The Face-Changers

44

Jane stepped off the plane in Rochester, Minnesota, and paused for a moment in front of a shop that sold newspapers, then walked on toward the car-rental counters. It was too soon for anything about what had happened in Santa Barbara to have reached print, and if there were any articles about Carey or Richard Dahlman or Janet McAffee she should not read them. She could do nothing now but what she was doing, and any distraction would weaken her.

She rented a Toyota Camry and drove up Route 52 toward Minneapolis. It seemed to her that a lifetime had passed since she had driven to Minneapolis with Richard Dahlman, and nearly that long since she had come back to watch Sid Freeman’s house.

As she drove on the dark highway, she could not help composing versions of what she was going to say. “I don’t know why you didn’t kill me while I was in your house. Maybe you’re so crazy that you forgot.”

Sid would protest. “Janie,” he would say. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t have anything to do with these people except what I told you that night to your face.”

Jane would say, “I saw Quinn.”

He would be silent, trying to work out all of the implications in an instant but not able to, and she would hear him breathing through his mouth. Maybe he would say, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” She would answer, “I don’t do that kind of work. Kill yourself.”

The last words she would say were, “Better get packed, Sid. The police will be here in five minutes.” She amended it: “three minutes.” That would be enough time for him to get frantic, but not enough time for him to scrape up twenty years’ accretion of incriminating evidence and make it into a fast car. She would wait until she could actually see the black-and-whites speeding along the lake road.

She thought through the conversation in so many variations that she almost failed to notice when she was getting too close to the lake road. She turned off at the next corner, circled the lake on the hillside high above Sid Freeman’s house, then parked her car on the street two blocks from the house where she had rented her room.

It was after midnight when Jane walked along the top of the hill above Sid Freeman’s house, among the tall old trees. She held the cellular telephone in her hand, but carried nothing else. She could have driven to the bank in Chicago, opened the safe-deposit box, and taken out the Beretta Cougar nine-millimeter pistol she stored there with a few spare identities. Maybe she would be making that trip sometime soon, and maybe in a few minutes she would wish she had done it tonight. If she did, the feeling of regret would probably last only a second or two before darkness came. She knew that tonight it was not a good idea for her to have in her hand the means of killing Sid Freeman. He had gotten very adept at taking away people’s whole lives and changing them into something that they did not want to be. His final act on earth was not going to be taking away Jane Whitefield.

Jane was afraid of the people who lived in that fortified house. She was in awe not of Sid Freeman but of his craziness. The strange, uncivilized teenagers he had brought in were one manifestation of it; his extreme premeditation was another. She could picture him sitting in that dim library, working all of it out as though the world outside were some enormous chessboard. As she walked along, a lot of sights and sounds that had struck her as little surprises came back to her.

Sid had said he had been watching television and reading newspapers and magazines and had not run across some runner who had come to his house. In the old days, Sid had never paid the slightest attention to published news. He had gotten all of the information that interested him from the people who came up the path to his house—and from Quinn. That was what had made it seem true: Quinn was dead.

She had bought without question the statement that Quinn was dead. It had seemed inevitable, even overdue. Selling commodities and services to criminals was a risky activity. Sid had stayed in that house in Minneapolis with lookouts and armed guards, while Quinn, and sometimes Christie, had traveled the country foraging for things that could be had only from people who didn’t care about laws, and delivering them to people who used them to commit crimes. All transactions had been in cash. When Jane had heard they were both dead, she had been only mildly surprised.

Of course they would be dead—if not now, then next week, or next year. The only part of the announcement that had even held her attention was that she had trouble imagining Sid without them. When she had tried to bargain with him, she had been surprised that the one who left the bigger void was not Christie. Christie had always floated in the background like some weird wraith, the only constant in Sid’s fortress, where everything was always in motion and even Sid couldn’t hold onto one identity for long. But now it seemed to Jane that Christie must just have been a young woman who had gotten some kind of titillation out of the excitement that surrounded Sid’s repulsive person.

