Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  Young women, even young women of considerable intelligence and self-reliance, had been known to get themselves into trouble with this sort of activity. They had even been known to be found dead. Because no matter what sort of caution a young woman had, once she was in a private place, out of earshot of trusted friends and in any of the positions necessary for what the polite called consummation, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the course of events. It was best to accomplish whatever checking of credentials needed to be done well before that stage.

  He glanced over at the cellar window and past his rosebush at Jane’s side window. He had been right. There was a second silhouette. It looked to be about the size of the young man who had been knocking on her door yesterday.

  Jane opened the cylinder of the pistol and emptied the bullets into the palm of her hand, then handed the gun back to Felker. She hesitated a second, then held out the five bullets too. He looked puzzled, and she said, "If you didn’t ask, they’re not the only ones you have."

  He took the five rounds and put them in his pants pocket. "What do we do now?"

  "We figure out what I can do for you," she said. "Are you married?"

  "I used to be. After about three years of being a cop’s wife, she saw the future before I did."

  "That would be—what—ten years ago. What about girlfriends?"

  "Why are you asking these things?"

  "Is there anybody in St. Louis who will already have called the cops and reported you missing?"

  "No. I told my boss I couldn’t do much while the computers were down, so I would take some vacation time. I told him to leave a message on my machine when things were normal again. My family consists of my sister, Linda, who is married and has four kids and talks to me once a year on the phone, and about thirty cousins I haven’t seen in twenty years. When I told Linda about this, she said I was right to run, and good luck."

  "Did she know where you were going?"

  "No."

  She thought hard for a minute. "I don’t suppose you speak any foreign languages well enough to fool anybody?"

  "No. A little Spanish."

  "Do you have anything else that would help you hide in another country?"

  "The money. That’s not mine, but the passport is."

  She studied him with a hint of sadness. "I know all this has happened fast, but you have to think a little bit ahead. A passport with John Felker on it isn’t going to help. You aren’t going to be able to sit at a café table in Rio reading American newspapers until you see that they’ve cleared your name. You’re not innocent."

  "No," he said. "I didn’t think ..."

  "Where do you want to go?"

  "I don’t know. They can’t be looking for me harder than people have looked for Harry. Where did you send him?"

  She sat in silence for a time, then said, "I guess it’ll have to be somewhere inside the country. That’s easier, but it takes more discipline."

  "What kind of discipline?"

  "You might have special problems." Then she brightened. "Were you ever an undercover cop, with a different identity?"

  "No," he said. "I was the regular kind. What’s the problem?"

  "Unlearning old habits," she said. "If somebody hits a cop, he hits back, harder."

  "I haven’t been a cop for a long time," he said.

  "Some people can live with the idea that they have enemies and never try to find out who they are. Can you?"

  "Why are you asking these things?"

  "I need to know who you are, and I want you to know who I am. Who I am to you, anyway. If you want peace, I’ll risk my life to give you that. If you want revenge, take your gun and go back."

  "I gave that up when I decided to come here."

  "I’m just telling you that I don’t waste myself. Nobody finds his way to me until his old life is used up. If you come with me, John Felker is dead. You’re somebody else, who doesn’t have any enemies."

  He thought for a long time. "I can do it."

  "How did you get here?"

  "I took a Greyhound from St. Louis to Buffalo, then a cab."

  "Buses are slow and have regular schedules. Anybody who wants a copy can pick one up and read it. Did anybody follow you?"

  "I don’t think so." Then he admitted, "I never looked."

  "Did anybody see you come into my house?"

  "Your neighbor. The old guy."

  "Where’s your suitcase?"

  "In your closet upstairs."

  "Go get it."

  Jake Reinert heard the sound of the car starting in the driveway next door. It was nearly dark already, but he couldn’t help going to the comer window to take a peek at what he could already see without using his eyes at all.

  It was Jane Whitefield’s rental car, and the man was in the driver’s seat. Jake Reinert watched the man adjust the seat and the mirrors. As the car slowly moved past his window, he stared at the man hard, with the knowledge that in a week or so he might very well have to describe the face to Dave Dormont down at the police station.

  8

  Jane pretended to look down into her leather bag, but her eyes slipped to the side to confirm that Jake Reinert was where she had thought he would be, in his corner window.

  "Where am I supposed to drive?" Felker asked.

  "Go north along River Road while we talk."

  "All right."

  "While I was packing I noticed that you had searched my room. You went through the papers in my desk. Why?"

  "I wanted to be sure that you were the woman Harry said you were. Even if you were, people move."

  "What did you find?"

  "You have some credit cards that aren’t in your name. Finding your bills was a big relief." He watched her closely for a moment, and she seemed satisfied. He asked, "Where are we going?"

  "We’re going to change cars."

  "Before we start?"

  "This is a rented car. If somebody saw the company name on it already, then they’re not looking for one out of sixty million cars anymore, it’s one out of ten thousand or so. Say ten percent have New York plates. Now it’s down to one thousand. Half are this model? Five hundred. Half are this color? Two-fifty. If they have the company’s records, they’ll know where it gets turned in."

