Dance for the Dead (7 page)

The woman at the boarding desk
was joined by a second woman, who said something to her. Then the one
who had given Jane her boarding pass picked up a microphone and cooed
into it, “Flight 419 for New York is now ready for boarding.”
People all over the waiting area stood up. “Will those
passengers with small children, or who need help boarding, please
come to the gate now….”

That invitation seemed to apply
to no one, so as the woman went on – “Passengers in rows
one through ten may board now” – the taller man walked to
the row of telephones beside the men’s room.

Mary Perkins stirred, but Jane
gave her head a little shake and picked up a newspaper someone had
left on a seat near her. The woman went on calling out rows of seats,
then said, “Passengers in the remaining seats may board now.”
Still Jane sat and stared at the newspaper. There were four minutes
left. When there were three minutes, she closed the newspaper and
began to walk toward the gate.

In her peripheral vision she saw
Mary Perkins stand up and follow, then saw the taller man hurriedly
punch some numbers into the telephone. Jane stopped to glance up at
the clock on the wall, and saw the smaller man walking along behind
Mary Perkins. The man at the telephone had hung up, and he walked
straight to the gate, handed the woman his ticket, and entered the
tunnel. Jane walked a few feet past the last set of seats in the
waiting area slowly, letting Mary Perkins catch up with her. At the
last second, she turned to her.

“Why, Mary,” she
said. “It
is
you.”

Mary Perkins stopped and stared
at her in genuine shock. “Well… yes.”

“You don’t remember
me, do you?”

The man who had been following
Mary Perkins stopped too, standing almost behind them. Jane seemed to
notice him for the first time. “Oh, don’t mind us. Go
ahead.” She pulled Mary Perkins aside. “It’s me,
Margaret Cerillo. I thought I recognized you before, but I wasn’t
sure…”

The man hesitated. He obviously
had orders to follow Mary Perkins onto the airplane, but he also had
been instructed to be sure he wasn’t caught doing it. He could
think of no reason to stand and wait for these two women while they
talked, so he stepped forward, handed his ticket to the woman at the
door, and stepped past her into the boarding tunnel.

Jane moved Mary Perkins away
from the gate casually. “Slowly, now, and keep talking,”
Jane whispered. “You seem to be worth a lot of expense.”

“I guess they think I am,”
said Mary Perkins.

“If you have something
they want, you’ll never have a better time to come up with it.
We can go right into the plane and make a deal. The lights are on and
everybody’s been through metal detectors. There’s no
chance of other people we can’t see.”

“If I had anything to buy
them off with, what would I need you for?”

Jane stopped and looked at her.
“I’ll still help you shake them afterward in case there
are hard feelings.”

“Thanks, but I can’t
get rid of them that way.”

“What did you do?”

Mary Perkins turned to look at
Jane, leaning away from her as though she had just noticed her there
and found it displeasing. “Why do you assume I did something?”

“I know you did. If you
didn’t, what would you need me for?”

Jane began to walk again. Any
woman whose claim to trust was that she had picked up some gossip in
the L.A. county jail didn’t inspire much confidence, and this
one struck her as a person who had done some lying professionally.
But Jane could see no indication of what she was lying about. She was
being followed by two men who had not taken the sorts of steps that
anybody would take if they wanted to stop her from jumping bail or
catch her doing something illegal. They had seen her waiting for a
flight to a distant state, and they had gotten aboard. The local cops
couldn’t do that, the F.B.I, wouldn’t be prepared to do
it on impulse, and if none of them had stopped her from leaving the
county jail, then they didn’t know of any reason to keep her
there.

Jane had to admit to herself
that the only possibility that accounted for the way these men were
behaving was that they wanted to keep her in sight until there
weren’t any witnesses. “A little faster now,” she
said. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”

They started across the waiting
area and Jane caught a peculiar movement in the edge of her vision. A
man sitting at the far end of the waiting area stood up, and two men
who had been conferring quietly at a table in the coffee shop did the
same. It wasn’t that any of them would have seemed ominous
alone. It was the fact that their movements coincided with Jane’s
and Mary’s starting to walk fast. “Did you hear them
announce a flight just now?”

