Read Blood Money for Free Online Page B

few minutes, no indication that they could have been followed. Rita had slouched in the front seat reading the newspaper Jane had given her at the hotel for a time, then fallen asleep. Every time Jane had glanced up at the mirror, she could see Bernie’s sharp, pale eyes staring ahead at the road. She said, “Bernie?”
    “Yeah, honey?”
    “Do you know where you want me to drop you off?” Jane saw Rita stir and sit up. The voices had awakened her.
    He said, “Someplace sort of on the small side. Not Cleveland or Cincinnati. How about Mansfield?”
    “How do I get there?”
    “How is he supposed to know?” said Rita. “The paper said he hasn’t been out of the house in, like, twenty years.”
    “He knows,” said Jane.
    Bernie said, “Stay on 90 until just before Cleveland, and then take 271 south. Stay on it, and it’ll change to 71. Keep going until you’re right outside Mansfield, then switch to 30. It’ll take us right into town.”
    Jane looked at Rita. “I found road maps in their trash at the hotel. That was what made me sure who it was.”
    “I don’t understand,” she said.
    “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I know how people running from trouble behave. A road map isn’t big, it isn’t heavy, and it isn’t incriminating. So who would throw one away?”
    Rita was silent, so Jane answered her own question. “A person who can look at it once and still have it later, in his memory. Bernie Lupus.”
    Rita sucked in a breath and turned to Bernie. “But you left them in the room. What if—”
    The old man said, “Don’t worry, kid. If the guys who are chasing you were as good as she is, we’d be riding in their car, not hers. Even if they played way over their heads and found the maps, what would they do with them? They’d spend two weeks looking for fingerprints on them that aren’t there.”
    Rita seemed skeptical, but she was silent. Jane drove the dark highway, thinking. She couldn’t get the sight of Danny’s face out of her mind. He had been moving along the hallway in a quick, stiff-legged gait, his face only slightly touched by worry, like a man in an airport hurrying to catch a plane. When he had seen the man step out of the doorway, there had been no question he had recognized him. He had made no attempt to avert his eyes and walk past, just stopped and died.
    She glanced at the old man in the back seat again. Thatwas what he was thinking about too. He stared into space, probably remembering some good qualities in the man that Jane would never know.
    She thought backward from that moment and remembered the bath. She had been running the water for her bath, heard the doorbell, turned off the water. It seemed to her now that at that moment, the floor beneath her feet had simply given way and dropped her here. She thought about Carey. What must Carey be thinking? He would be sick with worry. She had to find a way to call him. “Bernie?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Is there a good place to make a stop up ahead?”
    He considered for a moment. “There are some little towns. And there’s a rest stop on 271 just after the exit for Richfield, if you can hold out that long.”
    Jane glanced at her watch and drove on in silence, keeping the car moving. At this hour, the rest of the traffic was moving fast, the pace set by the long-distance truckers who planned to drive all night, pushing the speed limit a little while they could.
    When she reached the rest stop, she drifted past the small buildings that housed the rest rooms and the telephones before she began to search for a parking space. Near the entrance, everyone who pulled in would be glancing at all the spaces, and they would see her car. She wanted them to go past her car after the building, when they would be staring ahead at the ramp onto the highway, matching their acceleration to the speed of the traffic, and not noticing cars in the lot.
    Jane glanced at Rita. The girl had fallen asleep again, and now she sat up and