It was Quinn that Jane had kept missing. She had kept thinking of him while Sid was talking, catching herself glancing suddenly into the shadows and expecting to see him. It occurred to her that he probably had been in the house that night. She had somehow sensed it—maybe smelled some subtle personal scent that human beings gave off, or heard him in another room whispering to Sid’s kids, just below the level of conscious hearing.

That made her wonder why Sid had not told Quinn to kill her. That was the way it would have been done. Quinn was the permanent second in command, the junior partner. He had always made her tense and careful, not because he wouldn’t do as Sid asked, but because she had never seen him experience a moment of reluctance. It had been as though his craziness had been worse than Sid’s, and Sid’s deliberation and physical torpor had held it back from its natural excesses.

Jane still wasn’t sure why Sid had not killed her. He had sent the two teams of men all over the country looking for Dahlman. She sensed that she had missed something, so she tried to remember events in order. After that night, the men had not come close to Dahlman. Maybe they had stopped looking. As soon as Sid had seen that Dahlman was in Jane’s hands, he had quit. Was that what he had wanted? Yes. He had, maybe on the spot, decided he liked the idea of having Dahlman disappear. It was much better than having him dead. If Dahlman was killed, then the police could not escape the conclusion that someone must have done away with him, and wonder who. If Dahlman just vanished, then the only killer was Dahlman.

Jane reached the vantage point that she had been looking for, and stared down at Sid Freeman’s house. The high, dark brown building looked different, and at first she wasn’t sure why. She moved her eyes along the row of upper windows. There were no lights, no shades. Usually it was possible for her to pick out the room where the lookout with the spotting scope was stationed, because it would be the only room on the floor with no lights. She looked at the ground-floor windows. There was the usual dim glow of inadequate, old-fashioned ceiling fixtures. Sid had never been good about changing bulbs.

She moved closer to get a better look, her heart beating a little faster. She studied the front of the house. The steel-mesh security door was slightly ajar. It wasn’t squared with the jamb, so the lock was not engaged. She had known it was possible that Quinn would simply have driven to the nearest telephone to tell Sid it was time to stop being Sid and get out. During her flight she had put that notion aside, because it was a thought that could lead to no possible change in her actions. She had to come here.

She could not leave him alone and let him use her name to fool helpless runners into giving him whatever money and freedom they had left. And she couldn’t go back to being Mrs. McKinnon knowing that some night she might wake up next to Carey and hear the sound of Quinn cocking the hammer.

Jane had to see. She kept to the land above the house and behind it. She approached it from the corner so she would not be directly in front of any window. She walked with such care and silence that she could not hear her own footsteps, and she stayed in the deepest shadows with her back to a stand of trees up the hill. She kept moving until her hand touched the cold, damp brick apron along the side of the house.

She barely breathed as she slowly edged along the stonework that was taller than she was. It had been designed so that if Sid was standing, no bullet from outside would pierce the siding and take off his head. Jane felt no indecision about where she should go. Sid was nocturnal, and the room he used for his work was the library to the left of the foyer. If he had not left, that was where he would be.

She stepped close to the window. Had it always had bars on it? She had never seen them before, because the shutters were kept closed. Why were they open now?

She moved her left eye close to the corner of the window and looked in, then pulled back quickly, her back pressed against the cold stones. She studied the image she had brought away with her. The body on the floor seemed to be genuine. It was not some other big man in late middle age who had been turned into a corpse so Sid could be presumed dead. This seemed to be Sid. The open blinds and the unlocked door made sense. If the little monsters had turned on him, they wouldn’t bother to lock up. Jane began to step toward the front of the house. She would have to go inside and get a look at his face in the light. She heard a faint sound: the window latch.

Jane dived away from the side of the house just as the arm jabbed out between the bars and fired a pistol down into the ground directly below the window. The arm swung upward like a pendulum, firing a shot every yard or two along the stone siding, as rapidly as the finger could pull the trigger. The sound of the pistol with its suppressor was like the strike of a snake, so the ring of the brass ejected against the stone was almost as loud.

