exchange for three hundred dollars and a day’s excursion. She had paid him five, because she had liked him, and another two hundred as a finder’s fee, because he had introduced her to three other people who were willing to take the same excursion.
She leafed through the cards for young women. The selection was much broader and richer. She had almost decided to give Diane J. Rabel to Rita when she remembered another one. It was a license she had obtained when she had invented Michael Daily. This one was for Karen Daily. It had occurred to her that if she ever had an elderly runner, he might come with a younger companion. She had obtained identification for a younger female the following week, and named her Karen Daily. She hunted through the stack until she found her, and added her to the pack of identities.
Jane arranged the sets of papers and cards into little packets and slipped them into a slit she had cut in the lining of her purse, then looked at the metal box again. She decided that it would be wise to take an extra five thousand dollars with her. The move-in expenses in Santa Fe and buying the Explorer had seriously depleted her credit, and her cash supply was low. She took one thick bundle of hundreds out and slipped that into her purse too. Then she faced the last decision.
There was something at the bottom of this box, wrapped in a cloth. It had been here since the day when she had said good-bye to Bobby Ortiz six years ago. By then he had not been Bobby Ortiz for at least a month: he looked a bit different, he had a different name, and he was living quietly in Cincinnati, far from the troubles he had brought on himself in Modesto, California. She had not even known that he had it until the moment when she was about to leave. He had simply handed her a paper bag and said, “You told me that if I went with you I would have to leave everything from the old days. I kind of forgot something.” When she had gotten into her car, she had opened the bag and confirmed what the weight of it had told her. Inside was a nine-millimeter Beretta Cougar with two extra magazines.
Jane had left the gun in the safe-deposit box all this time for an emergency, but she had known even then that the kind of emergency that could be solved by putting a hole in someone never came with that kind of warning. If she could see it coming, she could probably evade it.
There had been occasions when she had considered it necessary to carry a gun, but she had noticed that guns had an unexpected effect. People—even thoughtful people—behaved differently when they were armed. She had noticed that her eyes remained sharp, her mind alert, but what they were doing was studying and evaluating each change in the configuration of people and events to recognize the one when she would need to pull the gun from its hiding place and fire it. That became the only decision: the gun was suddenly the only strategy.
She decided that this occasion, too, was not right. Her survival depended on unpredictable movement and fading into the scenery. If she could finish the trip without being noticed, she had nothing to worry about, and if she couldn’t, then stopping the car to produce a pistol was not likely to help.
She watched the bank teller slip the box back into its slot, then took her key and walked out of the bank. It was only nine-fifteen, but she felt more impatient than ever to be out of Chicago. She had not put enough distance behind her since her rental car had been traced to Milwaukee, and Chicago had a deep, ugly history of Mafia infestation.
She made her way back to the parking lot, pulled out her ticket, and watched the parking attendant run across the lot toward her. He was a young black man with his hair combed straight back on his head and a blue vest with a button on it that said, DON’T LAUGH. YOU COULD BE CRAZY TOO SOME DAY. He ducked into his little wooden shelter, hung the keys of the car he had just parked on his pegboard, then reached for Jane’s keys just as a car pulled into the lot behind him and honked its horn.
When he involuntarily jerked his head to see who was honking the horn, his eyes widened for an instant, and then the lids came down again. “I’m sorry. Just be a second. Got to get that car right away.” He trotted to the car and opened the door so the driver could get out. Jane stood by the wooden shelter and held the proceedings in the corner of her eye. The driver was a big man about forty years old, wearing a fawn-colored sport coat that was unbuttoned to make room for a premature paunch. He got out and stood for a moment to watch the parking attendant slip behind the wheel, drive the blue Lincoln Town Car twenty feet ahead, then back it up to swing into a space right behind the little shelter.
