Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

She heard one foot hit hard, then stop. His voice was below her, off to the left. He called up to her, “Stop, or I’ll have to shoot.”

Jane had been half-expecting the words, as she had heard them in her imagination for years. The sound was not as she had expected. The words were softer, less angry and brutal than they had been in her mind. He wasn’t shouting them out so some witness would testify later that he had killed her legally. The words were for her, to remind her what they both knew he was supposed to do.

Jane gritted her teeth, gazed up at the sky, and thought, “I did this.” Her legs pumped and her arms stretched above her, following her eyes up into the sky. As she climbed, she listened for the loud noise and relaxed her muscles to receive the pain. She was aware that there had never been the night when the average F.B.I. agent could not drop her in one shot. She had not climbed more than thirty feet of the way up, and he was maybe another thirty feet from the foot of the ladder.

Why was he hesitating? Was he deciding whether he had meant it? No, he must be aiming. Jane climbed faster, and the shot came. It was so loud that she cringed, trying to protect her ears with her shoulders. Then there was an aftersound that hung in the air as though the report had jarred the molecules and changed them somehow. She scrambled higher.

That had been the warning shot. The next one was going to shatter her spine. Her right hand reached up for the next rung and slapped down on a flat, abrasive surface. Her hand had touched the roof.

Her fingers spread to get a firm hold on the level, featureless spot. She forced herself to relinquish the left hand’s grip on the last metal rung to press both palms downward, pull herself up onto her belly, and slither onto the flat, tarry surface.

She lay there for a moment, panting, as she finally allowed herself to feel the terror. She assured herself she was up, out of sight, and he had not shot her. She heard a metallic ring, and her next breath caught in her throat. It was the sound of his shoe touching the lowest rung of the ladder.

She raised herself to her feet and spun her body to look around her frantically. She had assumed there would be something up here—a door, a vent, anything she could pry open to slip down into the building. But she was on a flat, open rectangle of black tar. On all sides she could see the roofs of other buildings, at varying distances. She looked back the way she had come. She couldn’t go back down the ladder, because he was on his way up from the alley. On the opposite side was the street. She whirled her head from side to side. The closest building was the next one along the alley.

Jane walked, less quickly than she wanted to, toward the edge of the black rectangle where she was trapped and looked toward the other roof. It seemed to be about eight or nine feet away. Jane gnashed her teeth, scared, frustrated, and angry at herself. She was more afraid than she had been when she had thought it would be a bullet. She tried to be rational. There were people who could take a running start and jump twenty-seven feet. This was one-third as far. She was uninjured and in good physical condition. She was a terrific runner.

But as she was marshaling the arguments, trying to convince herself, she knew that the arguments worked only if she could goad herself into running straight for the gap between the roofs at full speed. If she judged the paces wrong and stutter-stepped, or lost her nerve at the edge and hesitated, she would fall to the pavement below.

Jane cautiously approached the edge of the roof in a crouch, unable to stand up straight for fear she would get dizzy and topple over. She judged the distance again. It wasn’t that far. It was no more than she could have done with ease on the ground.

Jane heard the sound of the man’s feet on the metal rungs on the side of the building. She could hear his breathing now. He was a little winded, but there was no tremor or shallowness in his breaths. He wasn’t afraid.

She turned away from the edge and paced back toward the other end of the roof. One, two, three, four … she had to try. Seven. She could not stand here and get cornered and arrested by the F.B.I. while the face-changers drove off somewhere. Ten, eleven, twelve.

Jane took three deep breaths. In a moment he would be up here. She leaned into her first step, to force her left foot to come down and catch her weight. The second was slightly easier, and the third was like a reflex, the fourth unconscious. She ran faster, harder now. Dig, dig, dig. Four steps left—here it comes, one more—and leap! She pushed off with her right foot, then took another half step in the air, her arms flailing for balance. As soon as she was airborne, she knew that she had made it easily. She came down five or six feet past the edge, hit gravel, slipped, and tried to break her fall with the palms of her hands.

She slid on the rough, loose stones. Her hands stung, her thigh was scraped, but she was alive. She felt her lungs expand, taking in too much air, refusing to exhale until she stopped them. She huffed out a breath, then another. She had made it.

She got to her knees, then hurried to the edge beside the alley to look down and find the ladder. She lay on her belly to peer over at it. There was no ladder. She had made a horrible mistake. The fact that the last one had a ladder didn’t mean this one did. Reluctantly, with growing trepidation, she looked back at the last building. The man was climbing onto the roof.

All Jane could see was his silhouette, but she could read his thoughts. He looked quickly around the roof, then at the building where Jane lay. He stepped closer, as though to judge the distance between the two buildings. He saw her. He was thinking, “If she can jump it, so can I.” He backed away from the edge, but he didn’t seem to be looking at the chasm between the buildings. He was looking at her.

Jane stood and turned away from him to look at the building beyond hers. It was the same kind of jump that she had just made. She walked toward it, then changed her mind. She had no time to count the steps. She sensed the place where she should begin, fixed her eyes on the gap between the buildings, and leaned forward. Her left foot came down, and then the right, and she was in a full run. When she reached the place where she had to spring upward, her foot landed on gravel. She dug in and felt for friction. Her trajectory seemed too flat, too low. Behind her, she heard bits of gravel rolling off the edge. As she flew, she thought, “I’m dead,” but then it didn’t seem so certain. She brought her knees to her chest, hit the next roof, and slid forward on her back. After a second, she heard a handful of gravel hit the ground far below.

Jane was shaken, and this time the impact had scraped the skin on her back. She glanced behind her and saw the F.B.I. man take the leap to the second building. For an instant her mind interpreted the silhouette as having wings, but she realized that it was just his sport coat flaring outward in the wind as he jumped. He was only one building away again.

Jane turned and walked only close enough to the fourth building to see it clearly, then backed up and ran for it. This time her steps were sure, and she landed on her feet and took a few steps to stop herself. Then she looked at the fifth building.

This one was different. The little row of businesses was ending, and the next building was just a big house with a sloped roof. She looked back at the F.B.I. agent just as he made his second jump. He was tall and strong, and whatever he was afraid of, this wasn’t it. He landed hard and trotted forward a dozen feet to stop his momentum, but he was already looking ahead.

Jane felt despair. A terrible moment was coming. She could see it clearly, and there was no way that she could think of to avoid it. The big F.B.I. agent was alone. She didn’t know why he was alone, and there was no time to wonder. He just was. She could see from the way he carried himself—standing upright and then running ahead to leap each gap between buildings—that he was positive that the woman he was chasing was unarmed. The thought made her reach to the pocket of her jacket and touch the pistol she had taken from Brian Vaughn.