The Face-Changers jw-4 Read online

  There were two envelopes taped inside the carved Tibetan mask. She had been told that what the mask was vomiting through its fanged maw was supposed to be good luck, but she had never been able to feel comfortable about a culture so alien that it imagined good luck looked like that. She figured faith always worked that way—believing something frightening and unappetizing would be just the thing to make you happy. She supposed that attitude was why she had never married. Suddenly she wished she had a girlfriend with her so she could have said that aloud, but she was alone. At the moment, that woman waiting in the car was as close as she could come to a friend, and Janet somehow knew that the dark woman wouldn’t have laughed.

  She found one envelope behind her graduation picture, one in the battery compartment of a bulky old-fashioned portable radio that held four batteries, and three more tucked in with the receipts she kept with her old tax returns. That made twenty-one: two hundred and ten thousand. Oh, and five thousand in her purse. She had gotten into the habit of carrying that with her in case the very worst happened and she didn’t even have time to come here.

  Janet took a last look at the old things she had stored in the cubicle. She had judged all of them ineligible for space in her condo, but she had never been able to rid herself of any of them. She knew that as soon as the lease on the cubicle ran out, they would end up in a Dumpster. She felt a tearing sensation at the thought, paused for a moment, then retaped one envelope on the back of her graduation picture, under the frame cover.

  She went out to the counter, where the clerk was waiting. “Is there any way I can pay in advance for the next five years?”

  “Five?”

  She had said it without thinking it through, and tried to concoct a reason why he shouldn’t think she was doing something crazy or illegal. “Yes. I figure with inflation, I’ll save money over the long run.”

  He shrugged, and she could tell she had been wrong about him. If forced to think about it, he would probably have said that she was stupid, but he cared so little about her that he didn’t bother. He reached under the counter and produced a blank rental agreement like the one she had signed four years ago. “Sign it, and I’ll figure the charge.”

  He punched a calculator on the counter and did some elaborate mathematical operation while Janet’s brain silently screamed, “Just move the decimal point to the right! Four eighty a year. Forty-eight hundred, divided by two, is twenty-four hundred.”

  He said, “That will be … forty a month … times twelve months … times five.” Janet waited while he gave her a chance to prepare for the shock. “Two thousand four hundred.”

  She had been counting out hundred-dollar bills while he’d completed his computations. “Here.” She handed him the money and waited while he wrote up a receipt.

  As she left the building, she felt a little better, a little smarter. Two hundred thousand was enough running-around money, and this way, when she came back to Baltimore, she would at least have something—a little cash, a few objects that belonged only to her. She had even avoided writing a check, which would eventually be mailed to her condo and tell someone she had a rented storage space.

  She glanced at her watch. It had taken her twenty-three minutes. She had used too much time. The dark woman had probably thought she would walk in, grab the bag, and run.

  Janet hurried up the street toward the hotel, hating herself once again. She had worked hard for that money, invested it prudently each week for years, then carefully, over the past few months, had converted it to cash in five-thousand-dollar increments. She had hidden the cash in the way she had invested it: a little here, a little there. If the worst had happened, and someone had broken into her little storage area, she had hoped he might find one envelope and run away, assuming he had found everything. She had not considered that her chance of safety might be slipping away in the time it took her to gather it all.

  The cold, steady breeze from the harbor punished her tender face as she hurried toward the hotel, but Janet felt that she deserved it. She had been too slow-witted to explain in advance to the woman who was helping her that the money would take time. That was unforgivable. Had she even made sure the woman knew that what those men had threatened to do to her wasn’t just beating her up or something? Yes. She had told the person on the telephone all about it. The one on the telephone had been a woman too, or she might not have been able to say some of the words. The dark woman might even have been the one on the telephone.

  Janet hurried through the hotel entrance, then walked as casually as she could across the marble floor of the lobby. She had been in the habit of wearing business clothes to the plastic surgeon’s office. She had wanted to make the people there think she was a busy professional person, because being busy and prosperous seemed the same as being respectable. But now the disguise that had given her courage was making things worse. The high heels had always been just fine for getting out of a taxi cab and walking fifty feet to the waiting room, but now they were hurting her feet and making noises on the marble floor like a horse clopping down a cobblestone road. And the new sensitivity of the skin around her middle since the liposuction and tucks made her underclothes feel as though she were harnessed up to pull a carriage.

  Janet kept her eyes ahead of her on the big glass doors across the lobby. A sliver of green made her hold her breath and stare, but when she saw it again, it was only the doorman in his green generalissimo’s uniform lurking outside the door. There didn’t seem to be a green car out there. Janet veered to the left a little so she could see the spot to the right of the door that was the logical place for the green car to be waiting, but she couldn’t achieve enough of an angle.

  She quickened her pace, goading herself with the foolishness of taking the time to pay advance rent on her storage space. Her sudden reluctance to part with a pile of gewgaws too old and tasteless to keep in her home was going to get the dark woman killed, and then Janet. They both could have been out of Baltimore by now if she had only kept walking past that counter.

