastic behind the head, so she
slipped it up and off. There was a wide strip of adhesive tape across
Mary’s mouth. She undid the top straps on the stretcher.

Mary quickly sat up and fumbled
to free her own feet. She was sobbing and shaking, and kicking at the
strap so hard that her own hands couldn’t hold on to it. Jane
undid that strap too. “You’d better take the tape off
your own mouth,” she said.

Mary clawed at it and gave a
little cry of pain as she tore it off. “They trapped me!”
she sobbed. “There was no other way out.” She shook the
heavy turnout coat off, and Jane could see they had slipped it over
the jacket she had put on to escape the fire. “There was smoke,
and they banged on the door, and they looked like firemen. One of
them gave me an oxygen mask, and – ”

“I know,” said Jane.
“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Can’t you just keep
going?” Mary looked at the driver’s seat, willing Jane
into it.

“No. We’re already
pushing our luck. They’ll be looking for the ambulance. I
assume it’s stolen, so the police will be too.” She
pulled Mary to her feet, pushed her out the back door, and said, “Run
with me.”

Mary stood against the
ambulance. She took a step in the fireman’s boots, her beige
pants bloused over the tops just below her knees, then stopped and
pulled her jacket around her. “I can’t.”

“Try,” said Jane
simply. She slung her purse across her chest and started off across
the lot at a slow, easy trot. After a few steps she heard Mary
running too.

Jane jogged onto the broad back
lawn of the school. It seemed to be a high school because all of the
athletic fields were full-sized and elaborate, with wooden bleachers
beside them. The grass under the snow was level and clear, with no
chance of any unseen obstacles. Even better, there were tracks on it
where she could place her feet. When she was in the open away from
the building she could feel the wind blowing tiny particles of snow
against her cheeks. Now was the time to set a quick pace, before some
cop arrived to find the ambulance. She waited until she thought Mary
Perkins was warm and loose, then lengthened her strides a bit. The
playing fields were an advantage because she could lead them out a
quarter of a mile away on a street far from the path of the
ambulance. But while they were out here they would be the only black
spots on an ocean of empty white snow.

She looked over her shoulder at
Mary and saw that she interpreted the look as permission to slow
down. Jane turned ahead again and quickly worked her way up to a
comfortable lope. She listened to Mary’s footsteps and timed
her breathing. She was not used to running, but she seemed to be
doing it.

When Jane reached the goalpost
at the end of the football field, she stopped and ran in place until
Mary caught up. She said, “We’ll be able to walk as soon
as we reach cover,” and started off again. This time it seemed
to be a soccer field because it was longer. She could discern what
was at the end of the school property now. There was a high
chain-link fence, and beyond it some tall, leafless trees. She ran
ahead to look for the gate.

She found it in a few seconds,
but it had a thick chain and a serious padlock on it. She looked back
to see Mary struggling to catch up. She could see that there were
tracks all over the field. Unless kids had changed a lot since she
was in high school they would never walk an extra quarter mile just
to get around a fence. She moved along the fence and saw the answer.
There was a city parking lot beyond the fence, filled with plows,
dump trucks, tractors, and a forage harvester parked beside a
building that looked like a warehouse. The parking lot was empty of
cars, but it was clear of snow because they had used the plows to
push an enormous pile of snow up against the fence nearly to its top
eight feet up.

Mary came up behind her,
breathing deeply but not in distress. Jane said, “How are you
at climbing fences?”

“Take a guess.”

“I’ll help you,”
said Jane. “All we have to do is get to the top. We can walk
down.” She took Mary’s arm and pointedly placed her hand
on a chain link above her head. She began to climb, and Jane waited
for the moment to come when she decided she couldn’t do it.

Mary stopped. “I don’t
think – ”

Jane reached up, put both hands
on her thighs, and boosted her higher. “Do the work with your
legs. Toes in the spaces, step up. Just use your hands to hold on.
Step up. Good. Step up.” She climbed up after her, and when
Mary reached the intimidating part, where the packed snow was above
the top of the fence, she said, “Step up,” held on to the
fence with one hand, and pushed Mary hard with the other so that she
rolled up onto the mountain of snow.

When Jane reached the top and
flopped onto the snow she found Mary still lying there, breathing
deeply and trying to get her heart to slow. Jane sat up for a second,
then clucked down and burrowed into the snow. “Stay down,”
she said.

A beam of light moved across the
field. Jane could see it pass above their heads, lighting up
thousands of tiny snowflakes that had been blown into the air by the
wind. The police car was beside the ambulance, so the beam widened in
the thousand feet of empty fields and became enormous, but it was
still so bright that she could see the line of adhesive the tape had
left on Mary’s cheek.

Mary asked, “Is it –
”

“Cops,” said Jane.
“In a minute they’ll shut the light off. When they do,
don’t move.”

The light swept across the
field, came back, continued around the horizon, and then went out.
“Rest,” said Jane. “Use this time to rest.”
They lay in the darkness and she listened. Suddenly the light came on
again, swept over their heads, and shot back and forth around the
field. She listened for the sound of the engine, but it didn’t
come. Finally the light went off. “Okay,” said Jane. “Now
we move.” She sat up a little, slid down the hill, and waited
while Mary followed.

They hurried to the far side of
the lot, where the gate to the street was, and stopped. This gate was
locked with the same kind of padlock and chain as the first one. She
looked up at the fence. It was as high as the first, but it had coils
of barbed wire strung along the top. They couldn’t go back
because the police wouldn’t leave until they had a tow truck
hooked up to the ambulance. She looked around her. There were sure to
be cutting tools in the low building at the side of the lot, but
breaking in would be harder than getting over a fence, and at least
the fence didn’t have an alarm. There were trucks, tractors,
and plows all over the place, but even if she managed to hot-wire one
of them to crash the gate, the sound of the engine would bring the
police car across the field in twenty seconds. Then her eyes sorted
out the strange shapes at the other end of the yard.