by Thomas Perry
Farrell drove out of the lot and turned east across the flat farm country toward Mendota. Jane glanced at her watch, walked into the store, and bought a can of cola and a box of plastic straws. Then she got into her car, waited three minutes, and drove out after him. She could picture what was happening. When the station wagon’s engine started, the water pump began to circulate the coolant, taking the water from the leaky bottom radiator hose, while some of it drained from the hole. As soon as the engine reached its optimum temperature, the thermostat would open. He would go a few miles before his temperature gauge went wild, because the expansion tank would empty, keeping the engine cool until that coolant too drained out the hose onto the road.
She drove down the dark road until she saw the car pulled over on the right shoulder. She turned off the road, killed her lights, and watched. There was no sign of him. Far ahead along the road a truck pulled over to the side and she could see him caught in its lights for a moment, waving it down. He climbed into the truck and it drove toward her. She turned on her lights, pulled back onto the road, and passed it, but as soon as it was out of sight she turned around and drove back to Farrell’s car.
She opened the backseat door, took the rubber hair band off the latch, and pulled up the button on the driver’s side to unlock the tailgate. She had thought it through carefully on her drive, so she had no decisions to make. She put a tiny slit in the plastic milk jug, stuck a plastic straw into her perfume bottle of water hemlock and mayapple, put her finger over the end, inserted the straw into the milk bottle, and let it drain into the milk. Then she moved the gummed price tag to cover the slit.
She did the same to the cartons of orange juice. The flat packages of meat were an experiment because she had no idea what cooking would do to the chemical composition of the clear liquid, but the holes in the cellophane wrappings were easy to hide, so she used them. She was confident about the bottle of scotch because the alcohol would hide any taste. She found the cap could be opened and reclosed by peeling the blue tax stamp off with her knife instead of tearing it, then pasting it down with a little spit. She was certain that even if a bit of the food was intended to reward Mary for talking, the scotch was for the men. Alcohol made people too reckless to be afraid and too stupid to remember, and it dulled pain. She left the vegetables alone because they would be washed and boiled, but she made a tiny incision in each of the apples and pushed the straw far enough into the depression at the bottom to reach the almost-hollow core, so the poison would come out as juice and the white of the apple would not be discolored by contact with the air.
When the perfume bottle was empty Jane closed the tailgate, went to the driver’s side, pushed down the button to relock all the doors, and then drove her own car a mile down the road to wait for Mary Perkins’s interrogator to return with a new hose for his radiator.
It had been nearly forty-eight hours since Mary had walked across five lanes of the Ventura Freeway and gotten into the car. She did not know this because time had already become one more thing that had to do with other people. Sometimes so much happened in a very short time. If one of the men hit her, the bright sharp suddenness seemed to explode into pain and wonder, then bleed on into the next several hours, slowly tapering down into something she knew but didn’t feel.
At first she had been most afraid of permanence. There was some instinct that told her it didn’t matter if they gave her a sensation that made her scream, not because having it happen so many times had made her used to it but because it left something. It was like dividing her in half. Each time they did it, half of her was gone. Then they would divide the half, and she would be smaller, but no matter how many times they hurt her, some tiny fraction of her would be left. Even if all that was left at the end was the size of a germ, someday it might grow back. But if they blinded her or crippled her, her eyes or legs would not grow back. She had a deep animal urge to keep her body intact.
But even this feeling was faded now. She had gone from fear to despair. She could not force herself to imagine a future. The past was all lies, arrogance, and deception, and she could not think about her life as separate events now. Even Mary Perkins was more filth she had made up and smeared on herself. She was Lily Smith, and she was sorry.
Sometime after the little window high on the wall in the bathroom turned dark again, a man she had never seen before walked in carrying a briefcase. He was older and had gray, bristly hair. He wore a gray suit with a coat that seemed a little too tight in the shoulders, and a pair of shoes that looked as though he polished them a lot. She thought of him as Policeman. He brought with him a straight-backed chair that appeared to be part of a dining room set and sat down on it.
He watched her with eyes that looked serious and alert, but there didn’t seem to be anything else behind them. He had no predatory gleam, no cold contempt. He was simply waiting. She wanted to please him, to deal with this new person and win him over to her side.
She began slowly and logically because she had failed so miserably with Barraclough, and this one seemed even more touchy, more likely to dismiss her and go away. “I would like to find a way to make this end.” She tried to sound ingratiating, but her voice came out toneless and monotonous.
He pursed his lips and nodded, as though he were giving her permission to go on. “I know.”
She ventured a little further. “Nobody has asked me any questions.”
He shrugged. “There’s no hurry.”
This was like a weight tied to her. “Why?”
He said, “We destroyed the tapes you made of the meeting on the freeway—”
“I didn’t do that,” she interrupted.
He raised an eyebrow as a warning. She winced, forcing herself to keep silent. That was how she had earned Barraclough’s contempt, and if she did it to this one, her last chance would be gone. They both knew she was an accessory to the crime, so she accepted it.
