Free Blood Money by Thomas Perry Page B

when she was old.”
    Jane said, “Bernie, what do you want?”
    “He’s all I have left. I have to provide for him. If I could give him all the mob’s money, I would do it. But how can I? If a man like Vincent suddenly appears on the horizon with more money than most states have, what happens? There’s no good way to have that kind of money all at once. He would set off all the trip wires the government has set up to catch untaxed money. And what would he do if he had it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I do, because he’s no different from the others. He’d try to make himself boss of bosses. He would get himself killed.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Save my son.”
    “What does saving him mean?”
    The old man stood up and went to the door. “It means figuring something out.”
    Jane watched him disappear, then heard his footsteps receding down the hallway. She sat still for ten minutes, thinking about what she had heard, her eyes turned, unfocused, toward the clock beside the bed. Slowly, she remembered that the red numbers on the digital display meant something. It waslate, and she had to sleep. She turned off the lights and lay on the bed.
    For a few minutes, her mind was agitated with strange images, things that had been waiting in the back of her memory to jar and clash and keep her from sleep. She fought them by concentrating on Carey. She pictured him in the living room of the house, just going off to work. This time he was a little late—the digital clock said so—and his long legs took the distance across the carpet in fewer steps than he could have in real life, when she was awake. He stopped and smiled at her, then closed the door, and Jane passed into deeper sleep.
    Suddenly, her breath caught in her throat. The water. She had left the bathtub running. How could she have been so stupid? Jane ran up the stairs to the second-floor landing. She could feel the smooth, curved wood of the railing on the palm of her hand as she grasped it to make the turn up the hallway. She rushed into the bathroom and reached for the faucet, but it was already turned off. The water was high in the tub, but it was still and glassy.
    She gazed down into it, and she realized that the white she was seeing wasn’t the bottom of the tub. The water was cloudy, and it seemed to extend downward for a long distance. She touched it with her hand, and she found she could make a swirl in it, like smoke, but it was still not clear. She reached deeper to dispel the illusion, but she couldn’t feel the bottom of the tub. Jane sank to her knees and leaned downward. She submerged her arm to the elbow, then the bicep, and finally to the shoulder, but the bottom wasn’t there.
    Her fingers brushed against something, and she jerked back and withdrew her arm. She rose to her feet and backed away. She could tell that the thing she had touched had been coming up, and that it was big. In a moment she could make out the shape rising from the depths. It wasn’t merely floating to the surface, but somehow forming, coalescing as it rose closer, the chalky white particles adhering into the body of a man.
    First the nose, then the forehead and cheekbones, the eye sockets still filled with the milky liquid came up, and then thehead tilted and the shoulders emerged. His hair was blackening, the long strands on the sides slicked back by moisture and gravity, and he blinked to clear his eyes. He stood up, the white water pouring out of the sleeves and down from the bottom of his sport coat.
    “Danny?” said Jane. “Why?”
    His shoulders gave a twitch, and he reached to tug at his cuffs, the left one first, just as he had when he had put on his coat in the hotel room. He reached up to his collar and lifted his chin to adjust the necktie. She could see the four ugly holes in his shirt, where the bullets had hit. He stared at her. “You saw me die. I’m part of you now.”
    Jane’s eyes stung with sadness and regret. She had not been able to do