by Peter Clines
Eli switched tactics. “What’s she looking for?”
Theo’s smirk melted into a frown. “You’ve got no idea what’s going on, do you? You’re just chasing her because she smiled at you the right way.”
“What?” His tongue stumbled against his teeth. “No, no, no.”
“It’s okay. You wouldn’t be the first young man smitten with her. Although I’ve never seen one go this far.”
“Smitten?”
The smirk returned. “Have the hots for her, dumbass.”
“Well, no. I mean, she’s hot, yeah, but I’m just…I just wanted to warn her.”
“Warn her?”
“Yeah. There’s a…a guy after her. A creepy guy.”
The old man smirked and raised a brow. “At least you’re honest.”
“What? No, not me. I mean, I’m just here to warn her about him. The man with…”
“Man with what?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Kid, if we both trotted out all the things we’d seen that the other wouldn’t believe, I’d bet a million bucks I’d win by a wide margin. What’d this guy have that got you so spooked?”
Eli studied the man for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s not something he had. It’s what he didn’t have that freaked me out.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What didn’t he have?” The last words slipped from the man’s weathered lips and took some of his confidence with them. Realization and worry settled across his brows.
An echo of the expression twisted in Eli’s stomach. “This is going to sound freaky and impossible,” he said, “but this guy didn’t have a—”
“A face,” finished the old vendor. He glanced over at the finger-painter. “He was wearing a plastic mask over a smooth face.”
Eli stared at the old man, and then he spewed out two days’ worth of fear and confusion. “I saw him on Wednesday, but I saw him once before, when I was a little kid. He drove past me on the road when I was on my bike.”
A whistle slipped out of Theo’s lips. “Bet that gave you nightmares for a while.”
“Sort of. For a while. I think I convinced myself it wasn’t real, even after I met Harry again.”
The old salesman nodded. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
A shiver shook Eli, and it took him a moment to realize his body had just relaxed. Tension he didn’t even know he’d been carrying slipped away and left him feeling…free. Reassured. “Seeing him just brought back all these childhood memories. I think…I almost wet my pants.”
“Again,” Theo said with a smirk, “you wouldn’t be the first.”
“And his voice was just awful. I thought it was the mask, but then I realized it was his skin muffling—what is he? How can he talk with no mouth? Or breathe? Or see?!”
“You heard his voice?” Theo shuddered. “How close were you?”
“He was right there in my cubicle with me,” Eli said. “He was asking me about Harry and standing closer to me than you are. He had me kind of blocked in my chair, and then he—”
“Wait,” said Theo, holding up a hand. “You talked to him?”
“Yeah.”
“An actual conversation?”
The term threw Eli for a moment. “He sort of…he asked me about Harry. Interrogated me, I guess. I didn’t really tell him anything, but that’s how I knew she was in trouble.”
“He talked to you,” Theo said, considering the words as they slid out of his throat.
“Talked to me. Threatened me. Choked me.” The memory of strong fingers prickled the skin of Eli’s neck.
Theo dropped the board of jewelry onto the blanket. The pieces jangled against one another. “You stupid rookie,” he growled. He rolled off the blanket, grabbed its edges, and tossed them one across the other, folding it around the display board. The finger-painter looked up from his masterpiece.
“What’s wrong?”
“Think about it, kid,” Theo said. He looped a string of knotted shoelaces around the blanket and pulled it into a tight bundle. “He asked you about Harry, let you go, and you came running straight here. That sound like a smart move on your part? You ever seen a goddamned movie?”
The cool air slipped into Eli’s collar and down his back. “I…I wanted to help.”
“You want to help?” Theo threw his knapsack over one shoulder and shoved the bundle under the other arm. “Get the hell away from me. Managed to stay under the radar for forty years, and now you blaze a trail straight to my…Goddammit.”
His gaze slid from Eli’s face to lock on something behind him.
Eli turned.
