Vanishing Act jw-1

by Thomas Perry

  Maybe it was a policeman checking the window. Jane waited, holding her crouch. It was too late to slip away now. He was too close. She waited for the flashlight. She could make it over the fence to the next building in a couple of seconds, while he was still saying "Stop or I’ll shoot," but she decided not to. There was no such thing as one policeman: It was like one ant. She could survive what he would do if he saw her. She had rented the apartment, so this would just be a loss of anonymity.

  Then she heard the man fiddling with something in his pocket, rattling keys or change or something, and then a click. Next there was a scraping noise, and she decided to look. The man was wide at the shoulders, wearing a sportcoat the way a cop would to cover a weapon, but he was prying out the window screen. When he had set it on the ground, he slipped his knife blade in farther, and she heard a metallic scrape and a clank.

  He was breaking in. He was one of them. What was he doing here? Harry was already dead. The man slowly slid the window to the side, then reached in, grasped something solid, and pulled himself up. She was glad she had seen that. She would stay away from those arms.

  His upper body was inside. Keeping his legs from working and scuffing the wall, he pulled himself in like a snake. She stood and moved along the wall toward him. This would be the time to attack, incapacitate the legs somehow, but she hesitated. She had to find out what he was doing here. If he was back because he had left some evidence, she would need to know what it was.

  She waited for a moment beside the window, then she saw him pull down the shade and close the curtain. She stepped to the next window, where the kitchen was, and tried to hear him moving around, but the glass muffled the sounds. He pulled that curtain too. In a moment a light came on, and Jane moved back to the first window, slowly raised her head to the corner, and lifted the shade a quarter inch.

  She could see him on his knees in the middle of the room. He had put a towel along the bottom of the door. Was that it? No, he had done that to keep light from shining under it into the hallway, and now he was looking at something on the floor.

  She moved the shade aside a little and stood higher to see it. Blood. There was a huge reddish brown stain in the middle of the dirty shag carpet. She ducked down again and felt sick. Harry must have lain there dying for a long time.

  She was staring away from the window at the cinder-block fence when there was a bright flash of light that made the porous texture of the wall visible for an instant, then left it in darkness again. She cringed for a second, heard the click and whirr before she identified it—not a gun, a camera. She moved to the window again and listened. There was another flash, then the same click-whirr. She looked while he was still holding the camera to his eye. It was a Polaroid that unfolded with a bellows. He aimed the camera away from her at the door, down by the latch where the black fingerprint powder was thick, and it flashed again.

  She had been comfortable with the theory that he had forgotten something when he had killed Harry, but taking pictures didn’t make sense. That was what cops did. If he was a cop, why break in at night? Was he a reporter or something? Even they didn’t have to break in to take pictures, and it was hard to imagine a paper printing pictures that didn’t have a body in them. She ducked and slipped back along the wall of the building, picked up the transmitter in the flower pot, slowly slid the louver of the bathroom window up and reached in to find the one on the sink, then hurried across the patio to the other side.

  She could see Jake through the window, not sitting on the couch where she had left him, but standing by the door with one of the shotguns in his hands. She hoped what she was about to do wouldn’t give the old man a heart attack or, worse, make him whirl and open up on her. She reached up and knocked on the window. He turned, the shotgun ready, but something must have told him that nobody raps on a window if what they really intend is to shoot through it.

  He held the muzzle upward and hurried to slide the window open. "You scared me," he whispered.

  "Not as much as you scared me," said Jane. "Bring me the car keys."

  He reached into his pocket and produced them, then unlatched the screen to slip them through. "I think there’s somebody across the hall."

  "There is." She handed Jake the two transmitters. "I’ll be back when I know who it is."

  "Wait for me," he said.

  "You can’t go out the door. He’ll hear."

  Jake handed her the shotgun. "Take this," he said, then handed her the other one, and picked up his coat. He put one leg through the window, then the other, turned onto his belly, and lowered himself to the ground. He had done it very well, but he seemed a little stiff as he followed her down the walk. They stopped under the thick bower of wisteria at the front comer of the building and looked out into the street.

  They could see the man’s car at the curb. Sitting behind the wheel was a second man.

  "Can you see his face?"

  "You mean you can?"

  "Come on," she said. She pulled him around the edge of the fence to the next apartment building and waited.

  "I still can’t see his face," he whispered.

  "The guy in the apartment building will come out and get into the car with his buddy. The second they’re around the corner, we sprint for our car. If they go to the police station, we forget it."

  "If I have to sprint, we can forget it now. What if they go somewhere else?"

  "We’ll see." Jane was preoccupied. If the killers were still here, they must be waiting for John, and that meant he was alive. It occurred to her that the pattern was to frame John for everything they could think of. Maybe the man had planted something that had belonged to John in the apartment. But why would he take pictures? And how could he expect to plant something after the police had already spent days going over everything? Nothing she thought of made sense.

  Then she saw the man. She touched Jake’s shoulder. The man walked casually, his arms swinging and his head up, almost skipping down the three steps from the building to the sidewalk. He stepped across the lawn to the car. Jane whispered, "When he opens the door."

