The Face-Changers

8

As Jane drove along Route 62, she began to feel the old habits of mind coming back to her. Years of experience had taught her that the decisions she made during the first few hours would determine whether her runner was safe or merely a step ahead.

She was satisfied that she’d had no choice but to take Dahlman out of Buffalo tonight. The authorities would assume that a wounded man could not have gone far. They would look for him hardest in the immediate vicinity, and keep moving outward for a few days. They would knock on doors and interview everyone who could conceivably have seen or heard anything. For at least a month, it was going to be very difficult for a man in his sixties to show his face in Buffalo without getting a lot of inquisitive stares. If Dahlman so much as walked past a window, somebody might call the police. But if she could get Dahlman out of this part of the country, there was a good chance that wherever she took him, few people would have heard of him, and the local police would have their own fugitives to hunt.

The police were the immediate threat, but what they did made sense, so they were predictable. Her mind kept returning to the two men at the hospital. When she had pulled into the parking lot in a police car, they had hidden their guns in the weeds, so there was no possibility that they had anything to do with any police organization.

Who were they? She glanced over her shoulder at Dahlman. He was asleep on the back seat, so for the moment, she couldn’t ask him any questions. The sudden arrival of people Dahlman didn’t seem to have recognized, who were prepared to kill him in police custody, raised Dahlman’s problem to a new level.

Jane had believed Carey when he had said that Dahlman had been framed for a murder. What that had meant to her was that some person who knew both Dahlman and Sarah Hoffman had killed her and hit on some unusually effective way of throwing suspicion in another direction. Jane had only temporarily suspended her disbelief enough to accept Carey’s statement that Dahlman would not be safe from the framer if he went to jail. It was possible. If Dahlman had something to say that the killer was worried about, it wasn’t that difficult to find a prisoner who could be paid to make sure he didn’t live to say it.

But in Jane’s experience, lone killers were shy about the process. The killer had to go to an intermediary, negotiate a deal for the second murder, and then wait to see whether the other side delivered or turned him in. Her skepticism had triggered her reflex to construct alternative plans. She had decided to listen to Dahlman’s story as soon as possible, and then decide whether the threat was real. If she was sure that Dahlman was wrong, she would teach him to recite a plausible tale about why he had been scared enough to leave the hospital, then return to Buffalo and drop him off at the police station.

When she had picked up the guns the two men had hidden in the weeds, her skepticism had been obliterated. In its place was mystification. Dahlman’s adversary wasn’t some solitary amateur who had killed Sarah Hoffman and shifted the blame onto him. He was being hunted by professionals. That raised the possibility that Sarah Hoffman had been killed by professionals, and that the frame had been constructed by professionals.

What attraction would two doctors engaged in medical research have for people like that? Doctors had drugs. They tended to have money, houses and offices full of nice things, and cars that might interest thieves. Doctors engaged in research that had intriguing implications might excite a pharmaceutical manufacturer or a jealous rival. Sarah Hoffman might have had some secrets that Carey didn’t know about—a gambling problem or a boyfriend who called himself a “developer” or “investor” or “consultant” but was actually a gangster. No answer she could think of was more likely than any other. Until she had asked Dahlman all of the questions and listened to all of the answers, she would know nothing. She didn’t even know for sure whether Dahlman was innocent. Having armed men hunting him didn’t exactly prove he had not murdered Sarah Hoffman.

Jane looked at Dahlman again. He was still asleep, so for the moment he was invisible to a casual glance from a distance, but if a policeman were to pull them over, he could hardly fail to notice that there was an old man lying there, and that he looked sick.

Jane was only as far as North Collins when she noticed the headlights behind her. She watched and waited, hoping they would turn off in Lawtons, then Gowanda, Conewango, Clear Creek, but they stayed there, just far enough back so she couldn’t really see the car. When she slowed down, so did they. As she approached Jamestown she began to feel tense. Jamestown was big enough to have policemen who stayed alert at night, and the hour was half past eleven, when traffic was thin. If the ones behind were policemen, they could easily have called ahead and consulted with the local authorities. They would have asked them to pick a spot to set up a blind roadblock.