The faceless man stood halfway down the market, taller than most of the crowd. His hat added a few more inches even as it shadowed his blank skull from the midday sun. Eli could see a gleam of plastic wrapped across the space where the man’s eyes should’ve been.
No one reacted to the clear mask or the smooth skin beneath it.
Theo’s free hand grabbed Eli’s wrist and yanked. The salesman ran past the finger-painter, across the plaza, dragging Eli until the younger man’s feet started to catch up. They pushed past shoppers and lunch-goers and random wanderers.
“Move,” snarled Theo. “We’ve gotta get out of his range.”
“Hello, Mr. Knickerbocker,” bellowed the faceless man. “And Mr. Teague. If you could both please remain where you are, it would be appreciated! Don’t attempt to escape!”
Eli shook free of Theo’s grip. Theo didn’t hesitate, adjusting his bundles and diving between a man and woman in sharp overcoats. He didn’t look back to see if Eli followed him.
Eli followed him. He sidestepped quickly around the couple, pushing the man aside as gently as possible. “Sorry,” he called back over his shoulder.
As his head turned, people shrieked behind him. The crowd scattered as the faceless man raised a huge pistol. It came up through the parting crowd like a hungry shark breaking the surface of the water. The faceless man stood in the open space, a black-suited statue with one arm raised and aimed in Eli’s direction.
“Last warning, Mr. Knickerbocker!”
“Don’t stop, kid,” Theo snarled back over his shoulder. His lurching gait carried him toward the wide plaza exit beneath the steel-and-glass roof. “Keep running. Get as far away from him as possible. As long as you’re close they’ll be certain—”
The gunshot echoed over the crowd, across the plaza, between the buildings.
Theo’s baseball cap flipped in the air. The old man dropped his blanket bundle and took three quick steps. He let the knapsack slide off his shoulder and took three more. Eli’s momentum carried him past Theo, and he twisted around to urge him to leave the knapsack.
But Theo’s next step became a stagger. His knees sagged. His head dropped forward to display a thick, wet line of red spreading out across the salesman’s scalp.
Theo crumpled. His skull struck the bricks with a sound not unlike a bat connecting with a well-used Little League baseball. Blood drained out between the cobblestones, a gleaming red spiderweb around Theo’s head.
Eli stumbled three, four more steps and paused.
The faceless man strode forward. A few more shrieks and cries bounced in the air. Half the people scattered before him, the rest froze with expressions of horror or anticipation.
Theo vanished behind a grove of legs as some shoppers pushed in for a better view.
“Excuse me,” the faceless man called out. He slipped through the crowd without effort, the pistol down, his badge held high in his other hand.
Eli pushed back into the crowd, away from Theo, away from the body. He shifted direction and skirted around the outer edge of the plaza, doubling back the way he’d come, back to where Theo’s blanket had been spread out. He guessed he was thirty or forty feet away when he risked a glance back.
“Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen,” the faceless man called out. “Please stand aside.” The tall figure brushed past the lunchtime diners and shoppers and passersb
y to stand by the fallen salesman. A few glanced up at the tall man, but then their eyes returned to the body.
Why didn’t anyone react? A six-and-a-half-foot-tall man with no face stalked through the crowd and no one stared or screamed or recoiled.
The faceless man’s shoulders hunched, and his arms seemed to tense. Even from thirty feet away, Eli could sense the annoyance wafting off the tall figure. The masked skull turned to the left, then to the right.
Eli saw two police officers work their way through the crowd toward the faceless man and a cool wave of relief washed over him. A woman and a younger man. They seemed to bob up and down through the crowd like swimmers in rough water. The distance between the police and the faceless man shrunk, and then the last few shoppers stepped away to create a space.
The female officer stood near the faceless man. Her pistol was out, but she didn’t seem to be threatening the broad-shouldered monster. She looked up at the plastic mask, at the thing in the faceless man’s hand, and nodded three times.
