Silence

by Thomas Perry

  “Howard told me that if I didn’t go with anybody who didn’t have a really nice car and nice clothes, I would be safe. I turned a few down, and then a man came by in a Jaguar. He was maybe sixty years old and dressed in a black sport coat and blue jeans. When he held the steering wheel with his left hand, the coat sleeve slipped down a little and I could see a fancy watch. He leaned over to talk to me through the open window on the passenger side. He said, ‘Miss? Are you working tonight?’ I remember how polite he was. I was amazed at my luck. I could get into the car and off the street and not be cold or afraid for a while. I was so relieved that I really did have feelings for him, a little bit. I got in and he drove to the place where I was staying, and we went in. When we got there, I expected Howard would be around, but I didn’t see him. I had to unlock the door and turn on the light so we could go in. But Howard had been in the room, looking out the window and waiting. He had heard us come along the hall to the door, heard me get the key out to unlock it, and then hid. I locked the door after us and started to do my job, what I had promised this older man.

  “All of a sudden, out of a closet came Howard, holding a knife. He scared the man with it, stole his wallet, his watch, and his car keys, and left him there tied up. Howard took me with him, drove out of that town to the next one. He stripped the car and left it, used the credit cards for a few hours to buy stuff, and kept the cash. The next night, when he got a room and sent me out on the street again, I went out and just kept going.”

  “You ran to Las Vegas?”

  “Not at first. All I did was get out of that city and go to another one. I got a job in a women’s clothing store. After a couple of months, I came home one night and I saw that the lights of my apartment were on. I saw him in the window, waiting. He was sure I was stupid enough to go right in. I wasn’t.”

  “What did he want? Did you figure that out?”

  “Me. Sometimes I thought he wanted me back, and sometimes I thought he showed up only after I’d been on my own for a while because he knew if he gave me a couple of months I would save some money and he could take it.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have found you after that. What happened?”

  “Ann Delatorre. We got to be friends. We told each other everything. After about a year, she gave me a present.”

  “The name?”

  “It’s more than a name. It’s a life. She stayed in that apartment building for only a few months. By the time I met her, she had already put a down payment on this house. She was getting ready to move in. She brought me with her.”

  “Just like that?”

  “She knew I had to have a place to live where he wouldn’t look for me. This is Ann Delatorre’s house. We both knew that if he thought I might be in Nevada, then a suburban tract in Henderson wouldn’t be the place. He’d think I would be in a crummy part of the city turning tricks.”

  “How did the two of you get by?”

  “She set up the name and used it for a while, bought this house, and let me stay with her. She started a mail-order business that she ran off the Internet, selling overstocks of name-brand clothes. I worked with her, handling the packing and shipping and a lot of the hours online. We never said it was permanent, either of us. But we both knew that staying safe meant staying hidden, and that the longer we lived quietly in this neighborhood running a mail-order business, the less likely we’d be found.”

  “And then she just walked away from it, didn’t she?”

  “You think she wouldn’t do that?”

  “I know she would. She did it once before.”

  “I think she just got anxious, worried that she hadn’t run hard enough, or far enough. She gave me everything: the birth certificate, her credit cards, the deed to this house, the incorporation papers for the business. She withdrew the money from the business account at the bank and helped me start a new account at another bank that would know me as Ann Delatorre. She went with me to New Mexico so I could apply for a driver’s license in the new name. Then she left.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She gave you her name. You know that somebody is after her, too, don’t you?”

  “Of course. We told each other everything.”

  “But you kept the name, anyway—Ann Delatorre. That was part of the deal, wasn’t it? You could have the house and the mail-order business, but it had to stay in the name Ann Delatorre. You’re her early-warning system. If somebody came for her, the mostly likely way they would do it was the way I did—by tracing the name change and then finding this address. If anyone came here, you would warn her.”

  “It’s not like that. Neither of us believed anyone would ever come.”

  “I mean nobody any harm. I’m only trying to save her best friend from going to trial for her murder.”

  Ann Delatorre looked defiant. “He’s not her best friend anymore. I am.”

  “Then you’ll let me talk to her. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know, or you could never warn her. You’re here for that. You have something. Is it just a phone number?”

  Ann Delatorre looked at him, puzzled. “You’re so smart, but you’re not so smart.”

  “No?”

  “If somebody comes for her here, either they’ll kill me, or I’ll kill them. Either way, it will be in the newspapers, won’t it? All she needs to do is type the name Ann Delatorre on the Internet once a day, to see if it’s been in the news.”

  He stared at her. She was still holding the gun on the arm of the chair. It was not aimed nearer to his heart, but no farther away, either. “You aren’t going to trust me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m going to stand up now.” He leaned forward slowly and raised himself from the couch without making any rapid or abrupt movements. Ann Delatorre rose, too, and retreated around her chair to keep it between them. As he walked toward the door, he said, “You’re a good friend. I can see that. But somebody else is searching for her now. The man who’s after her hires people to do his killing. They’re pros, so as long as he can pay them, they won’t stop looking. Sooner or later, they’ll trace her this far. Expect them.”

