Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

Well, there was another option.

Rummaging in his satchel, Cray produced a bent wire hook. Carefully he inserted the hook in the opening, then snagged the chain and lifted it free of its frame.

No more obstacles.

In his pocket he kept a vial of chloroform, purchased from the same medical-supply house that had sold him the liquid nitrogen. He unscrewed the lid and moistened a washcloth.

With the cloth wadded in one fist, Cray pushed gently on the door and slipped inside. He stood for a moment just inside the doorway, a shadow amid shadows, scanning the layout of the room.

A suitcase rested on a folding stand. A television set, glass panel gleaming in the faint ambient glow, was bolted to a counter. Some sort of cheap artwork hung slightly askew on one wall.

All of this was on his left. To his right was the bed, flanked by nightstands with matching lamps, their conical shades dark. Elizabeth Palmer had not bothered to unmake the bed, even to turn down the rumpled spread. She lay across it, supine, her head on a pillow.

Fast asleep. Cray heard her breathing, the sound low and regular.

She did not snore. That was good. He disliked women who snored.

The air conditioner switched on again, the thermostat registering the warmer air flowing in through the open door.

Elizabeth stirred, half-awakened by the machine’s rattle and roar, then settled into sleep again. He heard her low groan, and he knew she was dreaming, and that the dream was unpleasant.

A dream of him, perhaps.

Gently, Cray shut the door.

Like a lover he approached her. He thought of myths. Of Cupid coupling with Psyche in the dark. Of the incubus that hovered wraithlike over its beloved to take her while she slept.

At her bedside he stopped. He stood looking down at her.

She intrigued him. She was a mystery.

He studied her face. Her blonde hair, formerly tied in a ponytail, was loose now, fanning over the pillow. She had a high forehead and soft, gently rounded features. Her mouth was small, the lips pursed in sleep. He saw her eyelids twitch and knew she was dreaming. Of what? he wondered.

Her skin was pale. He saw freckles. A dusting of them on her nose and cheeks and forehead.

And then he knew.

She had changed her hair. It used to be red, worn in a pageboy cut.

And she had grown up, of course. Twelve years was a long time. She had been a teenager then. Must be thirty now. No, thirty-one.

She was slimmer than she’d been — the baby fat was gone — and in its place he saw lean muscles in her arms and in the curve of her neck.

From a girl, she’d become a woman. Nearly everything about her had been altered, but she still had her freckles, and they gave her away.

Cray released a shudder of breath. He was shaking.

He had been calm until this moment. He had been focused. But abruptly there was something tearing at him, some blind confusion, a howling turmoil, and he needed a moment to understand that it was rage.

He thrust his arm down, clapping the wet cloth on her face, pressing it to her nose and mouth, and her eyes flashed open.

In the dark he couldn’t see their color, but he knew they were blue.

From her throat, a strangled noise of panic, good to hear.

Her arms thrashed. He held her down, not even straining. He was far stronger than she was. She had never been any match for him. It had been sheer suicide for her to go up against him on her own. With a shiver of surrender, she went limp. Her eyes closed slowly. Cray held the cloth in place until he was certain she was unconscious.

“I have you, Kaylie,” he whispered. “After all these years, I have you at last.”

Whiteout.

The world was erased behind a brilliant screen of pure white, no depth or texture anywhere, only the perfect whiteness of snow on snow.

Elizabeth struggled to understand it, and then she knew it was a dust storm, like the one that had caught her by surprise on Interstate 10 on her way from Las Cruces to Lordsburg five years ago.

She’d been driving the rattletrap Dodge she owned back then, a car that had never been very reliable, when without warning the highway had disappeared in a sheet of windblown sand, even the hood of her car wiped from sight, and for a few terrifying seconds she had coasted at sixty miles an hour, seeing no road and no traffic, praying she would not be part of a chain collision that would leave her mangled in the wreckage.

Then the dust storm blew past her, and she was in a motel room in Tucson, slumped in an armchair.

And Cray was there.

“Hello, Kaylie,” he said.

She blinked, focusing on the tall man in black, his gloved hands, the shiny pistol aimed at her. The room was very bright. He’d turned on every lamp.

“Your first instinct will be to fight or flee.” Cray’s voice was low, nearly inaudible over the buzzing drone of the air conditioner. “Resist the impulse to do either. I don’t want to shoot you here, but I will, if you make it necessary.”

She shifted in the armchair and heard the creak of old wood. Her bare toes curled into the carpet’s short nap.

Cray hadn’t tied her to the chair, but he had dressed her in her red Lobos jacket, zipping up the front, knotting the long nylon sleeves to trap her hands across her midsection.

Like a straitjacket. Yes. He would have been amused by that.

“Do you intend to be sensible?” Cray pressed, impatience seeping through his cool smile. “Well, do you?”

Slowly she nodded. It was the only way for her to answer. Her mouth was gagged with what felt like a washcloth, tied in place at the back of her head.

“Good. Then just sit tight. We’ll be leaving soon.”

He wedged the gun in the beltless waistband of his slacks, then turned away. She saw that her suitcase lay open on the folding stand where she’d left it.

He was rummaging through her things.

She became aware of the need to breathe. But she couldn’t breathe with the towel clogging her mouth. For an awful moment she was sure she would suffocate or choke to death.

No, wrong, she could breathe, and to prove it she inhaled slowly through her nostrils, feeding her lungs.

When she was calm again, or almost calm, as calm as she could be under the circumstances, facing death at the hands of the man who was her worst enemy — when she was able to think, she tried to reconstruct what had happened.

She’d talked to Anson, then gone to sleep. Bad dreams…

Then Cray must have broken in, sedated her somehow.

She remembered an instant of alertness, of disorienting terror, and after that, a long stomach-wrenching fall.

And now…

She was his prisoner.

Again.

In the suitcase Cray found the clipping from the Dallas newspaper. She saw him study it in the lamplight. His lips formed a circle. “So.” The clipping, neatly folded, went into his pants pocket. He resumed searching.

Her gaze traveled around the room and settled on the bed. The bedspread was a rumpled mess, the pillows strewn. Amid the disorder she saw a canvas satchel, something of his, which he’d tossed there.

Just behind it, on the nightstand where she’d left it, lay her purse.

In one lunge she could reach the purse, grab the gun inside. But first she had to free her hands. She tugged at the knotted sleeves. Cray had tied them tight.

She couldn’t break free, and so the gun would do her no good, and she had no hope and no chance at all.

“I intend to dispose of your luggage, of course.” Cray said it casually, merely for the sake of conversation. “I’ll put your suitcases in your car and drive into a bad neighborhood, then leave the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. The car and its contents will disappear quickly enough.”