Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  “I’d prefer to take you there, I really would. There, or to some destination even more remote. Sadly, the hour is late. Daybreak’s coming. We don’t have as much time as I’d like.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Aren’t you the inquisitive one. Brimful of questions. You know what they say about curiosity and the cat.”

  “Time for what?” she repeated, her voice low and toneless.

  “You’ll see. It’s a kind of game I play. But much more than a game.”

  “What game?”

  “Patience.”

  He was proud of her. She had not done the usual stupid things. She hadn’t tried kicking at him, or twisting wildly in her seat to grope for the door handle in a hopeless attempt to throw herself from the car. She hadn’t cried, not even silently.

  Best of all, she hadn’t retreated into a comatose state and left him with a mere simulacrum of a woman.

  He hated it when they did that. He wanted alertness, vitality, the animal instincts healthy and strong. He wanted a taut and quivering hare to chase.

  This one would do nicely. He should have expected no less.

  “Exactly how long have you been after me?” he asked her.

  “Twenty-seven days.”

  “Watching me, waiting for me to make a careless error?”

  “Yes.”

  “To catch me in the act.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bold of you. But I suppose, given the dictates of your conscience, you felt you had no choice. You couldn’t go to the police.”

  “No. I couldn’t.”

  “You might have phoned in an anonymous tip, of course. But on a case this highly publicized, the authorities must get hundreds of crank calls. And there are so many people who might carry a grudge against a man in my position. Disturbed people angling for revenge ...”

  “I know.”

  “They wouldn’t have believed you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So you had to do it all yourself, with no help from anyone.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “Poor Kaylie. Poor dear child.”

  She didn’t answer.

  He saw that she was gathering herself, her head lowered, lips pursed. That was good. She didn’t yet know what sport he planned for her, but she knew that all her resources would be required, and she was marshaling them for this last, doomed effort. He respected her for it.

  A saguaro cactus rose on the roadside, then fell back in a long, slow windshield-wiper motion. The cactus was a tall one. It might be a hundred years old. Cray wondered how many small, meaningless deaths it had witnessed in the nightly dance of predator and prey.

  He looked again at his passenger, saw the ripple of her throat as she swallowed the taste of fear. The freckles on her cheeks stood out against the paleness of her skin.

  She was pretty. Oddly, he had never noticed it before, not when he’d known her, not when he’d looked at her photograph and wondered if she was still alive and if he would ever have revenge.

  He found it strange to think of men kissing her mouth, whispering endearments, bringing pleasure to her. There was one man he knew of, but had there been many others?

  Well, there would be no more.

  “I like your hair,” Cray said. “You’re much better as a blonde. You weren’t the redhead type. You lacked the requisite personality.”

  “How can you say that,” she whispered, “when you never knew me?”

  “But I did know you. I knew you intimately. I knew your secrets. I knew your mind. I still do.”

  “I wasn’t myself then. You didn’t know me.”

  Cray considered his response as he slowed the Lexus, turning the wheel. A dirt road swung into the windshield.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” he allowed at last. “But I’ll get to know you tonight, won’t I?”

  The road was a narrow, rutted track bordered by swarms of prickly pear and jumping cholla. Cray’s high beams played over floury swirls of dust as the Lexus rolled forward.

  “Oh, yes, Kaylie,” he said. “You’ll be surprised how well I’ll know you before we’re done.”

  12

  Elizabeth thought she was holding up pretty well so far. Her mind, her body, the whole of her being had been focused on the single task of staying alert and in control.

  She had felt the Lexus turn onto another road, a dirt road that punished the suspension.

  At the end of this road, her death was waiting.

  Fear rose in her, a fierce wave of fear almost overpowering her will, but with a shudder of effort she forced it down. To panic would be fatal. Some of the others must have panicked. She would not.

  “Why am I blindfolded?” she asked, holding her voice steady.

  “It minimizes your mobility.”

  “I’m not very mobile anyway, right now.”

  “There’s nothing much to see. Cactus of all kinds. The moon has set. It’s very dark.”

  “Darker for me,” she said.

  Cray made a soft sound like a chuckle. “In every sense.”

  Her hands shifted inside the nylon sleeves. It was so much like wearing a straitjacket. She had worn one for three days not long after her arrest. The attendants had refused to remove it even when she used the toilet. They had wiped her off when she was done. She remembered the latex gloves, the cold touch.

  “I strip away the mask,” Cray said.

  The words came from nowhere, startling, baffling. She turned her head in the direction of his voice. “What?”

  “You asked what I do. The nature of the game. It’s just that simple. I strip away the mask.”

  She flashed on an obscure image, seaweed in the tide that became a woman’s face. “I know about ... that part of it.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. What I do at the end is merely symbolic, a kind of private ritual. Primitives take scalps or heads. But what they’re after is the soul. So am 1.”

  It was hard to think of something to say. “I never thought of you as religious,” she ventured.

  “Oh, I’m not. Not in the least. There is no ghost in the machine. We’re chemicals, nothing more. Mere vectors for our genetic endowments. The whole glorious human animal is only a Rube Goldberg contraption, jury-rigged by natural selection to dump our complement of DNA into the gene pool. We exist to fuck and die.”

