Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

He was breaking in. He was one of them. What was he doing here? Harry was already dead. The man slowly slid the window to the side, then reached in, grasped something solid, and pulled himself up. She was glad she had seen that. She would stay away from those arms.

His upper body was inside. Keeping his legs from working and scuffing the wall, he pulled himself in like a snake. She stood and moved along the wall toward him. This would be the time to attack, incapacitate the legs somehow, but she hesitated. She had to find out what he was doing here. If he was back because he had left some evidence, she would need to know what it was.

She waited for a moment beside the window, then she saw him pull down the shade and close the curtain. She stepped to the next window, where the kitchen was, and tried to hear him moving around, but the glass muffled the sounds. He pulled that curtain too. In a moment a light came on, and Jane moved back to the first window, slowly raised her head to the corner, and lifted the shade a quarter inch.

She could see him on his knees in the middle of the room. He had put a towel along the bottom of the door. Was that it? No, he had done that to keep light from shining under it into the hallway, and now he was looking at something on the floor.

She moved the shade aside a little and stood higher to see it. Blood. There was a huge reddish brown stain in the middle of the dirty shag carpet. She ducked down again and felt sick. Harry must have lain there dying for a long time.

She was staring away from the window at the cinder-block fence when there was a bright flash of light that made the porous texture of the wall visible for an instant, then left it in darkness again. She cringed for a second, heard the click and whirr before she identified it—not a gun, a camera. She moved to the window again and listened. There was another flash, then the same click-whirr. She looked while he was still holding the camera to his eye. It was a Polaroid that unfolded with a bellows. He aimed the camera away from her at the door, down by the latch where the black fingerprint powder was thick, and it flashed again.

She had been comfortable with the theory that he had forgotten something when he had killed Harry, but taking pictures didn’t make sense. That was what cops did. If he was a cop, why break in at night? Was he a reporter or something? Even they didn’t have to break in to take pictures, and it was hard to imagine a paper printing pictures that didn’t have a body in them. She ducked and slipped back along the wall of the building, picked up the transmitter in the flower pot, slowly slid the louver of the bathroom window up and reached in to find the one on the sink, then hurried across the patio to the other side.

She could see Jake through the window, not sitting on the couch where she had left him, but standing by the door with one of the shotguns in his hands. She hoped what she was about to do wouldn’t give the old man a heart attack or, worse, make him whirl and open up on her. She reached up and knocked on the window. He turned, the shotgun ready, but something must have told him that nobody raps on a window if what they really intend is to shoot through it.

He held the muzzle upward and hurried to slide the window open. "You scared me," he whispered.

"Not as much as you scared me," said Jane. "Bring me the car keys."

He reached into his pocket and produced them, then unlatched the screen to slip them through. "I think there’s somebody across the hall."

"There is." She handed Jake the two transmitters. "I’ll be back when I know who it is."

"Wait for me," he said.

"You can’t go out the door. He’ll hear."

Jake handed her the shotgun. "Take this," he said, then handed her the other one, and picked up his coat. He put one leg through the window, then the other, turned onto his belly, and lowered himself to the ground. He had done it very well, but he seemed a little stiff as he followed her down the walk. They stopped under the thick bower of wisteria at the front comer of the building and looked out into the street.

They could see the man’s car at the curb. Sitting behind the wheel was a second man.

"Can you see his face?"

"You mean you can?"

"Come on," she said. She pulled him around the edge of the fence to the next apartment building and waited.

"I still can’t see his face," he whispered.

"The guy in the apartment building will come out and get into the car with his buddy. The second they’re around the corner, we sprint for our car. If they go to the police station, we forget it."

"If I have to sprint, we can forget it now. What if they go somewhere else?"

"We’ll see." Jane was preoccupied. If the killers were still here, they must be waiting for John, and that meant he was alive. It occurred to her that the pattern was to frame John for everything they could think of. Maybe the man had planted something that had belonged to John in the apartment. But why would he take pictures? And how could he expect to plant something after the police had already spent days going over everything? Nothing she thought of made sense.

Then she saw the man. She touched Jake’s shoulder. The man walked casually, his arms swinging and his head up, almost skipping down the three steps from the building to the sidewalk. He stepped across the lawn to the car. Jane whispered, "When he opens the door."

When the man grasped the handle and pulled, the dome light came on. It took three full seconds for him to swing it open, sit down in the passenger seat, and swing it shut again. They were both in their mid-thirties, dark-haired.

"It’s them," said Jake.

The car moved ahead slowly a hundred feet before the headlights came on. At the comer it turned right. "Let’s go," she said, and they hurried down the steps to their car.

Jake held both shotguns across his lap while Jane wheeled the car around and went after them. At the first block, she glanced down the long street on her left and saw nothing, and then the next, and the next. On the fourth street she saw a set of taillights a block away, so she followed them. "I hope it’s the right car."

"I think so," said Jake. "It’s green like the other one."

The car pulled straight across Milpas to the freeway entrance ramp, and then the light changed and Jane couldn’t follow. She kept moving, turned right onto Milpas to the next intersection, extended a left turn into a U to come back at the light, turned right, and came up the ramp.

The green car was far ahead now, and Jane pushed the rented car up to seventy until she could see the two dark heads in the back window, then dropped back and let a station wagon pass her. She went along behind it for a while and then let a big shiny steel tanker truck slip in front of her, too. "I can’t see him anymore," said Jake.

"And he can’t see us," she answered. "Just watch the exit ramps to the right."

Most of the familiar parts of town had slipped past them when the car suddenly moved to the right and coasted up the ramp at Sueño Street. Jane kept her direction for as long as she could before she too peeled out of the traffic and coasted up the ramp. What caught her eye now was the big blue sign at the end of the ramp that said SHERIFF. Maybe she had just stumbled on to something that had nothing to do with anybody, the local cops spying on each other. But the green car kept going past the lighted one-story sheriff’s complex, and past a taller building with a sign that said COUNTY ADMINISTRATION and an older, bigger one that said HOSPITAL, and then turned around in the street and came back at them. Jane said, "Get ready," speeded up, and flashed past the car as it came down the road back toward Santa Barbara. She took her foot off the gas pedal and kept going slowly, watching the car in her mirror.