The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  She saw the white car flash past over the bridge upstream, but she kept her eyes in that direction for several minutes because she knew it was too much to hope that the men would simply miss the turnoff and keep going. “How are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Cold. I can take it for a while,” said Dahlman.

  “That’s all you need to do.” She changed her grip and began to push Dahlman downstream on the tire, using only her legs to propel them onward in hard surges.

  It was probably a lie, she thought, but Dahlman seemed to find contradicting her either beneath his dignity or beyond his strength, because he said nothing.

  The old, dim street lamps along the road above the stream and the faint glow of light behind the translucent curtains of the old two-story houses made the little town of Frewsburg look unreal, like a stop in an elaborate electric train set. It was after midnight now, and there were no cars moving along this road.

  She kept looking back at the bridge, and she had almost begun to believe that the white car would not be back when it came into view again. She kept her eyes on it and felt a weight in her stomach. The car was slower now, prowling along the quiet street like a police cruiser. She could not see the men from this distance, so the car itself seemed to become the predator. It glided to the middle of the bridge and stopped.

  Jane turned her face away and put her head under the surface, feeling the dark water pushing her along at its own slow pace. In the cold silence she thought and waited. She could not pull Dahlman under with her, but as long as his head was close to the tire, the shape would be hard to see and it wouldn’t look like a man.

  She held her breath for a long time, then surfaced on the downstream side of the tire and looked back. The car was moving again. It came off the bridge and turned up the street where she had parked. Jane rolled in the water and began to kick again, taking in deep breaths and blowing them out rhythmically, as she pulled the tire along with one arm.

  She could tell that her memory had been right about the course of the little river. As it turned and meandered out of the hills toward Pennsylvania, there were lots of lazy curves. But these little old towns had all been built along rivers and streams that would run a mill, so there were probably narrows ahead where the water would get difficult. She needed just one big curve to do this right. The first one was too gradual, so she kept kicking. But as she did, the curve extended—not cutting back on itself but making a much bigger half circle to the east. She bent her arms to bring her close to Dahlman’s ear.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” said Dahlman.

  “The worst part is over.” Dahlman was lying, and so was she.

  Jane raised her wrist close to her face and tried to read the dial of her watch, but the moon was hidden by clouds and she had not checked the time when she had entered the water, so the watch would tell her little anyway. She held the watch to her ear. It was still ticking. She was glad she had put the one Carey had bought for her in a drawer and strapped this cheap plastic one to her wrist. She had never worn anything that could be construed as jewelry while she was working unless it was part of a disguise meant to distract a viewer from her face, because jewelry was memorable. It was also precious, and that might make her hesitate to throw it away when she knew it was the sensible thing to do.

  Jane floated in the stream as long as the curve lasted, then dragged the tire to the shore with Dahlman clinging to it. He stood up with difficulty, the water running out of his clothes, then sloshed along in the shallows, leaning on her, until she could bring him up onto dry, pebbly ground. She pushed the tire back out into the current until it caught and rotated downstream, the momentum slowly nudging it toward the middle.

  Jane brought Dahlman up into a little park full of willow trees. She let him lean against the trunk of a short one with branches that drooped nearly to the ground while she wrung out his sport coat and emptied the water from his shoes. She twisted her long hair into a rope, then shook it out, and the shake turned into a shiver.

  “I know you’re cold,” she said. “So am I, but I seem to remember it was a hot night a little while ago. Maybe we’ll dry off a little on the walk.”

  “The walk?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She gripped his arm and began to ease him away from the tree to walk across a small open lawn.

  He came with surprisingly little resistance, and it worried her a little, but he said, “Tell me what we’re doing.”

  “I don’t know if you were following the course of the stream,” she said.

  “I had my eyes closed most of the time.”

  “Well, it was a curve, like a horseshoe. We left the car at one end, and came out of the water at the other. The people who built this park probably picked the spot because of the curve. It’s secluded, and there’s water on three sides. We’re going to walk straight north back to the other tip of the horseshoe, where we started—cut across the curve.”

  “But I saw them driving right along that street. By now they’ve found the car.”

  “I thought you had your eyes closed. But you’re right. So what are they doing now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “First they looked inside it. They thought about breaking into it, but they saw that it has an alarm installed. I know they saw it, because otherwise we would have heard the alarm. They thought some more, and remembered that the car wasn’t what they wanted anyway. They want us. The reason I rolled the tire along the street and onto the mud was so they would eventually figure out that we had gone into the water. First they’ll look in all the alleys and Dumpsters and dark alcoves around the car, but at some point, they’ll see the track, and ours beside it. Even they will know that a single fresh tire track leading into a creek wasn’t made by a car. So they’ll follow the creek looking for us.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I’m not. I told you what I think. And if they had done anything but park, we would have seen their headlights again.” Jane was pleased. She had gotten him across the park, and now they were on a street leading away from the creek. They were heading straight for the car.

  “What makes you think they’re not searching the whole town on foot?”

