Dance for the Dead (37 page)

The boy protested. “This
can’t be the end of the road.”

“For you it is.” she
said, and stepped back to her car.

When Farrell had paid the gas
station attendant and gotten back into his car, he drove a mile down
the road to a motel. Jane watched him go into the lighted office,
then come out with a key and go into a room. She pounded the steering
wheel in frustration. This wasn’t it. He was going to sleep Two
hours before dawn Mary almost fell asleep. She woke up with a start,
gripped by the feeling that she was falling, and slapped her hand
against the side of the shower stall to hold herself up. The second
day began for her at that moment. She was feeling a dread so deep
that there was no difference between the dream and what was
happening. The ground was coming up faster and faster, and when she
hit she would be dead.

An hour after dawn she saw the
doorknob turn. When the door opened she saw it was Barraclough. He
was naked too this time. He unlocked her handcuff and left the key in
it, turned on the shower, and held her under it for a long time,
turning her this way and that as though he wanted to be sure she was
clean enough. Then he turned her face to the wall. He never spoke. He
just put his foot between hers and kicked each of her feet outward a
little so she would know, and put a hand on her back. This time she
did not struggle. She stood stiff and still like a dead person while
he forced himself into her. After a few moments he slapped her
buttock hard with one hand, then grasped her wet hair in the other
and gave it three hard tugs. Slowly, a little at a time, she
understood what he wanted and began to move her hips with him.

After he had finished with her,
he turned on the shower again, washed himself as though she were not
there, then turned the water off, refastened her handcuff, and left
the room. As soon as the door closed, she began to cry. She had no
idea how long it went on, because time was no longer something that
had meaning. Finally the tears simply stopped and she was gripped by
a fully formed, uncontrollable anger. She wanted them to come in. Her
fingers clutched at the air, wanting to claw their eyes. Her jaw
clenched, her mouth salivating at the thought of biting a throat and
clinging to the man while the others tried to tear her loose.

The anger left her as abruptly
as it had come, but as she leaned against the wall in the shower
again she discovered that the anger had left something inside her. It
was small and hard and clean like the scar from a burn. She studied
it, touching it the way her tongue might touch a little sore in her
mouth, over and over until it knew the place and the pain and the
shape. She knew what she was going to do. Of all the people this
might happen to, Mary had the best chance of carrying it off. She had
a good head for numbers.

A few hours later Barraclough
returned with the tape recorder. He plugged it in at the outlet by
the sink for electric shavers, then turned it on. Mary watched him
warily. Now must be the time when he was going to get her to talk.
But then she heard a sound like the swish of a car going by, then
several of them at once, then Jane’s voice saying “You’ve
been chasing Mary Perkins, I’ve been hiding her. Now I’m
ready to sell her.”

“Why?” That was
Barraclough.

“I’ve been at this a
long time. A lot of people would be dead without me.”

“I’ve heard that.
Sometime I’ll get you to give me a list.”

“No, you won’t. Mary
Perkins isn’t the sort of person I want to risk my life for.
She’s not worth it. I gave her a chance and she disappointed
me. I know that she’s got a lot of money. You seem to think you
can get it. I’m not interested in that kind of work.”

“You know what will happen
when I have her?”

“You’ll end up with
her money. I also know that if you have her. she’s not coming
back to ask me how it happened.”

Barraclough stared at Mary for a
moment, then turned and walked away into the rest of the house, the
part where people who were free could walk.

Mary tried to laugh. She wanted
Barraclough to hear her laugh, but it was so low and empty that he
couldn’t have heard it. She knew why he had played the tape.
She was supposed to think that Jane had really been selling her. But
how could he expect her to believe that? She had been in on the plan
from the beginning.

But then she thought about what
she had heard, and she knew. He was playing it to let her know that
Jane had caught him on tape, and that she had thrown the evidence
away. She was so stupid that she had forgotten to leave the tapes in
the car when she had gone to him. She had forgotten there were any
tapes. He would have been caught and convicted of her kidnapping,
rape, and murder except for her unbelievably stupid mistake. She felt
burning humiliation and shame. She was going to die a horrible, slow,
degrading, painful death and the last thing she would remember was
that she had let her killer go free.

