Dance for the Dead (36 page)

The three looked at each other.
There were a few shrugs and head tilts, but no smirks. The part about
killing seemed to have raised their level of interest considerably.
She had forgotten for a moment about seventeen-year-old boys. There
had never been a moment in human history when anybody hadn’t
been able to recruit enough of them for a war. She reached into her
purse again and said, “The per diem is in advance.” She
started to count the bills in front of them.

The one in the middle said to
the one on the right, “You want to use your car or mine?”

“You have two?”
asked Jane.

“Yeah,” said the one
in the middle.

“Use them both and you
each get an extra hundred.”

Mary was leaning against the
tiled wall of the shower stall in the big first-floor bathroom of the
farmhouse. They had finally left her alone, her right wrist
handcuffed to the shower head so that she could never quite sit down.
She tried to stand on her own, but she felt faint and unsteady. This
was probably why they had chained her that way. If she fell she would
hurt her arm, but she probably couldn’t kill herself by hitting
her head on the tiles.

When she looked down at her legs
she could see the bruises were already a deep purple, and the welts
were red and swelling. She had tried to kick out at them, but they
had not grabbed her or tried to wrestle with her; they had simply
clubbed the leg that came up at them, and when she kicked out again
they would hit it again, until finally she couldn’t get the leg
to kick.

The two men had not spoken, even
to each other. They went about it in a cold, impersonal silence, like
people in a slaughterhouse working on an animal. They left the hood
on her head the first time, but not because they didn’t want
her to see their faces; it was because they had no desire to see
hers. Desire had nothing at all to do with it. The next time, when
she was thinking that maybe it was better that she couldn’t
breathe, because dying was just going to sleep and being awake was
every nightmare she had ever had, they took the hood off. She could
see them doing it, their faces intent but detached, whatever they
were feeling not comprehensible to her as emotion. Their faces were
not like the faces of men having intercourse, but unselfconscious and
empty, as though no other human being were present. She had always
thought of rape as a crime of hatred, or the sick pleasure of
exerting power over somebody who was helpless. But this didn’t
seem to bring them even that feeling of triumph; they were just using
what was there because it was there.

At first she cried and screamed.
She said, “No, please. You’re hurting me.” The one
who was holding her tightened his grip, but the one who was doing it
to her didn’t pay any attention at all. He didn’t seem to
be able to understand. Her voice was the call of a bird or the bark
of a dog, something he could hear but that carried no meaning at all.

When they left they chained her
to the shower, still naked. She tried to take what was left of
herself and put it back together, but she couldn’t. She was
torn apart, a lot of fragments that she couldn’t seem to
collect. After a long time she started to think again. Her mind kept
ticking off an automatic inventory of hurts and injuries that kept
being the same over and over, as though it were establishing the
boundaries. Then she began to imagine herself telling Barraclough
what they had done to her, and saw him decide to kill them for it.
She was valuable. But even while she thought about it, there was a
small, nagging voice somewhere just below hearing to remind her that
she wasn’t important. She wasn’t really worth anything at
all.

It was midnight when Farrell
emerged from the back door of the building. He walked a hundred feet
to the rear of the parking lot, opened the trunk of a dark sedan at
the rear of the lot, took out a large hard-sided briefcase, and then
turned and walked back into the building.

Jane waved to her lookout and
pointed at the front entrance, then started her car. A moment later,
Farrell came out the front door. A young man drove up to the curb in
a white station wagon, got out, and stood on the sidewalk while
Farrell took his place behind the wheel. Jane watched the boys she
had hired. The lookout had been in the narrow space between two
buildings, and already he was gone. He had waited long enough to see
the car Farrell was driving, and now he was in the back of the
building getting into his companion’s car.

When Farrell started off and
turned right, she saw the boys’ black Trans-Am already on the
right street, crossing the intersection after him. The second car, a
sedate-looking brown Saturn, only joined in after she had counted to
eight. She turned around in order to avoid passing the office
building, went down the side street, and joined the convoy three
blocks later.