Pulling over a suspected murderer was a delicate matter. They would want a big complement of policemen waiting, and Jamestown was the last city of sufficient size to have one. They would want to do it in a place where he couldn’t shoot bystanders, so it would be outside of town. No, she couldn’t even count on that. Since it was long after business hours, they might choose to divert him into a cul-de-sac in an industrial area where he would be surrounded on three sides by high walls lined with sharpshooters.

Jane tried to decide whether her uneasiness was pronounced enough to make her turn off the highway onto another route. She studied the headlights in her rearview mirror for a few seconds. The car was still staying back a set distance—maybe a thousand feet on the long dark stretches and half that when she approached a town. It had done nothing suspicious, and that could be what was making her suspicious. Carey would have said she was driving like an old lady, but she had her reasons. What were theirs?

After eleven, on an open country road in good weather, people got careless, drove too fast, got impatient waiting for a safe place to pass. The driver of the car behind her never did those things.

Her tires made a new sound as she crossed a little bridge over Conewango Creek. She glanced over the rail at the quick flash of black water. If she remembered the route correctly, the road would cross the creek at least twice more. “Conewango” meant “in the rapids.” The rapids were south of here, where there had once been a village. It was just before Warren, Pennsylvania, where the creek emptied into the Allegheny River. Tonight the stream seemed higher and faster than the last time she had been here. It had been a rainy summer.

She supposed it had always been a rainy summer. The Old People had a vast repertoire of procedures and medicines for success in war and love and curing disease and stopping whirlwinds, but she had never heard of one for making rain. They used to thank the Thunderers once a year for the plentiful supply. When European visitors of a literate sort visited Nundawaonoga in those days, they had all written descriptions of miles of fields growing tall with corn, bean vines twining up the stalks and squash beneath.

Jane stared at the empty blackness ahead, but a growing glare began to sear her eyes. The car behind her was coming up fast, and the driver had switched on his high-beam headlights. She tilted her mirror to keep the light out of her eyes and watched the car in the side mirrors. If he was trying to tell her he wanted to pass, she would be glad. But first she had to be sure.

She hugged the right side of the road and slowed down to let the car slip by safely. Then she watched. The car kept coming, moving a bit faster now.

Finally it swung into the left lane, and as it came abreast she turned her head over her left shoulder to look behind the glare of the headlights at the driver. She saw his head in silhouette, but all she could make out was that it didn’t have the long hair of a woman, and it wasn’t wearing a hat. The car glided forward and everything changed and came into focus at once.

A second head popped up from the passenger seat, the window started to come down, and she saw the face.

Jane stamped on the brake pedal, then turned the wheel to the left, toward the other car. She had predicted the other driver’s reaction correctly. He was alarmed by the sudden swerve and the squeal of tires. His foot touched his brake pedal for an instant, but then he realized he had miscalculated: if she wanted to ram him, then he wanted distance. His foot jammed down on the accelerator, and he shot forward again.

Jane saw her hood slip behind the other car’s trunk, missing it by inches, then keep turning. She concentrated on gauging the spin of her car. For two full seconds it was in its own motion and out of her control, the rear end swinging around with a shriek of friction. Her seat belt tightened around her hips and chest and she heard her purse slap against the inside of the passenger door and fall to the floor.

Finally, when it seemed as though the car could not do anything but keep spinning, the tires caught, the brakes held, and it came to a stop, rocking violently once, twice, but not tipping over.

Jane looked over the seat. Dahlman had his arms and legs spread, gripping the door handle with one hand and clawing the fabric of the back seat with the other, his face set in an open-mouthed breathless grimace. She found the white line on the pavement leading into her door, saw the bright taillights of the other car still diminishing at high speed, and regained her sense of direction. She straightened the car and began to accelerate northward, the way they had come.

“Who are they?” gasped Dahlman. “Police?”

