Free Dance for the Dead by Thomas Perry Page B

doorman
opened the back door for the two passengers while a bellman picked up
their suitcases. The doorman made a move to reach for Mary Perkins’s
door, but Jane stopped him. “She’s not getting out.”
    The blond woman said “Thanks”
to Jane, handed her seven dollars, and followed the suitcases toward
the lobby.
    Jane said to the doorman, “I
saw a couple of creeps pick those two out at the airport and follow
us. I didn’t want to scare them, but you might want to tell
Security.”
    The doorman said seriously,
“Yeah. Thanks. I’ll do it.” He went to his station
at the side of the door and picked up a telephone.
    Jane slipped behind the wheel
and started the car. “Keep your head down,” she said. “No
matter what happens, stay down and out of sight.” She watched
for the two men as she glided back along the driveway to the strip.
When she saw a dark blue car stop at the side of the building, she
kept it in the mirror until she saw the men from the airport get out.
They would waste the next few hours trying to find the two women in
the enormous hotel complex, then watch them for a while. They would
receive no help from anybody who worked at the hotel, and sooner or
later two or three polite men in dark suits who had been watching
them through the network of video cameras and the see-through mirrors
in the ceilings would ask them what they wanted.
    “Can I get up yet?”
asked Mary Perkins.
    “Yeah,” Jane said.
“I guess it’s okay now.”
    Mary Perkins sat up and looked
through the windshield. “That’s the airport up ahead. I
thought we were going to drive out.”
    “We’re not.”
    “Why not? It’s dark
and empty, and we could go a hundred.”
    Jane sighed. “It’s
the logical thing to do.”
    They returned the car to the
rental lot, walked into the terminal, and bought two tickets for the
next flight out. It happened to be to New York with a stop in
Chicago. They had to walk quickly to get to the gate in time. It was
almost three a.m. now, and any watchers would have had to be
disguised as furniture to escape Jane’s notice.
    As soon as they had taken their
seats, Mary Perkins whispered, “I can’t believe it. By
now those guys don’t know where they are, let alone where we
are.”
    “We’re alive,”
said Jane quietly. “Now I’m going to sleep. Don’t
wake me up until we’re in Chicago.”
    She closed her eyes and prepared
herself for the unpleasant experience of having the past few days run
through her mind all over again. There were a few bright, crackling
images that flashed in her vision, but they weren’t in order or
coherent, so they didn’t cause her much pain. After she had
dozed for a short time, she saw the fist coming around just before
she had flinched to take the force out of it. The spasmodic jerk woke
her up, but when she relaxed her muscles again, she dropped into a
deeper animal sleep that put her in darkness far out of reach of
recent memories.
     
5
     
    When
the plane began to descend, the pressure on Jane’s ears
increased and she woke up. The engines changed their tone, and she
pushed the button to let her seat back pop up again. The sleep had
left her feeling stiff in the shoulders, but she was alert. The Old
People believed that the place to obtain secret information was in
dreams. Sometimes a dream would be an expression of an unconscious
desire of the soul, and at other times a message planted there by a
guardian spirit. Those were two ways of saying the same thing. If
there were such a force as the supernatural, then the soul and the
guardian both would be supernatural. If there were no such force,
then the soul was the psyche, and the guardian spirit was just the
lonely mind’s imaginary friend.
    This time Jane could not
remember any impression that had passed through her mind in three
hours. Maybe that was the message from her subconscious: enough. She
had stored enough tragedy and violence in her memory during the past
few days to trip the