'You'd really be making a mistake to waste a resource like me.' She was sweating and horrified at how unconvincing she sounded, but she couldn't stop, could only go on like a drowning swimmer. 'I took the Bank of Whalen for six million dollars on a piece of land I'd bought for half a million a month before. I'm a moneymaker. When I bought out Harrison Savings, I used their own money to leverage an option on a controlling interest and then made the bank pay back the loan as an operating cost. I can do all of it again.' His face didn't change. 'I can do new things because a person who knows how to make money will always know.'
When he turned toward the door and took a step, she tried to stop talking, but she couldn't. 'If you don't want to get into business, I understand. You want it quick and clean and simple. So take me to a bank. Any major bank can do an electronic transfer. I'll get the money, hand it over, and everybody can go away.'
He was at the door now, and she waited for him to turn and look back at her so that she could read his features. Maybe there would be something false in his expression to let her know that he didn't really intend to kill her. He opened the door without hesitation and walked out.
Jane drove through the night thinking about the station wagon far ahead of her. She knew all of the reasons Farrell had chosen it. There was something benign about station wagons. The drivers were people who hauled kids around and had houses in the suburbs. They were also useful because if you put a good tarp down in the cargo bay you could carry a fairly stiff corpse without breaking any joints or doing any cutting.
Maybe Mary had already broken and told them how to get her money. It took time to do that to a person, but she wasn't coming into this fresh. She was already exhausted and disoriented when she first saw Barraclough. She had been in prison for a month, and then spent the next month running and hiding, getting burned out of a house, and then running some more. The belief that had been nurtured in the human brain that a person could endure physical and psychological torture without revealing secrets was probably accurate. The notion that more than one person in a thousand could do it was idiotic.
Mary had one advantage. She was smart enough to know that within an hour of the moment when Barraclough had her money, she would die. It might make her hold out for an extra couple of hours. There was no doubt in Jane's mind that at some point Barraclough would make dying seem like an attractive alternative to whatever was happening to Mary, but first she would offer all of the stalls that she could imagine - lies, promises, con games. As long as she kept trying new ones instead of giving in and telling the truth, she would keep breathing.
Farrell had driven deep into the San Joaquin Valley.
Some time in the past hour the signs marking ways to go east to Bakersfield and Tulare had ended and been replaced by signs for Fresno. Suddenly Jane caught the flashing of tail lights ahead as the two follower cars tried to slow down without getting closer to Farrell's station wagon. They slowed to forty and Jane let herself glide up behind them in time to see Farrell turning off the highway.
She watched the first car take the exit ramp to go up the road after Farrell. The sign at the top of the ramp said men-dota 20. When Farrell stopped at the lighted island of a gas station, the boys drove past, then pulled over to wait a quarter mile down the road while he filled up his tank. Jane drove up the road, stopped ahead of the boys, and kept her eyes on Farrell's car as she hurried to the driver's window. She held out a handful of hundred-dollar bills. 'Here,' she said. 'This is far enough. Pay your buddies.'
The boy protested. 'This can't be the end of the road.'
'For you it is.' she said, and stepped back to her car.
When Farrell had paid the gas station attendant and gotten back into his car, he drove a mile down the road to a motel. Jane watched him go into the lighted office, then come out with a key and go into a room. She pounded the steering wheel in frustration. This wasn't it. He was going to sleep Two hours before dawn Mary almost fell asleep. She woke up with a start, gripped by the feeling that she was falling, and slapped her hand against the side of the shower stall to hold herself up. The second day began for her at that moment. She was feeling a dread so deep that there was no difference between the dream and what was happening. The ground was coming up faster and faster, and when she hit she would be dead.
An hour after dawn she saw the doorknob turn. When the door opened she saw it was Barraclough. He was naked too this time. He unlocked her handcuff and left the key in it, turned on the shower, and held her under it for a long time, turning her this way and that as though he wanted to be sure she was clean enough. Then he turned her face to the wall. He never spoke. He just put his foot between hers and kicked each of her feet outward a little so she would know, and put a hand on her back. This time she did not struggle. She stood stiff and still like a dead person while he forced himself into her. After a few moments he slapped her buttock hard with one hand, then grasped her wet hair in the other and gave it three hard tugs. Slowly, a little at a time, she understood what he wanted and began to move her hips with him.
After he had finished with her, he turned on the shower again, washed himself as though she were not there, then turned the water off, refastened her handcuff, and left the room. As soon as the door closed, she began to cry. She had no idea how long it went on, because time was no longer something that had meaning. Finally the tears simply stopped and she was gripped by a fully formed, uncontrollable anger. She wanted them to come in. Her fingers clutched at the air, wanting to claw their eyes. Her jaw clenched, her mouth salivating at the thought of biting a throat and clinging to the man while the others tried to tear her loose.
The anger left her as abruptly as it had come, but as she leaned against the wall in the shower again she discovered that the anger had left something inside her. It was small and hard and clean like the scar from a burn. She studied it, touching it the way her tongue might touch a little sore in her mouth, over and over until it knew the place and the pain and the shape. She knew what she was going to do. Of all the people this might happen to, Mary had the best chance of carrying it off. She had a good head for numbers.
A few hours later Barraclough returned with the tape recorder. He plugged it in at the outlet by the sink for electric shavers, then turned it on. Mary watched him warily. Now must be the time when he was going to get her to talk. But then she heard a sound like the swish of a car going by, then several of them at once, then Jane's voice saying 'You've been chasing Mary Perkins, I've been hiding her. Now I'm ready to sell her.'
'Why?' That was Barraclough.
'I've been at this a long time. A lot of people would be dead without me.'
'I've heard that. Sometime I'll get you to give me a list.'
'No, you won't. Mary Perkins isn't the sort of person I want to risk my life for. She's not worth it. I gave her a chance and she disappointed me. I know that she's got a lot of money. You seem to think you can get it. I'm not interested in that kind of work.'
'You know what will happen when I have her?'
'You'll end up with her money. I also know that if you have her. she's not coming back to ask me how it happened.'
Barraclough stared at Mary for a moment, then turned and walked away into the rest of the house, the part where people who were free could walk.
Mary tried to laugh. She wanted Barraclough to hear her laugh, but it was so low and empty that he couldn't have heard it. She knew why he had played the tape. She was supposed to think that Jane had really been selling her. But how could he expect her to believe that? She had been in on the plan from the beginning.
But then she thought about what she had heard, and she knew. He was playing it to let her know that Jane had caught him on tape, and that she had thrown the evidence away. She was so stupid that she had forgotten to leave the tapes in the car when she had gone to him. She had forgotten there were any tapes. He would have been caught and convicted of her kidnapping, rape, and murder except for her unbelievably stupid mistake. She felt burning humiliation and shame. She was going to die a horrible, slow, degrading, painful death and the last thing she would remember was that she had let her killer go free.
It was another hour before she moved beyond herself and thought about Jane. 'Mary Perkins isn't the sort of person I want to risk my life for.... I gave her a chance and she disappointed me.' The reason Jane sounded so convincing on the tape was that she was telling the truth. Mary knew how to lie, and she had lied the same way. 'She's not worth it.' Even Barraclough, who caught liars for a living, was fooled because the words were literally true. Then the last part came back to her. 'I know if you have her she isn't coming back...' That was true too. She was here, chained, injured, and hungry, and it was going to go on and on until she was dead.
For the next six hours Mary tried to work out a way to kill herself. The shower door had been taken out, and they had been too smart to leave the hinges. She experimented with the handcuff to see if there was a way she could get the chain across her throat to hang from the shower head, but the effort hurt her wrist terribly and there
