Dance for the Dead by Thomas Perry Page B

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