Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"What do we do?"

"I go in, you stay inconspicuous and watch."

"What am I watching for? Your friend?"

"John isn’t likely to come in daylight. If you do see him, whatever you do, don’t let him get away. Talk to him. Ask directions or something. And remember, he’s got a lot to be scared of. Until he sees me, he’s as dangerous as the others."

She closed the door, slipped her shoulder into her purse strap, and walked across the street to the apartment buildings. Jake couldn’t see anybody to watch, so he watched the buildings. He had considered coming to a place like this to wait out his last few years. It was pretty, a lot of palm trees and stucco buildings you couldn’t see the ocean from, but it was just the front door of a nursing home, really, and those weren’t much different anywhere. At least in Deganawida there was a chance that somebody might visit.

Jane came back smiling and sat in the driver’s seat. "We’re in luck. I rented the apartment next door to Harry’s. We move in before dark."

"It just happened to be vacant?"

"There was a murder. People always move out in droves. But next door is better than I had hoped."

Jake wondered how a person came to know things like that, but she seemed to know a lot of them. She started the car and drove back down the street, turned right, then left, and went down a long, straight residential street with houses that looked like cottages.

"Where are we going?"

Jane seemed to be pulled back reluctantly from whatever she had been thinking. "There are homicide detectives in there right now. They never work nights except the first one, when the body’s on the ground and they still have some hope of catching somebody. The fact that they’re still in there after a couple of days is great news."

"It is?"

"It means they still have it sealed, and John probably hasn’t come in yet."

"Are you sure that’s what he’ll do?"

"No," she said. "I’m guessing. But he’ll feel the way I do, which is that we killed Harry. He and I did. He might not find anything by looking at the apartment, but he has nothing else to look at. And if he’s thinking like a cop, then seeing what the other cops looked at might tell him a lot."

"So where are we going now?"

"You’re going to drop me off downtown. Then you’re going to pick up a few essentials."

"Such as?"

"Food that we can eat without a lot of cooking. There’s a refrigerator in there, so get whatever you want. Two shotguns, short-barrel-something like a Winchester Defender or a Remington 840. One box of double-ought buckshot—make that the little boxes that hold five each. Get six. Two blankets, a pillow if you need one. An electric baby monitor. There are lots of kinds, but Fisher-Price makes a good one. No, two of those, and batteries for them. And a roll of electrical tape."

"What are you going to be doing?"

"I’m going to the library to see if there was anything in the local papers that the wire services didn’t pick up. Then to the police station to see if John is hanging around trying to strike up a conversation. That kind of thing."

She pulled over on Figueroa Street. "Can you remember all that stuff?"

"Sure," he said. "When do you want me to pick you up?"

"I don’t. See you later."

The supplies didn’t take much thought. It seemed to Jake that the differences between places had virtually disappeared during his lifetime. If you blindfolded somebody, put him on a plane, and set him loose on the main drag of any decent-size town in the country, he would be hard-pressed to say where he was. If there were palm trees or snow, all he’d really know was a list of places where he wasn’t. The supermarkets just had different names.

The shotguns took some thought. He kept himself from ruminating on the implications of them by concentrating on composing some small talk that would carry him through if there was some custom out here that required him to answer any questions. He decided he had no choice but to be Jake, the retired codger from Deganawida, since he suspected you couldn’t make this kind of transaction without showing somebody some identification. He decided that buying double-ought in May was highly suspicious, since as far as he knew, deer season anywhere on earth had to be in the fall, to give the does and fawns a fighting chance. He finally hit on the idea that he was buying the guns as a gift for a friend who had a ranch up near—he studied the map—New Cuyama. He suspected the peculiarity of buying two at once was actually an advantage, since nobody who needed a shotgun to commit suicide or rob somebody would need two.

When he went into the store, he was almost disappointed that he didn’t need to say anything to the clerk except that he was paying cash. He supposed that having a story to tell had made him look self-assured. He bought a cleaning kit while he was at it because they always test-fired the damn things at the factory and left them dirty.

The sun was getting low by the time he finished. He took a turn and drove toward the sunset for a few blocks. He figured he should at least see the Pacific if he was this close to it. The street came out on a winding road through a kind of suburb, but still the ocean didn’t turn up. Finally, he accepted his failure and checked the map. Sure enough, around here the coastline wasn’t to the west at all but to the south, which was damned inconvenient for visitors who were accustomed to thinking of the relationship of the sun and the continent and the ocean as pretty well stabilized.

He turned left, found the ocean immediately, and was glad. He stood on a broad lawn under some fifty-foot palm trees and stared past the white sand at the endless blue that extended out past the slow rolling waves, and across the world. It made the air smell different and dropped the temperature ten degrees. What he was looking at seemed as infinite as the sky. The word infinite was full of frustration; it was just another word for "so far you can’t see it." There was something that made him want to see beyond the horizon.

As he walked back to the car, Jake tried to formulate his complaint. If seeing was detecting light, and light could curve, then under certain circumstances a person ought to be able to follow the surface of the ocean past the horizon, around the whole world. Then he realized that what he would see at the end of it was himself, from behind. If infinity was looking at his own ass, he supposed he could pass it up. He felt satisfied with his decision not to give up on the Pacific, and relieved that he hadn’t been unable to find the biggest thing on earth.

When he made it back to the apartment building again, Jane was there to help him unload. When they had everything inside, she closed the door and locked it, and he set about unboxing the two shotguns on the kitchen table. She picked one up and sighted it, then pumped the action and clicked the trigger a couple of times and looked into the chamber. After that she let Jake sit at the table to clean and oil them while she went into the bedroom with the baby monitors.

Jane watched the street through the bedroom window as she put the batteries into the monitors and put tape over the little glowing ON lights. It was dark before she saw the last of the police cars drive off. She went out the door, walked around the side of the building, put one of the baby-monitor transmitters into an empty flowerpot, and set it in the bushes beside the building. Then she walked until she found the bathroom window. She had noticed that the bathroom window in the apartment she had rented had louvered slats that could be cranked open. She examined the bathroom window of Harry’s apartment, found that it was the same and that the glass slats didn’t fit any better than hers did. She was able to push one of them up out of its holder just enough to fit the second transmitter in and set it on the sink. Then she went back to her own apartment, set the two receivers on the kitchen counter, and turned them on.