Dance for the Dead (33 page)

She had selected the meeting
place carefully. It was the sort of spot a person might choose who
had some fear of ambush but no understanding of how such things
happened. It was free of people in the hours before dawn, a flat open
lawn that had been built as a flood basin with a vast empty sod farm
on one side, a golf course on the other, and nothing much but picnic
tables and a baseball diamond in between. The place gave the illusion
of safety because she could see a second car coming from half a mile
off. So could he, but all he had to do was block two spots on Burbank
Boulevard and one end of Woodley and she was trapped.

Jane left the Ventura Freeway
and continued eastward on Burbank Boulevard. It would still be
another hour before the sun came up. At exactly 5:20 she was driving
beside the golf course, and as she came around the long curve, she
saw his car. It was a new, dark gray Chevrolet parked beside the road
on the small gravel plateau above the empty reservoir. She could see
the little stream of exhaust from the tailpipe that showed her the
car was running. She took her foot off the gas pedal as she
approached, and coasted to a speed of under ten miles an hour. She
made a left turn onto the lot, then pulled up ten feet away from his
car and stared into the side window.

It was difficult to tell how
tall he was when he was seated in the car, but he gave her the
impression of being big. His hands on the wheel were thick and
square-knuckled, and his shoulders were much wider than the steering
wheel. The white pinstriped shirt he had on seemed a little tight on
his upper arms, the way cops wore theirs. He was obviously wearing it
without a coat to make her believe he had actually come unarmed.

She looked directly into his
face. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a wry half smile.
She reminded herself that she had known he would try to rattle her
with some intimidating expression, maybe the poker player’s
look when he raised his bet: my money’s on the table, so let’s
see yours. But his face set off a little burst of heat in her chest
that rose up her throat into her jaw muscles. She could not turn away
from the eyes. They were light, almost gray, squinting a little
because of the false smile, and watching her with a disconcerting
intensity. They took in her fear and discomfort, added his savoring
of it, and reflected it back to her. His mind was focused utterly on
her, on what she was feeling and thinking. His eyes revealed that he
felt nothing except some vicarious glow from the anxiety he could
inspire in her.

It was time to lose whoever he
had brought with him. Jane stamped her foot on the gas pedal and the
car’s back wheels spun, kicking up gravel. It fishtailed a
little as one wheel caught before the other and then it squealed out
of the lot onto Burbank Boulevard. She drove to the east, took the
ramp onto the San Diego Freeway at forty, and sailed into the right
lane at sixty-five. She checked her rearview mirror to be sure he was
coming, and saw the gray Chevrolet skid around the curve and shoot
off the ramp toward her. She kept adding increments of speed while
she held the car steady in the center lane.

She watched the mirror so she
could spot his helpers coming up to join him, but no other car on the
freeway was traveling as fast as theirs were. She checked the cars
ahead, but none of them did anything out of the ordinary either. She
waited until the last second to cut back across the right lane to the
feeder for the Ventura Freeway, then stayed in the eastbound lane
until it was almost too late before she cut across the painted lines
to the westbound ramp. She looked into the mirror again, not to
confirm that he was still chasing her but to be sure that no other
car could have followed him.

She drove westward until she saw
the telephone with the blue “177” painted above it, then
turned on her emergency flashers and coasted along until she made it
to the shoulder and stopped twenty feet past the call box. She got
out of her car and walked to the spot where she had aimed her
directional microphone and camera. She saw his headlights after five
seconds, then the turn signal, and in a moment he was rolling up
along the shoulder of the road to stop behind her.

He swung his door open on the
traffic side, got out as though he were invulnerable to getting
clipped, and walked up to her. His arms were out from his sides, but
he was carrying something in his hand. She stepped backward to the
door of her car. He saw her move and seemed to understand that she
was preparing to bolt. He set the object on the ground and stepped
back.