  “Just a guess.” Her guess was that she had heard a story that they had not. When she had thought about the road crossing and recrossing the stream, she had remembered one of the stories about the Old People. Once, maybe two hundred years ago and maybe two thousand, there had been a small party of Senecas camped at a bend in a river. While they were sleeping, they had been stealthily surrounded by a much larger band of Cherokees. It must have happened on one of these winding waterways like the Conewango that ran south toward Pennsylvania and beyond, because that was the way the raiders had traveled in the endless wars. While his friends prepared for battle, a brave Cherokee had clung beneath a floating tree trunk and breathed through a hollow reed to reach the spot where the Senecas’ canoes were tied, and cut them loose. When he had done it, there was no way left for the Senecas to escape.

  But a few Senecas had caught the canoes beyond the river bend. Then they portaged across the narrow spit of land to come out upstream on the river again. They had kept paddling down and carrying the canoes across, until the Cherokees had concluded that a huge army of Senecas was gathering at the camp. The Cherokees had quietly retreated.

  Jane did not walk quickly, just kept Dahlman moving at a constant pace. She could tell that the time and the sleep and the cold water and the fear had taken away the last traces of anesthetic that could have been in his bloodstream. Now his body was rigid with pain, but it made him seem stronger, faster. As though to warn her that his personality had not changed, he said, “You could easily be wrong.”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  He persisted. “They could simply call the police anonymously and say they saw me getting out of that car and recognized me. We could arrive to find a hundred police officers waiting for us.”

  Jane said patiently,
“I don’t think that’s what we need to worry about.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if having you in police custody was enough for them, they would have left you alone in Buffalo.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those two men didn’t show up because you had escaped from the hospital. We only saw them because they and I happened to know the last few minutes when the police would leave you alone, and which would be the safest hallway in the building. If you’ll remember, we were on our way out, but they were on their way in.” She added, “Carrying guns,” to settle the matter.

  “I sort of missed the implication,” he admitted. “There’s no way they could have known I wasn’t still in the operating room, is there?”

  “No.”

  “It’s still not a very good plan.”

  “No, it’s not,” she agreed. “Let’s hear yours.”

  Dahlman was silent. Jane looked behind her at the sidewalk. Their clothes were no longer leaving drips on the pavement. The moisture evaporating from her clothes into the night air seemed to be taking most of her body heat with it and leaving her shaking, but a casual observer would not glance at her or Dahlman in the light of a street lamp and know that they had been in the water. At this hour she had little to fear from casual observers anyway. They were getting close to the creek again, because she could detect the familiar scent of it.

  She kept scanning the street ahead for the shapes of men on foot. At each intersection she lingered in the shadows of the big old trees and looked up and down to detect any movement, then hurried Dahlman across and into the darkness again.

  When they reached the street where she had left the car, she ushered Dahlman into the shadow beside the corner of a house and whispered, “Wait here for me.”

  She slipped across the street and down the frontage road, staying close to the buildings. She came first upon the white car that had been following. It was parked three spaces back from hers. She saw no heads in the windows, but she approached it cautiously from behind the right side until her angle gave her a clear view of the interior. It was empty.

  She hurried ahead to her rental car, clutching the keys. She went to her knees, examined the tires, then sighted along the top of the hood to be sure there were no spots where fingers had displaced the dust of the road. She lay on her back and stared up at the undercarriage. There seemed to be no booby traps.

  Jane stood up, hurried back to the white car, took out her pocket knife, knelt in front of the hood, and reached under the grille. She felt around until she found the bottom radiator hose, then sliced it. She found the fan belt and cut that too. She stabbed the wall of the left front tire, then the right.

  She ran to her rental car, started it, and swung it around to go back up the street. When she got there, Dahlman was already emerging from the shadows with a stiff, tottering gait. She got out and helped him into the back seat.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Far off, in approximately the direction they had come from, there came sounds: Pop! Pop-pop-pop-pop! Pop!

  Dahlman was alarmed. “What was that?”

  “Sounds like they’ve found the tire floating down the creek. They just killed it.”

  9

  The sky was still dark when Jane crossed the line from Pennsylvania into Ohio, but by the time she was on the outskirts of Youngstown, whole blocks of street lamps were turning themselves off. Jane pulled into a gas station, filled the tank, and walked to the little building to pay for the gas. When she returned, Dahlman was still asleep.

  She found a motel, checked in, then came back to the car and shook Dahlman. “Wake up, open your eyes, but don’t sit up just yet.”

  Dahlman blinked up at the ceiling of the car. “Where are we?”

  “Youngstown, Ohio. A motel. I’m going to take you inside in a second, when I’m sure there’s nobody watching.” She took a long look in each direction, then said, “Now.”

  She quickly walked him into the building and down the hall to their room. She hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob outside and closed the door. “Make yourself comfortable. Don’t answer the door, don’t answer the phone, don’t open the curtains. I’ll be back.”