  “Then I’m not sure where the soul comes in.”

  “Soul—well, perhaps it’s a misleading term. Think of it this way, Kaylie. A human being is an onion, layer upon layer. Social norms and religious archetypes, shame and guilt, repression and evasion, personae we adopt and discard as mood or moment dictates. Peel the onion, strip off the mask, and what’s left is the naked essence. What’s left is what is real.”

  Anger stirred in her, pushing back fear. “You keep calling me Kaylie. It’s not my name. Not anymore.”

  “Isn’t it?” Somehow, though she couldn’t see him, she could feel his slow, cool smile. “Well, that’s one more layer of illusion I intend to peel away.”

  The Lexus slowed. Stopped. The engine clicked off.

  “We’ve arrived,” Cray said. “Now the real fun begins.”

  Unexpectedly she felt him lean close to her, and her vision returned as the blindfold was pulled away.

  She blinked at the surprise of light and color. Cray had left the key in the ignition, the high beams on. Long rays of halogen light fanned across an oval of dirt, the cul-de-sac at the end of the road.

  There was nothing beyond it but the land’s flatness and spiny humps of cacti and, here and there, tall saguaros like scarecrows in a field.

  “Take a good look,” Cray whispered. “It’s your final resting place. The end of all your journeying, at last.” He smiled. “What are you thinking? Perhaps that you stayed hidden for twelve years, and you could have gone on hiding?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And now you’re going to die. But perhaps not.”

  She was sure
he wanted to see an uplift of hope in her face. She wouldn’t give it to him. She merely narrowed her gaze and waited.

  “I’m giving you a chance. The same chance I gave the others.”

  “It didn’t do them any good.”

  “Maybe you’ll be lucky. You’re due for some luck in your life, aren’t you?”

  “Overdue,” she said, her voice low.

  “All right, then. You have miles of open space. No houses or roads nearby. A wilderness, and do you know how many small animals are being hunted in this wilderness tonight? You’ll be one of them. You’re prey. And you know what I am.”

  She looked around her, taking in the emptiness of a place without lights or people or doors to lock and hide behind.

  “You’ll have a fifteen-minute head start. I promise not to watch you when you go. I’ll pick up your trail, and hunt you down, if I can. I use no special technology, only a pistol, and it’s not even equipped with a night-vision scope. And you should know that I will shoot to wound, not kill. The killing is done with a knife. The last thing I’ll do is take your face. I get to keep that, as my trophy. And, by the way, I carry smelling salts, which sometimes prove necessary. You’ll be alive and conscious right to the end. That’s the game I play. The game I’ve played for more than twelve years.”

  She registered the words. She knew all of it was true, and it would really happen to her. She would be hunted like an animal, and she would die in pain, and there was no hope for her.

  “Why?” she asked.

  On his face she saw a flicker of surprise, and she knew that none of the others had thought of asking that particular question.

  He was silent for a moment. Perhaps he would not answer. Then she realized that he was gathering his thoughts, like a conscientious teacher composing the clearest possible reply.

  “Because this is life,” he said simply. “Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. All our most powerful emotions are reducible to the instinctive responses of animals in the fight for life. Anger pumps us up for battle. Fear sharpens our reflexes and perceptions. Have you noticed how preternaturally alert you are right now? And love, the poets’ favorite, is only an expression of the need to find safety in communal ties. Burrowing animals—that’s all most of us are. And then there are a few who do not choose to burrow and hide. It’s one or the other, predator or prey.”

  “There’s more to life than that.”

  “Really? Has there been more to your life for these past twelve years? Haven’t you been running, hiding? Doesn’t your heart beat faster when a siren goes off or there’s a knock at your door? No wonder you like that silly book, Watership Down. What are you, if not a timid rabbit in her hutch?”

  “Do you talk to all of them like this?”

  “No. Never. You’re the first. I thought you might understand.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “Evidently.” Cray frowned, and though it was crazy, for a moment Elizabeth felt certain she had disappointed him somehow. “Well, let’s get started.”

  He unlocked her door with the power button on his console, then left the car and walked around to the passenger side. She watched as he passed through the high beams, every detail of his features and form jumping into sudden clarity, then melting into a blur of shadow once more. He was careful to avert his face from the light, and she knew why, of course.

  He was protecting his night vision. He would need it for the hunt.

  She looked down at her purse, tantalizingly near. The clasp was still secure. Cray must not have looked inside.

  He wouldn’t know about the gun. The gun that was so close ...

  Again she tugged at the sleeves, but her efforts only pulled the knot tighter.

  Then her door swung open, and Cray leaned in, his face inches from her own.

  Reflexively she drew back. She could see flecks of amber in his gray-green eyes, his nostrils flaring with an intake of breath. He was clean-shaven, but a ghost of beard stubble was materializing on his lean cheeks and narrow, angular chin.

  The gun was in his hand again. She studied it—a large, black, dangerous thing, unpredictable as a snake. The gun he would hunt her with.

  Shoot to wound, he had said, not kill.

  She had never been wounded by a bullet. Distantly she wondered how it would feel.

