Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

When the bus pulled into its special entrance at Lot C, Jardine drove on to the public entrance, took his ticket from the machine, and waited for the arm to lift to let him in. He drove slowly on a straight course down the middle aisle of the huge lot, watching the shuttle bus going back and forth in front of him, stopping every two hundred feet to let passengers off.

Slowly the bus emptied; people put suitcases into the trunks of cars and drove toward the exit. Jardine’s luck seemed to be growing at every turn the bus made. She was going to be one of the last people out. That meant the others would be on their way home, and the empty bus would go back to its bus stop to wait for its next run to the airport. She would be virtually alone.

Finally the bus stopped and she got out. She walked along an aisle with few cars in it, staring around her as though she had remembered the row, but not the space where she had left hers. Jardine tugged the ends of the plastic restraints out of his pocket so he wouldn’t have to dig around for them when the time came. She had found the car. She reached into her purse as she walked up to it. He could see she was going to have the keys ready when she got there. He sped up, turned abruptly, and stopped a yard away from her. He was out of the car and moving when she turned to him.

Her arm came up to her waist, and her white teeth glowed blue from the overhead light as she smiled.

“Hello,” she said. She held a small black shape in her hand. He couldn’t see much in this light except that the muzzle seemed to be lined up with his chest.

He tried letting some of the surprise and outrage he felt escape his lips. “What is this?”

She was not susceptible to doubt. “Be quiet and listen,” she said. “I don’t have any desire to kill you, so you won’t need to do anything desperate.”

“What do you want?”

“Just a ride.”

“The key’s still in the ignition. Get in and take it.”

She moved around the back to the passenger side. He could see that she was giving him a few seconds to look around him. His inability to detect any other human beings in the vast parking lot was not comforting now. If he ran, he might get as far as the nearest parked car before she shot him, but he had nothing that would keep her from coming there after him, and reaching the first one wouldn’t get him to the shelter of the next one. If he did as she said, he might be able to get his gun out from under the dashboard. She didn’t seem to have any idea who he was.

Jardine climbed into his car and started the engine, glanced at her, and felt his jaw drop. He had given her too long alone in his car. The gun she was holding now was his. He said, “Look, I don’t know you, but I’m sure you don’t want to get in any worse trouble than—”

“Nice try, Alvin,” she said. “I know you, and you know me. I knew you would be at the American Airlines terminal. I knew you would recognize me and follow. So here we are.”

“Mind telling me how you got a gun in past airport security?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Before I flew out this morning, I left it on the other side of the checkpoint.” She looked at him in mock sympathy, then at his gun in her hand. “I guess you forgot to do the same.”

He reached the parking lot exit, his mind churning, trying to catch up, while she read his mind aloud. “You’re trying to convince yourself that you never heard of me killing anyone, so I probably won’t shoot if you try to get help at the gate.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

“You don’t know me that well.”

He handed his ticket and his money to the attendant at the gate and took his receipt, then drove out of the lot toward Century Boulevard. She let him get a few blocks, then said, “Take La Tijera.” He turned onto the long, straight road. When they approached a small, dirty-looking motel she said, “Pull in over there.”

He stopped the car in the motel lot where part of the low pink stucco building shielded it from the street. Jardine turned off the engine and tried to settle himself. He had felt intense shock when he had seen the gun, but in his experience, if the trigger didn’t get pulled within the first few seconds, the danger went away. The story of how she had managed to walk out of an airport carrying a gun made him uneasy. She was a bit too wily for Jardine’s taste. He reminded himself that these were just little potholes on the approach to his triumph. She had picked exactly the sort of place he would have, where the odd sound now and then wouldn’t make anyone nervous because every ten seconds a jet plane came over so low you could see passengers’ faces in the windows.

She said, “Room eleven.” He got out and walked toward the door, listening for the sound of her feet behind him. He couldn’t hear them, so he was not sure how far away she was—not sure enough. He stopped at the door and she reached around him and held out the key. She was close enough, but he could feel the barrel of the gun against his back. “You’ll open the door, turn on the light, and step in where I can see you. Don’t turn around.”

He wanted nothing so much as to be indoors and out of sight with the door locked before he made his move, so he obeyed. In a few seconds, things would begin to go his way.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Lie on the bed on your back.”

He sat and swung his long legs up onto the bed. “This could be a night to remember.”

She raised the pistol a little so it pointed at his chest and stood at the foot of the bed, where he couldn’t get at her.

“Just a little joke,” he muttered. “What do you want?”

“Take one of the wrist restraints out of your back pocket.”

His eyes widened. How had she known? He had let them hang out because he had wanted them to be ready, and then forgotten. Fool. “You don’t need those.”

She said, “It’s for your safety. If I know you can’t reach me, I might not get startled and shoot you. Put it around the bed frame and your left wrist.”

As he connected his wrist to the steel frame, he was already trying to work out the way to free himself. He could lift the frame off the slot in the headboard and slide the restraint to the end, but to do it, he had to get his weight off the bed. Maybe she would have to use the bathroom. “There. Satisfied?” He tried to sound patronizing.

She said, “I’m going to try to make this quick and simple. You know who I am, and I know who you are, so we won’t waste any more time on that.”

“What are we going to waste time on?”

“Tell me about Brian Reeves Vaughn.”

He smiled. “If you tell me about Rhonda Eckerly.” He studied her face for a reaction. “Or about Mary Perkins, or Coleman Fawcett, or Ronald Sitton.”

She frowned and shook her head. “Silly me. I forgot to tell you how this works.”

She took out of her purse a small silver picture frame and tossed it to him.

It was the photograph of his mother taken on her eightieth birthday. He was outraged. “You’ve been in my house.”

“I found that on the mantel in your living room, and it looked as though it might have sentimental value. I figured you might want to keep it, so I brought it … just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

She looked at her watch. “It’s now one-thirty. You can usually drive the speed limit at this time of night. If you do, you can make it from here to your house in twenty-eight minutes.”

“So?”

“At two-thirty, the electric timer on the coffee maker in your kitchen will turn it on. The pot is filled with gasoline, and the heating element under it is covered with black powder. I’m betting it won’t burn the whole house down before the fire department gets there.”