Blood Money by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

said. He was too quick, too perceptive.
    She took the phone from her ear, wanting to hang it up, but sure that he would know it had been intentional. “Yes,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.
    “If it’s somebody like that, how can you possibly expect to—”
    “I have to try.”
    “My God.” Carey’s voice was strained, incredulous. “It doesn’t matter to you who wins, does it?”
    “Of course it does,” she said. “But it matters more that somebody try.”
    He was silent for a few seconds. She heard him draw in a deep breath and blow it out slowly. “I don’t understand. Ormaybe I do, and I just don’t agree. I can’t pretend that I do. Arguing about it isn’t going to do any good, is it?”
    “No,” said Jane. “It isn’t.”
    “I love you, and I’ll be in the usual places waiting to hear from you. You already know that if I can do anything to help you, I will.”
    “Thanks, Carey,” she said. “I promise that the second I can come home, I will. I love you. Got to go.” She hung up.
    As she walked to the ladies’ room she felt guilty and sorry and, most of all, unsettled. What she had been doing from a year before they had met in college until the day they had married had always been hard to talk about. She had considered agreeing to marry him to be a promise to stop being a guide. But she had been away twice since then.
    The first time it had been Pete Hatcher—a man she had hidden before she had made the promise. One night she had learned he’d been spotted, and was running again. She had considered him unfinished business, and she had gone off to make him disappear for good.
    In the year after that, she and Carey had both gotten attached to the idea that making people disappear was just something she used to do when she was young and single. When they talked about the past, it was the shared past—things that had happened to both of them—or the distant past inhabited by parents, aunts, and uncles. But Richard Dahlman had changed that.
    Dahlman was a doctor, the older surgeon who had taken Carey on as a novice and taught him. Jane had never met him until the night when he had turned up at Carey’s hospital with a policeman’s bullet in his shoulder. Jane had plucked Dahlman out of the hospital and kept him invisible while she had tried to sort out how a respected surgeon had gotten into that kind of trouble. She had done it because Carey had asked her to.
    But apparently then, or in the months after that, something had quietly changed. It seemed that when Carey had asked her to make one more person disappear, he had forfeited—no, knowingly spent—his right to demand that she never do itagain. She had heard it in his voice tonight, and she didn’t like it.
    While she was listening to the girl’s story this afternoon, she had acknowledged that Carey would not be pleased. Then she had told herself that Carey would understand why this, too, was an exception. But to Carey, this had been merely the first instance to occur after he had given up his right to an opinion. Marriages were more fragile and complicated than she had ever imagined. Trouble came in quiet, unexpected ways. Things had to be said over and over again, all existing agreements renewed and clarified.
    When Jane returned to the car, the girl was half-turned in the front seat and the old man was leaning forward in the back, while they talked. As soon as the girl saw Jane coming, they stopped and both stared straight ahead. Jane wasn’t sure that she liked that, either. She got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove off onto the highway.
    It took only a few minutes for the old man to speak. “You know, I think I’m going to need a car. Mansfield is big enough to have a couple of used-car lots. Suppose Rita comes in with me to buy one. I’m old, so nobody is shocked if I’m old-fashioned enough not to trust banks. I pay cash. Rita makes a big deal about what a crazy old coot I am—you know,