  “It’s a nine-millimeter Glock,” Cray said, “if that means anything to you.”

  “Not a lot.”

  “I’m going to hold this gun to your head, Elizabeth, or Kaylie, or whoever you think you are.”

  The muzzle touched her forehead. She had expected it to be cold, but Cray must have worn it close to his body, and his own heat had warmed it.

  “My finger is on the trigger. All I need to do is squeeze.”

  She drew a tight breath. “So do it, then.”

  “Oh, no. That’s not the game I play. I simply want you to understand that you have no options here. No freedom of choice. Not that you ever did. Free will is only another illusion.”

  She wanted no more philosophy from him. She waited.

  “In a moment I’ll release your hands. Then you’ll climb out.”

  “All right.”

  “Any deviation from my instructions, and—bang—you’re dead.”

  “You’ll kill me anyway. This would be faster.”

  “Indeed it would. Quick and perhaps painless. But you don’t want me to shoot you, and do you know why? Because while you live, you have a chance. A slender chance, a chance hardly worth considering, it’s true—but a chance. You might outrun me, evade me, survive this night. You won’t give that up. Will you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not. You see? I do know you.”

  With his left hand Cray reached for her sleeves. The knot he’d tied was clever, expertly made. With one pull it came apart, and she was free.

  “Now get out,” Cray said.

  This was the critical moment, her last opportunity. Once she left the vehicle, the purse would be beyond her reach forever.

  Cray was leaning back, his big black gun floating a few inches from her face.

  She unbuckled her lap belt. The retractable portion was a three-foot strap, the buckle’s steel prong lolling at one end.

  As a weapon, it wasn’t much.

  But it was all she had.

  With a jerk of her arm she flung the strap at Cray, whipping the steel prong at his gun hand, then dived to the floor and seized the purse, popping it open—

  And Cray laughed.

  “It’s not there, bitch.”

  He was right.

  The Colt was gone.

  She looked up at Cray and saw his bland, cool smile.

  “Your purse was the first thing I looked at,” he said. “I found your stupid little toy. I took it with me when I returned the master keys to the storage room. On my way there, I tossed the gun into the desert brush, where no one is likely to find it for months or years. What did you think I was doing while you were out cold?”

  She dropped the purse. There was a kind of numbness in her, an absence of any sensation.

  “Now,” he added, his smile unchanged, “exit the goddamned vehicle, you little piece of shit.”

  The black gun, the Clock or Crock or whatever it was called, drifted down to fix her in its sights.

  “Okay,” Elizabeth whispered. “You win.”

  She started to rise, and without conscious intention she slipped her hand into the satchel beside the purse, closing her fingers over the first item she touched, a steel canister with a spray nozzle.

  There was a trigger, and she found it as she sprang at Cray.

  From the nozzle—a jet of hissing gas.

  She had time to think the canister was useless, only a can of compressed air for fixing flat tires, and then she felt the atmosphere around her turn suddenly cold with a mist of ice crystals, and Cray screamed.

  He spun out of the doorway, and she pumped the trigger again.

  His left arm came up to prot
ect his face. Frost glittered on his sleeve.

  Whatever was in the canister, it was cold, as cold as dry ice, and she could hurt him with it, and she wanted to.

  She held down the nozzle, spraying him with arctic cold, and his knees gave out, dropping him to the dirt.

  For a moment she knew a wild sense of power, of victory, and then his pistol swung at her.

  He had a clear shot, and there was nowhere for her to hide.

  But he didn’t fire.

  It seemed as if his hand wouldn’t work, or maybe it was the gun itself that had jammed or locked or—

  Frozen.

  She could see the glaze of ice on the black barrel.

  The gun had been disabled, and Cray was defenseless.

  She could punish him.

  Kill him.

  “Son of a bitch!” she shrieked. “You son of a bitch!”

  She depressed the trigger, aiming for his face, his eyes.

  But this time there was only a feeble hiss, then silence.

  The canister was empty.

  Cray knew it. Already he was already struggling to rise.

  She threw the canister at him. Missed.

  There might be other weapons in the satchel, but she had no time to look.

  Into the driver’s seat. Crank of the ignition key. The motor bursting to life as the high beams momentarily dimmed.

  Cray lurched upright, his face wild, and grabbed for the open door.

  She saw his gloved hands seize the door frame, and then the Lexus surged forward as she wrenched the gear selector into drive and stomped the gas pedal.

  Cray’s gloves, shiny with ice, slipped free of the door, and he fell again in the dirt.

  Elizabeth watched him fall, then looked ahead, and there was a low wall of cactus rushing at the Lexus, no way to dodge it or even slow down, and she screamed as the chassis bucked with impact, the foliage sliding under the wheels, dirt rising everywhere in thick spiraling drifts.

  Then she was in a clear patch, steering between obstacles, and behind her Cray dwindled in the rearview mirror, a dusty, staggering figure, all in black, so small now, smaller than she could have imagined, and finally gone in the night.

  She kept driving, the accelerator on the floor, the big Lexus careening like a carnival ride.

  There was a dirt road somewhere and a paved road beyond it, but she knew she couldn’t find either of them, not now.