  As he opened the door, he turned to look at her. She still held the gun on him. “I do.”

  15

  IT WAS NEARLY ten o’clock in the evening when Paul Turner drove the rental car to the corner of the street where Ann Delatorre lived. “He’s gone. He’s been to that house twice today,” said Paul. “I’ll bet he set this up six years ago: If he ever needed to get in touch with Wendy Harper, he would come here, and Ann Delatorre would know where she was.”

  “Till’s amazing,” Sylvie said. “He never let anybody know that he had even met Wendy Harper, let alone taken her away. But he still bothered to set up a woman nobody ever heard of to act as a go-between.”

  “You know, this could easily be the meeting place. But we can’t assume that.”

  “What do we do?”

  “It’s like watching a magic trick. You keep your eye on the hand that holds the ball, and ignore everything else.” He looked at the notebook computer on Sylvie’s lap, and watched the blue dots appearing on the map. “We follow Till’s car.”

  He pulled out from the curb and drove out to the Boulder Highway toward Las Vegas. When he reached the city and turned left toward the Strip, he saw bright spotlights and construction machinery ahead. He took three quick lane changes, moving in and out of traffic. Then he made a wide turn. There were pockets of road construction everywhere in Las Vegas, constant revision and replacement. This road was being widened to accommodate the expansion of a hotel, but tonight all but one of the lanes were blocked by big yellow machines hauling asphalt or stirring up clouds of dust. Paul’s hand was always sure and steady as he swerved to achieve position.

  Sylvie wasn’t worried about catching up with Till’s car. She watched Paul’s dark eyes shine as he looked ahead, and she knew he was looking ahead in t
ime, too. He was working out details.

  “We’re going to need the two .38s, and also the rifle. Make sure they’re loaded and lying where you can reach them, so we can pick one up and fire.”

  “Okay.” Sylvie released her seat belt, knelt on her seat, and reached between the bucket seats to the floor behind her. She carefully pulled the SKS rifle between the seats to the front. She had to keep it low and covered with her jacket because the drivers of trucks and bulldozers they passed could see down into the car.

  Sylvie was comfortable with the .38 revolvers they had picked up from Paul’s gun dealer. Revolvers were simple, and the differences between them were mostly cosmetic. But the SKS rifle had a nasty profile like a black wasp, with a folding metal stock and a pistol grip that made it short enough to swing around inside a car. The SKS was Russian, so the markings that hadn’t been drilled off meant nothing to her, and the action felt stiff and unpredictable. The spring-operated moving parts seemed likely to pinch her fingers. She held it carefully under her coat and reached behind her to the floor for the ammunition clip. “Do you want me to crank a round into the chamber of this thing?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. Just so you know it’s there.” She clicked the magazine into the underside of the receiver, then held the rifle by its pistol grip and pulled back the charging lever. She checked the safety catch and then carefully placed the rifle between her seat and the door with the barrel upward so any accidental discharge would only blow a hole in the rented car’s roof. Then she reached into the glove compartment and took out the two .38 pistols, careful not to bump the threading on the ends of the barrels against anything. She checked the cylinder of each, put them both on her lap under the coat and waited for Paul.

  The SKS would punch through the sheet metal of a car without slowing down very much. The .38 pistols didn’t have the same piercing power, but they would be lethal fired through glass at short range. Paul must be planning to take Jack Till and Wendy Harper in Till’s car and kill them both at once, without any preliminaries. He always seemed to know what he wanted and how to get it. That was one of the things that she had always loved about him.

  When they had met, she had still been married to Darren McKee. After all this time, it was hard to remember what it had felt like being married to Darren. He had been short, and had come up to a spot about even with the middle of her ear. She could remember embracing him and feeling his hair tickling her earlobe. She could still recall how bristly his mustache had felt on her skin, but that wasn’t a feeling anymore, it was just information. She couldn’t bring back his smell or hear his voice or feel his shape on her hands or her body. He had no weight or volume in her mind anymore.

  Darren pampered and controlled her. He allowed her to buy all the clothes she wanted, but he would look at them when she brought them home, and if he disapproved of them he made her take them back to the store. He scheduled her days, so there was a two-hour period for exercise, then an hour for hair and makeup. Darren believed it was beneficial for her to leave the house every afternoon, so from one to five she was free to shop, see friends, or go to matinees. She had a cell phone, but she almost never made a call. Darren would call her several times a day to see if she was on schedule. If she wasn’t, he would adjust the schedule to give her more time.

  The money had been a big surprise to her. Darren had been managing the stripping tours of adult-film stars for about fifteen years by then. As a group, his clients required a great deal of managing—some were addicted to drugs, some were not very bright or practical, some were lazy—but they were good at attracting male audiences. Darren acted as producer. The club paid to book a show, and Darren paid the women salaries. So instead of taking ten or fifteen percent as a manager would have, he took about sixty, and let the women get rich on tips.