He said, “Your girlfriend Jane wrote you off. She turned up yesterday at the L.A. airport. Operatives followed her to Chicago.” He opened his briefcase and lifted out a big plastic food-storage bag with a seal on the top like the ones they used for evidence. Inside was a long shock of shiny black hair. He placed it back in the briefcase. “It seems to me that there’s nobody else who even knows that you’re missing. You’ve been traveling under false names for some time.”
She had not realized until now that she had been living on the assumption that Jane was alive. If she was gone, then Policeman was right. Enduring a day or a year made no difference because nobody in the world knew she was gone. There was no possibility that she could ever leave this room. She repeated, “Is there any way that I can end this?”
Policeman looked at her judiciously. “It all depends on you.”
A tiny hope began to return. It was from a different source this time, and it seemed more genuine than imagining that Jane could convince the authorities to break down the door to save her. Now that Jane was gone, she could see how foolish she had been to think of it at all. She said, “What do I do?”
He said, “Let’s talk.”
“All right.”
“Tell me what happened the day you left the Los Angeles County Jail.”
“I took a bus to the airport. Then I saw Jane.”
“What color was the bus?” He asked her questions without appearing to listen to the content of the answers, just watching to see if she was lying.
“What name did you use in Ann Arbor?”
“Donna Kester. Jane picked it. She had cards and things in that name.”
“Where did you go when you left there?”
“Let’s see. Ohio. We hitched a ride with a student to Columbus, then Cleveland. The Copa Motel.”
“Did you pay cash?”
“No. Credit cards. She had lots of credit cards, all in different names.”
“What name did she use at the Copa?”
“I’m not sure. I think it was Catherine Snowdon.” She told him the addresses of the
hotels and motels, the agencies where they had rented cars, the routes they had driven—everything that came out of her memory. She wanted to please him. He seemed to be rooting for her, hoping she would pass. He wrote nothing down, but he seemed to be listening for mistakes. Each time a detail struck his ear as wrong, he would interrupt.
“How did you get into a women’s dormitory at night? They’re locked.” It would always be something irrelevant, but it would be like a slap because it made her remember something else to prove she was giving him everything.
Finally, when the questions didn’t bring any new answers, he stood up and took a step toward the door.
“Wait,” she said. “Don’t go. I’ve done everything, given you everything. What do you expect me to do?”
Policeman opened his briefcase again, pulled out a blank piece of paper, took a black felt-tipped pen out of his shirt pocket, closed the briefcase, and set the pen and paper on the chair. Then he walked to the shower, unlocked the handcuff from her wrist, turned, and walked out the door. She heard him locking it behind him.
She could not believe her good fortune. She stepped unsteadily to the chair. She started by printing the names as neatly as she could: Bahamas Commonwealth Bank; Union Bank of Switzerland; Banco de America Central of the Cayman Islands; International Credit Bank of Switzerland. The names themselves brought back the numbers, clear and fresh and clean in her mind, because numbers always were.
When she was finished, she left the pen and the paper on the seat of the chair and went back to her shower stall. After a long time, Policeman came through the door, picked up the chair and the piece of paper, and walked out the door.
It took them a few hours to do whatever they had needed to do to verify that the accounts existed. Then Policeman came in with Barraclough. This time Barraclough carried the papers. They were bank-transfer authorizations. Across the top was the name of one of her banks and the account number. Across the bottom of each one was the account where all of the money was going: Credit Suisse 08950569237. Her hatred clutched the numbers to her and clung to them as though they were the eyeballs of the men in the house.
When she was finished signing the papers they took them and walked out of the room without speaking to her. She had a strange sense of relief now. Her body felt light, as though she could dance or just rise up into the air. She held the numbers in her head and played with them like colored billiard balls that clicked when she moved them. Oh, eight ninety-five, oh, five sixty-nine, two thirty-seven. No fours or ones. First letters, O-E-N-F-O-F-S-N-T-T-S. 08950569237.
Jane sat in the dark and studied the gravel drive beside the house. There were the white station wagon, a white van, and a dark gray Dodge that looked like the same model as the red one they had used to bring Timmy to the freeway meeting. The small white house looked as though it had once been a real farmhouse where a family had lived and worked the broad flat fields around it, probably back in the thirties.
Jane knew she was going to have to do everything as quickly as she could. In an hour or two the sun would be up and one of them would look out a window. She had left the car a mile away by the side of the road, so there was no chance of using it as a blind.
She moved a little closer to the house, slowly and quietly, watching for signs that they had wired the grounds somehow. She had seen a beige box on the back side of the gate that she guessed was a motion sensor, and she had given the long gravel drive a wide berth because of it. She had come in across the empty field and seen nothing electronic since then.
She had imagined the safe house would be something big and fancy and in proportion with Barraclough’s ambitions. But if Barraclough owned such a place, he wasn’t going to make the mistake of committing crimes there. This house was small, unobtrusive, and run-down. He was too smart to have the fantasy that he could make any building impregnable. This one looked as though he expected to just walk away from it one day. His protection wasn’t the delusion that he could keep the police out if they wanted to get in; it was the high probability that they would never try.