It was another hour before she
moved beyond herself and thought about Jane. “Mary Perkins
isn’t the sort of person I want to risk my life for…. I
gave her a chance and she disappointed me.” The reason Jane
sounded so convincing on the tape was that she was telling the truth.
Mary knew how to lie, and she had lied the same way. “She’s
not worth it.” Even Barraclough, who caught liars for a living,
was fooled because the words were literally true. Then the last part
came back to her. “I know if you have her she isn’t
coming back…” That was true too. She was here, chained,
injured, and hungry, and it was going to go on and on until she was
dead.

For the next six hours Mary
tried to work out a way to kill herself. The shower door had been
taken out, and they had been too smart to leave the hinges. She
experimented with the handcuff to see if there was a way she could
get the chain across her throat to hang from the shower head, but the
effort hurt her wrist terribly and there was no way to bring any
pressure on her windpipe. At some point they would have to feed her,
and there would be something – a glass, a knife, or even a
china plate – that she could use to slash and stab herself.

But in the end she realized that
she was not going to do it. If she killed herself, she would leave
the hard, cold, perfect nugget of hatred inside her dead body,
stranded like a virus. She had to stay alive to use it.

Jane
waited until she was positive that Farrell was asleep, drove the mile
back to the gas station to fill the tank of her own car, and returned
to the motel. She was so exhausted that she was afraid she would doze
off and wake up hours later to find Farrell’s station wagon
gone. She walked close to his car and looked in the windows. For a
moment she considered hiding in the cargo section in the back and
letting him drive her to Mary, but dismissed the idea. He would have
a gun, and she would probably wake up about the time he flipped off
the safety to fire it into her head.

Then she saw something lying on
the dashboard, a yellow, crumpled piece of paper. She moved closer
and recognized that it was a receipt from an American Express card.
It was so wrinkled that she could barely read the machine printing on
it. She took her pen and a receipt from her purse and wrote down the
information – the name David R. King, the expiration date, and
the thirteen-digit number – then walked to the pay telephone at
the convenience store across the street.

She looked at the back of
Catherine Snowdon’s American Express card and dialed the number
printed on it.

“Customer Service,”
said the voice. “May I help you?”

Jane said, “Yes. I’m
afraid I have a problem and I guess you can tell me what to do. My
husband’s wallet has been lost, and his American Express card
was in it.”

“Account number?”

Jane read it off her receipt.

“Expiration date?”

“Next August. He’s
in the hospital. There was an accident and they brought him in, and
his wallet somehow disappeared. I don’t know if – ”

“I understand,” said
the woman gently. “We’d better not take a chance. I’m
going to cancel the card as of now. He’ll be receiving a new
one in the mail in a couple of days with a new number.”

“But what happens if
somebody else has it?”

“That’s all
explained in detail on the back of your statement. Basically you have
nothing to worry about. You did the right thing by calling. Thank you
very much. I hope your husband recovers quickly.”

“Thank you,” said
Jane. She took some time walking back to the motel, formulating the
details of her story.

She opened the office door with
an air of authority and looked around. It was a bright morning
already, but the young man behind the desk looked as exhausted as she
felt. The hair on the back of his head was standing out in tufts from
lying back in his chair while he watched a dreadful dubbed movie on
the small television set beside him. At the moment several muscular
men in fur kilts were swinging clumsily at each other with swords and
taking a terrible toll on the columns of the Parthenon. He stood up
and leaned his elbows on the counter. “May I help you?”

“I’m Kit Snowdon,”
Jane said. “American Express Fraud Division. I’m afraid
we’ve got a little problem.”

The young man switched off the
swordsmen behind him and looked as though he were glad she had come
along. “How can I help?”

“You have a gentleman
staying in Room 4 who is in possession of a stolen American Express
card. He would be registered under the name David R. King.”