  Before she had learned that Darren had money, he had talked her into signing a prenuptial agreement. “Honey,” he said. “It’s to protect your money and my pride. I can’t have people in the industry thinking I married a hot young star so I could live off her money. It’s emasculating. If we sign the agreement, our assets stay separate. I can say I support my wife, and haven’t touched a cent of her money.” She had signed. Shortly afterward, she realized how he had stayed rich through three marriages. But it had not bothered her.

  What eventually did begin to bother her was that she was twenty-one and he was forty. She was bored. He was busy, obsessed with business, and not much fun. Then one day she was at the gym finishing the exercise class that Darren had put into her schedule, and on the way into the locker room she saw a sheet on the bulletin board. It said “DANCE CLASS: BALLROOM DANCING.” The small print said the class was to take place in the aerobics workout room later that afternoon, so she stayed to look through the glass wall into the room.

  When Sylvie heard the music and saw the woman who was running the class demonstrate the dance, Sylvie began to move to the music, unconsciously imitating the steps. But the instructor—she had introduced herself as Fran a moment earlier—noticed, and beckoned to her through the glass.

  Sylvie didn’t see Paul at first. She came into the room, keeping her eyes on the instructor and taking a few tentative steps of a samba, and then he was there beside her and they were dancing together. That was all. They had become partners. When the class was over, Paul stood with her for a few minutes in the big room outside where there were stationary bikes and treadmills and Nautilus machines. They exchanged names and the short versions of their histories that people constructed and carried around like calling cards. When she said, “I’ve got to go,” and he said, “I’ll look forward to seeing you on Thursday,” she walked off and noted that the capsule autobiography she had given him was a newly revised version. She had not mentioned that she had a husband.

  On Thursday they simply walked in when the aerobics class ended and stood together but apart from the rest of the dance students, waiting to begin. At the class she wore her hair in the chignon she had worn all those years in ballet. Fran, the dance instructor, was a skinny middle-aged vegan who had been a physical-education teacher at one time. She moved like an anthropologist demonstrating the dances of a tribal culture. The steps were all mimicked with technical accuracy, but the passion and the grace were what she had not been able to bring back with her. She had to evoke them with words, exhort the better dancers to supply the missing qualities, and the best dancers were Sylvie and Paul. Paul was the sort of man that Madame Bazetnikova had called un danseur noble. But it wasn’t about him. It was, as in ballet, about her.

  When she danced with Paul, Sylvie felt herself become beautiful and wild and somehow triumphant. After years of slouching, she held herself erect and was still not nearly as tall as he was. She had tried since she was in high school to look small, so she wouldn’t be noticed. Now she wanted to be noticed, to be admired. She felt light and graceful, as though she could float a foot above the floor.

  When the music ended for the last time, and Fran put on her oversized sweater to leave, the rest of the class followed. Paul simply placed his hand on the small of Sylvie’s back and exerted the same gentle pressure that had been there since the dance had begun. They talked as they walked, mostly about the dancing, the parts they liked the most, the parts they wanted to work on and improve. But Sylvie was not thinking about the words. She was thinking about the large male hand on her back.

  She thought about what he might mean by placing it there, and what it meant when she let it stay, and when she obeyed its pressure, walking where he guided her instead of turning to go into the women’s locker room to dress for her workout. He conducted her to the passenger side of his car, opened the door, and drove her to his apartment. On the way, they talked about the traffic, the summer heat, the houses on his street, and not about where they were going. She told herself it was faintly ridiculous for her to have been in those movies, but now to feel the tension of this moment, to feel the delicate ambiguity of each word or touch or glance.
>
  She let him lead her into the apartment as he led her in the dance. She let him undress her, and she felt, for the first time, a sense of rightness. This was the way she had always wanted things to be. Later, when it was over, she lay in Paul’s bed for a few minutes, then sat up, walked into his living room, putting on her clothes as she found them on the floor. On the way back, they talked as they had before, about the songs they loved and the dance class.

  The next Tuesday, the same thing happened, and Sylvie realized that it hadn’t been an isolated event, a mutual lapse that they would each silently wonder about forever. That had been the lie she had told herself. Soon she was lying to Darren about the exercise sessions she missed at the gym and about her partners in the dance class. Sometimes she would describe for him men who really were in the class, and sometimes, because there were more women than men, she would say that she had danced only with women that day.

  After a few weeks, she told Paul that she was married. He said, “I saw the mark on your finger where you took off your ring.”

  Two months later, Paul said, “We should be married. It’s time to get your divorce.”

  She told him about the prenuptial agreement she had signed. “If I divorce him, I won’t have much money—only what I could save before I got married.”

  “Does he have a lot of money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he’s made a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s only left you one way to get your share of it.”

  Sylvie let the moment pass. She never asked, “What do you mean?” She said nothing. For two more months, she thought about what Paul had said. She knew he had meant it at least a little, because he had said it the way some men made jokes—the kind that really weren’t jokes, but questions. She detected certain feelings in herself that she should not be having. She resented Darren for having caught her at a weak moment and holding out marriage as the alternative to a bad part of her life. She began to wish that Darren were dead.