Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

She stared at him intently. She tried to remind herself that her instinctive feeling of dread didn’t matter for the moment. He knew something. “Who is it?”

But Sid shrugged. “There are some people, and they’re doing pretty much what you always did, only they’re not going about it in this eccentric and self-indulgent way.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re in a business, and they act like it. They charge what they can get, and they don’t turn somebody away because he offends their nostrils. They give him what he can pay for. This, as you know, is a theory of business I subscribe to. On occasion they’ve sent to me for specific items of merchandise.”

“Sent to you?”

“Yeah. They send the runner to pick up things, but don’t come with him. There will be this typed list of stuff, practically pinned to his shirt, and he’ll have the money in cash. I’m talking about runners who know zero. If I let them out the wrong door, they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to the car.”

“Like who?”

Sid threw up his hands. “Do I suddenly know names? Some up-and-comers from business school who looked at me like I wanted a handout for wiping their windshield.”

“Any women? Kids?”

“No kids so far. A couple were women, but the kind that when they say ‘the market’ they don’t mean a place you buy groceries. They’re just men with suits that cost more and don’t come with pants.”

“And not one of them ever made a mistake and said who sent them?”

“Never.”

“Did you ask?”

“Be assured,” said Sid Freeman. “They always say it was a friend of theirs. But these are not people who would know enough not to say. Someone told them.”

“What did they buy?”

“Not much overlap. What some of them wanted might get them a job as night watchman in a junkyard. One of the women got the full glamour makeover—birth, Social Security, credit, diplomas, transcripts, job references, old tax returns, doctored photographs of her standing in front of the Denver capitol building hugging one of my guys who was cleaned up to look like a boyfriend, passport, shot record.”

“You came up with all that, and she said nothing? It must have taken a month.”

“You have to understand that this is a very unpleasant young woman who came to Sid’s door with a suitcase full of money. No incentive to establish a social relationship, and Sid doesn’t haggle.”

“Didn’t the proportions strike you as wrong?”

“They did seem a bit off,” said Sid. “But I kept an eye on the television and checked a lot of newspapers and magazines. There was nobody who looked like her, no disappearances of famous people, or of anybody about the same time who rated a line of print.”

Jane’s eyes rested on Dahlman, but he sensed that she was listening to something. “Your boys are back.”

Sid looked away from her. “See how reliable? The future is in good hands.”

Jane was still staring at Dahlman. “What about him?”

Sid looked at Dahlman too. “What about him?”

“How did you know he wasn’t some madman who really had killed his friends and run off? If you got the story from television, what was there that told you?”

Sid stared at her uncomfortably. “I think it was his cunning plan to go live in a farmhouse. Was he going to stay there forever? Who would buy that as a plan? I mean, not counting the police.”

Jane shook her head. “The world is a wondrous place, Sid. Naive credulity is rampant. What did they buy from you? The photographs they left in his house?”

“Just the gun. That’s how I remembered the name. It was a tricky business, because it had to come from a legitimate dealer that never saw the buyer, but be registered in the name Dr. Richard Dahlman.”

“Registered?” said Jane. “Then it was a suicide gun?”

“That’s what I think now, after all the dust that got kicked up. I think the idea was to shoot them both and put the gun in his hand. Maybe they figured it was safer to just kill her: no matter how hard the police look at a murder it’s still a murder, but a murder-suicide doesn’t always include a real suicide. If the suicide doesn’t hold up, they start looking for somebody else.” He frowned at Dahlman. “They obviously put too much confidence in police marksmanship.”

Jane said, “Are you going to help us, or not?”

“I still like money,” he said. “But something in my mind keeps telling me, ‘Janie and these faceless guys are about to bump into each other. Who’s coming home to dinner?’ Your suitcases are waiting.”

Jane walked to the door, picked up Dahlman’s suitcase and reached for hers, then saw the keys beside the handle. She could see that the papers beneath them were a car registration and a pink slip with no names on them. She straightened and turned toward Sid Freeman.

“Just fresh horses, that’s all,” he said. “It’s the quickest way to get him out of my place of business.”

14

Jane drove the new car down the hill and along the parkway beside the lake. Dahlman stared ahead for a few minutes. Then he said, “It’s astounding. I’ve been rejected by even the worst criminals.”

“Oh, Sid’s okay,” said Jane.

“ ‘Okay’?” Dahlman said. “He has no mercy, no morality, no—”

“Don’t get launched, or I’ll be listening to what he doesn’t have all night. He got us out of a very hot car and into one we could keep forever if we were careful. That’s more than any number of nice law-abiding citizens could do. He also told me some things we might have died finding out.”

“He probably told you lies … nonsense,” said Dahlman. “He’s probably on the telephone right now, telling the people who are after us exactly where we are.”

Jane shook her head. “Once you’re in a car, he doesn’t know exactly where you are.”

“I don’t know that he’s not following us.”

“I do.” She sighed. “Sid doesn’t have a set of rules. He has to make his decisions as they come up. All things being equal, he would rather I lived than that my enemies did. He knows that he can’t affect the outcome, so it’s unwise to try too hard. But he gave us what we needed.”

“He said several times his only interest is money.”

“Nobody is only interested in money. Sid wants to be important, and he lives on impulse, so he needs money. But the way he gets money means he has to live in isolation in a house with bulletproof walls and armed guards. He won’t sell us out.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“To those ‘faceless guys,’ as he calls them?” said Jane. “They have not endeared themselves to Sid. They’ve been so careful to be sure he doesn’t know who they are that he can’t get word to them to negotiate a price for us. He resents that, and he resents them. They don’t come in person to talk to him. I do.”

As Jane drove through the night, she thought a bit about Sid’s dead companion, Christie. She had always been the one in the background, floating around like the bad fairy. Jane could picture her now, with her anorexic body, close-cropped red hair, and nocturnal pallor, watching with a smug look on her face as though Sid’s visitors were there for some sadistic amusement of hers. It had come as a surprise to Jane that Christie’s sudden absence had made so little difference—not to Sid, but to anyone. Jane had always suspected that Christie had done most of the thinking—concocting the plans and then cajoling and manipulating Sid into executing them. But the atmosphere of the strange household, an uneasy tension between agonizingly slow, patient scheming and temporarily suspended violence, had not changed since Christie had died. Nothing had changed. The teenaged girl Jane had seen watching from the staircase had even looked a little like Christie.