  When the man grasped the handle and pulled, the dome light came on. It took three full seconds for him to swing it open, sit down in the passenger seat, and swing it shut again. They were both in their mid-thirties, dark-haired.

  "It’s them," said Jake.

  The car moved ahead slowly a hundred feet before the headlights came on. At the comer it turned right. "Let’s go," she said, and they hurried down the steps to their car.

  Jake held both shotguns across his lap while Jane wheeled the car around and went after them. At the first block, she glanced down the long street on her left and saw nothing, and then the next, and the next. On the fourth street she saw a set of taillights a block away, so she followed them. "I hope it’s the right car."

  "I think so," said Jake. "It’s green like the other one."

  The car pulled straight across Milpas to the freeway entrance ramp, and then the light changed and Jane couldn’t follow. She kept moving, turned right onto Milpas to the next intersection, extended a left turn into a U to come back at the light, turned right, and came up the ramp.

  The green car was far ahead now, and Jane pushed the rented car up to seventy until she could see the two dark heads in the back window, then dropped back and let a station wagon pass her. She went along behind it for a while and then let a big shiny steel tanker truck slip in front of her, too. "I can’t see him anymore," said Jake.

  "And he can’t see us," she answered. "Just watch the exit ramps to the right."

  Most of the familiar parts of town had slipped past them when the car suddenly moved to the right and coasted up the ramp at Sueño Street. Jane kept her direction for as long as she could before she too peeled out of the traffic and coasted up the ramp. What caught her eye now was the big blue sign at the end of the ramp that said SHERIFF. Maybe she had just stumbled on to something that had nothing to do with anybody, the local cops spying on each other. But t
he green car kept going past the lighted one-story sheriff’s complex, and past a taller building with a sign that said COUNTY ADMINISTRATION and an older, bigger one that said HOSPITAL, and then turned around in the street and came back at them. Jane said, "Get ready," speeded up, and flashed past the car as it came down the road back toward Santa Barbara. She took her foot off the gas pedal and kept going slowly, watching the car in her mirror.

  It moved along a road parallel to the freeway, then turned to get back onto it. "Do you think they were trying to lose us or to see us?" asked Jake.

  "I don’t know," she said. She turned around quickly and speeded up the road after it. "I think it was just a precaution."

  The car kept going back through town and left the freeway at the Cabrillo Boulevard exit. Jane followed it, keeping the distance as great as she could without losing it. But instead of staying on the winding road past the bird sanctuary and on to the beaches and the harbor, it turned left toward Montecito.

  Jane watched it until it moved up one of the little streets below the freeway. She pulled the car to the side of the road and turned out the lights.

  ’’This doesn’t feel right," she said.

  "You think they know we’re following them?"

  "You’re sure those are the men who tried to break into my house?"

  "Positive."

  ’’The last time I saw them, they did something like this. They went ahead on a dark country road and waited for us." Jake was silent, so she took a deep breath. "Okay. Then we’re at crazy time now."

  "What’s that?"

  "I can’t just let them go away this time. They killed Harry. If they go now, chances are they’ll get John, too, sooner or later. Do you understand?"

  "You’re saying you’re going to follow two killers up a dark road that’s probably a dead end," he said. "Sounds perfectly sensible to me."

  "No, I’m saying it’s time for you to get out."

  "You know anybody who does what you tell them to?".

  "Lots of them."

  "Oh," he said. "Should have brought them."

  She drove ahead and pulled over on the gravel shoulder at the end of the street where the car had disappeared. Jake wrapped the two shotguns in his coat and got out of the car.

  They hurried away from the roadside, into the darkness, where headlights wouldn’t reach them. Jane knew that walking along the road, even twenty feet from it, was probably what the men wanted them to do. There was a low fence beside her, with thick shrubs and vines entangled above it. She pushed some of the plants aside and stepped over, then held them so Jake could climb over too. When she looked around her, the land she saw didn’t seem to have the silhouette of a house on it. There was a long, curved plot of open grass. She moved along the fence in the direction the car had gone.

  As they walked she began to feel more sure. They would be up ahead somewhere, waiting just out of sight of the road. When she had walked along the fence for a hundred feet, she saw the green car. It was on the other side of the field, just below the elevated hill that carried the freeway, parked behind a big grove of trees, its lights off, just about where it would be if the men were waiting for someone to drive up the dark street outside the fence into an ambush. She crossed the lawn above it and looked down.

  "What is this?" asked Jake.

  "I don’t know. A park or golf course or something," she said. She reached out and tapped the bundle Jake had wrapped in his coat.

  He handed her one of the shotguns and put his coat on.

  "Last chance," she said.

  "No talking," he whispered.

  Suddenly, there was a rattle of a car starting, but it came from the wrong place. Jane pulled Jake to the ground and aimed her shotgun toward the sound. There was a second car. This one was white. It was up along the hedge at the edge of the field, and now it was slowly moving along toward them. She pushed the safety off with her trigger finger and then put her hand on Jake’s sleeve. "Not yet."

