The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  Jane found a trash can and discarded the shoe polish, then a wheeled laundry bin and left the hospital gown and surgical outfit in it She glanced at her watch. It had been almost an hour since she had left Carey, and thirty-five minutes since Dahlman had gone into surgery. Dahlman’s golden time was dwindling to nothing. She kept him moving as steadily as she dared down the long, empty hallways, past offices and labs that had closed doors and darkened windows, but each step was short and deliberate. Her mind kept bounding ahead, bursting forward to consider each foot of the corridor they still had to cross.

  They passed an alcove with a big window and she turned her head to look out. There was nothing out there but the driveway and a cinder-block wall, and the blackness threw a bright, sharp-edged reflection back at her. She kept exerting the steady, gentle pressure on Dahlman’s good arm. Her mind carried the sight of their reflection like a snapshot, and she studied it.

  She could detect no errors so far. Whatever Carey’s anesthesiologist had shot into Dahlman seemed to be wearing off. He bent over a little as he walked, but he didn’t look as though he was protecting a bullet wound. The waxy brown polish had covered his gray hair, and it looked as though he had slicked it down with the kind of greasy stuff that some men his age actually used. The coat and tie helped. Dahlman looked like a man who had just come from visiting a patient, and Jane could easily be his daughter.

  Jane led him around another corner and she could see the rectangle of the glass door ahead. Through it she could make out a few feet of dimly lighted sidewalk, and then inviting darkness. She wanted to push him, to get out of the light, away from the hospital before something happened. But suddenly there was movement in the darkness, and it startled her. In a second she could see that there were two men coming up the walk toward the door.

  She let go of Dahlman’s arm. “Walk by yourself. Do the best you can.” She spoke evenly and forced her face into a smile as she glanced at the old man. From a distance, she knew, it would look as though they were having a pleasant chat.

  “What is it?” Dahlman whispered. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked at him as though he had said something clever. “Two men coming up the walk. If they’re cops, they won’t be the ones who arrested you, because those two have been sent home for the shift. These haven’t seen you before. Just act like we’ve visited Aunt Hilda, and we’re going home. Don’t rush, because we’re not in a hurry.”

  “What if they’ve seen my picture?”

  “If they say your name, laugh at the idea. Don’t try to run, but keep moving unless you have to stop. If we’re separated, turn right at the corner and go to 4997 Carroll Street. It’s about a block. Wait for me behind the building.”

  As Jane moved toward the door she focused her eyes on the right objects: on the floor for two seconds, on her companion for two more, straight ahead for just a second and then at a spot on the floor ten feet ahead so she didn’t appear to be looking at the men or not looking. She controlled her breathing to relax the tightness that was growing in her chest. She had been so close to the outside that she had almost begun to consider it accomplished when the sudden sight of the two men had startled her.

  The fact that there were two of them bothered her. There were a thousand harmless reasons why two large men in their thirties might come up the walk together, but until one of them had been positively shown to apply this time, none of them brought any reassurance. Couples or solitary men might be doing anything, but men didn’t usually travel in pairs unless they were working, or doing something that excluded women. These two weren’t playing poker or bowling.

  She touched Dahlman’s arm again to move him along. The best place for them to see him was right outside the door, where the light would be behind him and his face in the shadow.

  Through the glass she saw the blond one’s eyes take note of the fact that Jane and Dahlman weren’t going to turn at the end of the hall, but were coming out the door. Then he did something unexpected. He stopped, turned away, bent his head, and cupped his hands in front of his face to light a cigarette. His companion stopped and stood in front of him to shield him from the wind.

  As Jane stepped out and held the door for Dahlman, she turned her face to feel the direction of the wind. She had to be sure. The wind sometimes whipped around in eddies beside big, tall buildings. She took five more steps, then watched the darker man point his finger toward the lighted lobby entrance and mutter something. The blond one agreed, and they set off across the lawn in that direction, walking slowly. Jane stared at their backs as she walked. As soon as she was five more steps away from the building she stuck her finger in her mouth and lifted it to feel the wind. “We might have a problem,” she said quietly.

  “Why? They ignored us,” Dahlman protested.

  “The blond one—the one that lit the cigarette—turned into the wind to do it.”

  “I’m not surprised. Smoking in this day and age requires a certain flair for ignoring the forces of nature.”

  “Don’t you see?” she asked. “He was doing it just to turn his face away from us. He’s thirty feet from a building where he’d have to put it out anyway.”

  Dahlman was silent for a moment. He looked over his shoulder, then winced and grunted from the pain. “Do you think they’re policemen?”

  “A policeman might recognize you, but he doesn’t care if you see his face. Carey said you thought someone wasn’t just trying to get you arrested. Is that true?”

  “Yes. I think someone is trying to kill me.”

  Jane found that Dahlman was walking a little faster now, but it cost him great effort. They moved down the street toward the corner. Just as they turned up Carroll Street, Jane saw the two men coming away from the lighted lobby entrance of the hospital and walking toward the door where she had first seen them. She said, “We’re in trouble. They didn’t go into the lobby entrance. You’re too weak to run, it’s too late to hide, and I’m not carrying anything that would scare them”—the answer came to her as she heard herself say it—“off.” She leaned close to him and said, “Can you keep walking?”

