Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Do you think other people get that way—soldiers, people who have to think about it a lot, cops?"

"I don’t know," he said. "Do you?"

"People always find some way to do what they have to do, don’t they? Pretend the plane that crashes isn’t going to be theirs."

"Yes," he said. He looked at her closely, his sharp old eyes studying her.

She opened her purse and took out the article she had torn from the Los Angeles newspaper. She had read it three times on the way to Chicago, but she read it again, keeping her eyes down where Jake couldn’t see them.

After they landed in Portland, she walked to the airport shop and bought a Vancouver newspaper. She had no trouble finding an article about the murder of Lewis Feng. There was a photograph of the policemen standing in front of the stationery shop while two of the coroner’s men wheeled a body bag to the curb. When she got to the part of the article that described what had happened to Feng, she put it down. He had been tortured. Of course, they would have had to do that. He would never have given them his client list unless they had first brought him to the point where the future didn’t matter as much as getting through the present. He would have to be willing to trade anything to make the pain stop. He had suffered for her mistake. She had done that to him.

The flight down to Medford was short, but she was aware of each second as she breathed in and out in an agonizing mechanical count. As they drew nearer, she concentrated on preparing herself for the most likely possibility. John had driven the five hundred miles down from Vancouver, gone to the apartment, opened the door, and found the four men waiting for him.

The article had said Harry was taken without a struggle in his apartment, his throat cut silently. He could have let somebody in and turned his back for a moment. But John wasn’t Harry Kemple. John was big and strong and alert. For him it would have to be something different, and more horrible—maybe three of them to hold him down and his eyes would bulge when he saw the knife come out and he’d push off with his feet to keep his neck away from the blade. She caught herself actually shaking her head to get the image out of her mind.

She glanced at Jake. She knew he had seen it, but he pretended he hadn’t. He stared straight ahead, stiff and erect. There was a kind of integrity to him, a separate-ness from the airplane, a refusal to slump in the seat and give up his will to the machine.

This time when the plane touched and bounced and then rattled along the runway to taxi to the terminal, Jane was one of the people who were incapable of waiting. She was unbuckled and ready. They had not checked their bags on the final leg of the trip because she had known that she would go mad waiting for them to come rumbling down into the baggage area. They walked into the terminal, put their suitcases into storage lockers, and stepped outside.

When the cab pulled up on the 4300 block of Islington, Jane picked the place out at once. It was the sort of building the Fengs would have chosen. It was a sprawling new apartment complex of the sort where people didn’t pay much attention to their neighbors because there were so many of them, and each wing would have a few moving out at the end of each month and new people coming in to replace them. But it was also the sort of place where you could murder a tenant without anyone noticing unless you did it with a bomb.

She walked along the sidewalk in front of the complex and saw that it was divided into sections that had their own numbers: 4380, 4310, 4360. When she reached 4350, she looked for the parking space in the carport at the side of the building. She found B, but the Honda wasn’t in it.

"Not home," said Jake, and she remembered his presence.

"Time for you to go for your evening walk," she said.

"Right." Jake started off on his stroll. He walked along the long row of parking spaces looked for all of the signs that Jane had told him about: a car with a man sitting in it, maybe pretending to wait for somebody while he read a newspaper. He scanned the windows for faces and then searched the surrounding block for a gray Honda Accord; a man who thought he might have unwelcome visitors might not park his car in a space with his apartment number on it.

Inside the hallway, Jane read the letters on the doors. They started with F. She worked backward until she found B. She heard someone across the hall in Apartment A walk close to the door, probably to look at her through the glass peephole. She tensed her legs and prepared to move quickly. After a moment there was a creak and she could hear the person moving off.

She turned to Apartment B and rang the bell. She could hear it jangling beyond the door. She knocked, then rang again, but there was no sound that she hadn’t made. She turned and knocked on the door of Apartment A.

A woman about her age, wearing a sweatshirt that had a stain on it Jane identified as baby formula, opened the door and stared at her with a resigned look. "What can I do for you?"

"I’m sorry to bother you," said Jane, and she could tell the woman was thinking, Not as sorry as I am, "but I’ve been trying to reach my friend, who just moved into Apartment B. His phone isn’t working, and—"

"Oh," said the woman. She brushed a long strand of corkscrew-curled hair out of her left eye, and it bounced back perversely. "They haven’t moved in yet."

Jane felt the tension beginning to grip her. "Are you sure?"

"Believe me, in this place I’d know it. People carrying furniture around sounds like an earthquake."

"Is there a manager?"

"Yeah. In the next building. Apartment A." Jane heard the first faint sounds of a baby waking up, amplified by an electric monitor. "Oh," said the woman vaguely, and the harried look returned to her face.

"Thanks," Jane said, and turned away so the woman could close the door. It didn’t prove anything. John Young didn’t have any furniture yet.

She went outside the building and walked around the corner to the window of Apartment B. The window looked into the living room. It was just four bare walls enclosing a shiny imitation-parquet floor. The bedroom door was open, and there was nothing in there, either. Even the closet doors were open, something that the people who gave apartments their gang-cleaning between tenants did to air them out.

The next thing Jane saw made her turn away. It was a small piece of white paper on the floor that had been slipped in under the door. She was starting to walk when she saw Jake coming around the building toward her. She pointed to the window, and he looked inside.

"That’s my note on the floor," she said. "He never made it."

"Are you sure?"

"I’m going to check with the manager, but it looks that way."

"I’ll do that," said Jake.

In a few minutes Jake returned. "No. He would have had to check in to get his power and water turned on. He hasn’t been here."

They walked out of the apartment complex, down Islington Street, with no destination. She hadn’t thought of this—not that he wouldn’t be in his apartment now, but that he had never been here at all. Even if the four men had found Harry’s and John’s addresses on the same list, how could they have stopped John so quickly? He would have had a good head start. They could have made it to the apartment before he did, but how could they catch him on the road?

Jake cleared his throat, and she knew she had to ask, so she said, "What is it?"

"Well," he said. "Is there any chance that he didn’t entirely trust you?"

She was stung. "No chance," she said. Was there? Could he possibly think that she had some ulterior motive for everything she had done? "No."

"I see," said Jake. "So he knew you really well."