Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

“Then you’ll die trying.”

Jane turned the car quickly to the side and up a street in the little town. It ran along Conewango Creek a short distance, then reached a dead end. She parked the car between two others along the curb, got out, and hurried to the trunk. Dahlman stepped out stiffly and leaned on a taillight to watch her. She pushed the two small suitcases aside, then lifted the false floor of the trunk, pulled out the spare tire, tossed her purse into the trunk, and slammed it.

“Come on.” She rolled the tire across the street and between two old brick buildings, then scrambled down a rocky bank onto a narrow muddy plateau. “Take my hand.”

Dahlman let her help him down onto the mud and stared at her in confusion as she lifted the tire down beside them. She said, “I know you’re not in any shape to swim, but that’s what the tire is for. The rim is heavy, so it will float low, but it will hold you up. Cling to it. If you can’t, I’ll hold you.”

Jane eased him into the cold, dark stream and placed his hands on the tire, then kept walking until the muddy bottom was no longer under her feet. She felt the current begin to pull them downstream. The momentum of the water tended to sweep them outward, away from the bank, but Jane resisted it, keeping her legs pumping steadily in a frog kick that didn’t risk breaking the surface.

She saw the white car flash past over the bridge upstream, but she kept her eyes in that direction for several minutes because she knew it was too much to hope that the men would simply miss the turnoff and keep going. “How are you doing?” she whispered.

“Cold. I can take it for a while,” said Dahlman.

“That’s all you need to do.” She changed her grip and began to push Dahlman downstream on the tire, using only her legs to propel them onward in hard surges.

It was probably a lie, she thought, but Dahlman seemed to find contradicting her either beneath his dignity or beyond his strength, because he said nothing.

The old, dim street lamps along the road above the stream and the faint glow of light behind the translucent curtains of the old two-story houses made the little town of Frewsburg look unreal, like a stop in an elaborate electric train set. It was after midnight now, and there were no cars moving along this road.

She kept looking back at the bridge, and she had almost begun to believe that the white car would not be back when it came into view again. She kept her eyes on it and felt a weight in her stomach. The car was slower now, prowling along the quiet street like a police cruiser. She could not see the men from this distance, so the car itself seemed to become the predator. It glided to the middle of the bridge and stopped.

Jane turned her face away and put her head under the surface, feeling the dark water pushing her along at its own slow pace. In the cold silence she thought and waited. She could not pull Dahlman under with her, but as long as his head was close to the tire, the shape would be hard to see and it wouldn’t look like a man.

She held her breath for a long time, then surfaced on the downstream side of the tire and looked back. The car was moving again. It came off the bridge and turned up the street where she had parked. Jane rolled in the water and began to kick again, taking in deep breaths and blowing them out rhythmically, as she pulled the tire along with one arm.

She could tell that her memory had been right about the course of the little river. As it turned and meandered out of the hills toward Pennsylvania, there were lots of lazy curves. But these little old towns had all been built along rivers and streams that would run a mill, so there were probably narrows ahead where the water would get difficult. She needed just one big curve to do this right. The first one was too gradual, so she kept kicking. But as she did, the curve extended—not cutting back on itself but making a much bigger half circle to the east. She bent her arms to bring her close to Dahlman’s ear.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” said Dahlman.

“The worst part is over.” Dahlman was lying, and so was she.

Jane raised her wrist close to her face and tried to read the dial of her watch, but the moon was hidden by clouds and she had not checked the time when she had entered the water, so the watch would tell her little anyway. She held the watch to her ear. It was still ticking. She was glad she had put the one Carey had bought for her in a drawer and strapped this cheap plastic one to her wrist. She had never worn anything that could be construed as jewelry while she was working unless it was part of a disguise meant to distract a viewer from her face, because jewelry was memorable. It was also precious, and that might make her hesitate to throw it away when she knew it was the sensible thing to do.

Jane floated in the stream as long as the curve lasted, then dragged the tire to the shore with Dahlman clinging to it. He stood up with difficulty, the water running out of his clothes, then sloshed along in the shallows, leaning on her, until she could bring him up onto dry, pebbly ground. She pushed the tire back out into the current until it caught and rotated downstream, the momentum slowly nudging it toward the middle.

Jane brought Dahlman up into a little park full of willow trees. She let him lean against the trunk of a short one with branches that drooped nearly to the ground while she wrung out his sport coat and emptied the water from his shoes. She twisted her long hair into a rope, then shook it out, and the shake turned into a shiver.

“I know you’re cold,” she said. “So am I, but I seem to remember it was a hot night a little while ago. Maybe we’ll dry off a little on the walk.”

“The walk?”

“I’m afraid so.” She gripped his arm and began to ease him away from the tree to walk across a small open lawn.

He came with surprisingly little resistance, and it worried her a little, but he said, “Tell me what we’re doing.”

“I don’t know if you were following the course of the stream,” she said.

“I had my eyes closed most of the time.”

“Well, it was a curve, like a horseshoe. We left the car at one end, and came out of the water at the other. The people who built this park probably picked the spot because of the curve. It’s secluded, and there’s water on three sides. We’re going to walk straight north back to the other tip of the horseshoe, where we started—cut across the curve.”

“But I saw them driving right along that street. By now they’ve found the car.”

“I thought you had your eyes closed. But you’re right. So what are they doing now?”

“I have no idea.”

“First they looked inside it. They thought about breaking into it, but they saw that it has an alarm installed. I know they saw it, because otherwise we would have heard the alarm. They thought some more, and remembered that the car wasn’t what they wanted anyway. They want us. The reason I rolled the tire along the street and onto the mud was so they would eventually figure out that we had gone into the water. First they’ll look in all the alleys and Dumpsters and dark alcoves around the car, but at some point, they’ll see the track, and ours beside it. Even they will know that a single fresh tire track leading into a creek wasn’t made by a car. So they’ll follow the creek looking for us.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m not. I told you what I think. And if they had done anything but park, we would have seen their headlights again.” Jane was pleased. She had gotten him across the park, and now they were on a street leading away from the creek. They were heading straight for the car.

“What makes you think they’re not searching the whole town on foot?”