Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  She held up the photo. “Is this him?”

  Gabe stared at it. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not a very recent picture. The father here looks pretty young, so he might have been in his forties or even older when you saw him at the observatory. Any similarities?”

  Gabe continued to stab his eyes at the portrait. Mira got the impression that it disturbed him somehow. He was looking at it as if trying to set it on fire, like Superman with his heat vision.

  “Gabe?”

  He resumed his search of the closet. “I don’t know.”

  “It was dark that night, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mira wondered about his reaction, but there was no use making an issue of it. “Well, if this is Olivares, then I guess he and his wife must have split up, because there’s no way a woman lives here, not unless they share all those pairs of brown pants.”

  “Definitely.” He gave up on the closet and went to the chest of drawers.

  Mira turned the picture over. Just for the sake of checking, she pried up the metal clasps and removed the cardboard easel. Her guesswork paid off. Printed on the back of the photo in faint blue ink were the names of the family members.

  JESUS & RAINA OLIVARES

  ALBAN & SACHIN

  “Looks like I was wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Alban isn’t the father in the picture. He’s one of the sons.”

  Gabe abandoned the drawers and studied the names. “Consider me impressed. That’s some blue-ribbon sleuthing.”

  “I was Agatha Christie in a past life.”

  “Or Nancy Drew.”

  “Good enough for me. Should we try to track down Jesus and ask about Alban?”

  “Tell a man that his son was murdered? I don’t know if I’m built for that. But I do know that we need to get out of here. I don’t want to wear out our welcome.”

  “Nancy Drew concurs.” She returned the picture to its place in the living room, careful to wipe away her prints. This particular act—the cleaning of fingerprints—was so far beyond her usual element that she shook her head even as she was doing it. But that’s the kind of life you led when you wore your Danger Cap.

  They were rushing back through the kitchen to the back door when she saw the wedding announcement on the fridge.

  “Hold on a sec.” She crossed the small room and peered at the square of ivory cardstock held to the refrigerator with a magnet in the shape of a soccer ball. Though the text was faded and written in Spanish, she recognized the names.

  “What’s it say?”

  “Sachin Olivares married a woman named Carella Lepin.”

  “Sachin and Carella. The ones we saw online? Nicky’s parents?”

  “Apparently.”

  Gabe pondered it for a moment. “The Midnight Messenger was the dead boy’s uncle.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Okay, then how does it add up? Nicky Lepin was the torturer’s grandson. He was abducted, and his uncle, Sergeant Alban Olivares, went looking for him. But when Alban finally found him, butchered and sewn up, it was too late.” Gabe didn’t wait around for her opinion. He was through the back door before Mira realized it.

  She hurried to catch up.

  The lot behind the line of duplexes was a dug-up sand pit of cacti and derelict cars without wheels or doors. A dog with a rib cage like a xylophone excavated something that was apparently buried deep.

  Mira looked around, but she saw no one watching them. “We should get back to the hotel. I need to check in on one of the great American novelists.”

  Gabe didn’t reply but just kept walking, staring down at his feet.

  “Hello?”

  “Sorry. It’s just … we’ve connected a lot of the dots, but you know there’s only one man who can tell us everything.”

  Mira almost asked Who? before her ESP activated and downloaded at least a portion of his thoughts. She looked at him in profile as they walked. Was he really considering such a thing?

  “It’s the only way,” Gabe said, showing her that two could play at telepathy.

  “Is it? Then I think we may be out of luck. Though I don’t know much about breaking and entering, I know even less about infiltrating Chilean prisons.”

  “We’ll learn as we go,” Gabe said.

  Mira hoped he was right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Someone grabbed Gabe’s arm. A busy sidewalk in front of the hotel was the last place he expected an attack. Violence seemed impossible next to this corner ice-cream vendor surrounded by giggling children. Yet the fingers biting into his forearm hadn’t chosen him at random. He knew this even as he turned to confront his assailant.