Jane kept her eyes on him as she
stepped forward and picked it up. It was a small box with a metal
hoop and a thumb switch. She recognized that it was a hand-held metal
detector like the ones they used in airports when somebody set off
the walk-through model. She ran it over herself from head to foot,
then tossed it to him and he did the same, turning around so she
could see there was nothing stuck in his belt. The little box didn’t
beep.

Barraclough’s eyes scanned
the area around him in every direction, returning to her face
abruptly now and then to see if she reacted. He said, “Mind if
I look in your car?”

“Go ahead,” she
said. “Mind if I look in yours?”

The mysterious smile returned.
“No.” He watched her as he took a step toward her rented
car. She never moved. He said, “You driving or am I?”

She said, “I’m not
getting into a car with you.”

He looked around him again, as
though this meant he needed to do a better job of searching the
middle distance for witnesses. He said, “What made you panic
back there?”

“That’s not what I
want to talk about. I say it was a trap, you say it wasn’t, I
say you’re a liar.”

His smile seemed to grow a
little. “What do you want to talk about?”

“You’ve been chasing
Mary Perkins, I’ve been hiding her. Now I’m ready to sell
her.”

He squinted a little as he
studied her face. “Why?”

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

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

“No, you won’t,”
she said simply. “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.”

Barraclough tilted his head a
little to watch her closely. “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.”

“That’s true,”
he said.

She took a deep breath and blew
it out. She had done it. He had agreed on tape that he was going to
take the money and kill her. “This is a one-day sale,”
she said. “Tomorrow she goes up for auction. You want her or
not?”

“I want her.”

“The price is three
million in cash. You hand it over and I give her up three weeks
later. I know you’ll mark it, so I need time to pass it on
before you start tracing.”

A laugh escaped him abruptly, as
though a small child had surprised him by saying something
unintentionally profound. “Done,” he said. “Of
course, that’s assuming I get to see her in person so I know
you can deliver.”

“You can,” said
Jane. “She’ll be along any minute.”

“Here?” he said. She
could see his mind working. He wanted to get back to his car to
retrieve the weapon he had hidden, but he had not yet thought of a
way to do it without Jane’s noticing.

“There,” said Jane.
She pointed across the ten lanes of the freeway at the white car just
like hers gliding onto the shoulder on the eastbound side. “That’s
her now.” Mary Perkins’s car rolled to a stop just at the
spot Jane had shown her. “She’ll get out of the car so
you can see her. Then she’ll pick up something I left for her
in the bushes over there. She thinks you’re a wholesaler who
sells me stolen credit cards and licenses.” Jane watched
Barraclough’s hands. “You’re not trustworthy, so I
can’t pay you until she has them.” Mary got out of the
car and stepped over the barrier into the bushes.

Jane let her eyes flick up to
Barraclough’s face. “Well?”

“Hard to tell,” he
said. “She’s so far away.”

“Nice try,” she
said. “I saw you start to drool the second she opened the door.
You get one more peek.”

Mary Perkins came back out of
the bushes. Jane could see the bulge of the tapes from the video
camera and the recorders in her purse. Mary nodded and Jane stepped
away from Barraclough, closer to her car. Now was the time when it
would occur to him to hold her.

Barraclough was smiling again.
His arm straightened and he waved happily at Mary Perkins.

“What are you doing?”
Jane snapped.

He turned to face her, but his
arms were poised in front of him. He looked like a fisherman about to
make a grab for a hooked fish. “Just waving to the lady. We
don’t want her to think I’m not a friendly wholesaler.”

Jane’s body tensed, not
certain whether to run for the car or attack him. He was signaling
someone, and it wasn’t Mary. What had she missed? She jerked
her head to the left to look back up the freeway – and saw the
man Barraclough must have been waving to. He stepped out of the
bushes and ran back along the shoulder just at the entrance ramp. In
another two steps he disappeared around the curve.

