Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

The other visitors were ephemeral. One night, after Jane had watched a middle-aged man selling crystal methamphetamine to a college-age boy, a man and a woman pulled to the curb near the spot where Jane’s directional microphone was trained. Jane’s spine straightened, she turned on her cameras, and recorded the sounds her microphone picked up. The scene began as she expected. The man was alert and watchful, looking around him for other people, then moved the car with its lights out so that it was precisely in the ideal parking spot, shielded by bushes, barely visible from any side but Jane’s.

Jane put on the earphones, and the man said, “This isn’t a good idea. I don’t want to do this. Please.” That didn’t sound right. The woman’s voice said, “What are you afraid of?” Then she suggested, “The police?” and the man said, “Well, that’s not unreasonable, is it?” Jane increased the magnification of the zoom lens of the video camera aimed at the car, turned up the volume of the microphone, and began to prepare. She had her suitcase closed, her keys and purse on the bed, and was on her way to the window with the big empty suitcase to begin collecting her electronic equipment, when the sounds began to change. She stopped and listened. They were having sex.

Jane had started to turn off her electronic equipment, then stopped. It wasn’t out of the question for one of them to be a face-changer and have that kind of relationship with a runner. This wasn’t the time for it, but since it wasn’t beyond the realm of human behavior, she couldn’t dismiss these two people just yet. She waited, keys in hand.

Finally, the man said, “Next Friday?” and the woman answered, “I’m sorry, but it’s my anniversary, and it’s very important to me. How about Saturday?”

Jane thought about that a few times afterward, but never was confident that she understood. Each of the false alarms during those few weeks made her faster and more efficient, but each one made her more impatient. She seemed to have done to herself what she had done to Carey. She had left him in a kind of paralysis, where he could do nothing but stay where he was and allow every tiny movement he made to be watched. Now she was trapped too, sitting in a room watching a static landscape, waiting to detect some minuscule change.

One night another man and woman arrived and stopped in the same parking place. They behaved so much like the other couple that she was almost sure it was just more sex. The woman said, “Are you sure no one will see?” and the man was the one who said, “Don’t worry.” But then he said, “Just walk straight ahead along that ridge. Then go up to the big brown house, stand on the porch, and knock. By the time you get there they’ll be waiting.”

24

Jane watched the woman walk along the dark path toward Sid Freeman’s house. She was about twenty-five years old with a good figure and a face that might be pretty under white light. But in the dim green glow through the eyepiece of the nightscope, the skin looked ghostly and the hollows of the eyes were deep gashes of darkness. Her hair seemed to be dark, cut above the shoulder, then curled and puffed to stand out a little. She wore a dark sweater and a pair of jeans, but Jane did not consider drawing any conclusion about her from the way she dressed tonight.

She carried a big shoulder bag, and Jane watched the way she handled it. At first it hung on her left shoulder with her hand resting on it. Jane watched her head moving in little jerks from side to side, looking for human shapes and listening for footsteps, and wondered if the woman was carrying a gun in the purse. Then the woman stopped, frozen for a moment, and listened. After a few seconds, she recognized that the sound she had heard was a car going by on the street, and she went on, looking anxious. She slipped the strap over her head and across her chest and clutched the bag with her left hand, but never touched the metal latch. She didn’t have a gun in there. She had money for Sid Freeman, and she was protecting it as though all she had to worry about were purse snatchers.

Jane turned the nightscope away from her and watched the man. She wrote down the license number of his car, then reached to turn up the volume on her directional microphone, but found she already had it all the way up.

He was in the shadow created by the roof of the car, and there were no streetlights nearby, so he was a shadow in a shadow. Jane picked up a small ticking sound, then recognized it as the sound car engines sometimes made when they were hot. The man’s hand came up to his mouth, then went down again. The other hand came up and there was a bright flash, then a blinding glare. Jane blinked, then instantly understood he was lighting a cigarette, but the nightscope made it look as though a flare had exploded in his face. She turned to the eyepiece of the video camera in time to see the next two seconds. The automatic light meter on the video camera let in more light than a human eye would, so she saw his face clearly until the cigarette caught and he closed the lighter. He was the man she had seen outside the hospital in Buffalo—the blond one who had turned into the wind to light a cigarette.

Jane listened to the recorder as she hurriedly prepared. She wiped off the door knobs, tore the sheets off the bed and threw them into the suitcase with her clothes, then began to dismantle her equipment. The cameras, recorder, and scopes went into the second suitcase. She turned off the light in the room before she took her empty air conditioner out of the window and reinstalled the original. She carried her first suitcase and the empty air conditioner down to the car, then returned. Finally, with a little trepidation, she yanked the wire at the side window and coiled it as the directional microphone slid down the roof. It stopped at the gutter and she tugged it over, then barely kept it from swinging against the side of the house as it fell. She pulled it in the window, put it in the big suitcase with the rest of her equipment, and took a last look around before she locked the door. On her way to the car she left her good-bye letter in the landlords’ mailbox.

Jane drove out onto the side street, away from the road by the lake, then made her way along the streets on the hillside, keeping herself far above the waiting man. Whenever her route took her out of sight of the car for more than a block, she began to feel anxious. Each time she came to a turn or a stop sign, she would crane her neck to be sure the car had not moved. But when she had nearly completed a half circle to come out beyond it on the road, she saw that it was gone. The woman must have just come to pick up something Sid already had prepared for her.

Jane’s breath caught in her throat. She turned right and let the car gain speed as it coasted down the long straight street toward the lake. She had considered it essential to get out of Minneapolis without again coming into the sight of Sid Freeman’s juvenile delinquents, but now she had no choice. She had to hope they would just see her car passing and classify it with all the others that happened to move along the lake shore each night. She was aware that there were a few problems that weighed against her. It was now after two in the morning, so there were few cars on any of the streets of this residential area, and none on the lake drive except hers. Another was that Sid’s kids had very good optical equipment and nothing to do but look. If Sid thought she was breaking the rules, he would regretfully tell them to kill her.

She speeded up. When the road veered away from the lake she felt as though a weight had lifted from her chest. Jane had come to the house from a dozen different directions over the years, so she was familiar with all of the ways a car could go, but tonight she had no choice but to pick the most likely. The man would follow the surface streets until he came to Interstate 94, take it down toward the central part of the city, then branch off onto one of its tributaries—394, 494, 694. There was no telling which one he would take, and they went in all directions. He would disappear.