  The man he saw was anyone and everyone.

  Prosopagnosia was given its name in 1947, based on the Greek terms for face and non-knowledge. Over fifty years later, men and women with multiple initials behind their names had yet to explain its genesis, much less concoct a cure. Most of those who suffered from it were victims of head trauma. Others were born with it, a delightful little heirloom from somebody’s cross-wired DNA. Growing up, Gabe hadn’t realized he was different until he was nine years old, and he wasn’t diagnosed until two years later.

  “He’s coming.”

  The face that spoke these words did nothing to calm Gabe’s heart. He jerked his arm free and took an automatic step in retreat, the anonymous entity looming in front him. Things had been so easy at home, where he knew his parents and brother Ronny by countless little clues that had nothing to do with their faces. But out here, out in the wild …

  “Take it easy, man!”

  The voice made sense. Gabe had learned to compensate for his disability by developing his sense of hearing and a strong memory for the voices of those he met. “Ben?”

  “No, the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa come back to kick some Mafia ass.”

  “Sorry, you just—”

  “Scared you?” Luke asked. “Scared the poop out of you?”

  “Something like that.” He collected himself as he always did, then hoisted a smile to his face and hoped they believed it. “I’m just jumpy, that’s all.”

  “Get ready to be jumpier. He’s coming.”

  “Who?”

  “The Martian,” Luke said. “The Martian’s on his way, and that ray gun didn’t even stop him!”

  “How do you know? Who told you this? The police?”

  Ben scoffed. “The cops know exactly two things about your rifleman. One of those things is jack, and the other begins with an S.”

  “Salad?” Luke ventured.

  “Jonah called,” Ben continued. “The bastard was there. Nobody got hurt, but he threatened them and then lit out after us.”

  “He knows where we are?” Mira asked. Gabe couldn’t see her face, but he heard the concern in her voice, amplifying her words. “He’s coming after us?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  Gabe wilted at this but pressed on; the meek would not inherit the rifleman’s Earth. “So Jonah can identify him?”

  “Not really. I’ll tell you everything I know, which isn’t much, but first I suggest we repair to less threatening environs, if you get my drift. Luke and I were hanging out at that bookstore on the corner. You two get your bags and meet us in the sci-fi section.”

  Gabe glanced that direction. The street seemed safe enough. A food truck sold cornhusk-wrapped humitas out front, doing heavy business. Immigrants mingled with locals on the sidewalk, speaking a fusion of Spanish and English that was probably a harbinger of some future universal tongue.

  “Fontecilla told us to wait at the hotel,” he said.

  “The good inspector has my cell number, and Mira’s, too. He can let his fingers do the walking. We won’t be far away. Follow me, young squire.”

  “Sure!”

  “Luke, be careful!” Mira called.

  Luke waved as they crossed the street.

  Mira watched them all the way into the booksto
re. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve ever said that.”

  “He seems solid enough to me.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I know so.”

  They headed into the hotel to retrieve their things.

  “It makes me feel good to hear you say that and mean it,” Mira said, “but the watchful sisterly eye never closes.”

  “Must get tiring after a while.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “How often are you two apart?”

  She looked at him as they waited for the elevator. Gabe saw her eyes, but they might have belonged to any woman he met in the desert in South America, or anywhere else. “Let’s just say I don’t go out and party with the girls very often.”

  “You know what I think? Sometimes you just have to let go.”

  “And you’re a good role model for letting go? I think Alban Olivares would have to call your bluff on that one.”

  “Yeah? Maybe you’re right.” He trailed her into the elevator, smelling her hair.

  * * *

  Mira met Tilanna over the body of a brigand who’d been shot through the mouth. The faceshield of his environmental helmet was shattered. With the sound of her brother’s voice guiding her, Mira looked from the wound to the woman who had inflicted it, the barrel of her lover’s gun cooling in the frigid Martian wind.

