The Face-Changers

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.”

Jane sighed. “All right. Tell me what to do.”

Dahlman waited while Jane went into the bathroom and returned with the little paper packet. He didn’t watch her, just began to talk. “We’ll use white thread, because it’s been bleached rather than dyed, and the dye is probably more poisonous. Soak the needle and thread in alcohol for a few minutes while we repeat the procedure we used on the entry wound to disinfect. When you’re finished, take as many stitches as you can fit with the thread we have. Work outside the sutures that are there, by at least a quarter inch on each side, in a pattern that looks like shoelaces.”

“How do I tie it off?”

“Take it in and out of the earlier laces a few times and then tie it in a square knot.”

Jane went about preparing the needle and thread. When she poured the alcohol on his wound, he gripped the mattress so hard that she heard a sound like the sheet ripping, then went limp. But in a few seconds she heard him say, “Next the peroxide, please.”

She used the peroxide, then waited until he said, “Now begin.”

Jane forced her mind to stop thinking of his back as living flesh. She told herself it was the soft, buttery leather they used for couches and car seats. She sewed it as she would have repaired a piece of furniture, except that it bled. She had to catch the blood with cotton. When she had finished, she tied off the thread as he had told her to.

“Next, douse the whole area with peroxide again,” said Dahlman. His voice was hoarse, all air and no vibration. “Then Neosporin and a full dressing of gauze and adhesive tape.”

When Jane had finished she stepped back and waited. Dahlman lay still. Finally she detected from the sound of his breathing that he was asleep, so she covered him with the blanket and went to the table by the window. She opened a Styrofoam container, looked at the food she had bought, then closed it and sat down in the chair with her hands over her eyes.

Dahlman awoke an hour later, sat up, threw off the blanket, and walked to the bathroom, still as unaware of his nakedness as ever. He used the shaving mirror in front of him to look over his shoulder into the big mirror. He lifted the gauze and studied the wound. “I don’t like the look of that. It’s inflamed.”

“What do we do?”

“An antibiotic. I’m afraid I can’t just write a prescription, can I?”

Jane shook her head. “We’ll have to do it another way.”

“I’ve heard there’s a black market for medicines,” he said. “Is it true?”

“Of course it’s true. There’s a black market for everything. But they’re not people we want to deal with right now. They’re just like any other drug dealers. Antibiotics aren’t their usual merchandise, so they’d have to make a special trip. That makes them curious. We’ll just cut out the middle man and get it ourselves.”

“How?”

“The way they do. What’s the antibiotic?”

“I’d prefer Cipro. It’s effective against the widest spectrum of bacteria, and I have no idea what was in that water.”

“Spell it.”

“C-I-P-R-O. But if that isn’t available, any of the penicillins or cephalosporins would be worth having.”

She picked up her purse and walked toward the door. “Get some rest, and try to eat something. I won’t be back for a few hours.”

Jane selected a gynecologist by talking to a woman at the hotel desk, who had a list of doctors for sick guests. She called and made an appointment for that afternoon. When she reached the office she told the nurse that she was on vacation and had forgotten her birth-control pills. The doctor took her right away, checked her blood pressure and heart rate, and wrote her a prescription for Orthocept pills. As she left the office, she slipped his pen into her purse.

Jane drove up the street until she saw a mailbox-rental store that advertised “Self-Serve Copies, 10¢,” went inside, made a copy of nothing, then used the blank sheet to cover the doctor’s handwriting and make a blank prescription form. Next she used the doctor’s pen to trace his signature and the genuine prescription, substituting the word “Cipro” for “Orthocept.”

It took Jane a little longer to find the right pharmacy. She looked for one on the other side of the city so the druggist would not be too familiar with her doctor’s handwriting. She wanted one that was not part of a larger building, so all sides would be visible, and one that wasn’t part of a chain, because there was no way to know what might come up on the computer of a chain store. After she handed in her prescription, she sat in a coffee shop in the strip mall across the street and waited. No police cars arrived, no stranger showed up to hang around the building. After an hour she went in, picked up her prescription, and paid for it in cash.

When Jane handed Dahlman the bottle of pills he looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

“Something wrong with it?”

“It’s exactly what I asked for.”

“That’s why I asked you to spell it.”

He took a dose immediately, then went back to the bed. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

Jane said nothing. She opened her suitcase and brushed her hair.

“Don’t you want to hear what I was thinking?”

Jane stared at him over the lid of the suitcase. “Not if it’s about me.”

“Interesting,” said Dahlman. “What I was thinking about was why a man like Dr. McKinnon would know the telephone number of a woman like you.”

“A woman like me?”

Dahlman went on. “He had it in his head, you know—didn’t have to look it up. I was thinking it was something like this. He did you a favor—maybe operated on you or a friend of yours. You told him that if he ever needed anything in return, he should call. The number just stuck in his mind. He’s a brilliant man, with the sort of mind that things just stick to. And last night I came looking for you. The police shot me before I could make it to your house. I told Carey your name, and out came your number.”

“You think he once took a thorn out of my paw?” Her face wore a mirthless little smile.

“Well?” He looked at her triumphantly. “Am I right?”

Jane picked up a new set of clothes and walked toward the bathroom. “I’m going to shower and change. Then I’m going to sleep for a few hours. You can watch TV quietly, or read if the light’s not in my eyes. When I wake up it will be dark. And then we’re going to check out and drive on.”

“You won’t tell me how he knows you?”

“He knew my number because I’m his wife.” She closed the door, and in a moment Dahlman heard the shower running.

Dahlman eased himself onto the bed. He had done it again. He had met a person he liked, and had studied her for a time, and found her so intriguing that he had allowed his curiosity to explode into life and hungrily turn her into a specimen for study. His life seemed to him a long and distressing series of incidents like this—a sequence of offenses that made him want to hide his face. He found himself wishing he could be back in the clinic in Chicago with the door closed and human beings kept far away, where he wouldn’t be tempted to do something that would make him ashamed. He felt a sudden twinge in his shoulder and shifted his weight to his right side. “That’s another reason,” he thought. “If I were back there, I could make this thing go away.”