She followed the three cars onto
the freeway, fell back a quarter mile, and watched the Saturn’s
taillights. She had given the boys a short course on following cars
while they waited for Farrell to move, and now she watched them work.
On a freeway all they had to watch Farrell for was an exit. They
stayed well back from him. When there were packs of cars on the road
ahead they moved up and hid among them. They didn’t change
lanes when he did. They waited, showing a clear preference for the
right lane, where it was difficult for him to notice them, and other
cars entered the freeway and slipped in to put a new set of
headlights in his mirror for a few minutes.

After they were north of the
city and the traffic thinned out a bit, the second car passed the one
in front and stayed there until it was possible that Farrell was
getting used to the new set of headlights, and then it dropped to the
rear again. Jane drove conservatively, watching the taillights of her
decoys and holding herself in reserve. She was beginning to feel a
little more hopeful now. Every minute that passed, Farrell would come
closer to accepting the conclusion that he had not been followed.

Mary had been left alone in the
shower stall for hours. She had begun to spend long periods trapped
in her own mind. She would try to strengthen herself. “I did
this. I chose to trade my life for the life of a little boy. This is
the best thing that I have ever done. It’s the best that any
human being ever does. I’m past the decision, the part where
I’d have been weak if I had thought about it, so no matter what
happens to me now, I can’t fail. I can do this.” But
there was another feeling, one that didn’t respond in its own
words. It was just like an echo that revealed the hollowness of the
sounds Mary was making. She was a fraud. She was not brave enough. It
was self-deception. She had stepped off a cliff and now as she was
falling she was regretting it more every second. Then she would
wonder. Priests said that if a person made a pure unselfish act of
contrition at the very last moment, she would be forgiven, her whole
life validated retroactively. But what if she did make the promise,
the sacrifice, and then wanted to take it back much more sincerely
with every single breath? She wished she had died before she had ever
had that moment of madness.

Then there were sounds outside
the door, men’s voices, big heavy feet on the floorboards, and
she tried to stand without holding on to the wall, but she couldn’t.
It wasn’t that she was hurt, but her muscles didn’t want
to contract when her mind willed them to. They were quivering and
weak.

When the door swung open she
felt an impulse to scream, but even her throat was paralyzed. Just a
harsh, raspy “Huh” came out. The man came into the room
and closed the door. It was Barraclough. She cringed and tried to
disappear into the corner of the shower as he walked toward her. She
tried to cover herself with the one arm she could use.

After a moment she realized that
he was paying no attention to her. He walked across the tile floor,
looked around, and stopped. He seemed only to be making sure she was
alive. Then to her surprise he turned to go.

“Wait,” she said.
“Don’t you want to talk?” She was fighting the fear
that he was going out to let the other two come in again.

He said, “What do you
want?”

“They raped me,” she
tried to say, but her face seemed to collapse and shrivel inward, and
she couldn’t control her voice, so it broke into a sob.

“Don’t waste my
time,” he said. It sounded like a warning. It didn’t
matter what they did to her because she wasn’t a regular person
anymore, a being who had the right to keep anything as hers, even her
body. She had thrown her rights away. She was a criminal and she had
been caught. She longed to change that, or at least hide it from him.

“Look, this has been a
mistake. You seem to think I’m somebody I’m not. I didn’t
do anything or hurt anybody.” She pointed to the door. “They
hurt me. But I can understand; they didn’t know they weren’t
supposed to. I’ll just forget that it ever happened. Like a bad
dream. We’ll never mention it again. You let me go –
anywhere you like. Drive me someplace so I don’t know where
this house was.”

He looked at her with an
expression that froze her. It came from a vast distance. It seemed to
detect everything at once: her abject fear, her guilt, her lying –
no, not just that she was lying but that she was a liar. His
expression showed that he knew all of it, and that it inspired
disgust and contempt. For the first time he even seemed to
contemplate her naked body, but not with lust. It was the way a god
would look down at it from a great height. She was dirty, bruised,
covered with sweat, and throbbing with pain, a small, unremarkable
female creature who would have been unappetizing at any time but was
now filthy and cowering.

