Dance for the Dead by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

the
keys of the computer and waited for the machine to print out the
ticket, she noticed his eyes come up, rest on Jane’s face for
an instant, and then move away too fast. Jane explained, “I had
a little car accident yesterday. Some idiot took a wide left turn on
La Cienega and plowed right into me.” The last time she had
looked, the makeup had covered her injuries well enough, but with the
heat and the hurry, the scrapes and bruises must be showing through.
    “It must have been…
painful,” said the man.
    “Pretty bad,” said
Jane. She took the ticket and credit card and walked up the escalator
and through the row of metal detectors. She kept going along the
concourse until she found an airport shop that had a big display of
cosmetics. She selected an opaque foundation that matched her skin
tone and some powder and eye shadow. When she caught a glimpse of
herself in the mirror at the top of a revolving display, she reached
below it and picked out a pair of sunglasses with brown-tinted
lenses. Then she took her purchases with her into the ladies’
room. Her face was still hot and tender from the punches she had
taken, and her right hand was aching from the hard blows she had
given the men in the hallway, but a little discomfort was better than
being noticed.
    She looked under the stalls and
found she was alone. She was glad, because she wouldn’t have to
pretend that what she was doing was easy. She leaned close to the
mirror and dabbed on the foundation painfully. The resuit looked
tolerable, but it stung for a few seconds. She stopped until the pain
subsided a little, and had just begun to work on her eyes when she
heard the door open and a pair of high heels cross the floor behind
her. She had a pretty vivid black eye from the big guy with the
yellow tie who had piled in at the end. It was hard to cover it and
make both eyes look the same with a hand that hurt.
    “Can I help you with
that?”
    Jane didn’t turn around,
just moved her head a little to verify what she guessed about the
woman behind her in the mirror. She wasn’t surprised that the
woman was attractive. Makeup was a personal issue – not quite a
secret, but almost – and you had to be pretty spectacular to
have the nerve to tell somebody you could do her makeup better than
she could. This one was tall – almost as tall as Jane –
and almost as thin, but her face had that blushing china-figurine
skin that women like her somehow kept into their forties. They were
always blond, or became blond, like this one. Every last one of them
had switched to tennis after their cheerleading coaches had put them
out to pasture, but they must have played it at night, because their
skin looked as though it had never seen sunlight.
    Jane said. “No, thanks. I
can handle the painting. It’s the repairs that are hard.”
    “You don’t remember
me, do you?” There was tension in the voice.
    “No,” said Jane. “If
I should, then you must be good at this. Maybe I should let you do my
makeup after all.”
    The woman whispered, “I
was in the county jail when you were.”
    Jane turned to look at the woman
more closely, this time with a sense that she ought to be watching
her hands, not her face. “Well, congratulations on getting
out.”
    Jane waited for her to leave,
but the woman just smiled nervously and waited too. “Thanks.”
    Jane decided that she could do
the finishing touches in another ladies’ room or even on the
plane. “Well, I’ve got a plane to catch.”
    “No, you don’t. It
doesn’t leave for an hour. Four-nineteen to New York. I’m
on it too. My name is Mary Perkins.”
    “Are you following me?”
    “I was hoping to do better
than that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “There’s not much to
talk about when you’re in jail. There was a girl who had been
in court when you were arrested. There was a rumor you had hidden
somebody. That sounded interesting, so I asked around to find
somebody who could introduce us, but sure enough,