Read Blood Money for Free Online Page A

were coming up in the elevator.
    Her ears were tuned to the sounds below her. She had seen two men carrying flowers. One was on his way up in the elevator, but it wasn’t out of the question that the other might come up one of the stairwells. She had to hope it wasn’t this stairwell. She heard no door opening below, so she kept moving, trying to keep the echoes of their own footsteps separate in her mind. Abruptly, it occurred to her that the footsteps on the stairs above her were wrong. She stopped and looked back. “Where’s Danny?”
    She saw Bernie’s look of surprise, then sudden understanding. He turned and began to climb back up, but Jane passed him, taking three steps at a time. “Keep going.”
    She reached the fifth-floor landing, quietly pushed the door open a couple of inches, and looked out. She saw Danny hurrying down the hallway toward her, carrying the two suitcases she had seen in the men’s room. He had gone back for the luggage. She felt a horrible frustration with him. Nobody was here looking for him or for Bernie. There was nothing in their suitcases that could have made any difference: everything was still in its package.
    It was only a second later that she saw the delivery man. He stepped out of Rita’s room carrying the basket of flowers with his back toward her. She pushed the door open and took a step toward him, but there was no time. He reached inside the basket and produced a pistol with a silencer on the end. There was a soft, spitting noise as he shot Danny in the chest. He fired three more times as Danny fell. Jane heard the sound of one of the other stairwell doors opening down the hallway, and pulled her door closed.
    She held her ear to the door until she heard the second man go past her, then pushed it open a crack. She heard their voices. “Danny Spoleto?” That one sounded surprised.
    “What was I going to do—wrestle with him? Help me get him in the room, quick. He probably stole her credit card and used it to get here.” She heard them dragging Danny’s body, then one of them said, “Call and tell them to bring up the trunk they were going to use for the girl.”
    The door to Rita’s room closed, and Jane could hear no more words. She closed the door to the stairwell and hurried downward. She found Rita and Bernie standing at the first-floor landing.
    “Where is he?” asked Rita.
    Jane met Bernie’s eyes. “He had to go out another way.” She could see that Bernie understood.
    Bernie held the girl in the corner of his eye and said, “We had a plan for this kind of thing. He knows where to go.” Then he looked at Jane, sadly.
    Jane said, “Let’s go.” This time, when she went out into the first-floor hallway, she held the door open until the others had passed her. Then she led the way down the residentialwing to a side entrance. She walked along the outer wall toward the back of the building, down the service driveway and across the street, then around the block to the car.
    She unlocked the doors, then looked up and down the street while Bernie got into the back seat and Rita sat in front. Jane started the car and drove a block, then said, “I want to get on the Thruway, and the entrance is on the other side of the hotel. Lie down, both of you. Don’t raise your heads until I tell you.”
    She drove past the hotel, and she could see that the florist’s truck had already left. In the loading zone in front of the lobby, a big black Lincoln Town Car had stopped. A blond woman in a smooth beige suit was standing beside it, watching a man pull a large trunk from the back of the car. Jane had time to see the man tip it up on its wheels and push it toward the lobby. The woman pivoted on her high heels to follow, and Jane was past.

3
    J ane drove along Lake Erie into the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, then on across the Ohio line. It was dark now, and she had watched the mirrors for three hours. There had been no car that had stayed in their wake more than a