At the end of the swing, in the instant when the arm reached horizontal, Jane leapt. She pinned the forearm to the wall with her left shoulder and hammered the fingers with her right fist.

The yelp was Quinn’s. He yanked his arm back and dropped the pistol so he could get his hand back through the bars quickly. Jane picked up the gun, ducked behind the trunk of a tree, and waited.

“Jane?” She could hear his position as though she could see him. He was under the window, where no bullet could reach him through all that stone. He wanted to hear where she was.

She decided that she would need to keep up with where he was, too. She had to make him talk. “What, Quinn?”

“It occurred to me that we have a problem.”

“Do we?”

“If I moved away from this wall—say, toward the door—you would shoot me through the window, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s possible,” she admitted. “I don’t like you.”

“But you’re behind the tree. If you move away from it, I’m going to be able to pop up and shoot you before you could get to the next one.”

“Assuming you have another gun where you can reach it.” She ventured a glance around the tree at the window. He was letting her see the end of the barrel over the windowsill. She aimed the pistol at it and waited. Just a tiny bit of his hand would be enough. The barrel disappeared.

“Janie? You here to see Sid?”

“I just saw Sid,” she answered.

“Oh,” said Quinn. “Hey, do you smell fat burning? Sid must be in hell already.” He laughed. “Courtesy of you.”

“How did I manage that?” she asked.

“Sid died for your sins. I couldn’t let you tell him that all this time the one sending him runners was me.”

“You mean he didn’t know? He really thought you were dead?” Of course, she thought. She had not caught Sid lying, because Sid had not been lying. He had been fooled, too.

Quinn laughed. “How else was I going to leave Sid and take a lot of Sid’s money with me?”

“What about the lovely and talented Christie?”

“She’s really dead. Nothing to do with me. Got killed in New York, I heard.”

Jane was silent for a long time. Had his voice come from a different spot? She listened for fainter sounds that might be movement.

Quinn broke her concentration. “You know, there’s one good way to get out of this, Janie.” He was still under the window.

“Maybe more than one.”

“I said one good way. I can do everything Sid ever did, and you seem to be back in the trade. We could get pretty rich if we’d help each other.”

“Great offer, Quinn. But your last partner seems reluctant to give you a reference.”

“You know what really killed him?”

“Besides you?”

“He didn’t get out enough,” said Quinn. “He lost touch. He knew zero. He sat here all alone, waiting for everybody to come to him, and without me—”

“All alone?” said Jane. Was it possible he didn’t know?

“Yeah, all alone,” Quinn repeated. “He sat here on his fat ass. He didn’t even change the locks after I got killed. So ten minutes ago, I walked right in and—”

Jane said, “Quinn, listen to me. Get out of that house. Get out now.”

Quinn laughed again. “I head for the door, you pop me through the window? Sure.”

“No, you don’t understand. Sid wasn’t alone. He must have sent them out on some errand. I swear I won’t go near the window. Just get out now. They’ll kill us both.” She took three steps from the tree.

The barrel of Quinn’s gun appeared above the windowsill, and Jane dived back toward the tree. She heard the gun spit four or five times, and a stone near the base of the tree jumped upward into the weeds.

She lay behind the tree listening. She had not heard a car pull up on the street, but now she heard doors slamming and running feet. She was not sure whether Quinn’s sudden silence meant he was listening too or he was just moving to another window to get a better shot at her. Then she heard the roar of the Ingram MAC 10 tearing his body to pieces.

Jane lay still as a young girl appeared at the window. Jane could tell this was the one she had seen hiding at the top of the stairs on the night she had come here with Dahlman. The girl pressed her thin, feral face against the metal bars and her sharp eyes stared out into the dark.

Then Jane heard the voice of the boy she had seen that night. “What—you think somebody went out through the bars?”