  Jane drove out of the lot, along Bridge Street to Coitsville Center Road, north to King Graves Road, and west to the airport. She turned in the car she had rented in Buffalo and went to a second agency to get a new one under the name Kathy Sirini. On the way back to the motel she stopped at a big discount chain store and took a shopping cart.

  She bought pairs of sunglasses for men and women, two kinds of hair dye, makeup, baseball caps, a big roll of gauze, a bag of sterile cotton balls, a roll of adhesive tape. She bought a bottle of peroxide, some Mercurochrome, Neosporin ointment, a bottle of alcohol. Before she returned to the motel she stopped on Route 224 at a take-out restaurant and bought four breakfast specials that came in foot-wide Styrofoam boxes.

  She entered the room and looked around. Dahlman was invisible. “Anybody home?”

  “I’m in here.”

  She walked into the bathroom to find Dahlman lying in the bathtub naked. “Oh. Sorry,” she mumbled, and stepped out.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Dahlman. “Come in here.”

  Jane entered again. Dahlman glared at her. “You are a grown woman. You have definitely seen enough by now so that the sight of an aged person of the opposite sex can bring no surprises.”

  “I was being considerate,” said Jane.

  “Thank you,” said Dahlman. “Now look at this wound, and you can be more considerate.” He pointed to the hole in his left shoulder. “This is the entrance wound. Very neat and clean. A high-velocity bullet passed through intact. It was sutured expertly by a fine young surgeon. Come around to the back.” He leaned forward. “What do you see?”

  It was big and angry looking, and the white of his skin had a redness around the sutures. “Not so neat,” she said. “The stitches haven’t completely come apart, but they look … like they’re unraveling. It doesn’t seem to be bleeding.”

  “That’s the lesion I’m most concerned about. When a bullet enters the body, it’s still only nine millimeters wide with a rounded tip. After it’s hit bone and burrowed through muscle tissue, it mushrooms and splays out, and the exit wound is worse. This one was closed as it should be. But last night’s violent fall off the car seat undid that, and the swim in polluted water will have introduced contamination. What color is the tissue around it?”

  “Red. I’m sorry.”

  He brushed her words away with his hand. “That was your job, and this is my job. If I get a raging infection, your job will have been a waste of time.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Well, I think we should start by washing the wound with antiseptic. Any drugstore should have what we need.”

  “I bought peroxide, alcohol, Mercurochrome, and Neosporin.”

  He stared at her a moment, but she couldn’t tell whether he was considering praise or a reprimand. “Yes. Well, help me dry off and we can get started.”

  Jane took his arm over her shoulder and let him lean his weight on her while he stepped out of the tub. Jane worked to dry his bony legs and feet while he dried the places he could reach. She finished with his back.

  “Now let’s lay out what you’ve got,” he said. She brought in the shopping bag and he arranged the bottles and wound dressings. He looked at her again and conceded, “Very thoughtful of you.”

  “I had noticed that you had a hole in you,” she said.

  “Oh, yes. Well. You can wash up and we’ll get started.”

  Jane scrubbed her hands until he said, “Let’s start by washing the surface area around the wound with alcohol.”

  Jane took some cotton balls, soaked them with alcohol, and gently dabbed around the front of his shoulder. He watched her and frowned. “Here.” He took a few cotton balls, soaked them, and roughly sloshed alcohol on the wound at the back of his shoulder.

 
Jane waited. It was only a couple of seconds before the pain clawed him. Every muscle in his body tensed, then quivered. His eyes squeezed tight, and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. His breaths were shaky hisses moving in and out through clenched teeth.

  He leaned forward, gripping the counter for a moment, as though he were about to faint. When the wave had passed, his voice was rough and croaky. “Now, let’s use the peroxide the same way.”

  “I’d like it if we could do this someplace where if you faint you won’t crack your skull.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I was being foolish.”

  He walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed. “The alcohol is dry. Now the peroxide.”

  Jane slopped the peroxide on the entrance wound and watched him suffer. “That’s better,” he gasped. “It hurts like hell, but it ends. An infection would feel like that until I died. Just remember that. You’re not causing someone pain. It’s not you.”

  “What next?”

  “Neosporin, then tape a sterile gauze pad over it.”

  Jane did as he directed. He looked down at her work, nodded, then lay on the bed on his stomach. “Now comes the hard part,” he said. “This wound, the exit wound, is open. I can tell by the feel that infection has begun. It needs a bit more attention. Are you a good seamstress?”

  “No,” said Jane. She shook her head slowly as he looked up at her.

  “Do you mean, ‘No, I’m not a good seamstress,’ or ‘No, I won’t do any sewing’?”

  “A little bit of each,” she said.

  “Will you do it, or not?” He glared at her from the pillow.

  “If you think it’s necessary, I’ll do it. But I don’t have anything to sew with. I’ll have to get something.”

  “There’s a kit in the bathroom for sewing buttons on. Compliments of the inn. These are battlefield conditions, so you use what you’ve got.”