He must be getting into another
car that had been idling out of sight beside the entrance ramp. Now
she saw its lights come onto the freeway and they seemed to jerk
upward into the sky before they swung around and leveled on the
pavement ahead of it. The car accelerated toward Jane and
Barraclough, its right tires already on the shoulder as though it
were going to obliterate them.

Jane waved her arm at Mary.
“Go!” she shouted.

Mary seemed to be transfixed by
the sudden arrival of an unexpected car. She stared across the ten
lanes of the freeway and watched the red car rushing up the westbound
side toward Jane, knowing it was time for her to leave, but not
knowing how.

Jane screamed. “Go! Go!
It’s a trap!” She started backing toward her parked car,
the adrenaline making her legs push too hard so she half walked and
half danced, trying to watch the car bearing down on her and Mary and
Barraclough at the same time.

Mary dropped her keys, bobbed
down to pick them up, then got into her car. Jane took one more look
at Barraclough and hurried to the door of her own car.

The headlights of the car
Barraclough had summoned dipped down as it decelerated suddenly,
moved past Barraclough, and then pulled over. As it slowly moved up
behind Janes car, her heart began to pound. Its headlights went out,
the driver’s door opened an inch, and the dome light came on.
The one in the passenger seat was Timothy Phillips.

Barraclough opened the other
door, pulled the little boy out onto the shoulder of the freeway and
yelled, “Hey, Jane! How about a trade? Is he worth it?”

These were the first words loud
enough for Mary to hear across the freeway. She started the engine
and shifted to Drive, but her eyes were on the activity going on
across the freeway. The little boy must be the one Jane had told her
about. Who else could he be? He was scared, straining to get closer
to Jane Whitefield, but the big man in the white shirt had a grip on
his thin arm and it was hurting him. Anybody could see it was hurting
him. Headlights settled on them, grew brighter and brighter, and then
flashed past. Were those drivers blind? Couldn’t they see that
something horrible was happening?

The knowledge slowly settled on
Mary that none of the drivers knew who the big man was, and you had
to know that. They probably thought he was a father who was afraid
his son might stray too close to the lane where their cars were
speeding past. There was only one person here who had any idea of
what she was looking at.

Mary turned off the engine, got
out of the car, and stood on the shoulder of the road. She could see
Jane ten lanes away, caught for a second in the headlights of a
speeding car, staring back at Mary, her mouth wide open and her arm
in motion, waving her back into the car. Her voice reached Mary
faintly across all the lanes, but whatever it was saying was only a
distraction.

Mary was concentrating, so there
was no room for Jane’s voice. She waited for a moment while a
truck barreled past and the hot, sulfurous wind from its passing tore
at her clothes and stung her face. Then she stepped onto the hard
pavement of the freeway. She walked at a normal pace. She never
stopped to wait on the dotted line between two lanes, because
anything that was not in motion might blend in. It would take only a
second of blindness for a driver going sixty miles an hour to travel
eighty-eight feet and kill her. She made it across five lanes to the
middle island and rested her fear for a moment inside the barrier
before she could face walking across another five lanes.

Now Jane was much closer, and
Mary could see the anguish on her face. “Run! Go back!”
Jane shouted. Mary was disappointed. Jane simply didn’t
understand.

Mary looked across the last five
lanes at Barraclough. They stared into each other’s eyes, and
she could see that he understood. He pushed the little boy back into
the red car that had brought him, then ran back along the edge of the
freeway and got into his big gray car.

Mary Perkins’s eyes never
left Barraclough after that. She could see him glancing in his
rearview mirror as he pulled out into the traffic, then crossed over
one lane, then another, then another. He had already gone far past
her, but she walked in his direction patiently, watching him take the
last two lanes and stop far ahead of her on the center island where
she walked. Then she saw his back-up lights come on, and he began to
move in reverse on the center margin to meet her. She had never seen
anybody drive backward so fast. Oh, yes, he had once been a
policeman. They all learned how to do things like backing up on
freeway shoulders.