The girl bristled. “Maybe I need some air. Do you mind?”

“He’s dead, and the other old guy is dead. You want to be dead too?”

The girl sighed in heavy annoyance. “Go pack the car. I’ll look around for money.”

Jane heard the boy’s shoes on the floor, hurrying out of the room into the foyer. The girl stayed where she was for a moment, then moved toward the door after him. She looked down at the body. “Bye, Sid.” Her voice sounded like the voice of a little child. Then Jane heard her move out into the foyer after the boy.

Jane stood, wiped the gun off, and left it on the ground. She whispered, “Bye, Sid,” picked up the cellular telephone she had brought, and moved off into the darkness toward her car. As she drove, she made three telephone calls. The first was to an apartment in Cleveland, the second to a retirement home in Carlsbad, and the third was to the Minneapolis Police Department.

As soon as she had made the last call, she stopped the car at a parking lot beside a picnic area overlooking the Mississippi. There was only one street lamp near the entrance to the lot. She drove to the far end of the pavement and turned off her lights. She left the car running, got out, walked across the lawn to the edge, and hurled the telephone into the slow, dark water.

Jane turned and walked back to the car. She sat down in the seat, pulled the safety belt across her chest, and fastened it. She put the car into gear and began to make a wide turn toward the entrance.

“Jay-nee …” It was a soft, female voice, like a song just above a whisper. It made the hair on the back of Jane’s neck stand.

Jane’s foot hit the brake and the car jerked to a stop. She whirled in her seat to look behind her, and what she saw made her breath catch in her throat.

The woman’s face was illuminated in the glow of the single street lamp. It looked supernaturally pale under the long, black hair, but the red lips were set in the same amused, knowing smile that Jane remembered. “Jay-nee,” came the voice again. Then came the horrible, mocking laugh. Jane could see the big, square-looking .45 pistol held just above the woman’s lap with the muzzle aimed at the center of Jane’s backrest. They both knew the car seat wouldn’t stop the bullet.

The voice rose to a normal volume. “Say something.”

Jane said, “Everybody around here seems to come back from the dead. First Quinn, now you.”

The woman looked irritated. “Not exactly. I’m not Christie anymore. Quinn and I figured you must be dead, so I died too, only the death I came back from was yours.”

Jane said, “You’re supposed to be me? That’s why you grew your hair long and dyed it. You’re Jane?”

Christie shrugged. “I was the only one who had the qualifications. I got rich at it. Did you?” She seemed to enjoy the thought for a moment, then said, “You surprised me tonight, though.”

“By staying alive.”

Christie nodded. “I knew you were coming. I sent Quinn in to do Sid, so you could be Little Red Riding Hood, and Quinn could be the wolf. I spent the evening driving around, waiting for a rental car like this to appear in the neighborhood.”

“Why?”

“If the one who came out of the house was Quinn, great. If Sid came out, still okay: I could make him believe anything—that I was Quinn’s prisoner or something. But if the one who came back was you.… What could I do?”

“Christie,” said Jane. “You don’t have to—”

“I’m not,” Christie interrupted. “I’m sick of the whole business. Without Quinn or Sid, it’s too much trouble. I wanted to let you know. Drive back to the dark part of the lot and park. When you get there, I’ll get out and you drive off. I’ll be watching until you’re out of sight, so don’t do anything strange. Don’t even look back.”

Jane turned the car and drove in the direction of the river. Christie was lying. There was no reason in the world for Christie to do anything now except pull the trigger. Jane pressed her foot down on the gas pedal a little harder. The car was moving faster now, slowly gaining speed. She had not turned the headlights on when Christie had appeared, and she didn’t turn them on now, in the hope that Christie would not notice just how fast the car was moving.

The voice came again. “Slow down.”

Jane said nothing. Christie was more alert than she had expected. There was no hope of hiding the speed now, so Jane accelerated rapidly. The faster she was going, the fewer options Christie would have. It was already too late to shoot and jump.