  The car moved closer and closer to them. She waited for the lights to come on, the window to come down. As it drifted past them, she kept her hand on Jake’s arm. She could hear the soft swish of its tires on the grass. She looked up and saw there was someone in the passenger seat beside the driver. On the bumper there was some kind of rental sticker, and then the car was going on into the darkness. There had to be a gate somewhere in that direction. In a moment she saw it coming back up outside the fence. She ducked down before the lights went on, and then it was gone.

  She took her hand off Jake’s arm and started to make her way toward the green car, with Jake at her side. They moved onto the grass and approached the car from the side, keeping low along the hedge at the edge of the lawn. Jane touched Jake and put her mouth close to his ear. "Get down and get ready. If somebody shoots, take your time. You’re invisible until you pull the trigger."

  "I’ll save a shell for the radiator," he whispered. "Nobody’s going to kill me and ride away from it in comfort." He eased himself to the ground and lay prone with the shotgun aimed at the car. Jane began to crawl on her belly, closer and closer to the dark shape. She had gone twenty feet when she touched something hard and cold. It felt like a piece of metal, set into the ground. A drain? She ran her fingertips across it and felt raised letters. I...N...M...E...M...O... a cemetery. It was a grave marker.

  She heard a snick-chuff sound, coming from the other side of the car. Somebody was digging. She could hear the clods of earth landing on the pile, some granules rolling back down, and then snick-chuff again. So that was why the other two had left. They were working in shifts. It was a lot of work to dig a grave, but not much room.

  She crawled closer until she was beside the car. The trunk was open, but there was no light inside the lid. She knew she had to look inside, and that when she did, the sight she was going to see was John. They were in a town they didn’t know any better than she did, and they had decided to use the old, reliable way of disposing of the body: finding a fresh grave, digging it up, and burying the new one with the legitimate resident.

  She forced her breaths to come more deeply. The air seemed to seep into her lungs and lie there, and then she would have to think to force it out and let in more. She tasted her dry tongue and made her way to the back of the car. She put her hand on the rear bumper and experienced a sensation like the one she had felt when standing on a high diving board as a little girl, those few seconds when it still seemed possible to turn and go back down.

  She found herself counting silently: one ... two ... three, and then popped her head up and saw ... nothing. The trunk was empty except for a flashlight. The way it was lying there on the center of the flat, empty surface was almost like an instruction from somewhere to pick it up.

  She grasped it and took a few breaths to calm herself. She could hear the shovel noise again, and now she could tell it wasn’t one shovel. They were both digging. She began to crawl toward the sound. She couldn’t see a silhouette or a shadow, but then she reached the place and she knew. They were already too deep in the hole, over their heads with piles of dirt on both sides. She moved to the nearest pile of dirt, feeling her way for John’s body.

  She grasped the slide of the shotgun and stood up just as the flash came. She saw all of it at once. The two men were standing over the casket and they had the top half of it open, and the one from the apartment was taking another flash picture. Down in the coffin was Harry Kemple. The darkness closed on all of them instantly, there was the familiar whirr, then the man aimed again and the flash came with a click, and then darkness.

  Jane shone the flashlight into the open grave and shouted, "Police officers. Freeze." She hoped Jake could hear her and not just see the light and shoot it.

  The two men in the pit below her stood still, straddling the casket. They seemed unsure of what to do, but certain that they weren’t going to be able to find adequate footing in the narrow hole to turn around and face her, let alone draw a gun and shoot her. They raised their hands.

>   "Turn around," she said.

  They slowly, carefully tried to free their feet from one side of the casket, turn about to step across it, and face in the other direction, but neither was able to do it with his hands in the air. Each had to lean across the casket and hold the opposite wall to do it. Then they raised their hands again and tried to stare past the beam of the flashlight to see her.

  "It’s not what it looks like," said one of them. She recognized his thick arms and broad shoulders. He was the one who had climbed in Harry’s window, and he looked down so she could see the camera at his feet. "It’s just a camera, see?"

  The other, a taller, thin man with a permanent look of distaste holding the muscles around his lips rigid, said, "She don’t think we killed him, for Chrissake." To Jane he said, "I know this looks strange. Weird, even."

  "Save it," she said gruffly. "First I want to see you slowly take your guns out and toss them up over the pile of dirt, one at a time. And give a lot of thought to how you look while you’re doing it. If I get startled, you’re dead. First you, the tall one."

  The tall man hesitated for a second, and she added, "We know you’re armed. Just having a gun on you means I can shoot now and never have to answer any questions." Looking at them, she decided that they had certainly been arrested more times than she had, and they were beginning to sense that this wasn’t normal. She pumped the shotgun. There was already a shell in the chamber, and she ejected it onto the ground, but the sound had its desired effect. The tall man bent over, took a gun out of an ankle holster, and threw it over the mound of dirt to the grass. The second man took a gun out of the waistband of his pants at the small of his back and did the same.

  "Now turn and put your hands on the side of the pit."

  This seemed to comfort the two men, who executed the movement with an assurance that could only have come from practice. They had their legs apart and their arms out from their bodies, and leaned across the casket to look down at the poker-faced Harry.