  “‘… but Tilanna had killed before,’” Luke read, “‘so the sight of the blood hardening to dark ice on the man’s teeth did little to sway her. In fact, swaying was a luxury that had no place here, where the very biosphere was out to get you. Earth women could sway. But when you were terraforming a planet…’”

  Mira blinked several times, the hotel across the street reappearing, the red landscape turning to fragments to be replaced by the Calama street at dusk. Her brother had been reading to her here in the bookstore for the last two hours. “And?”

  Luke closed the Moleskine notebook Ben had bought upon their arrival at the store. “And what?”

  “‘When you were terraforming a planet,’ then what?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Isn’t that a sentence fragment?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.” Through the same plate-glass window that looked out onto the street, Mira watched Gabe and Ben. The latter talked animatedly on his phone while the former paced and looked like a man in acute need of a cigarette. He’d told her he was trying to quit. Now didn’t seem to be a very good time for that.

  “She’s having a baby,” Luke said. “Tilanna is preggers.”

  “It happens to the best of us.”

  “It hasn’t happened to you.”

  “No, there’s not much chance of that, I guess. It takes two to tango.” Though Mira was a strong believer in safe sex, the sad truth was that she was practicing the safest sex of all: lack of a love life. “Why did you and Ben decide to make her pregnant?”

  “We didn’t decide.”

  “You’re the writers, aren’t you?”

  “Tilanna told us.”

  “That so? What else did she tell you?”

  Luke grinned. It was the grin that assured her he’d been a huckster in a past life, moving the shells too fast for the eye to see. “She told us she’s having twins.”

  “Ah, well, twins are certainly near and dear to my heart.” She wasn’t surprised he’d guided the story in this direction. Often in Luke’s make-believe, the champions of his escapades were brother and sister. He and Mira had baked a thousand witches in the ovens of his imagination. “Looks like Tilanna’s going to have her hands full. A single mom with twins? Poor woman’s about to become an unwilling insomniac. She better get herself a nanny, and soon.”

  Luke just kept grinning. “Twins are cool.”

  “So how does this opus end, anyway?”

  “We don’t know the ending. We ain’t there yet!”

  “Aren’t.”

  “We aren’t there yet. And anyway, that’s a secret.”

  “Ah, of course.” Mira didn’t know how their story would evolve, but she’d never seen her brother quite this way, so whatever its conclusion, she gave it her approval. “You two can have your secrets, but if you’re going to make me hang on till the last chapter, you better write faster. If I remember correctly, Tilanna’s not a very patient woman.”

  Mira wondered briefly if she should take a hint from the fictional heroine. If they switched places, would Mira be able to tame the harsh frontier with such aplomb? Would Tilanna be content to—

  “Shit is holy.”

  Mira was so unaccustomed to hearing her brother swear that her first instinct was to scold him in her usual sisterly way … but a second later she realized that his tone of voice wasn’t frivolous this time.

  Luke stared through the window, mouth sagging open.

  The many streetlights resisted the coming nightfall, neons sharpening the haze. Tourists and locals blended into an Impressionist’s swirl, their identities lost to twilight. A taxi idled in front of the hotel.

  “I don’t see anything,” Mira admitted.

  Luke clutched Ben’s notebook like a shield. “It’s him. It’s the Martian.”

  “Where?”

  He pointed.

  A man stood on the far side of the street. Though not fully revealed in the dusk, he was clearly interested in the hotel, inspecting it from about thirty yards away. He wore boots and a shapeless coat, the sleeves too long for his arms. His face was narrow, but the rest of his features were hidden in the semidark.

  “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “Absolutelypositivelyhundredpercent.”

  She stood up. “Don’t move.” She used that rare voice that would stand for no argument, then ran between the bookshelves to the door. Halfway there she stopped. What if her warning to Gabe prompted the man to take action? He’d murdered Eduardo and cut up Nicky Lepin. Mira couldn’t risk setting him off like some kind of human bomb.