Mary winced. “Please don’t
tell me you hear voices.”

“I don’t. There were
two men on that flight. Do you have some reason to believe there
wouldn’t be others?”

“Well… no.”

Jane’s jaw tightened. “Let
me give you some advice. Whatever it is you’ve been doing that
makes people mad at you, cut it out. You’re not very good at
getting out of town afterward.”

Mary Perkins let Jane hurry her
along the concourse in silence until they reached Gate 36. They
slipped into the tunnel with the last of the passengers, just as the
man at the gate was preparing to close the door. Jane heard running
footsteps behind her, so she stopped at the curve and listened.

“I’m sorry, sir,”
said the airline man’s voice. “You’ll need a
ticket. We aren’t permitted to accept cash.”

“Can’t I buy one?”

“Yes, sir, but you’ll
have to go to the ticket counter. I have no way to issue a ticket.”

“But that’s way the
hell on the other end of the airport. Can you hold the plane?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but
passengers have to catch connecting flights, and we have a schedule.
There are five flights a day from LAX to McCarran. You could –
”

Jane walked the rest of the way
up the tunnel and through the open hatch, and she and the woman took
their seats. Mary Perkins said, “What do you call that?”

“Airport tag,” said
Jane. “I haven’t played it in years.” She sat back,
fastened her seat belt, and closed her eyes. “I hope I never do
again.”

“What
are you thinking?” asked Mary Perkins.

“I'm
not thinking. I’m resting,” said Jane.

“Does resting mean you’ve
already thought, and you have a plan? Because if it does, I’d
sure like to know what it is.”

“No, it means I want you
to be quiet.”

Jane closed her eyes again. The
plane was flying over the Southwest now, toward the places where the
desert people lived: Mohave, Yavapai, Zuni, Hopi, Apache, Navajo.
Some of them believed that events didn’t come into being one
after another but existed all at once. They were simply revealed like
the cards a dealer turned over in a blackjack game: they came off the
deck one at a time, but they were all there together at the beginning
of the game.

What Jane needed to do now was
to find a way to reveal the cards in the wrong order: go away, then
arrive. She reviewed all of the rituals that were followed when an
airplane landed. The fact that they were known and predictable and
unchanging meant that they already existed, even though the plane was
still in the air. The flight was a short one, and she felt the plane
begin to descend almost as soon as it had reached apogee. It was just
a hop over the mountains, really, and then a long low glide onto the
plateau beyond.

Jane reached into the pocket on
the back of the seat in front of her and examined the monthly
magazine the airline published. She leafed past the advertisements
for hotels and resorts and the articles on money, cars, children, and
pets. At the back she found the section she was looking for. There
were little maps of all of the airports where the airline landed, so
people could find their connecting gates. She studied the one for
McCarran, then tore the back cover off, reached into the seat pocket
in front of Mary, and tore that back cover off too.

“What are you doing?”
asked Mary.

Jane pulled her pen out of her
purse and began printing in bold capital letters. “Here’s
what you have to do. When the plane lands, everybody is going to get
off except you. You take as much time as you can. You’re sick,
or your contact lens fell out. I don’t care what it is.”

“How long?”

“Try to stretch it out
long enough to get at least one flight attendant to leave the plane
first. It may not work, but I’ve seen it happen, and when it
does, people watching for a passenger get confused.”

“Okay,” said Mary.
“Then what?”

“Then you come off the
plane. Walk out fast, don’t look to either side. Head for the
car-rental desk. Rent a car. Make it a big one, not a compact.
Something fat and luxurious and overpowered. They’ll probably
have lots of them in Las Vegas. Drive it around to the edge of the
building where you can see the Southwest baggage area. When I come
out the door, zoom up fast and get me.”

“What if something goes
wrong?”

Jane was busy going over and
over the printing on her two sheets, making the letters bigger and
bolder. “Here’s what it will be. They’ll follow you
to the car desk. They’ll stick around long enough to be sure
what you’re doing, and then they’ll leave to try to get
to the lot before you do. The lot will be the first time you’re
alone and away from airport security. They’ll want to get into
the car with you.”

