Free Dance for the Dead by Thomas Perry

steps across the waiting area, around the
corner, and gone.
    Jane needed to keep their
attention on her, so she stood up and walked toward the gate. She sat
down in the closest seat she could find to the gate and held her sign
in her lap. She felt her heart begin to beat more slowly. Now time
had a little knot in it. and the longer the rest of it took the
better. The men were convinced that Mary Perkins’s plane was
about to arrive, but she was already on her way down to the
car-rental counter.
    A woman much like the one who
had presided over the arrival of Jane’s flight announced,
“Flight 907 from Los Angeles will be arriving at Gate 12 in
approximately four minutes.” Jane could already see the lights
of the plane shimmying along at the end of the runway. She kept her
head motionless so the two men wouldn’t get the urge to move
again. She could see that the plane was a big one, and this improved
her chances considerably.
    The plane slowly rolled to the
terminal and nuzzled up to the doorway. The ground crew chocked the
wheels, the boarding tunnel extended a few feet to touch the
fuselage, and the engines shut down. People near Jane began to stand
up and congregate near the doorway. Most of the passengers flying
into McCarran were strangers, so the crowd of relatives and friends
was small.
    Jane stood among them. She held
up the mary perkins sign while she watched the first few passengers
come out. There were some middle-aged couples, some men traveling
alone, a couple of grandmothers. Then there were about ten people of
both sexes who seemed to be the age of college students, and she
remembered there was a college here. Then she saw a pair of women in
their early thirties, and one of them was blond.
    She had been cradling the mary
perkins sign under her chin, and now she flipped the sign over
without letting the move be visible from behind. She stepped out
where the two women could not help seeing her, and tried to look at
them winningly. They read her new sign:
    PRIVATE LIMO: ANY HOTEL, THREE
DOLLARS.
    The blond woman stopped and
asked, “Three dollars for both of us, or three each?”
    Jane smiled. “If you’re
both going to the same place, I’ll take you for four.”
    The blonde said, “Caesar’s.”
    “No sweat,” said
Jane.
    The three women walked down the
concourse quickly.
    Jane didn’t look behind
her to see if the men were following. She knew they were. She said,
“You’ve been to Vegas before?”
    The blonde had appointed herself
to do the talking. “Once in a while. Just when we get really
sick of behaving ourselves. We gamble, stay up late, and never grade
a single paper.”
    “You’re teachers?”
    “Yes,” said the
other one, who had curly brown hair. “As if you couldn’t
tell by looking.”
    Jane felt guilty about what she
was going to do next, but the truth was that both of them were
attractive in a scrubbed-and-deodorized way. “No,” she
said. “Everybody comes to Vegas. I just drive them around. Once
you’re here, you’re whoever you say you are – at
least until your money’s gone. I wouldn’t have guessed
teachers, though. Most people wouldn’t.”
    “Sure,” said the
blonde.
    “Really. Those two guys
who gave you the wall-to-wall and roof-to-foundation when you got off
the plane. I bet they don’t think you’re teachers.”
    The quiet one said, “That’s
a laugh.” As though to prove it, she laughed.
    Jane had put the itch in them,
and that was enough. At some point in their walk to the baggage area,
each of them would turn and look at the two men, trying very hard and
very clumsily to be sure she wasn’t caught at it. Looking had
nothing to do with real interest. It didn’t matter if they were
nuns, or lesbians in the tenth year of a lifelong relationship. If
they were human, they would look. The idea that they were being
watched might frighten them or disgust them or make their weekend,
but they would look, and when they did, the two men would be