The young man was shocked. “But
I ran his card on the machine. There’s got to be some mistake.”

“Run the numbers again.”
She allowed her voice to betray a tiny portion of the impatience she
was feeling.

He picked the receipt out of the
drawer, pushed a few buttons to get onto the phone line, then punched
the numbers in. After a few seconds the machine rattled off a message
from the central computers in North Dakota or someplace. He looked
sick. “They want me to confiscate the card.”

“The computer always says
that. We haven’t had a computer beat up yet,” she said.
“Ignore it.”

“But – ”

“If you ran the card
before, you must have gotten a look at him. Did he look like somebody
you want to take a card from?”

“No.” He shook his
head solemnly, then looked at the telephone on the counter. “Should
I call the police?”

Jane sighed wearily. “I’ll
lay it out for you. He’s been traveling for two days. He has
two other cards and he’s got some charges – maybe fifteen
hundred by now. If I apprehend him, he gets charged with petty
larceny. If I can get him without making a legal mistake and if the
company lawyers follow through, he gets ninety days – tops. If
I follow him another day or two and he gets the bill up over three
thousand, then it’s grand theft, forgery, maybe possession of
stolen property, and the judge gets to swing hard. In fact, he has
to.”

“What do we do?”

“I’ve been following
him for two days,” said Jane. “I’m asleep on my
feet. I want you to check me into a room and watch his door while I
get some sleep. The minute you know he’s awake, ring my room.”

“What if he checks out?
Should I slow him down?”

“Don’t do anything
you wouldn’t normally do, except this time buzz my room. That’s
all.” She handed him the Catherine Snowdon credit card.

The kid slid it across the slot
of his machine and handed it back to her with the key. “I’m
sorry I messed up with the authorization. I was positive – ”

“You didn’t mess
up,” said Jane. “He altered the magnetic strip to change
one digit, or the machine would have said ‘Tilt.’ The
real pros know how to do that. Just be sure he doesn’t slip
away. If you go off duty, make sure the next guy knows what to do.”

She went into her room and slept
in her clothes. The call came in the evening. When she picked up the
receiver there was nobody on the other end. He must be in the office,
so the boy could do nothing but press the button for her room. She
was on her feet instantly, standing by the window. His station wagon
was still in the lot in front of Room 4. She slipped out her door,
turned away from the office, walked around the building, got into her
car, and followed Farrell down the street past the freeway entrance.
He pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket, got out of his car,
and walked into the store.

Jane looked at her watch. Some
of the mystery of his movements was dispelled. It was eight-thirty
p.m. He had left his office in a clean car at midnight and driven
through the rest of the night. When he was positive he had not been
followed, he had slept through the day in the motel room under a fake
name. If he was wrong about being followed, probably the pursuers
would have made a move of some kind while he slept. If they had lost
him somewhere during the long drive, he would have been invisible for
a whole day, while they were forced to widen their search to places
he had never been, dispersing and exhausting themselves.

Now he was sure he had nothing
to worry about, and he was going grocery shopping. That made sense
too. They could not have known they were going to be using the safe
house. They probably didn’t visit it often enough to keep fresh
food there. When Barraclough had gotten Mary, he had simply changed
cars and driven her up here.

There was another side to what
Farrell was doing, and it made her feel anxious again. He had
efficiently changed himself into a nocturnal creature. Jane had taken
a few people out of the world who had been held by someone who wanted
information, and they had told her what it was like. The captors
would wear them down for days, alternately abusing and ignoring them,
depriving them of sleep and food until some chemical imbalance
occurred and they began to lose themselves in a depressive psychosis
that seemed to bounce erratically from guilt to anger, but hopeless
guilt and anger. The tormentors who understood the process would
begin their final interrogation when the mind was weakest and most
vulnerable, between two and five in the morning. Tonight when Mary
woke up, starved, exhausted, and probably injured, there would be a
new face. He would be fresh and sharp and tireless, and by now it
would seem to her that he could read her mind.