She turned to her partner and exchanged a few quick words. Then they both waved the crowds away from Theo’s fallen body, clearing a space in the plaza. The female officer glanced back at the faceless man and gave a confirming nod.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” The voice rolled out across the plaza. Not amplified, but clear and loud. It reminded him of the actors at the Ogunquit Playhouse, booming out the lyrics of Buddy Holly without making it seem like shouting.
Eli could still hear the soft, muffled edges on the words.
The faceless man lifted his arm and displayed the object in his hand—the badge in its leather wallet. “I know this has been disturbing for all of you, and I’m sorry you had to see this. Rest assured, this is a matter of national security. We’re looking for a dangerous fugitive who may have spoken to this man in the past half hour or so.”
People stared at the tall, blank-faced man in the suit. Some looked curious. A few squinted suspiciously at the raised hand with the badge. But still no panic. No alarm.
“The fugitive is a woman,” the faceless man told the crowd. “Approximately thirty years old, five foot ten, blond hair. She is most likely dressed in a blue coat, like one of the colonial reenactors here, possibly wearing a tricorn hat.”
A few people on the edges of the crowd looked around. They eyed the distant reenactors. Some of them pointed. The police scanned the dozens of faces in front of them.
“She may also have an accomplice,” continued the faceless man. “Male. Twenty-nine. Five-foot eleven. Brown hair. They were both supposed to meet with this man, a collaborator.” Without turning his blank features, he gestured at the body splayed on the bricks behind him.
A cold chill crawled over Eli’s skull and slipped down his back. A level of panic he hadn’t felt since childhood tingled in his chest and fingertips.
He took a step back and let his shoulders slump a little. He let his chin settle low and hunched a little more. His left foot slid back again and he dragged the right one after it. He took three more steps backward.
Most of the people in the crowd still looked at the faceless man, but a few on the edges glanced around. A few yards away, the finger-painter scanned the crowd, his head swinging back and forth.
Eli pulled his sweatshirt hood up, realized it made him look like every guilty person since the creation of hoodie sweatshirts, and pushed it back down. He turned to his left, parallel to the crowd, and then let his path curve around, away from the faceless man and toward the streets outside Quincy Market.
“Hello, Mr. Teague,” boomed the voice. “Good to see you again.”
Eli wasn’t stupid. It was a trick to make him turn and look. To get him to reveal himself. He kept his shoulders slumped, his head down, and continued toward the road. He passed a few people heading the other way, into the plaza. They looked ahead at the crowd, then glanced behind them. Two or three of them glanced at Eli.
He reached the corner, stopped, and stretched. He filled his tight chest with air and tried very hard to look like a man with all the time in the world. A man definitely not trying to slip away from a crowd that might be turning into a mob.
He looked to his right, down the street, and turned a little more to look over his shoulder at the plaza.
The faceless man had waded through the crowd. The blank sockets behind his plastic mask were aimed at Eli. He took another step forward and raised his arm.
Eli ran.
6
What little Eli knew about being on the run was from half-remembered movies and less-remembered childhood novels about teen investigators. He didn’t think either source could be thought of as reliable. He also didn’t have much else to go on.
He ran for two blocks, then slowed down and tried to blend into the crowd. He shrugged his dark pea coat off and pulled the sweatshirt hood back up. He thought about tossing the coat but decided to leave it draped over one arm.
He stopped to stare at a flyer taped to a phone pole—something about a band he didn’t know playing at a bar he’d never heard of—and used it as a chance to look back the way he’d come.
No one pointed or yelled. No police or enthusiastic citizens or faceless men. A good number of pedestrians strode through his field of view, but none of them seemed interested in him. Or anyone else for that matter. They focused on newspapers, phones, balancing their bags, and just getting to a hundred different destinations.
Eli turned and kept walking away from Quincy Market.
And away from his car too. It sat in the garage north of the market. Probably for the best—there might be someone watching it. Or maybe the faceless man could track it somehow.