“Then what do I do?”

Jane looked at her in
disappointment. “As soon as they’re gone, cancel the car
and go to the next desk, of course. Rent from a different company.
They’ll take you to a different lot.”

“Just let me get it
straight. Stay on the plane, get off quick, rent a big car, pick you
up at baggage.”

“Right.” She looked
up at Mary critically. “Come to think of it, even if you don’t
spot anybody behind you at the rental counter, cancel the car and go
to the next desk anyway.”

“You don’t think
I’ll see them, do you? That’s it, isn’t it?”

Jane stuck the two magazine
covers into her belt under her coat at the small of her back. Then
she leaned back and closed her eyes again. “Bet your life on it
if you want. Either way I’ll come out of the baggage door and
look for you. If you don’t come, I can probably find a cab.”

When the pilot’s voice
came on the intercom and said something inaudible that contained the
words
Las Vegas,
Jane opened her eyes. People ahead of her in
the plane were looking out their windows and nudging each other.
Probably they were beginning to see the lights. Flying into Las Vegas
after dark was always a strange experience. The world below the plane
was as black as the sky above it, and then suddenly, with no warning,
there was a light like a frozen explosion in the middle of it: not
just a lot of dull yellowish bulbs like the lights of other cities,
but crimson, aquamarine, veridian, gold, and bright splashes of
white. As the plane descended, the lights moved, blinking, flashing,
and sweeping, and a line of fan-shaped beams of car headlights were
visible flowing up and down in the middle of it. The explosion had
gotten even crazier in the past couple of years, she noticed.

Mary was staring out the window
like the others. “God, I love this place,” she said. “Are
we going to be here long?”

“Not unless you’re
held over by popular demand,” said Jane, and closed her eyes
again. She listened and let her body feel the machinery of the plane
work. The ailerons moved to tilt and swing the plane around, and then
the right one went down with the left and the plane leveled to skim
over the desert. There was the odd whistling noise of the wind
holding the plane back, and the engines cut down, and then the noise
seemed to get louder for no reason she had ever understood, and then
the hydraulic system pushed the wheels down until they locked with a
thump, and there was the long sickening feeling of the plane losing
altitude. She said, “You okay on everything?”

“Yes,” said Mary.

Jane nodded. The best part of
the plan was that if Mary Perkins, or whatever her real name was,
panicked and ran, they would both have a pretty good chance. Mary
Perkins would be behind the wheel of a big, fast car with a good head
start. Most of the watchers would still be following Jane.

The plane bounced along the
runway, slowed, and taxied to a stop at the terminal. Jane stood up
and joined the line of impatient people opening overhead compartments
and shuffling along between the seats. She stepped into the boarding
tunnel and picked out a man a few paces ahead of her. He was tall and
in his mid-forties and had the preoccupied, bored look of a salesman
making his rounds.

She hurried until she was at his
side, then matched his pace to make it look as though they were
together. As soon as they were out of the tunnel and around the
corner she separated herself from him and ducked into the gift shop.
She took two steps past the entrance and found a baseball cap with
las vegas on the crown in sequins and gold thread, and a sweatshirt
with a picture of a hand holding five aces. She walked across to the
other side wall and picked out a pair of running shorts. The little
store didn’t sell shoes, but it had some foldable slippers for
people whose feet bothered them on long flights. The whole shopping
spree took less than a minute, and then she was at the cash register.

She came out the door with her
bag of purchases and slipped into the ladies’ room. She changed
in the stall, dropped her clothes into the trash can, picked up her
magazine covers, and then came out again, this time to join the crowd
going toward the arrival gates.

As she walked, she checked her
watch. Only four minutes had passed since she had stepped off the
plane and come out of Gate 10 with the salesman. This time she was in
her shorts and sweatshirt, two and a half inches shorter than she had
been in her high heels, her tinted glasses gone and her hair in a
ponytail through the back strap of her Las Vegas baseball cap.