Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

She opened the garage door, got back into the car, and drove inside. She opened Dahlman’s door and helped him out. “Do you think you can walk a little farther by yourself?”

He said, “Yes.”

“Then start walking up the street in that direction. I’ll catch up.”

“What are you doing?”

“Go,” she said.

As soon as she could see that Dahlman was heading in the right direction, Jane closed the garage door, turned on the headlights, and found a rag hanging on a nail on the garage wall. She quickly wiped the steering wheel, the shotgun, the door handles, the shifter, then opened the trunk and found the foam fire extinguisher. She sprayed it liberally inside the car, then wiped the extinguisher off too, and tossed it onto the front seat. The foam would destroy any fingerprints she had missed. She turned off the headlights and stepped out the small door in the back of the garage. She walked along the house to the street and hurried after Dahlman.

When she caught up with him, she said, “I don’t want you to faint or fall down. But can you walk a little faster?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure. You could get caught.”

He turned his head to focus his sharp gray eyes on her. “Suppose those men had seen your face—figured out that the police car was stolen? That you weren’t a police officer?”

Jane shrugged. “They were still on foot in a parking lot. They could see I had a very big car, and suspect that there was a very big shotgun inside it.”

“But suppose they had guessed that those were just part of the bluff?”

Jane looked at him with quiet sincerity in her eyes. “If they had guessed that, then one of them would have tire tracks on his chest, and the other would have a five-inch hole in his. This isn’t a game.”

4

Jake Reinert hung up the telephone, put on his jacket with slow deliberation, lowered his weight carefully down each of the front steps, and walked to his car. He had been Jane Whitefield’s neighbor for her first thirty-one years, and had lived beside her parents and grandparents for the forty years before that. Since she had married Carey McKinnon he had found himself living beside an empty house. He had watched the lights going on to illuminate unoccupied furniture in the evening, then going off at bedtime, heard radios talking to themselves during the day, and sometimes heard the telephone ring four times before the answering machine cut in. Burglars might not be fooled by all that, but if they came in they certainly would not be lonely.

Jane’s unexpected telephone call had disturbed Jake, but he was making an effort to hold his anxiety in abeyance. He started his car and drove down the street toward Delaware Avenue.

The night air was chilly, and Jake began to feel better as the engine warmed enough to permit him to engage the heater. If Henry Whitefield’s daughter had called him at any hour of the day or night in any of her thirty-three years and said, “Jake, I’m having trouble. Can you fly down here to Peru and pick me up?” he would certainly have been on his way to the airport. Tonight she was just asking for a ride home from a movie.

Jake began to feel impatient to see her face and verify that this was all she was asking. He glanced at his speedometer and saw that his foot had begun to get impatient too. Thirty-seven in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone wasn’t exactly madness, but it wasn’t especially smart, either. A man in his seventies could easily fail to discern some pedestrian in the dark, and then react too slowly to do anything but stop and back up over the body.

After about twenty minutes, Jake saw the bright lights of the marquee over the theater and began to search for an acceptable place to pull over. He failed to find one until he was abreast of the place, so he stopped in front.

There was a startling thump on the roof, and he looked over the back seat to see Jane standing there yanking the right rear door open. “Hi, Jake,” she said. “Wow, it’s hot. Is the heater on?”

“Evening,” said Jake. He turned off the heater while she helped a man about his age slide into the back, then slammed the door and got into the front seat beside Jake.

“This is Dr. Dahlman,” said Jane, “and this is my friend Jake.”

The two men nodded, but Jake had already said “Good evening,” and a second greeting seemed to him like taking a hat off twice. Besides, he was sure he had heard that name before, and might be able to think of something original to say if he could just drag out of his memory why the name was familiar. He pulled the car out into traffic.

The man was quicker. “I hope we’re not getting you into trouble, Mr. Reinert,” he said, and then Jake remembered. It was the name that they had kept interrupting the baseball game to repeat.

The confirmation of Jake’s ability to sense trouble was not a sufficient recompense for the obliteration of his peace of mind. He turned to Jane and watched her face as he said, “Finding married life a little quiet, are we, Janie?”

“No,” she said. “I like it.” She looked strained, as though she were concentrating on biting something that she had between her teeth. After a moment she said, “I’m sorry to get you involved, Jake. I had no time to prepare anything sensible, so I had to improvise.”

“It’s flattering to be the first name that came to mind, I guess,” Jake sighed. “What can I do?”

She turned her face to him. “Thanks, Jake.”

“What can I do?” he repeated.

“Not much more than this. We’ve got to stop at my old house, so it’s best if you just pull into your own garage. Dr. Dahlman, you may have heard, had a nine-millimeter bullet pass through him a couple of hours ago, so he’s not at the top of his game, but we can bring him in my kitchen door. We’ll only stay long enough to pick up some things I left there, and make arrangements for a car.”

Jake nodded, then drove the rest of the way home. He pulled his car all the way into his garage, then got out to help Dahlman to the driveway of the Whitefield house and up the back steps. Jane closed the door behind them and then turned on more lights.

As he helped Dahlman into the living room to sit on the couch, Jake said, “Don’t lean back just yet. There’s blood showing through your coat.”

He went into the bathroom, found a towel, folded it, and placed it between Dahlman and the throw pillow, then helped him lie down. He watched Dahlman’s eyes rise upward toward the staircase, so he knew Jane was climbing the stairs behind him.

Dahlman whispered, “She said you were just a family friend. Why are you doing this?”

Jake shook his head. “Lie still. Gather your strength.”

“Why are you helping me?” Dahlman insisted.

“They said on the news that you were a big doctor somewhere. Why did you kill somebody?”

“I didn’t.”

“Good,” said Jake. “Then from now on, that can be the reason.” He watched Dahlman close his eyes. In a few moments he seemed to be asleep. Jake heard the sound of a television set above his head, so he climbed the stairs. As he reached the top, he saw Jane moving up the hallway. “He seems to have dozed off.”

“Good,” she said. “He’s going to need some strength.” She walked into the master bedroom and Jake followed. As he watched her throwing things into the suitcase, it occurred to him that she had left an awful lot of Jane Whitefield in this house when she had become Mrs. McKinnon. She hesitated, took off her wedding ring, and quickly slipped it into a drawer.

Jane kept walking to closets, to dressers, to the suitcase on the bed, then turning to glance at the television set. She caught him watching her. “It’s the only way I have to keep an eye on the opposition. Sometimes at the beginning, before the police know much, the newspeople will put it all on the air. There’s a good chance this time, because they’re all at the hospital trying to scoop each other.”