  She returned to the table and grabbed her phone, nearly dropping it. She and Ben had exchanged numbers before Gabe had led her to El Estribo.

  Luke hadn’t taken his eyes off the man. He sat there whispering to himself at the reading table, his fingers held in the shape of a gun.

  Through the window, Mira watched Ben as the phone rang in her ear. Ben paused in midconversation to check the cell’s screen, then pressed a button.

  “I’m still on the phone with the prison officials,” he said. “Normal visitation hours are tomorrow…”

  “Forget that. Don’t turn around. Are you listening to me? Don’t turn around.”

  “Mira? I don’t under—”

  “Shut up. Just keep doing what you’re doing, so he doesn’t know we see him.”

  “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “He’s right across the street.”

  Mythical Medusa might have turned Ben to stone. Unmoving, he breathed into the phone.

  “Do I have your attention now?” Mira asked.

  Much quieter: “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “Luke ID’d him. He’s … he’s staring at the hotel.”

  “Where at?”

  “In front of that ritzy shoe store on the other side of the street. There’s a crosswalk there. He’s standing beside the light.”

  “Is he armed?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “And Luke is sure?”

  She glanced at her brother. His lips moved silently, and he pulled the trigger of his finger gun, over and over.

  “Yeah, he’s sure.”

  “Damn.” Ben ran a hand over his face. “He’s about an hour sooner than I predicted. Okay, listen. Hang up and call the cops. Gabe and I will mosey back into the store and hope he doesn’t see us. Got it?”

  Mira didn’t bother saying Be careful. She ended the call and immediately dialed the emergency number she’d learned as part of her preparations to visit Chile: 133.

  Outside the window, Ben put his phone away and motioned
to Gabe. The two men convened, Ben discreetly grabbed Gabe’s elbow, and they zeroed in on the bookstore’s door.

  The man from the desert turned and noticed them.

  Mira saw it all. The next few moments, each lasting no more than two beats of her heart, unfolded before she could rock herself to action. Tilanna would not have wasted so much time. Emboldened by memories of her lost love, the first pregnant woman on Mars would’ve already opened fire.

  The man in the too-big coat stepped off the curb without regard for traffic. Calama was one of those cities that gave every impression of driving itself into the internal-combustion future, hybrids and biofuels be damned, and the cars came in sudden surges. Tire rubber chirped on the asphalt as drivers avoided ramming the sudden pedestrian in their midst. Horns fired warning shots across his bow. He didn’t slow or even acknowledge them.

  Mira knew this would be more than a Lipstick Smear if she didn’t get herself moving.

  Ben and Gabe disappeared from her field of vision when they entered the bookstore. The store itself was sprawling and modern, a place where bestsellers were pimped by lavish cardboard displays and the classics relegated to a corner near the bargain bin. The numerous shelves blocked her field of vision.

  The phone kept buzzing. Emergency services at 133 had yet to pick up.

  The man in the street avoided the bumper of a brown UPS van and reached the near sidewalk. Mira made out more details, now that he was closer, even as she stepped away from the window so as not to be seen. The word that came to her was craggy. His gaunt skull was like a mountain face, something to be scaled, with a sharp overhanging nose and a curving handhold of flesh beneath each eye, revealing the redness within. Strings of hair hung down either side of his head.

  “Let’s go,” she said to her brother, and then ran for the door.

  Gabe stepped around a shelf and collided with her. He caught her and kept her from falling. The look on his face was absurd, as if he’d run into a random stranger and not someone who’d just aided and abetted him during a break-in.

  “He spotted you,” Mira said. “We’ve got to find a back door.” She checked on Luke, then got a visual on Ben, who trailed Gabe by only a few feet. And what the hell was taking 133 so long to pick up?

  Gabe needed no more prompting than that. “Everyone stay close!” He dashed between the shelves, heading for the rear of the store.