  “I can, but—”

  “Then do it. Walk straight up the street to the small brick building over there. It’s Carey’s office. No matter what anyone does, keep walking. Go around to the little parking lot in back. Sit down between the gray car and the brick wall. Don’t move. If they follow you, try to watch them but don’t let them see you. Got it?”

  “I heard it,” said Dahlman.

  “Do it.” Jane pivoted away from him, then stepped along the side of the hospital building. As soon as she was out of sight of the sidewalk she began to run. She knew that she must look insane running in a skirt, but in the narrow space beside the tall building nobody could see her. The weightless, flat shoes she had worn were better than she had expected.

  She worked herself up into a sprint, dashing along the side of the building. Three stories above her, there were lighted windows where she knew that patients lay staring up at television sets that showed live shots of police officers milling around the hospital. Down here she was alone.

  Just before she reached the lighted area at the far end of the building she slowed to a walk. She knew it would have to be the first try. She couldn’t walk up and loiter, looking for an opportunity. It had to be there and she would have to read it instantly.

  Jane took a deep breath as she stepped around the corner into the light. The three television trucks had their booms up and their dishes turned toward their stations’ receivers. The ambulances were lined up in their spaces as before. No one was missing. There were five police cars now. Three had arrived after the emergency was over, so they had been parked in designated spaces with their doors closed.

  She stepped along more quickly, her head held rigid, but her eyes scanning. She was closer now, and she could hear the same garbled radio noises she had heard when she had arrived. She passed to the right of the first police car, where she could see the ignition on the s
teering column, but the radio sound led her on past it.

  The window of the second car was half open, and faint orange lights glowed on the dashboard. She angled away from the curb and passed the trunk. In a single, fluid movement, she reached for the door handle, swung open the driver’s door, and was in. She turned the key, brought down the gear selector, and stepped on the gas pedal. She didn’t let the car glide forward before she began the turn, because it would pass in front of the glass doors of the emergency room. Instead she wrenched the wheel to the left as far as it would go and swung around smoothly to drive the wrong way down the entrance lane.

  Jane pulled out of the drive and accelerated up the straight, empty street away from the hospital. As she passed into the little splash of light under each street lamp she studied the interior of the police car: first the shotgun upright in the rack behind her right elbow, then the dashboard with its radio and mike and what looked like a computer screen, next some hard-sided notebooks that could be manuals or books of tickets or even the source of all of those forms that cops seemed to whip out when anything happened. It wasn’t until she reached the bright intersection that she found the switches she had been searching for.

  She made the turn, drove past the hospital, and began to look for Dahlman. She searched for the two pursuers, but she could not see them either. Could they have run hard and caught him already? She tried to imagine it. They would have needed to recognize him, see her part from him, decide she was going for help, dash to catch him, and either kill him silently and hide the body or push him into a car.

  Jane was nearly at Carey’s office. As she came to the parking lot, she spun the wheel sharply toward the entrance to make the car seem to have come from nowhere. As soon as her front wheels touched the driveway, she reached to the dashboard, switched on the red and blue lights, and stopped.

  Just outside the beams of her headlights she discerned the two men walking toward the end of the building near a red car. If Dahlman had followed her instructions, then they must have seen him come as far as the building. If they were looking at the red car and not the gray, then they hadn’t found him yet. Their heads turned in her direction, then away. Jane put her hand on the upright shotgun beside her and waited. The men didn’t move.

  Jane suspected they could see a head silhouetted in the windshield above the headlights, and she knew they could see the bright red and blue lights revolving on the roof. Maybe they could see Jane was alone, or even recognize her.

  She closed her right hand on the grip of the shotgun, but didn’t lift it. Of course it would be loaded. There would be no shell in the chamber, but there would be five rounds of number four buckshot in a line ahead of it in the magazine.

  With her left hand she switched on the spotlight mounted on her door, and manipulated the handle to sweep the beam along the side of the building. She let the car begin to drift forward slowly in their general direction as she shone the light on the door of the building, then along the ground near it, inching her way along like a cop who had received a prowler call. Then she swept the beam ahead to the corner of the building. The two men were gone.

  She hit the gas pedal and shot forward to stop behind her own gray car, then waited. Where was Dahlman? She craned her neck to look in every direction, but she saw nothing. Her breath came out in a hiss through clenched teeth. She had come too late. The men must have killed him, and she had let them walk away. She began to turn the police car around, then hit the brake. Of course: What had she been thinking?

  Dahlman was a fugitive. If he saw a police car pull into the lot with its lights flashing, would he come out of hiding and climb in? She backed up quickly, opened the door of the police car, and ran to the row of cars parked behind the building. “Dr. Dahlman?” she called.

  “Here,” came the quiet voice behind her.

  She whirled. “Where?”

  Dahlman slowly stood up behind the low brick wall at the end of the lot. She stepped to the wall and helped him swing his legs over it.