“Stop the car or I’ll blow your head off.”

The car left the pavement and bumped onto the uneven surface of the lawn without losing speed. Jane watched the rearview mirror and saw the arm come up carrying the gun, then swing hard at her head.

Jane ducked to avoid the impact, but the gun caught the back of her head in a glancing blow that knocked her forward and made her see a red afterimage. Then she realized that the car had already reached the end of the grass. It shot outward, and it felt for a moment as though they were suspended in the air, and then the car began to fall. Jane’s seat belt seemed to tighten and drag her down out of the sky.

For a second she was aware that Christie was rising behind her in the back seat, both hands pressed against the ceiling to keep it away from her. Jane straightened her spine and sat up in her seat, looked out the windshield, and tried to see the surface of the river below. It was all darkness. She waited a second, then another, and then came the shock.

The car seemed to stab downward into the water at an angle. There was a bang as the airbag exploded out of the hub of the steering column and flattened Jane against her seat and, at the same time, a heavy thump as Christie was thrown forward behind her. Almost immediately, Jane heard a rushing noise in the dark, like a waterfall, and then the sensation of cold water on her feet.

It took Jane a second or two to determine that she could move. She fought the airbag to free her right arm, unbuckled her belt, and slipped sideways to the passenger side. She fell against the dashboard. The car was sinking front-first, the heavy engine weighing it down.

The water began to rush in faster. Her legs were in water up to the hip. Then she could hear more water, and she could feel that it was coming in through the weakened seal around the windshield. Jane listened, but she couldn’t hear Christie, so she tried to stare between the front seats toward the floor of the back seat.

At that moment, Christie moved. She pushed off against the back of the driver’s seat and brought the pistol around. There was a deafening report, and the airbag beside Jane deflated. Then Christie climbed higher onto the back seat, and Jane ducked lower.

Jane let the torrent of water coming through the open side window pour over her. She held herself against it with all the strength in her legs, and groped for the door handle. When she found it, she grasped it and stayed down. The water was up to her chest now, then her neck, and she held only her face above it. She knew that no human being could open a car door against the rush of water. She would have to hold on to the door handle and wait until the door was completely submerged.

The seconds went by, while Jane listened for another shot. Then she could hear nothing, because the water was up over her ears. She lifted her face above it to take a breath of air, pushed down on the door handle, put her shoulder against the door, and used her legs to press against it. The door opened. Jane slipped out and swam. She counted her strokes: one, two, three; her head broke out of the dark water, and she gasped in a breath.

Jane swam on the surface to the little margin of pebbles and mud on shore, pulled herself onto it, then looked back. The front of the car was completely underwater now. The only parts visible were the rear window, the trunk, and a bit of the roof, but it was sinking. Suddenly there was a shot, and a hole appeared in the rear window.

“No!” Jane shouted. “Get out the way I did! Swim down to the door!”

But there was no way Christie could hear her. There was a series of five muffled shots, and Jane saw bits of glass sparkling in the muzzle flashes as they exploded upward out of the rear window. Christie had created a ragged row of punctures, but she had not created an exit for herself. The car sank more rapidly, and the water reached the rear window. Christie’s shoe kicked against it once, making it balloon outward an inch or two; then the leg was pulled back to kick again when the rear window collapsed inward and Christie disappeared. The water poured in, and the car sank from sight.

Jane jumped to her feet and ran a few yards downstream, where the lazy current had carried the car, then sloshed back into the water until it was up to her thighs, and ducked into it. She dived downward, trying to reach the car. But the water was black, and she could not find it. She tried over and over, but her hands touched nothing except soft mud and stringy weeds. There was nothing that felt like metal. After what could have been ten minutes or a half hour, Jane crawled back onto the shore and lay there, panting.

Before she had fully regained her breath, she forced herself to stand. She took one last look at the slow, untroubled surface of the river. Then she turned away and began to walk.