Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

“Who is he?”

“An F.B.I. agent. He’ll arrest you.”

“Arrest me? I could go back to Baltimore and get arrested. Why should I call him?”

“He’s working on the case of Richard Dahlman, the other runner I told you about. You can give him answers he can’t get any other way. The details from his case will make what happened to you a lot easier to believe. If you help him, he might be able to help you find the least painful way back to where you started.”

Christine’s eyes welled up. Not tears, Christine thought. I don’t want to cry now. “That’s what you think I should do, isn’t it?”

Jane looked at her, and Christine could see that she was feeling sorry for her. “I don’t know. The decisions I’ve made for you haven’t done you much good. This one’s yours.”

“Please,” she said. “You know, but you’re not telling me.”

Jane touched her arm and spoke quietly. “This isn’t your life. This is just a nasty detour, like a sickness.” She picked up her suitcase and went to the door. “Give us both a month. No more.” She opened the door and slipped out.

32

Jane found her seat in the airplane, sat down, and felt a cold, empty sensation in her chest. She was about to go west again, away from Carey instead of toward him. She had spent most of the summer trying to find people who had done terrible things and left Richard Dahlman to take the blame. But Richard Dahlman was in a pleasant retirement home in Carlsbad, and the one who was surrounded by policemen, watched, and suspected was Carey. It couldn’t go on much longer. Something Jane tried had to work.

She slowly forced herself to stop thinking about Carey and tried to think instead about what she had to do to set him free. But every time she tried to plan what she would do when she arrived in Santa Barbara, she began to lose her resolve. It was impossible to think about Santa Barbara without bringing back a horrible memory.

Harry the gambler had been so hot that she had not wanted to know where his final hiding place would be. She had been afraid that she would be caught and that whatever they did to her would make her reveal it.

She had taken Harry to Lewis Feng’s shop in Vancouver, where she could buy him a whole prefabricated identity, not just a few good papers like the ones she could have bought from Sid Freeman. Lewis Feng had not dealt in new names. Lewis’s specialty had been creating unoccupied spaces in the universe, then holding them until the right customers arrived with the right sums of money. The driver’s license, the credit cards, the Social Security card, the car registration, even the apartment had been obtained in advance and kept current, waiting for the right purchaser. Most of Lewis’s customers had been rich ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia who foresaw that some day they might want the chance to slip into the United States. But Lewis had kept a number of surnames that weren’t necessarily Chinese. So Harry had filled the space of Harry Shaw, and Jane had left him in Vancouver.

Harry had made no mistakes. He might have lasted forever if Jane had not met another runner who had convinced her that he, too, deserved the very best kind of identity, one with an impeccable provenance and enough age. Jane had taken John Felker across the country into Canada and left him at Lewis Feng’s shop. The next time she had seen Lewis Feng she was staring at a picture of him in a newspaper above an article that called him “the victim.” The next time she had seen Harry she had been looking down at him from the rim of an open grave. And the next time she had seen John Felker, he had been busy cycling the bolt of a rifle for his second shot at her.

Lewis Feng had placed Harry in a small apartment on a quiet street on the outskirts of a medium-sized community at the edge of the country. Harry had been killed in Santa Barbara. Jane reminded herself that it was a coincidence. Harry had been put there because it was a place where a lot of middle-aged people could be seen doing nothing. It was a place where Harry would not be able to play the horses in person. If he wanted to organize a game of cards, he couldn’t be stopped, but in Santa Barbara he probably would not find himself sitting across the table from other pros, who would know who he was and what his location would be worth to them.

The face-changers must have picked Santa Barbara for similar reasons. It was still a place where a stranger could appear to be minding his business without having a business that was evident. There were a couple of colleges, lots of tourists, lots of conventions, lots of retirees from someplace else. It was a place where you could give a runner a history and assume it wouldn’t be deeply scrutinized.

Jane got off the plane in Sacramento, then took the whole day driving south down the long highway through central California, and arrived in late afternoon. Santa Barbara still looked pretty and peaceful to her, wedged in the pocket between tall mountains and the ocean.

When she parked on Anacapa Street and walked to State Street, she could see that the pedestrian traffic was thicker and faster and busier than the last time. Visitors were the city’s main industry, and it looked to her as though business was expanding. The parts of lower State Street that used to cater to fishermen and divers and surfers had been replaced by a mall that might have been moved in one piece from Beverly Hills. Jane had stayed alive by reading changing configurations of people, and this change was one that added to her safety. It was not hard for a strange woman to stay invisible on a street crowded with strangers.

Jane waited until night to drive to Padre Street and find the address Christine had given her. It was a small white house with a low porch and a tiny patch of green grass between that and the sidewalk. The front windows were blocked by opaque white horizontal blinds, but she could see tiny slices of light behind them.

Jane drove past the house once each hour. The lights were still on at midnight, but were off when she came by at one. At two she made a list of the cars parked on the street nearby, because they probably belonged to people who lived on the block in houses that, like C. Langer’s, had no garage. One of them was probably C. Langer’s.

At three she parked her car around the corner and walked to the house for a closer look. The night was warm, and the smell of jasmine was overpowering. She left the deserted street and walked quietly beside C. Langer’s house. The windows were the sliding kind with wooden sashes and a latch between the upper pane and the lower. They were all closed and the latches locked, but there were no signs of an alarm system. Jane studied the lock on the kitchen door and the placement of shrubs between the windows and the street, then walked the fences along the sides and back. By the time she returned to her car she was confident that if she needed to, she could get in without making much noise or being visible from the street.

It wasn’t a bad spot to place a runner. It was quiet and private without looking as though anyone had gone to any effort to make it so. It had three good ways out—two that would put C. Langer on another street in ten seconds. That was the way to keep a runner alive: keep her out of sight, and give her an escape route she could use if something went wrong.

Jane stopped herself. She had unconsciously slipped into the assumption that C. Langer was a woman, just because Chris was a woman, maybe because the house looked like a woman’s. But Sid Freeman had told her that most of the clients he’d seen had been men. C. Langer was probably a man. It was also possible that this runner wouldn’t be some stockbroker who had driven drunk, or a banker who had been unable to keep customers’ accounts from merging with his own. There was no guarantee that the face-changers wouldn’t take on a runner who was dangerous. If they were in it for the money, a client was anybody who had the fee.