Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

Janet shrugged. “He says I’m doing great. I’m not supposed to see him again for six months.”

“He did a wonderful job on you. Big improvement.”

“Thank you,” she said mechanically. It was a shock that this woman, who seemed so strange, would say something as normal and human as an empty compliment. “How do you know? We’ve never met before.”

“I’ve seen a lot of pictures of you.” She made another turn. “What have other people said? Has anyone who knew you before the surgery seen you since?”

Janet shook her head. “I’m a little low on the invitation list lately, and I didn’t go out at all while my face still made people stare. The doctors and nurses are the only ones. And cab drivers.”

The woman swung into a covered parking ramp, went up two levels, then stopped in an empty space and turned off the engine.

“Why are we stopping?”

“I need to give you some things.” She reached into her purse and produced a ticket in an airline envelope. “Your flight leaves in two hours.”

“Where am I going?” She pulled aside the corner of the envelope and read the ticket. “Chicago?”

“You’ll be there for a while, but it’s just a stop on the way. It will keep you out of sight until your plastic surgery is completely healed. You should show up at your final destination looking like a finished product—face, body, hair, wardrobe, credentials.”

She handed Janet a small wallet that was stiff with cards. “Here’s your ID.”

Janet looked at the MasterCard on top. “Mary Anders. Is that going to be my name?”

“Just for this trip. You’ll need to flash identification to get on the plane. If something goes wrong or you’re stalled, you can’t even get a room without a credit card. Use those.”

Janet looked at the driver’s license. The picture was the one she’d taken in a photo booth a week ago, but it had been touched up. It looked to her as though someone had scanned it into a computer and adjusted the color and texture to hide the surgery. She gazed at the picture. It was a young, pretty woman, but it was still her face. Maybe she would look like that after everything healed, and it made her hopeful again. She put the wallet in her purse with the ticket.

“Now let’s have yours.”

“Mine? What?”

“Your license, credit cards, and so on. Whatever you have with Janet McAffee written on it has to go.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. It had not occurred to her that she would have to lose things that took so little space. But of course she did. The dark woman watched impatiently while she took out her wallet, removed her driver’s license, stared at it for a second as though she were saying good-bye to it, and set it down on the seat beside her.

“You’d better give me the whole thing. There’s nothing in there that you’re going to need.”

“But what about later?”

The dark woman looked at her sympathetically and patted her arm. “I wish we had more time together right now, before you get on that plane, so I could help you through the hard parts. I really do. This has all been done before, and there’s a right way. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for things in Baltimore to improve. It might be that those men will get caught trying to put a bomb in your condo tonight, or try to hire an outside killer who is really an undercover cop. Stranger things have happened. But you have to be prepared to wait a long time, and that means doing everything as though it were for keeps. It’s not that much harder.” She took the wallet and put it into her own purse. “Now for your traveling money. They told you to get a safe-deposit box nobody knows about, right?”

“It’s not in there. I was afraid you’d come for me when the banks were closed. It’s in a long-term storage place. The closest cross streets are Light and Fayette.”

The woman looked at her with curiosity. “You mean by the courthouse, and all that?”

“That’s right,” Janet said apologetically. “I thought with all those policemen coming and going, it would be safer. It’s so much cash …”

The dark woman didn’t verify or contradict her theory. She seemed to be thinking hard. “Okay. Give me all your keys—condo, apartment, everything. I’ll get rid of everything that might cause trouble later.”

Janet handed over her keys, and the woman looked at them, then asked, “What about the safe-deposit box? Is the key in the apartment?”

“No, I have it with me.”

“Then give it to me. I’ll put your old ID in there with the rest of your papers.”

“But I only have one key.”

The woman smiled, but it was the kind of smile that told Janet she should have known better than to bring up something as foolish as that. “People lose them all the time. When this is over, you go to the bank. You tell them you lost it. They drill the lock.” She held out her hand.

Janet handed over the key.

The dark woman seemed to hear something. Her eyes rose to settle on the rearview mirror. Then she turned in the seat and stared out the back window for a moment. Her smile was gone, and she looked intense, agitated. “We’d better get moving.”

Janet tried to keep herself from looking in the direction the woman had been staring, but she couldn’t help herself. “Did you see something?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m not in the business of hanging around to verify hunches. I just get people out.” She started the car.

A black car had been prowling up the ramp on the far side of the garage. As soon as the noise of the green car’s starter echoed in the concrete enclosure, the black car accelerated. It swung around the first aisle, where there were a dozen empty spaces, past several more aisles, and began to make the turn up this aisle.

The dark woman backed out of the parking space quickly, stopped with a jerk, threw the car into forward gear, and shot ahead. Janet tried to interpret what she had seen in a dozen sensible ways, but she could not. The black car could only have been trying to make it up the aisle before the green car backed out so it could stop behind it to block it in.

Janet turned in her seat to stare out the rear window. She could make out that the black car had silhouettes of two heads, but the upper part of the windshield was tinted, and she could not have seen the two faces in the dim light of the parking structure anyway. She had time to see it go past the parking space they had just vacated before the dark woman spun around the first turn of the ramp and descended so she couldn’t see anything.

“I think they’re coming,” she said.

The dark woman didn’t look surprised. “Are they the ones we have to worry about, or could they just be police?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen them. They would just call me on the phone.”

The woman’s eyes kept flicking upward to the rearview mirror, then settling on the ramp ahead so she wouldn’t hit anything. “I guess we’d better assume they are, since they don’t seem to own a siren. I’ll have to lose them while you go get your traveling money. It’s Light and Fayette?”

“Yes.”

“All right. We’ve got about an hour and forty minutes left, so this will be tight Here’s what we do. I can get us into the neighborhood in the next five minutes. I’ll let you off somewhere nearby, and keep going. You go into the storage place and pick up your money, then meet me wherever I let you off.”

“Okay.”

“Then get ready.”

Janet watched the rear window while the dark woman took several quick turns, sped down a narrow street lined with row houses, cut across a parking lot, then emerged on Light Street and drove past the intersection at Fayette. Finally, she turned in at the Harbour Court Hotel. There was a brick portal like the mouth of a cavern, then a circular patio with a fountain in the middle to keep cars moving around it in a circle to the lobby entrance.