  She reached the door and looked out, but the green car wasn’t in the courtyard. As she craned her neck to look toward the street beyond the portal, she felt the presence of someone behind her. She stepped aside to let them out the door.

  The voice was almost in her ear. “Stay out of the doorway.”

  It was the woman. She took Janet’s arm and led her toward the steps leading up to the restaurants on the second floor. “What happened?” Janet whispered.

  “They were nastier about letting me lose them a second time.” She changed her direction slightly, and they skirted the stairway, went out the door, and emerged on Light Street. “The car is down here.” She brought Janet down Pratt Street, then turned into a parking area for the Convention Center. The car was parked between two big vans.

  Janet came closer. The rear window had a small, round puncture, a milky circle of pulverized safety glass, and around it, a radiating spiderweb of cracks. She knew instantly that it was a bullet hole, and she noticed that it was not on the left side, behind the driver’s seat. It was on the right, where they must have thought she was crouching. The dark woman acknowledged her thought.

  “Don’t worry about that. Just get in. We’re taking too much time.”

  Janet obeyed, wondering how anyone could not worry about that. She listened for some kind of assurance that what had caused the bullet hole was over, but none came. The car began to move away from the Inner Harbor, and she looked through the side and rear windows for the black car. What met her eyes were last glimpses of familiar sights—the National Aquarium, then the World Trade Center, and lots of other buildings that she had never been inside, but that she somehow felt she knew because she had driven past them so many times.

  In minutes they were on the 295 expressway, then the 195, and every sign announced the approach of Baltimore/Washington Airport. But the dark woman pulled off the expressway and glided onto Dorsey Road, then stopped at a hotel near the southern edge of the airport
.

  “We’ll have to take a few quick precautions,” the dark woman said. “Come in.”

  She hurried into the nearest wing of the hotel with Janet struggling to keep up, and moved down the carpeted hallway, then into a room. She hurried to the closet. “They’ve seen you, and they’d be fools not to have figured out you might be heading for the airport.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Get rid of everything they’ve seen, and show up a different way.” She laid some jeans and a sweater on the bed, then tossed a pair of thick-soled running sneakers on the floor. “Put these on.”

  Janet put on the jeans and sweater, then sat on the bed to tie the sneakers, and the dark woman knelt on the bed behind her to braid her hair in a way she never wore it. “There’s an airport shuttle that stops at all the hotels along here. Maybe we can catch it. They’ll be expecting to see the car.”

  The woman took a small suitcase out of the closet and opened it. She put Janet’s bag of money and her business suit and blouse into it. “Check the suitcase at the curb. You can’t carry a bag of money on a plane and not have them run it through the X-ray machine, and maybe look inside. After you get to Chicago, throw the clothes away. Once they’ve seen an outfit, it’s dangerous.”

  Janet tried to look in the mirror over the bureau, but the woman took her arm and pulled her to the door. “It’ll have to do.”

  As they walked down the hallway toward the reception area, Janet thought about her appearance. She had not been allowed to see whether it was attractive, but it certainly was better. The clothes had a different look, but also a different feel. The running shoes made her a couple of inches shorter, and they made her walk differently, too. The woman seemed to know dozens of little tricks and shifts and be able to put them into play so quickly that the effect was not a collection of small details, but a transformation.

  The dark woman left her and went to the front desk. She spoke to the clerk, then looked up over the clerk’s head at the clock on the wall, and returned to Janet. “The shuttle bus is already due, so it should be here in the next minute or two.”

  Janet said, “Are you coming with me?”

  “No. The way to get past them is to lose everything they’ve seen—the car, the clothes, the hair, and me. They’ll be watching for two women, and once you’re in the building, there’s nothing I can do for you that the airport police can’t.”

  “But the airport police don’t know I’m in danger.”

  “Once you’ve checked your suitcase, go straight through the metal detectors. After that, whatever those men have in mind, at least it can’t involve guns or knives. Then duck into a ladies’ room and stay there until you hear the speaker announce that your flight is boarding. Walk directly to the gate and get on.”

  Janet stared out at the driveway, watching for the shuttle bus, but that made each moment tick by and upset her. “I know this is none of my business, so you don’t have to answer.”

  “If I can’t, I won’t.”

  “What will you do next? If you’re in a hotel, you don’t live around here. Do you just get on a plane too?”

  “The job’s not over yet.” The woman shrugged. “In a minute I’ll get back in the car and drive toward Baltimore. If they’re driving south toward the airport and see me coming in the northbound lane, there’s no way they can get to me, but they’ll think about it.”

  “What will they think?”

  “Either we didn’t go to the airport, and you’re still with me, or you’re already in the air. They’ll realize that either way, I’m the one to follow, so they’ll try, and fail.”

  Janet saw the shuttle van pull up and stop at the curb. As the driver jumped out, she could see three or four people already inside. He ran to the door and said, “Airport?”

  “Yes,” said the dark woman.

