lobby. She had been in the habit of wearing business clothes to the plastic surgeon’s office. She had wanted to make the people there think she was a busy professional person, because being busy and prosperous seemed the same as being respectable. But now the disguise that had given her courage was making things worse. The high heels had always been just fine for getting out of a taxi cab and walking fifty feet to the waiting room, but now they were hurting her feet and making noises on the marble floor like a horse clopping down a cobblestone road. And the new sensitivity of the skin around her middle since the liposuction and tucks made her underclothes feel as though she were harnessed up to pull a carriage.
Janet kept her eyes ahead of her on the big glass doors across the lobby. A sliver of green made her hold her breath and stare, but when she saw it again, it was only the doorman in his green generalissimo’s uniform lurking outside the door. There didn’t seem to be a green car out there. Janet veered to the left a little so she could see the spot to the right of the door that was the logical place for the green car to be waiting, but she couldn’t achieve enough of an angle.
She quickened her pace, goading herself with the foolishness of taking the time to pay advance rent on her storage space. Her sudden reluctance to part with a pile of gewgaws too old and tasteless to keep in her home was going to get the dark woman killed, and then Janet. They both could have been out of Baltimore by now if she had only kept walking past that counter.
She reached the door and looked out, but the green car wasn’t in the courtyard. As she craned her neck to look toward the street beyond the portal, she felt the presence of someone behind her. She stepped aside to let them out the door.
The voice was almost in her ear. “Stay out of the doorway.”
It was the woman. She took Janet’s arm and led her toward the steps leading up to the restaurants on the second floor. “What happened?” Janet whispered.
“They were nastier about letting me lose them a second time.” She changed her direction slightly, and they skirted the stairway, went out the door, and emerged on Light Street. “The car is down here.” She brought Janet down Pratt Street, then turned into a parking area for the Convention Center. The car was parked between two big vans.
Janet came closer. The rear window had a small, round puncture, a milky circle of pulverized safety glass, and around it, a radiating spiderweb of cracks. She knew instantly that it was a bullet hole, and she noticed that it was not on the left side, behind the driver’s seat. It was on the right, where they must have thought she was crouching. The dark woman acknowledged her thought.
“Don’t worry about that. Just get in. We’re taking too much time.”
Janet obeyed, wondering how anyone could not worry about that. She listened for some kind of assurance that what had caused the bullet hole was over, but none came. The car began to move away from the Inner Harbor, and she looked through the side and rear windows for the black car. What met her eyes were last glimpses of familiar sights—the National Aquarium, then the World Trade Center, and lots of other buildings that she had never been inside, but that she somehow felt she knew because she had driven past them so many times.
In minutes they were on the 295 expressway, then the 195, and every sign announced the approach of Baltimore/Washington Airport. But the dark woman pulled off the expressway and glided onto Dorsey Road, then stopped at a hotel near the southern edge of the airport.
“We’ll have to take a few quick precautions,” the dark woman said. “Come in.”
She hurried into the nearest wing of the hotel with Janet struggling to keep up, and moved down the carpeted hallway, then into a room. She hurried to the closet. “They’ve seen you, and they’d be fools not to have figured out you might be heading for the airport.”
“What can we do?”
“Get rid of everything they’ve seen, and show up a different way.” She laid some jeans and a sweater on the bed, then tossed a pair of thick-soled running sneakers on the floor. “Put these on.”
Janet put on the jeans and sweater, then sat on the bed to tie the sneakers, and the dark woman knelt on the bed behind her to braid her hair in a way she never wore it. “There’s an airport shuttle that stops at all the hotels along here. Maybe we can catch it. They’ll be expecting to see the car.”
The woman took a small suitcase out of the closet and opened it. She put Janet’s bag of money and her business suit and blouse into it. “Check the suitcase at the curb. You can’t carry a bag of money on a plane and not have them run it through the X-ray machine, and maybe look inside. After you get to Chicago, throw the clothes away. Once they’ve seen an outfit, it’s dangerous.”
Janet tried to look in the mirror over the bureau, but the woman took her arm and pulled her to the door. “It’ll have to do.”
As they walked down the hallway toward the reception area, Janet thought about her appearance. She had not been allowed to see whether it was attractive, but it certainly was better. The clothes had a different look, but also a different feel. The running shoes made her a couple of inches shorter, and they made her walk differently, too. The woman seemed to know dozens of little tricks and shifts and be able to put them into play so quickly that the effect was not a collection of small details, but a transformation.
The dark woman left her and went to the front desk. She spoke to the clerk, then looked up over the clerk’s head at the clock on the wall, and returned to Janet. “The shuttle bus is already due, so it should be here in the next minute or two.”
Janet said, “Are you coming with me?”
“No. The way to get past them is to lose everything they’ve seen—the car, the clothes, the hair, and me. They’ll be watching for two women, and once you’re in the building, there’s nothing I can do for you that the airport police can’t.”
“But the airport police don’t know I’m in danger.”
“Once you’ve checked your suitcase, go straight through the metal detectors. After that, whatever those men have in mind, at least it can’t involve guns or knives. Then duck into a ladies’ room and stay there until you hear the speaker announce that your flight is boarding. Walk directly to the gate and get on.”
Janet stared out at the driveway, watching for the shuttle bus, but that made each moment tick by and upset her. “I know this is none of my business, so you don’t have to answer.”
“If I can’t, I won’t.”
“What will you do next? If you’re in a hotel, you don’t live around here. Do you just get on a plane too?”
“The job’s not over yet.” The woman shrugged. “In a minute I’ll get back in the car and drive toward Baltimore. If they’re driving south toward the airport and see me coming in the northbound lane, there’s no way they can get to me, but they’ll think about it.”
“What will they think?”
“Either we didn’t go to the airport, and you’re still with me, or you’re already in the air. They’ll realize that either way, I’m the one to follow, so they’ll try, and fail.”
Janet saw the shuttle van pull up and stop at the curb. As the driver jumped out, she could see three or four people already inside. He ran to the door and said, “Airport?”
“Yes,” said the dark woman.
The driver snatched the suitcase and hurried to the van. Janet hugged the dark woman and whispered, “Thanks.”
“Go,” said the dark woman.
As Janet sat in the van beside a pair of elderly ladies, she could see the dark woman walking quickly toward the small green car to draw the killers away from her path.
As soon as the shuttle bus had safely made the turn onto the airport drive, the green car pulled away from the hotel. It moved along Dorsey Street for a half mile, then turned into the driveway of the Holiday Inn. The dark woman drove up to the front entrance, and two large men in their thirties got in.
The green car pulled away. As it passed under the Baltimore/Washington Parkway, the dark woman reached into her purse and produced a little Colt SF-VI revolver. She turned to the muscular man with blond hair sitting in the front seat beside her. “Get rid of this,” she said.
He took the pistol and put it into his coat pocket. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the bullet hole in the rear window. “What was that for, anyway?”
“To give her nightmares.” She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the top of the dark, curly head of the second man, who was bent forward as he ran his hand along the back of his companion’s bucket seat. “Don’t bother