So, thought Eli. What now?
Finding out the secrets of the alluring Harry Pritchard and her mysterious life had lost a lot of appeal in the past half hour or so. A few seeds of fascination still tickled his mind, but a much larger part of his brain screamed, Not worth it! Truth was, he’d known her for maybe two hours all together. He knew nothing about her, good or bad.
He could go home. Just go back to his car and—if he didn’t get arrested right there—drive home to safe, boring Sanders and continue with his safe, boring life. Again, assuming he wasn’t arrested and hauled off to some prison or stockade or something.
Maybe the faceless man would leave him alone. He had twice before. If Eli made it clear he didn’t know anything—and didn’t want to know anything—maybe the blank-faced man would let him go home.
But the faceless man had shot Theo Knickerbocker. In the head. Right in front of a few hundred people. No questions. No hesitations. One warning—bang.
A man with no face and a Halloween mask had shot someone dead in the middle of a shopping mall. And no one had said a thing! The gunshot had caused a few screams and cries, but then…nothing.
Going home didn’t seem like a great option.
Just like finding system bugs—process of elimination. He couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t go back.
Stupid as it sounded, he had to go forward.
Eli walked two more blocks coming to this decision. As his chain of reasoning came to its end, so did the sidewalk. And across the street from him sat the bus station.
The hotel room had eaten a good chunk of his dwindling bank balance, and a ticket to California would eat up a lot of what remained. He knew, better than most, that bank withdrawals could be tracked, but didn’t see much choice. After a bit of internal debate, he got all the money he could from the bus station’s ATM—flinching at the fee—and then paid cash for the ticket. It wasn’t much of a screen, but it might slow the police down a little bit.
Or whoever else might be following him.
The route cross-country involved a few transfers, but it would put Eli in Pasadena five hours before Harry’s scheduled appearance. By sheer luck, the bus he needed boarded in just forty minutes. He spent the time walking from one end of the terminal to the other, watching every road and door. It probably made him look suspicious, but his ner
ves jumped too much for him to stand still.
On the fifth time around the station, Eli saw the faceless man standing on a distant street corner. He ducked behind the bulk of a vending machine before the mask turned to aim in his direction. When he peered around a few moments later, he saw the faceless man’s back.
A woman’s voice with a thin Boston accent called boarding for his bus. Ten minutes early. He backed away from the corner and followed the signs to his terminal. He stood in line next to the big blue bus as people slung duffel bags and rolling suitcases into the luggage compartment. He glanced over his shoulder three times while the line inched forward, showed his ticket to a bored man with Coke-bottle glasses, then climbed up the narrow stairs.
The inside of the bus looked more like a train. Or what trains looked like in the movies Eli had seen over the years. The seats were set up in groups of four, facing each other two by two. A small staircase led upstairs. The bus had an upstairs.
He found a seat near the window and hunched down low. He should’ve bought a hat at the bus station’s little store. Or a pair of sunglasses. He shifted the hood of his sweatshirt, hoping it settled in a position that hid his face without looking like it was hiding his face.
An older man in a down coat flopped into the seat across from Eli. His skin had the color and texture of a vintage leather jacket. At least thirty years of cigarettes wafted from the man’s pores. One rested behind his ear. Wrinkles along its length showed where it had been bent and straightened.
Through the bus window, Eli saw a man in a dark suit step out of the station. He stood fifty feet down the walkway and held no luggage. One of the hanging signs blocked the man’s face. His body turned toward Eli’s bus, away, then back.
A woman sat down in the aisle seat across from Eli. The cigarette man raised a brow, and a wave of perfume rolled up to sting Eli’s eyes. He blinked away the smell of baby powder and chemical roses.
The man in the suit took a few steps toward Eli’s bus. Was the suit black or very dark blue? Eli tried to get a better sense of its color and style, but the man was too far away, and the bus window, while not filthy, was far from clean.