It made her desperate, as though
she were standing alone on a shore and the ship was drifting farther
away.

“I’m not naive, and
I know you aren’t. Sure, I have money. That’s what you
want, and I’ve got it. You seem to forget, I didn’t get
caught. I came to you. Why do you suppose I did that? I know you want
some money from me, but I also want something from you. I took lots
of banks for lots of money while the time was right. And I wasn’t
alone. I know people you haven’t even heard of who took a whole
lot more than I did. I can bring them to you. I can deliver them
here.”

His expression didn’t
change, and it made her more desperate.

“You’d really be
making a mistake to waste a resource like me.” She was sweating
and horrified at how unconvincing she sounded, but she couldn’t
stop, could only go on like a drowning swimmer. “I took the
Bank of Whalen for six million dollars on a piece of land I’d
bought for half a million a month before. I’m a moneymaker.
When I bought out Harrison Savings, I used their own money to
leverage an option on a controlling interest and then made the bank
pay back the loan as an operating cost. I can do all of it again.”
His face didn’t change. “I can do new things because a
person who knows how to make money will always know.”

When he turned toward the door
and took a step, she tried to stop talking, but she couldn’t.
“If you don’t want to get into business, I understand.
You want it quick and clean and simple. So take me to a bank. Any
major bank can do an electronic transfer. I’ll get the money,
hand it over, and everybody can go away.”

He was at the door now, and she
waited for him to turn and look back at her so that she could read
his features. Maybe there would be something false in his expression
to let her know that he didn’t really intend to kill her. He
opened the door without hesitation and walked out.

Jane drove through the night
thinking about the station wagon far ahead of her. She knew all of
the reasons Farrell had chosen it. There was something benign about
station wagons. The drivers were people who hauled kids around and
had houses in the suburbs. They were also useful because if you put a
good tarp down in the cargo bay you could carry a fairly stiff corpse
without breaking any joints or doing any cutting.

Maybe Mary had already broken
and told them how to get her money. It took time to do that to a
person, but she wasn’t coming into this fresh. She was already
exhausted and disoriented when she first saw Barraclough. She had
been in prison for a month, and then spent the next month running and
hiding, getting burned out of a house, and then running some more.
The belief that had been nurtured in the human brain that a person
could endure physical and psychological torture without revealing
secrets was probably accurate. The notion that more than one person
in a thousand could do it was idiotic.

Mary had one advantage. She was
smart enough to know that within an hour of the moment when
Barraclough had her money, she would die. It might make her hold out
for an extra couple of hours. There was no doubt in Jane’s mind
that at some point Barraclough would make dying seem like an
attractive alternative to whatever was happening to Mary, but first
she would offer all of the stalls that she could imagine –
lies, promises, con games. As long as she kept trying new ones
instead of giving in and telling the truth, she would keep breathing.

Farrell had driven deep into the
San Joaquin Valley.

Some time in the past hour the
signs marking ways to go east to Bakersfield and Tulare had ended and
been replaced by signs for Fresno. Suddenly Jane caught the flashing
of tail lights ahead as the two follower cars tried to slow down
without getting closer to Farrell’s station wagon. They slowed
to forty and Jane let herself glide up behind them in time to see
Farrell turning off the highway.

She watched the first car take
the exit ramp to go up the road after Farrell. The sign at the top of
the ramp said men-dota 20. When Farrell stopped at the lighted island
of a gas station, the boys drove past, then pulled over to wait a
quarter mile down the road while he filled up his tank. Jane drove up
the road, stopped ahead of the boys, and kept her eyes on Farrell’s
car as she hurried to the driver’s window. She held out a
handful of hundred-dollar bills. “Here,” she said. “This
is far enough. Pay your buddies.”