  He drove in silence a couple of blocks west before he reached the river. It looked big and dark in the early evening. Across the channel, the shore of Grand Island was dark except for the bright grid of windows on a hotel. He turned right and followed the road. "Do you really think they could get the car company’s records? It used to take us a couple of days to do that, and we needed a court order."

  "If they can get into your company’s records, why not any company?"

  "Yeah," he said glumly. "Why not?"

  "I’m not trying to ruin your morale. I’m just being as careful as I can. We don’t know who they are or why they did it to you. But we do know they probably got, or are getting, a lot of money, and they think if you die, they can keep it. So they’ll spend as much as they have to."

  Felker sighed. Then he seemed to remember something. He turned toward her. "Money," he said. "It’s funny how when your life is in danger you stop thinking about it. What do you charge for this? What’s your fee?"

  She looked out the side window and watched the familiar buildings going by: the pizza parlor where she and her friends used to spend about half their evenings. It was Jimmy Connolly’s skinny ankles that had made her fall in love with him. She could see them now, but somehow she had lost the ability to bring back why they had seemed so attractive. A few doors down was the big old movie house that was called the Berliner until the First World War and the Tivoli for sixty years after that. It had closed twenty years ago and been broken up into little stores. The upper stories of the building still had the elaborate scrollwork because it was carved in the stone, and she could still remember the smell of ancient popcorn and the feel of the worn velvet seats. They used to show Tarzan movies on Saturdays for a quarter,
so children had watched them without complaint. She had sensed that it was always a big moment when Jane got wet, but at the time the significance was lost on her. "I don’t have a fee," she said. "Sometimes people send me presents."

  "You mean you live off presents?"

  "I didn’t say they were small presents." She smiled slyly.

  He frowned. "Just give me some idea. I want to be fair."

  He was such a ... man. Things had to be decided, nailed down and certified. He probably wanted to have each of them say it and then shake on it, give her hand one of those single, hard shakes. She turned toward him and said, "Okay, I’ll tell you how it’s going to work. When this is over, you’re going to sleep for a day or so, and then you’ll take a week or two getting used to a new place, and then a month getting used to being somebody different. One day—maybe then, maybe a year from then—you’ll sit down and think about how it happened, and you’ll send me a present."

  She let him think about that, and stared past him at the river. The road was good and fast, through the quiet old towns that had grown up along the Niagara in the 1790s, after the Revolutionary War. From the beginning of time, all of this land had been a place where people lived. As a little girl she had walked along the river and found arrowheads, and they were still finding them, three hundred years after the metal brought in by the fur trade had replaced them.

  As they crossed city lines, a stranger like Felker probably didn’t even know he wasn’t in Deganawida anymore, because the distinctions between these little towns were subtle and had to do with things that had happened through time. They weren’t boundaries, they were stories.

  As they passed the long grassy strip on the way out of North Tonawanda and the brush began again, she caught herself watching for the marker along the river, where the river widened and she could see past the tip of Grand Island. The marker was old, almost invisible thirty feet from the road in the grove of trees that had grown up around it, so she tried to look fast, but it was too dark to spot it. That didn’t matter, because what was worth looking at was something that couldn’t be seen with the eyes anymore.

  On this spot one summer in the 1670s the Frenchman La Salle had built the Griffon, the first ship to sail the Great Lakes. It must have looked strange to the Seneca staring at it from the dense forest beyond the stumps of the trees the Frenchmen had cut for lumber. The keel and ribs of the half-finished hull would have loomed just at the shore like the skeleton of an enormous fish, and the Seneca, who were still invincible in this part of the world, must have been more curious than threatened.

  Beyond the town named after La Salle, the road grew into a parkway that took them past the congestion that had grown up around the Falls. Hennepin, the Jesuit priest on La Salle’s expedition, had been the first white man to blunder out of the woods and lay eyes on them, so people remembered his name. That had always struck her as funny. Here were these falls, well over a half mile wide and 180 feet high, so loud you could barely hear anything else and throwing big clouds of mist far into the sky that you could see for miles. In the 1670s every Indian from Minnesota to the Atlantic knew all about them, because they were the only serious interruption in the ancient trade routes. And those were the days when gods still had addresses. Heno the Thunderer lived in a cave right behind that wall of water.

  As they continued on up the parkway, she glanced at Felker again. He was doing pretty well, considering the fact that his whole life had been destroyed in a couple of days and he had been on the run ever since. There was no whining, no questions she couldn’t answer. She supposed that if he had lasted eight years as a cop, the least he could be was tough. She had felt a little alarm when she had seen that he had searched her room, but he was a cop and that was the way cops were trained to find out who they were dealing with. And he had, at least once, been in the position she was in. He had seen a harmless little guy like Harry, with enemies closing in on him, and he had thought about it and decided to save him. She would do her best for him.

  She tried to prepare herself. This was one of the hard ones, and she was tired. It was one thing when two social workers were at a convention and they were sitting at a bar in a city strange to both of them and confiding in each other, and one of them said she had a case that was horrible and the system just couldn’t be made to work, and the other one looked down into the bottom of her glass and said, "I know a woman..." But it had long ago grown into something else. She had been out six times in the past year. She forced herself to forget what had gone before. She needed to keep thinking ahead.

