Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

Few had traveled so far. Few had stared into the depths of the well of darkness, the abyss as Nietzsche called it, and had stayed true to what they’d seen.

He was a pioneer — yet not the only one. Today there were others exploring territories close to the land he had mapped. There were geneticists who ascribed all human action to an instinct of reproduction mysteriously encoded in DNA. There were anthropologists who sought the origins of morality in the social instincts of lower primates. There were psychologists who dispensed with both the conscious mind and the subconscious, focusing instead on reflexes trained through operant conditioning.

Different paths, but they led in the same direction. They led to the new millennium just dawning in all its bright but alien promise.

Cray saw the future sometimes. It would be a world stripped of illusions, a world where no outdated ethical precepts would hold sway, where no one would judge or be judged, ever.

There could be no such thing as conscience in the world he saw, and therefore no guilt, no shame. And no hours lying lonely in the dark.

That world was very real to Cray. He was committed to it, utterly.

He had to be.

*

At dawn he found the Lexus, abandoned in the desert.

He approached it slowly, aware that there was no need for haste. His quarry must be long gone by now. Long gone, and laughing at him.

Inside his gloves, his hands curled into fists, and because he performed the action without strain, he knew that the last effects of the cryogenic gas had worn off.

The front end of the Lexus was canted at an absurd angle. The left front tire was flat. More than flat. It was shredded. Cactus needles had punctured it — he could see a clump of prickly pear clinging to the ribbons of rubber — and the bitch had gone on driving until the tire had disintegrated and she was riding on the wheel rim.

The doors were unlocked. There was no key in the ignition. She’d taken it, no doubt hoping to leave him at least temporarily stranded, unable to start the engine. If so, she’d miscalculated. As long as the vehicle was still drivable, he could get it moving.

He walked around the Lexus, surveying the damage to the exterior. Scratches were grooved into the side panels, where the mesquite brush had stripped away the finish. A few cactus spines were stuck like porcupine quills in the other tires, but none had penetrated deeply enough to cause another flat.

All right, then. He would change the tire, and then he would drive away.

Drive where? Home, he supposed. There was no place else to go. He surely wouldn’t find her at the motel again.

Cray looked around him. The Tucson Mountains lay to the south; somewhere west was the Tohono O’Odam reservation. East, there was a road. He saw a sparkle of traffic. Sandario Road, probably. A two-lane strip of blacktop running north-south. Not a major artery, but crowded enough in the first phase of the morning rush.

She would have walked there. The distance couldn’t be much more than a mile. And at the roadside she would have stuck out her thumb and waited.

She might be waiting still. Might be, but he knew she wasn’t. Not too many cars would pass before someone stopped to pick up a pretty blonde woman in distress.

Afterward, what would she do? Call the police, identify him as Sharon Andrews’ killer? Possibly.

But the authorities were unlikely to believe her. They might carry out a perfunctory investigation. He could handle it.

Cray nodded, his lips pursed tight. Yes. He could handle anything Kaylie McMillan could do to him.

In his wallet he carried a duplicate key to the Lexus. He used it to open the rear compartment, where he kept a full-size spare tire and a jack.

Kneeling in the dust, he changed the tire. The wheel itself was slightly bent, but he could drive on it.

He replaced the jack and shut the trunk, and then very calmly he jacked back the slide on the Glock, taking aim at a tall saguaro.

But it was not a saguaro.

It was Kaylie.

“Die,” Cray said.

He snapped the trigger once, and a bullet pockmarked the saguaro’s trunk, scaring a cactus wren from its burrow.

“Die.”

A second shot nicked one of the long, drooping arms.

“Die, you little whore. Die as you should have died, twelve years ago. Die and die and die and die….”

He went on firing until the gun was empty and the saguaro was a punch card of drilled holes.

It, at least, would die.

Something had to.

Cray got into the Lexus and turned on the engine, then began the long drive home.

“Bad night?”

Elizabeth took a moment to register the question.

She knew the driver was looking obliquely at her, sizing up this strange, scared, barefoot woman who had appeared on the shoulder of Sandario Road in the predawn darkness, carrying a purse and a canvas satchel and hoping for a ride.

“You could say that,” she answered finally.

Something more was obviously required, some narrative to satisfy the man’s curiosity. She could claim she’d had a fight with her boyfriend and run from his parked car. Or that her own car had broken down on a back road.

There were many things to say, but she had no strength for any of them. She remained silent.

Daybreak bloomed over the mountains. A glaze of pink light spread across the pale, tired land.

“So where am I taking you?” the driver asked.

She looked at him. He was an Indian, perhaps sixty. Age had filled out his face and grayed his ponytail. His hands on the steering wheel of the old Dodge Rambler were thick and meaty and lightly liver-spotted.

He reminded her of Anson, her father-in-law. There was no physical resemblance, only a similarity of character. Both of them were men well worn by the years, men whose squinting eyes had seen too much darkness ever to fully trust the light.

“I’m staying at a motel.” She couldn’t remember the name. “It’s off Interstate Ten, near Silverlake Road. But if it’s out of your way—”

“Not really”

“I appreciate this.”

“Don’t worry about it. What’s your name?”

“Paula Neilson,” she said, using one of her old identities. Lying about such things had become habitual with her.

“Wallace Zepeda. What brings you to Tucson, Paula?”

“Just… personal business.”

“Personal business. Well, that’s clear enough. Me, I’m in the security field.”

She flashed on the fear that he might be a cop, a detective or an undercover officer or something.

“Airport security,” he added, and she saw a smile crease his cheek. “You wouldn’t get past my checkpoint.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Not when the mere mention of the word security turns you as pale as… well, as a paleface, pardon the expression. You on the run from the law, maybe?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. I’d hate to be aiding and abetting. Mind if I turn on the music?”

“Music would be fine.”

“Better than talking, huh?”

That smile again.

She didn’t answer.

There was an audio cassette half-inserted in the Rambler’s tape deck. Zepeda pushed it in and thumbed the on-off knob, and Creedence Clearwater Revival pumped through the cheap speakers at moderate volume.

The song was “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

Elizabeth thought it was a good question.

She looked at the desert. Cray was out there. Cray, who hunted women in the wilderness the way other men hunted mule deer and javelinas. Cray, with his erudite, impeccably pedigreed opinions on the nature of the human mind.

No ghost in the machine, he had said. No spirit, no soul, only chemicals.

And if that was so, then what was murder except a rearrangement of those chemicals into a new form? And where was the crime in that? There was no right or wrong, no good, no evil. There was only better living through chemistry. There was death as sport.