“No such luck,” said Jane. She watched the rearview mirror as she added speed. “It’s the two men we saw outside the hospital.” The other car was still going south, but then the taillights came on bright They were stopping.

“How?”

“Maybe they were at the airport when I rented the car. Maybe anything. We’re in trouble.”

“What do we do?”

“Run.”

She stared in the mirror just as she entered the first curve, and the mirror showed a flash of the white side of the other car turning around to come after them, and then she could see only the empty darkness of the trees beside the curve. She tried to remember in reverse order all of the sights that had floated past her window on the way south. Whatever she did, it had to be soon.

Her speedometer said fifty, sixty, seventy. At eighty-five, the big car was harder to keep on the right side of the white line, and each bump seemed to make it rise into the air and come down with a bone-jarring bounce. She knew she was putting some distance between them and the white car, but two men who had planned to walk into a hospital full of cops and shoot a patient who was already in custody probably had an optimistic view of the nature of risk. The fact that they were following her would add to their safety. All they had to do was get her taillights in view and keep them there. Any obstacle in the road might kill Jane and Dahlman, but the white car would have plenty of time to stop.

She said to Dahlman, “How are you feeling?”

“Rotten, but fortunately I was asleep when it happened, so I woke up on the floor and didn’t see enough to give me a heart attack.”

“I’m afraid we have to do something. If you’re not up to this, tell me now and we won’t try.”

“I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no.”

“What am I thinking?”

“You’ve disarmed them. You have their guns, and they have nothing. You want to arrange an ambush and shoot them. I won’t permit that. I’ll let you off somewhere with the guns, and drive on by myself.”

Jane fought her way through competing thoughts, each in its own way important, but distracting. She had left the guns in Jake’s car, because she had been trying to get on an airplane. Dahlman wasn’t very observant, but he was unexpectedly brave. He wanted to take all of the risk on himself and let her escape—a completely impractical idea. He also had been lucky enough to live in the world all this time without learning anything about criminal behavior. The pistols those men had been carrying at the hospital were throwaways: ones they could use on him, then drop in a trash can before they walked out. If they had not left others in their car, they would never have come after him now.

Dahlman was naive and overconfident and insistent about matters he knew nothing about, but Jane supposed she should have felt glad. A man who would not use a gun to protect himself in a situation like this could be called many things, but he was certainly no murderer. Circumstances had presented her with the proof that she might have gotten around to wishing for later. Carey had been right about Dahlman, but it wouldn’t matter unless she could keep him alive.

“You’re wrong about nearly everything, but we have less than a minute for talk, so I’ll do all of it. Those men aren’t unarmed, so don’t give them a target. Just do as I say.”

“What’s your plan?”

“To have you do as I say.”

“I thought I had an option. What if I can’t do this?”

“Then you’ll die trying.”

Jane turned the car quickly to the side and up a street in the little town. It ran along Conewango Creek a short distance, then reached a dead end. She parked the car between two others along the curb, got out, and hurried to the trunk. Dahlman stepped out stiffly and leaned on a taillight to watch her. She pushed the two small suitcases aside, then lifted the false floor of the trunk, pulled out the spare tire, tossed her purse into the trunk, and slammed it.

“Come on.” She rolled the tire across the street and between two old brick buildings, then scrambled down a rocky bank onto a narrow muddy plateau. “Take my hand.”

Dahlman let her help him down onto the mud and stared at her in confusion as she lifted the tire down beside them. She said, “I know you’re not in any shape to swim, but that’s what the tire is for. The rim is heavy, so it will float low, but it will hold you up. Cling to it. If you can’t, I’ll hold you.”

Jane eased him into the cold, dark stream and placed his hands on the tire, then kept walking until the muddy bottom was no longer under her feet. She felt the current begin to pull them downstream. The momentum of the water tended to sweep them outward, away from the bank, but Jane resisted it, keeping her legs pumping steadily in a frog kick that didn’t risk breaking the surface.

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.”