As soon as Jane saw the van she knew she was going to have to look inside it. If Mary was dead, they would not leave her body in the house for long. They would wrap it and place it in the back of the van so they could clean the house without any worry that there would be new blood when they moved it. The inside of a van could be washed with a hose. She moved quietly to the back of the van and looked in the rear window. The floor was lit enough by the moonlight through the windshield for her to tell there was nothing big enough on the floor to be a corpse. She could see the spare tire fastened with a wing nut on the right side just inside the rear door. She tried the door handle and found it unlocked, so she reached inside and searched around the tire by touch. When she found the tire iron she took it out and slipped it into her belt, then closed the door quietly and moved back out into the field.
She selected a spot a hundred feet from the house where the alfalfa had grown to about ten inches. Since the farm had not been worked for decades, the land had not been plowed and the thatch from other seasons lay thick on the surface. The tire iron was thick and heavy, and the chisel end that was designed for taking off hubcaps dug through it easily and reached rich, soft, black dirt only an inch down. She broke the earth and softened it, then took off her black sweatshirt, loaded double handfuls onto it, and used it as a sack to help her spread the dirt around the field in the deep grass. When the trench was longer than she was and ten inches deep, she gathered the tufts of alfalfa and thatch she had removed, lay down, and began to bury her legs.
The dawn came slowly, while the low fields were still blanketed with wet fog. It was still half an hour before sunrise when she heard the front door of the house open. She lay still in her shallow grave with the blanket of alfalfa and thatch covering her to her neck, then the sweatshirt above her head with a layer of cut alfalfa over it. She clutched the tire iron. There were two sets of heavy footsteps on the front porch. She heard them clop down the wooden steps, then followed the quiet crunches on the gravel. She heard one car door slam, then another. Then there was the hum of an engine. She listened as the wheels rolled on the gravel toward the highway.
Jane lifted her head only far enough to see that it was the dark gray car that was gone, then lay back for a few minutes considering the implications. Two men were gone. It could mean that they had come to the end of Mary Perkins’s interrogation and that she was dead. She decided this was not likely. There would be the body to worry about. Barraclough had more understanding of human nature than to leave the body and the cleaning entirely to some underling, and he certainly wouldn’t send his trainees on an errand while he did the messy, stomach-turning work himself. He would supervise while at least two of them wrapped the body, put it in the van, and took it somewhere far from here, then buried it deep. Mary was alive.
Two men were gone. Jane waited for twenty minutes, listening for sounds from the house, before she moved. Jane had to use this time to find out where Mary was and how many men were still in the house. Quietly she rolled over in her trench and crawled out the end of it. She slipped to the side of the house, put her ear against one of the clapboards, and listened. She heard music. In a moment it stopped and she heard the muffled cadence of speech, but it was loud and exaggerated like the voice of an announcer, and then the music came on again. She moved to the front of the house and checked the window. The living room was almost empty. There were two chairs, an old couch, and a portable television set on a coffee table. She followed the sound of the radio around the house to the kitchen door.
She listened for a few minutes, but there were no other voices. She slowly stepped up beside the door and let one eye slide close to the corner of the screened window. Inside were two young men. They were lying on the floor beside the kitchen table. One of them was clutching his belly, and his mouth was open as though he were trying to scream, but his eyes were staring without moving. The other was facing away from her, but he too was still. Sh
e could see that they had begun to eat breakfast. Cereal and milk were spilled on the floor, and on the table were two empty glasses with little bits of orange pulp residue almost to their brims.
Jane swung her tire iron and smashed the small window over the door, reached inside and turned the knob. Neither of the men moved. She walked past them into the living room and quietly climbed the stairs to the second floor, holding the tire iron. She looked in the door of each room and saw only four empty, unmade beds. She descended the stairs again and found a closed door off the hallway. She tried the knob, but it was locked. She pushed the flattened end of the tire iron between the jamb and the door at the knob, lifted her foot to step on the lug end to set it, then pushed with all her strength. The door gave a loud creak and then a bang as it popped inward, bringing a piece of the woodwork with it.
The sight of Mary was worse than the sight of the two men Jane had poisoned. She was naked and bruised, one eye swelled so that it was nearly closed, her lips dry and so chapped that when her mouth moved a clotted wound at the corner cracked and a thin trickle of blood ran down to her chin. She didn’t seem to have the strength to stand up, so she started to crawl across the bathroom floor toward Jane.
Jane stepped to her and put her arm around her waist to lift her to her feet. “Come on,” she said.
“They said you were dead.” Jane could barely hear her.
“I’m not, and you aren’t either. We have to hurry. Where are your clothes?”
“I don’t know.” She was seized with tremors, and it was a moment before Jane heard the rest of what she was trying to say. “Just get me out.”
“Stay here a minute,” said Jane, and quickly went into the kitchen to search for car keys. They were lying on the counter. As she snatched them up, she sensed movement behind her.