  The driver snatched the suitcase and hurried to the van. Janet hugged the dark woman and whispered, “Thanks.”

  “Go,” said the dark woman.

  As Janet sat in the van beside a pair of elderly ladies, she could see the dark woman walking quickly toward the small green car to draw the killers away from her path.

  As soon as the shuttle bus had safely made the turn onto the airport drive, the green car pulled away from the hotel. It moved along Dorsey Street for a half mile, then turned into the driveway of the Holiday Inn. The dark woman drove up to the front entrance, and two large men in their thirties got in.

  The green car pulled away. As it passed under the Baltimore/Washington Parkway, the dark woman reached into her purse and produced a little Colt SF-VI revolver. She turned to the muscular man with blond hair sitting in the front seat beside her. “Get rid of this,” she said.

  He took the pistol and put it into his coat pocket. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the bullet hole in the rear window. “What was that for, anyway?”

  “To give her nightmares.” She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the top of the dark, curly head of the second man, who was bent forward as he ran his hand along the back of his companion’s bucket seat. “Don’t bother looking for a bullet in here,” she said. “I packed the inside of the window with a couple of phone books before I did it”

  She passed a sign that said “Patapsco Valley State Park,” then pulled over at a wooded picnic area, and all three got out of the car. The woman opened the trunk, took out the tire iron, and leaned over the right side of the car. She swung the tire iron against the rear window three times, pounding the glass around the bullet hole into the back seat. She looked at the bigger hole, nodded to herself, and tossed the tire iron back into the trunk. “I saw a body shop down the road from your hotel the other day. Get the window replaced before you leave for home. And don’t forget to tell them you’re paying cash, so they don’t waste a day writing up an inflated estimate for the insurance company.”

  The shorter man with curly hair said, “Are you going to fly back?”

  “I’m going to keep her apartment occupied for a while,” she said. “It’ll take about a month to get a loan against her condo. Once the check clears, and I’ve cleaned her safe-deposit box and maxed out her credit cards, I’ll turn up.”

  The blond man grinned, then sat on top of the nearest picnic table and lit a cigarette. “I’ve got to say, you kept us hopping. We actually lost track of you a couple of times.”

  She nodded. “Did you ever see Jane when she was getting somebody out?”

  “See her? I thought somebody made her up. You mean there’s a real Jane?”

  The dark woman walked back toward the car. “Probably not,” she muttered. “There used to be.” She got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Come on. If we trade cars now, you may be able to get this one fixed today and leave.”

  2

  Jane McKinnon turned into the driveway, drove to the back of the big old stone house, and strolled up the flagstone path toward the back door. She would just have time to get dinner going and step into the shower before Carey finished his rounds and started home. The feel of the evening made her think of the ends of summer days when she was a child in Deganawida, the air still and humid, the crickets just beginning to compete with the faint calls of the red-winged blackbirds in the marshy fields between her parents’ house and the river.

  She heard the muffled sound of the telephone ringing inside the house and changed her walk to a trot. After two steps, the ringing stopped. Maybe she could still catch the call while the person talked to the answering machine. She reached the back porch with her key ready, unlocked the back door, flung it open, rushed through the little cloak room, across the kitchen, and snatched the telephone off the wall. She heard the dial tone. She took a deep breath, then blew it out through her teeth as she walked through the living room and into the den. She pressed the button on the answering machine and heard her husband’s voice.

  “Jane? It’s me. Can you meet me at the hospital as soon as you get home? Thanks.”

  Jane reached for the te
lephone, then let her hand hover over it. He had not said where he was, and his voice had sounded rushed. That usually meant he was already on his way to the next patient’s room. If she called the main desk it would probably take them fifteen minutes to get him to a telephone, and she could drive there in twenty. It would probably strike him as a refreshing change if she simply did as he had asked. The recording had sounded a bit like the voice of a man with car trouble.

  She retraced her steps through the kitchen, swung her purse onto her shoulder, picked up her keys, locked the door, and backed the car out of the driveway. The drive to the hospital at this time of the evening was easy. The mild rush hour that Buffalo could manage was almost over, and the only heavy traffic that she could see was flowing out of the city toward her.

  Jane pulled her car into the lot behind Carey’s office building, around the corner from the hospital, and walked up the street, feeling the warm, humid air wrap around her. Winters in this part of the world were dark and fierce, but the summers were a sweet, guilty pleasure. Jane went around to the rear entrance of the hospital, so she could go up the elevator closest to Carey’s wing.

  As she turned the corner of the building, Jane saw the two police cars beside the emergency-room entrance, not exactly parked, just stopped and hastily vacated. One of them had its door open and the radio still crackling over a woman’s voice chanting numbers and street names into the hot night air. Jane glanced across the parking lot at the row of doctors’ reserved spaces to verify that Carey’s black BMW was still there, and that no tow truck was hooked to it, then noticed the news vans beyond it. There were three of them, all with transmitter booms folded on their roofs. Beside one of them, a young man who looked like a carnival roustabout uncoiled a long double strand of electrical cord.