Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

She stared at the agent’s shape in the darkness. He was what she had told Dahlman to worry about. He was not some evil, greedy psychotic who wanted to turn people into money. He was one of the good guys—the best of the good guys, because he spent all of his time protecting the weak from the strong. She had challenged him to come after her, and he had to do it, but he didn’t have to do it this way. He could have shot her while she was climbing up here, but he had decided that it was better to risk his life jumping from rooftop to rooftop above the sleeping city, where the street lamps were far below and threw no light.

She watched him moving forward to look at the next stretch of empty space he would have to cross. He would be so easy. She could sit down on this flat surface where she now stood. She could take Vaughn’s Walther P99 in both hands, steady them on her right knee. If she squeezed off the first round just as he went up, she could probably put two or three more into his chest before his limp body slammed into the side of the building.

Jane took a deep breath and held it for a second, then pushed the air out of her lungs and turned away from him. He was going to be on this roof with her soon. If she let that happen, it was over. She stared at the next building. There was no choice as to how she must do it. The peak of the roof was higher than this flat one, and jumping up there was physically impossible. She would have to leap for the place where the slope matched her level, and hope that after she hit, she would be able to stop herself before she slid the rest of the way down and dropped off at the eaves.

Jane leaned into her first step and ran hard. She threw herself into the air, then landed with her left leg bent, so both feet and then her left hand hit the shingles. As soon as she felt the impact, she turned a little so her momentum would make her flop onto her belly.

Jane completed the turn, and stopped. She felt herself begin to slip. She clawed at the shingles with her fingertips, but her face was four inches from the roof and she could see it moving upward past her eyes. She felt the rough, grainy texture moving under her fingertips and nails, then felt her fingers slip down to the next shingle. She grasped at one with her right hand, jammed her thumb under it and pinched it, then did the same with her left. Her arms extended, trying to slow her down as her sweatshirt rolled upward under her belly and she felt the scratchy shingles on her bare skin. Then she stopped. The buckle of her belt had caught on the shingles. She lay there, straining to hold herself and afraid to move.

She heard the man’s running footsteps, then heard the heavy impact as he landed on the roof of the building she had just left, then four more steps as he stopped himself.

Jane spread her legs apart and felt for a footing on the shingles, keeping her knees and the insides of her toes touching the roof. When she sensed resistance, she pushed herself upward a little with her feet and reached for the next shingle, then the next. A few inches at a time, she pulled herself up the roof toward the peak like a mountain climber.

The F.B.I. man was at the edge of the next roof now, looking at her. He called, “This looks like a good place to quit.”

She pushed his voice out of her mind and reached up to pinch the next shingle between her thumb and forefinger, feeling the strain all the way to her wrist. She used her feet to push her body up to it.

He tried again. “Whatever happened back there, the penalty for it isn’t as bad as the penalty for falling.” His shoes made crunching sounds on the other roof three times, as though he were sidestepping to get a better look at her. “I can get the fire department to bring you down with a ladder.”

She longed for it. They would drive a truck up and extend the ladder. Some big, strong guy would climb it to the peak and anchor a rope up there, then lower a harness that would fit under her arms like a mother’s hug, then slowly ease her to the ladder. She looked up, and she could see that she was making progress. Her thumbs and fingers were numb, but the peak looked closer. She put her face close to the shingles and kept climbing.

Then she reached up, and felt the slightly rounded shingles running along the spine of the roof. She put both hands over the apex and pulled, and she could look down the other side to the street in front of the building. She swung one knee over the peak and began to crawl unsteadily away from the F.B.I. man toward the far end of the roof. When she reached the chimney she leaned her back against it, then slid her shoulder blades up it to rise to her feet shakily and look for a way down.

The loud, harsh sound of the shots made her squat down quickly. Why now? Why kill her now? But the shots had not been that close. They were coming from somewhere below. The face-changers had not run back to their car and driven out of town. They were here.

Then she heard a different set of shots—one, two, three, four in rapid succession. That had to be the F.B.I. man returning fire. There was an irregular volley of shots from below, then silence. They weren’t shooting at her. They were shooting at him.

The pause lasted a long time. Maybe after all of that noise they had decided they had to leave. She slowly raised her body against the chimney, then craned her neck to search for the F.B.I. agent. She picked out a shape that must be his on the next roof, crouched and looking away from her along the row of rooftops they both had crossed.

She kept her eyes turned in that direction. She knew she should be spending this time searching for a way down, but she couldn’t. She saw movement. The F.B.I. agent fired twice, then ducked down. Muzzle flashes erupted far down the line. Jane pulled out Vaughn’s pistol and waited. She thought she saw the shadow of a man appear on the farthest roof and tried to aim, but lost it in the shape of another building. Then another bobbed up from the ladder. She tried to lead them as they crouched and ran, but it was too late. They flopped down on their bellies so she couldn’t see them.

The F.B.I. man fired two times at their prone figures. Then there was a click as though he had removed the magazine from his pistol. The two men heard it too, or sensed it. They popped up and fired eight or ten times while he slid his next magazine into place.

One of the two men made a run and jumped to the second roof. Just as he came down, the F.B.I. man fired once. But the other man had been waiting for it, and he fired wildly in the F.B.I. man’s direction to keep his head down. He used the pause to make his run and jump to join his companion on the second roof.

When the F.B.I. agent rose to fire at him, he got off only one shot before the man’s companion fired a rapid salvo to make him drop down again.

Jane watched anxiously as the two men used the same strategy to reach the third roof. Each time the F.B.I. agent tried to raise his head to aim at the one who was vulnerable, the other one would lay down a barrage of fire that forced him to go down again. Jane had led them both into a terrible place. Jane was already trapped on a roof with a steep slope, and she could not hold a view of the two men long enough to fire. All she could tell in the darkness was that they were moving closer and closer, and the F.B.I. agent had gone as far as he could without being trapped beside her.

He had fired probably ten times and then he had needed to reload. Why wasn’t he carrying a government-issue Beretta 92 with a police-only fifteen-round magazine? He had been walking around town alone, in a jacket and tie. He had been looking for a doctor’s wife, not conducting a raid on Brian Vaughn’s house, or getting into a firefight. He was probably using something smaller that he could carry without attracting attention, with a single-stack ten-round magazine like the ones they sold in every gun store. It was very unlikely that he was carrying more than one extra magazine.