  She could see they were only a couple of miles from Ridge Road, where the Tuscarora Reservation started. She looked at the signs, watching for the garage, built outside the border of the reservation so people couldn’t watch its proprietor too closely. Finally, she saw it and said, "Pull in up here, away from the gas pumps." Felker drove the car up onto the cracked blacktop and kept the engine running.

  "Want me to fill the tank?" he asked.

  "No," she said. "Just wait for me." Jane walked to the little lighted building beside the garage and went inside, away from the sounds of the cars flashing by on the road.

  The man sitting on the stool behind the counter was watching a small television set next to the cash register. He smiled when he looked up to acknowledge that he had seen her, and his eyes returned to the television set. He said to it, "Hi, Janie."

  "Hello, Cliff," she answered. "Nice night."

  "You come to watch the game with me?" Clifford Tarkington smiled his special smile, and his broad Tuscarora face seemed to widen and his dark eyes narrowed, but his mouth didn’t move. "Big night. The Indians are playing the Yankees."

  The Tuscarora all had names like Wallace or Clifford or Clinton, just the way the Seneca did. The Seneca had never given children the names of Christian saints. The Mohawk at Caughnawaga, on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence, had been called the Praying Indians. There had never been any praying Seneca, and if there had been any praying Tuscarora, they would have gotten cured of it in 1712. That was the year when a Swiss mercenary had led an army of South Carolina colonists and enemy tribes to take their homeland in North Carolina. The winners had feasted on the body of a dead Tuscarora and then sold their prisoners at the slave markets. The survivors had been taken in by the Seneca and given the village of Ga-a-noga to live in.

  "I came to relieve you of one of those old junkers you keep around here," said Jane. "I can see you need the space."

  "I might be able to part with something elegant yet understated," said Clifford. "What kind?"

  "Mid-size," she said. "Nothing eye-catching, not just out of the box."

  "But not too old either?" he guessed. "I got a ’ninety-two Ford. Cherry, runs good, low miles."

  "What color? I don’t want one of those cars put together in the Ford plant in Hamilton with Canadian two-tone colors on it so everybody thinks I just came out of the woods."

  "Pearl-gray. Hell, they’re all gray now, or white. Five a week if it comes back the same color."

  Two years ago, she had been taking a twelve-year-old boy out of Ohio where two sets of cousins who had let him stay in foster homes all his life had learned he had an inheritance coming. They had put a description of the car on television. She had run the car through a one-hour painting shop and had them put the two-hundred-dollar special on it. Clifford had sometimes thought to mention it during subsequent negotiations.

  "Five hundred?" she exclaimed. "You misunderstood. I don’t want to own it. How about two hundred?"

  "Four-fifty," he muttered at the television. "It’s a T-bird. It’s loaded."

  "Two and a half, and I won’t play with the power seats."

  "Hasn’t got them."

  "And you said it was loaded?"

  "Three-fifty, and I throw in a full tank."

  "It’s already on full if it’s sitting back there. You’re afraid it’ll get water vapor in the tank. Three hundred, and I’ll forget about what you owe me for the pain
t job on the other one."

  "Three twenty-five and I’ll take back the rental you got parked out there."

  "Done," she said, and handed him a check she had already written.

  He looked at the amount and said, "It’s always an education to do business with you, Janie."

  "Yeah," she said. "Except I always pay the tuition."

  He handed her a ring with two keys on it. "Later, Janie."

  "Later," she said, and walked out onto the pavement. She kept going around to the back of the building and found the car sitting on the cracked cement foundation of an old, vanished building that Cliff used as a parking lot. The Ford wasn’t bad to begin with, and when she started it she could hear and feel that he must have just tuned the engine. She let it idle and walked back around to find Felker standing beside the rented car, leaning on the door.

  As they got in, she said quietly, "It’s better at this stage of the trip not to stand around under a light unless you have to."

  "Why? Did you see somebody?" He checked his impulse to whirl and look behind him.

  "I don’t know," she said. "At least fifty cars have gone by here since we stopped, but I don’t know who I’m looking for. They do."

  She drove around to the back of the building, where the other car sat running. "Pull that one out so I can put this one in its place."

  He got in behind the wheel of the Ford and pulled it out, waited for Jane to stop, and lifted their two bags out of her car, then opened the door of the Ford to set them in.

  Jane said, "It’s cash, isn’t it?"

  He shrugged. "Well, yeah. I didn’t think I’d be in a position to cash a check or something."

  "Put it in the trunk. It won’t be any safer two feet closer to you on the back seat."

  He opened the trunk and put the two bags inside, then started to close it, but hesitated. "I don’t want to keep guessing wrong. Is it all right to keep the gun up front with us?"

  She was at the rear of the rented car, opening the trunk. She said, "It’s fine with me. Keep the trunk open." When she slammed the trunk and came around to the new car, she was carrying a backpack and a short-barreled shotgun. She put them in beside the bags.