Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

The woman didn’t turn, and she didn’t run. She drifted toward him, and he sensed what she had in mind. She was winding up for a kick in the groin. They always taught women that in those self-defense classes. He bent his body and held his hands low to grip her leg when she did it.

As he watched her legs, she leapt forward and butted her forehead into his face. The blow to his nose had been painful, but this time the world exploded. She had pushed off the ground with both legs, and knocked him backward with all her strength.

Killigan let out a howl as he hit the pavement. It was a screech of hurt and shock and, for the first time, fear. Killigan was desperately injured now, and he was down, where he couldn’t defend himself. She would go for his eyes in a second. He clapped his hands over his bloody face and rolled onto his belly on the concrete and shouted, "Help! Help me!"

His ears told him she was hovering somewhere nearby, dancing around, circling to look for a chance to do whatever they had taught her to do. He tried to see between his fingers and keep his face down, and then he felt it. The handcuffs went around both of his wrists at once. He was outraged, scandalized.

He scrambled to his knees and tried to stand, but her voice came again. This time it was louder, but still calm: "Stay down on the ground." He put his fists on the pavement and pushed himself up, but the patch of concrete in front of his eyes seemed to flash as though it were electrified, and then he found himself on his side, his legs spasmodically working, trying to run. It had been a kick to the kidney. It occurred to him he could be dying. He lay there and screamed again. "Help!" he shrieked. "Help me!"

Suddenly, he saw lights that didn’t go away: bright, blinding and steady, and his sluggish consciousness tried to decide if she had gotten his eyes after all. That didn’t make sense, because he could see his hands. And then he heard it. "Police officers! Don’t move!"

He tried to smile, but it hurt. His top front teeth felt loose, and his upper lip was swollen to a tight, hard lump that didn’t seem to belong to him. Then there were footsteps, and they got louder, and he could see one pair of cops’ black shoes and black pants, and he knew it would be all right. Then big, hard hands rolled him over onto his back, and the pain surprised him so much that he didn’t see anything anymore.

When Killigan awoke he was in a hospital room. He had no idea how long he had been there, but he knew he had not been wrong about the damage he had sustained. His whole head had a tender, fragile feeling, as though moving it would cause something to come loose and bleed. He heard a rustling noise, and then the cop was standing in front of him.

"Mr. Killigan?" He was the kind of cop that Killigan liked the least. He was trim and neat, with a short, carefully combed haircut that made him look like an army lieutenant. He pulled a little notebook out of the inner pocket of a gray tweed coat, letting Killigan see the strap of the shoulder holster.

"Yeah," he rasped. He wasn’t sure why his voice sounded like that, and then he tasted that he was swallowing blood.

"I’m Detective Sergeant Coleman, L.A. Police Department. I need to ask you some questions about what happened. Your I.D. says you’re a private investigator."

"Right."

"Were you working?"

"Yeah."

"What were you doing at the airport?"

"Picking up a woman named Rhonda Eckerly. Citizen’s arrest. There’s a complaint. She’s wanted in Indiana."

"What charge?"

"Grand larceny."

"So you’re a bounty hunter?"

Killigan heard something he didn’t like in the sound. It was a careful modulation of tone, as though the cop were trying to keep contempt out of his voice. Well, Killigan would make enough on this job to pay his salary for a year. Maybe he would find a way to mention the number and let this guy chew on it for the next few days. "The victim retained me to locate the suspect and bring her back."

The cop squinted and tilted his head a little. "Who’s the victim?"

"Mr. Robert Eckerly."

"I see," said Sergeant Coleman. He stared at Killigan for a long time without letting his face reveal anything. Finally, he said, "I’d like to bring in the woman who was arrested when the officers found you. Are you up to that?"

"Yeah. I want her held. I’ll press charges."

The detective’s tongue made a quick search of his teeth as he headed for the door, but then he turned around again. "How did she come to assault you?"

So that was it. The little bastard was so sure Killigan was weak—that it couldn’t happen to him. "I was escorting her to the van, and she surprised me. She must have taken one of those courses."

"Were the handcuffs yours?"

"Yes."

The detective pulled a chair close to the bed and sat on the edge of it. "Mr. Killigan," he said. "You’re in a dangerous business. You must have some idea of how to pull this kind of thing off without getting yourself in trouble. I think you made a mistake."

"It would seem so," said Killigan. "Now, where the fuck is Rhonda Eckerly?"

The detective stood up, walked to the door, and opened it. A uniformed cop came in with his hand on the arm of a woman. She was about thirty. She was tall and slender and olive-skinned, with large eyes and black hair. Then Killigan realized that she was wearing Rhonda Eckerly’s clothes. "No," he said. "No. That’s not the one."

"This isn’t Rhonda Eckerly?"

"No!" he shouted. A pain gripped him from his hairline to his jaw. It was as though his whole face had been peeled and a cold wind blew on it. "You got the wrong one!"

"No," said Detective Coleman evenly. "You did."

The sanctimonious little cop hadn’t needed to say that because, even distracted by pain and half paralyzed by the dope they’d shot into him to make him lie here, Killigan had been able to figure out that much. She was a ringer. The clothes, the amateurish way Rhonda Eckerly had tried to do things—it had all been planned so they could change in the bathroom.

The woman said, "Can I talk to him?"

"I guess so," said the cop.

"Alone?"

"No," said the detective. "Not a chance."

She didn’t look surprised. She walked a little closer to the foot of the bed, and the uniformed officer stayed at her elbow. "Do you know anything about Rhonda Eckerly?"

"Enough," said Killigan. "She’s a fugitive. Fair game."

The woman turned to the cop. "Thank you." She took a step toward the door.

"That’s it?" Killigan asked. "Aren’t you going to laugh at me and tell me how easy it was?"

’No."

"Why not?"

"I understand you now. Telling you anything would be a waste of time. You’re the walking dead."

"You both heard it," Killigan said with glee. "She threatened to kill me."

The detective stared at him again, his head tilted to the side a little. "We’ll discuss that later." He took the woman by the arm and ushered her out the door.

When the door closed behind them, Coleman walked Jane Whitefield down the hall, past the emergency room desk and the waiting area, across the black rubber mat. The doors huffed open and outside, in the hot night air, he led her past a couple of ambulances to his plain blue car.

"You got into this intentionally?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Why?"

Jane Whitefield took a deep breath and let it out, then said, "Robert Eckerly married a girl. She was about twenty, he was about fifty. He’s a rich man in a small town. He’s charming. He’s also a sexual sadist."

"Whose diagnosis?"

"She ran away once before, and he managed to have her caught, like this. I don’t know if he thought of the theft charge by himself or if he called somebody like Killigan and that person told him that was how it was done. She was released into his custody. He didn’t just beat her up. He chained her by the neck in a room and invited a few like-minded friends to come and help." She looked at Detective Coleman.