Jane could see that this was a place of honor: the spot closest to the sidewalk, where the attendant could bring it out in seconds. There was no chance that as the day got busier, another car would be parked in front of it. The attendant couldn’t help having his eyes on it, because he had to pass it to dispense tickets or accept money. Jane watched only long enough to be sure that the attendant didn’t go through the charade of burdening the big man with a ticket, then turned her head away so that even her profile would be hidden while the man walked off down the street. She ached to get out of here. Everything about the man smelled to her like Mafia.
As the attendant returned and reached for her keys on the pegboard, Jane’s eyes fell on the inner wall of the little shelter. The attendant had a collection of pinups pasted to the wall. At the top were two portraits of women lounging on beds with blissful smiles. Beneath them, at eye level, were four snapshots. Two were of a fully dressed young black woman, and the third was of the same woman with the attendant. His wife? Girlfriend? Below the snapshots was an anomaly—a black-and-white drawing. Jane took a step closer. The woman had long, black hair like the others, but it wasn’t his girlfriend. It was Jane. She could see writing beneath. “Five feet eight or nine, 130 pounds, pretty.” Then, scrawled in pencil along the top, she saw a telephone number.
Jane reached into her purse, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and stepped to the left side of the exit as the attendant pulled up. As he got out, she handed him the money without looking at him, muttered, “Thanks,” and got into the car.
The attendant said, “It’s only five.”
She said, “Keep it,” pushed the button to raise the tinted window, and drove out of the lot. She put three blocks behind her, then took last-minute turns at the next three corners, watching her mirror. She found the entrance to Interstate 90, drove north for ten minutes, and got off at North Avenue.
Jane drove west for a few blocks toward the strip mall. She was sure that she had not been followed, but the drawing still frightened her. It was a fairly good likeness—good enough for the man in the Seattle-Tacoma airport, anyway. She knew that she had just been seen by two men who had looked at the drawing, and neither had apparently recognized her, with her haircut and glasses. But the sheer reach of the families terrified her.
The little delay at the parking lot had reminded her of how completely the Mafia was built into people’s everyday lives. Unless there was a fresh scandal, people didn’t even think about them. Maybe they were involved in this business or that one, and their extortion added ten cents to the price of a product. But maybe that was just a rumor, and the increase was just because of a strike, or a rise in the price of raw materials. You were never going to find out, and you couldn’t do anything about them any more than you could control the weather, so you bought the product at the new price and didn’t waste any time thinking about it.
Jane drove past the little strip mall and studied it. The stores were still the same: the doughnut shop, the hair-and-nail salon, the small hardware store, the dry cleaner, the mailing service, and the ever-changing restaurant. This time, the restaurant was Chinese. Last time, it had been Cuban, and before that, barbecued ribs and chicken. There was something about the building’s position on the planet that made each tenant open a restaurant and fail, always to be replaced by another tenant with a restaurant.
Jane was used to coming here once or twice a year to visit the rented mailbox of the Furnace Company and pay her bill. The Furnace Company was a genuine corporation she had formed eleven years ago. She was neither the sole owner nor the sole officer, but none of the others happened to be made of flesh. When the Furnace Company received mail, it was forwarded to another box in Buffalo.
The Furnace Company had been a useful entity. It allowed her to request credit checks and background information on people without raising eyebrows, gave her another mailing address with an extra layer of anonymity, and had given her a few easy ways of providing histories for runners. Sometimes she requested references or school records for employees of other companies, changed the names, and passed them on. Sometimes she had presented the Furnace Company as an executive-search service that had already checked all references.
Jane drove around the block and pulled into her favorite parking space on the little strip of asphalt. She stepped into the mailing service and waved to Dave, the owner.
“Hey, Mary!” he said. “About time you got here. What the hell did you do with your hair?”
“Why, did you want it?” she asked.
Dave rubbed his bald head thoughtfully. “Nah. Doesn’t go with my body. You got a shipment back here.”
She moved to the counter and watched as he walked to the corner of the back room. She could see the ten