  “Did you see what they did when I got here?”

  “They threw something over the wall. Over there someplace. I heard it but I couldn’t see what it was.”

  Jane didn’t need to see. She vaulted over the brick wall and walked the weedy patch between the two parking lots. She found first one gun, then the other only a few feet away, picked them up, and ran to the police car. She looked around anxiously. “Get in.”

  Jane helped him ease his body into the passenger’s seat, then handed him the two guns. “Hold these.”

  She turned off the flashing lights and drove quickly out of the lot and up a dark side street, then turned and drove up another. She drove until she passed a house a mile away with its lights off and a FOR SALE sign stuck on the lawn. She stopped, backed up, and pulled into the driveway.

  She opened the garage door, got back into the car, and drove inside. She opened Dahlman’s door and helped him out. “Do you think you can walk a little farther by yourself?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  “Then start walking up the street in that direction. I’ll catch up.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Go,” she said.

  As soon as she could see that Dahlman was heading in the right direction, Jane closed the garage door, turned on the headlights, and found a rag hanging on a nail on the garage wall. She quickly wiped the steering wheel, the shotgun, the door handles, the shifter, then opened the trunk and found the foam fire extinguisher. She sprayed it liberally inside the car, then wiped the extinguisher off too, and tossed it onto the front seat. The foam would destroy any fingerprints she had missed. She turned off the headlights and stepped out the small door in the back of the garage. She walked along the house to the street and hurried after Dahlman.

  When she caught up with him, she said, “I don’t want you to faint or fall down. But can you walk a little faster?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Sure. You could get caught.”

  He turned his head to focus his sharp gray eyes on her. “Suppose those men had seen your face—figured out that the police car was stolen? That you weren’t a police officer?”

  Jane shrugged. “They were still on foot in a parking lot. They could see I had a very big car, and suspect that there was a very big shotgun inside it.”

  “But suppose they had guessed that those were just part of the bluff?”

  Jane looked at him with quiet sincerity in her eyes. “If they had guessed that, then one of them would have tire tracks on his chest, and the other would have a five-inch hole in his. This isn’t a game.”

  4

  Jake Reinert hung up the telephone, put on his jacket with slow deliberation, lowered his weight carefully down each of the front steps, and walked to his car. He had been Jane Whitefield’s neighbor for her first thirty-one years, and had lived beside her parents and grandparents for the forty years before that. Since she had married Carey McKinnon he had found himself living beside an empty house. He had watched the lights going on to illuminate unoccupied furniture in the evening, then going off at bedtime, heard radios talking to themselves during the day, and sometimes heard the telephone ring four times before the answering machine cut in. Burglars might not be fooled by all that, but if they came in they certainly would not be lonely.

  Jane’s unexpected telephone call had disturbed Jake, but he was making an effort to hold his anxiety in abeyance. He started his car and drove down the street toward Delaware Avenue.

  The night air was chilly, and Jake began to feel better as the engine warmed enough to permit him to engage the heater. If Henry Whitefield’s daughter had called him at any hour of the day or night in any of her thirty-three years and said, “Jake, I’m having trouble. Can you fly down here to Peru and pick me up?” he would certainly have been on his way to the airport. Tonight she was just asking for a ride home from a movie.

  Jake began to feel impatient to see her face and verify that this was all she was a
sking. He glanced at his speedometer and saw that his foot had begun to get impatient too. Thirty-seven in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone wasn’t exactly madness, but it wasn’t especially smart, either. A man in his seventies could easily fail to discern some pedestrian in the dark, and then react too slowly to do anything but stop and back up over the body.

  After about twenty minutes, Jake saw the bright lights of the marquee over the theater and began to search for an acceptable place to pull over. He failed to find one until he was abreast of the place, so he stopped in front.

  There was a startling thump on the roof, and he looked over the back seat to see Jane standing there yanking the right rear door open. “Hi, Jake,” she said. “Wow, it’s hot. Is the heater on?”

  “Evening,” said Jake. He turned off the heater while she helped a man about his age slide into the back, then slammed the door and got into the front seat beside Jake.

  “This is Dr. Dahlman,” said Jane, “and this is my friend Jake.”

  The two men nodded, but Jake had already said “Good evening,” and a second greeting seemed to him like taking a hat off twice. Besides, he was sure he had heard that name before, and might be able to think of something original to say if he could just drag out of his memory why the name was familiar. He pulled the car out into traffic.

  The man was quicker. “I hope we’re not getting you into trouble, Mr. Reinert,” he said, and then Jake remembered. It was the name that they had kept interrupting the baseball game to repeat.

  The confirmation of Jake’s ability to sense trouble was not a sufficient recompense for the obliteration of his peace of mind. He turned to Jane and watched her face as he said, “Finding married life a little quiet, are we, Janie?”

  “No,” she said. “I like it.” She looked strained, as though she were concentrating on biting something that she had between her teeth. After a moment she said, “I’m sorry to get you involved, Jake. I had no time to prepare anything sensible, so I had to improvise.”