Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

This one would do nicely. He should have expected no less.

“Exactly how long have you been after me?” he asked her.

“Twenty-seven days.”

“Watching me, waiting for me to make a careless error?”

“Yes.”

“To catch me in the act.”

“Yes.”

“Bold of you. But I suppose, given the dictates of your conscience, you felt you had no choice. You couldn’t go to the police.”

“No. I couldn’t.”

“You might have phoned in an anonymous tip, of course. But on a case this highly publicized, the authorities must get hundreds of crank calls. And there are so many people who might carry a grudge against a man in my position. Disturbed people angling for revenge…”

“I know.”

“They wouldn’t have believed you.”

“Of course not.”

“So you had to do it all yourself, with no help from anyone.”

“I’m used to it.”

“Poor Kaylie. Poor dear child.”

She didn’t answer.

He saw that she was gathering herself, her head lowered, lips pursed. That was good. She didn’t yet know what sport he planned for her, but she knew that all her resources would be required, and she was marshaling them for this last, doomed effort. He respected her for it.

A saguaro cactus rose on the roadside, then fell back in a long, slow windshield-wiper motion. The cactus was a tall one. It might be a hundred years old. Cray wondered how many small, meaningless deaths it had witnessed in the nightly dance of predator and prey.

He looked again at his passenger, saw the ripple of her throat as she swallowed the taste of fear. The freckles on her cheeks stood out against the paleness of her skin.

She was pretty. Oddly, he had never noticed it before, not when he’d known her, not when he’d looked at her photograph and wondered if she was still alive and if he would ever have revenge.

He found it strange to think of men kissing her mouth, whispering endearments, bringing pleasure to her. There was one man he knew of, but had there been many others?

Well, there would be no more.

“I like your hair,” Cray said. “You’re much better as a blonde. You weren’t the redhead type. You lacked the requisite personality.”

“How can you say that,” she whispered, “when you never knew me?”

“But I did know you. I knew you intimately. I knew your secrets. I knew your mind. I still do.”

“I wasn’t myself then. You didn’t know me.”

Cray considered his response as he slowed the Lexus, turning the wheel. A dirt road swung into the windshield.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he allowed at last. “But I’ll get to know you tonight, won’t I?”

The road was a narrow, rutted track bordered by swarms of prickly pear and jumping cholla. Cray’s high beams played over floury swirls of dust as the Lexus rolled forward.

“Oh, yes, Kaylie,” he said. “You’ll be surprised how well I’ll know you before we’re done.”

Elizabeth thought she was holding up pretty well so far. Her mind, her body, the whole of her being had been focused on the single task of staying alert and in control.

She had felt the Lexus turn onto another road, a dirt road that punished the suspension.

At the end of this road, her death was waiting.

Fear rose in her, a fierce wave of fear almost overpowering her will, but with a shudder of effort she forced it down. To panic would be fatal. Some of the others must have panicked. She would not.

“Why am I blindfolded?” she asked, holding her voice steady.

“It minimizes your mobility.”

“I’m not very mobile anyway, right now.”

“There’s nothing much to see. Cactus of all kinds. The moon has set. It’s very dark.”

“Darker for me,” she said.

Cray made a soft sound like a chuckle. “In every sense.”

Her hands shifted inside the nylon sleeves. It was so much like wearing a straitjacket. She had worn one for three days not long after her arrest. The attendants had refused to remove it even when she used the toilet. They had wiped her off when she was done. She remembered the latex gloves, the cold touch.

“I strip away the mask,” Cray said.

The words came from nowhere, startling, baffling. She turned her head in the direction of his voice. “What?”

“You asked what I do. The nature of the game. It’s just that simple. I strip away the mask.”

She flashed on an obscure image, seaweed in the tide that became a woman’s face. “I know about… that part of it.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. What I do at the end is merely symbolic, a kind of private ritual. Primitives take scalps or heads. But what they’re after is the soul. So am 1.”

It was hard to think of something to say. “I never thought of you as religious,” she ventured.

“Oh, I’m not. Not in the least. There is no ghost in the machine. We’re chemicals, nothing more. Mere vectors for our genetic endowments. The whole glorious human animal is only a Rube Goldberg contraption, jury-rigged by natural selection to dump our complement of DNA into the gene pool. We exist to fuck and die.”

“Then I’m not sure where the soul comes in.”

“Soul — well, perhaps it’s a misleading term. Think of it this way, Kaylie. A human being is an onion, layer upon layer. Social norms and religious archetypes, shame and guilt, repression and evasion, personae we adopt and discard as mood or moment dictates. Peel the onion, strip off the mask, and what’s left is the naked essence. What’s left is what is real.”

Anger stirred in her, pushing back fear. “You keep calling me Kaylie. It’s not my name. Not anymore.”

“Isn’t it?” Somehow, though she couldn’t see him, she could feel his slow, cool smile. “Well, that’s one more layer of illusion I intend to peel away.”

The Lexus slowed. Stopped. The engine clicked off.

“We’ve arrived,” Cray said. “Now the real fun begins.”

Unexpectedly she felt him lean close to her, and her vision returned as the blindfold was pulled away.

She blinked at the surprise of light and color. Cray had left the key in the ignition, the high beams on. Long rays of halogen light fanned across an oval of dirt, the cul-de-sac at the end of the road.

There was nothing beyond it but the land’s flatness and spiny humps of cacti and, here and there, tall saguaros like scarecrows in a field.

“Take a good look,” Cray whispered. “It’s your final resting place. The end of all your journeying, at last.” He smiled. “What are you thinking? Perhaps that you stayed hidden for twelve years, and you could have gone on hiding?”

“Something like that.”

“And now you’re going to die. But perhaps not.”

She was sure he wanted to see an uplift of hope in her face. She wouldn’t give it to him. She merely narrowed her gaze and waited.

“I’m giving you a chance. The same chance I gave the others.”

“It didn’t do them any good.”

“Maybe you’ll be lucky. You’re due for some luck in your life, aren’t you?”

“Overdue,” she said, her voice low.

“All right, then. You have miles of open space. No houses or roads nearby. A wilderness, and do you know how many small animals are being hunted in this wilderness tonight? You’ll be one of them. You’re prey. And you know what I am.”

She looked around her, taking in the emptiness of a place without lights or people or doors to lock and hide behind.

“You’ll have a fifteen-minute head start. I promise not to watch you when you go. I’ll pick up your trail, and hunt you down, if I can. I use no special technology, only a pistol, and it’s not even equipped with a night-vision scope. And you should know that I will shoot to wound, not kill. The killing is done with a knife. The last thing I’ll do is take your face. I get to keep that, as my trophy. And, by the way, I carry smelling salts, which sometimes prove necessary. You’ll be alive and conscious right to the end. That’s the game I play. The game I’ve played for more than twelve years.”