Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  She raced through the trackless desert, plowing up clumps of prickly pear, skirting the big saguaros, barely able to see, because her control had shattered at last, and she was crying.

  13

  Cray walked for two hours through the desert, following the Lexus’ tire tracks. His hands still ached with cold from the liquid nitrogen spray, and he found it difficult to flex his fingers.

  Only the black leather gloves had saved him from serious injury. The gloves—and his reflexes. Had he been less quick to react, she would have sprayed him in the face, and he would have been permanently blinded.

  As it was, he had shielded his eyes, and the gloves and his long shirtsleeves had absorbed the worst of the spray. The gun, too, of course. The Glock remained frozen, its trigger immovable, the slide locked.

  Tonight’s misadventure was his first defeat. In years of deadly sport he had never lost to an adversary, had never known the embarrassment of failure.

  Still, he would overcome this setback. He would find a way to win. He would bring Kaylie down.

  The task posed challenges, to be sure, but he had faced and surmounted many challenges already. A lifetime of challenges.

  What he was now, he had made of himself by a concerted and persistent exertion of will. He was not a born predator—at least no more than any man.

  At the beginning, he had been only a precocious little boy, a boy kept soft and sheltered, doted on by his mother and grandmother, his sole caretakers in a household barren of a father.

  Johnnie Cray had been told that his daddy was a policeman killed on duty, a story that sustained him in his earliest years, until he learned that it was a well-intentioned lie, and that his father was, in fact, a television repairman who had run off with his mother’s best friend when Johnnie was six months old. He left a note explaining that childbearing had made Johnnie’s mother fat.

  As a small boy, Johnnie knew nothing of such unpleasantness. He knew nothing of ugliness or pain. His mommy and grandma did their best to protect him from life’s stronger jolts. They kept him apart from other children, fed him sweets, ruffled his hair, and praised his blossoming intelligence.

  You’re special, Johnnie, his mother would tell him. You’re so smart. You’ll do great things with that mind of yours.

  And Cray, so small, had puffed with pride at the words and the future that was their promise.

  Then, at the age of seven, he started school. And things changed.

  School was a different world, a universe of coarse humor and petty tests of manhood for which he was utterly unprepared. He became the goat, the class joke, the universal victim. The pack smelled his weakness. They pounced.

  His nemesis was Billy Curtis. Billy hounded him. And Billy was everything Cray had been protected from, everything despicable in human nature. He was unintelligent and crude. He spit food. He made farting sounds. He kicked people. He notched stick-figure graffiti into the bathroom wall.

  And he hated Johnnie Cray. Johnnie Cry-baby, he called him. Johnnie, who wears diapers. Johnnie, who's such a good little girl.

  Cray was nine years old, a third grader, having endured two years of this torment, when one day at recess Billy Curtis tackled him for no evident reason and threw him helplessly to the ground. It had rained that morning, and the pavement was wet and muddy. Cray fell in the slop and lay there, gasping, as all the other boys and even a few unkind girls gathered in a circle to laugh.

  Billy Curtis, performing for his audience, capered in triumph and yodeled a singsong doggerel: Johnnie, Johnnie, better call your mommy!

  And Cray, on his knees, stared up at Billy, chanting and cavorting, swinging his loose arms, an ape in triumph, and he knew suddenly that Billy Curtis was quite literally an ape—an animal, mindless and savage.

  Hating Billy, Cray conceived his revenge.

  The next evening he climbed the fence to the Curtises’ backyard, where he stole Billy’s dog, a half-blind, arthritic schnauzer named Shoe. Cray took the dog into the woods, carrying it bundled in his arms. He would always remember the dog shivering in confusion and fear, yet staying quiet—too old, it seemed, to present any resistance.

  In the woods he tied a leash around Shoe’s neck, and then with cold intent he pulled the leash tight and slowly, very slowly, he strangled the dog to death.

  Shoe took a long time to die, wheezing and pawing at the damp, clotted earth. Finally a shudder of surrender hurried through the small body, and the schnauzer was dead.

  In that moment Johnnie Cray’s anger left him, and he was just a little boy, poking at the dog, both fascinated and horrified by the simple phenomenon of its lifelessness.

  He had meant to throw the dead dog over the fence into Billy’s backyard, but he found he couldn’t do it. Abruptly he was stunned by his own savagery, ashamed, unwilling to advertise the act. Instead he dug a shallow grave near an oak tree and buried Shoe in secret, crying as he filled in the hole.

  He did not sleep that night. He lay awake in the great darkness which seemed so unnaturally still, and he thought about the thing he had done and the reasons for it.

  Billy Curtis was an animal, yes. But Johnnie Cray was no better, was he? He too was nothing but an ape, driven by anger to an act of violence he could not justify.

  Strangely, this thought, when it finally formed itself in words, eased his distress. If he was only an animal, then he couldn’t be blamed for what he’d done. He might be no better than Billy Curtis, but at least he was no worse. No worse than anyone, because they were all like that, everybody on earth. All of them were animals, even the grownups in their business suits and cars and offices. All of them, at heart, were no different from Johnnie Cray.

  He was not an outcast, then ... or if he was, it was only because he saw a truth that others didn’t. Saw it and acted on it.

  All this he had understood at the age of nine. In the thirty-seven years since, he had not wavered in his fundamental faith.

  By degrees, year after year, Cray had pursued a higher understanding of this truth, peeling away humanity’s pretensions to greatness, sloughing off any notion of human dignity as a mere antique curiosity. He had explored the deepest dimensions of his bestial inheritance, confronting it even though it scared him, even though at times he felt he couldn’t bear the truth he faced—until finally he had broken through to a new, exhilarated self-acceptance, the end of denial, full and grateful surrender to the predator within, a surrender so complete that in its throes he would crane his neck and bay the moon like a mad animal.

  Few had traveled so far. Few had stared into the depths of the well of darkness, the abyss as Nietzsche called it, and had stayed true to what they’d seen.

  He was a pioneer—yet not the only one. Today there were others exploring territories close to the land he had mapped. There were geneticists who ascribed all human action to an instinct of reproduction mysteriously encoded in DNA. There were anthropologists who sought the origins of morality in the social instincts of lower primates. There were psychologists who dispensed with both the conscious mind and the subconscious, focusing instead on reflexes trained through operant conditioning.

  Different paths, but they led in the same direction. They led to the new millennium just dawning in all its bright but alien promise.

  Cray saw the future sometimes. It would be a world stripped of illusions, a world where no outdated ethical precepts would hold sway, where no one would judge or be judged, ever.

  There could be no such thing as conscience in the world he saw, and therefore no guilt, no shame. And no hours lying lonely in the dark.

  That world was very real to Cray. He was committed to it, utterly.

  He had to be.

  * * *

  At dawn he found the Lexus, abandoned in the desert.

  He approached it slowly, aware that there was no need for haste. His quarry must be long gone by now. Long gone, and laughing at him.

  Inside his gloves, his hands curled into fists, and because he performed
the action without strain, he knew that the last effects of the cryogenic gas had worn off.

  The front end of the Lexus was canted at an absurd angle. The left front tire was flat. More than flat. It was shredded. Cactus needles had punctured it—he could see a clump of prickly pear clinging to the ribbons of rubber—and the bitch had gone on driving until the tire had disintegrated and she was riding on the wheel rim.

  The doors were unlocked. There was no key in the ignition. She’d taken it, no doubt hoping to leave him at least temporarily stranded, unable to start the engine. If so, she’d miscalculated. As long as the vehicle was still drivable, he could get it moving.

  He walked around the Lexus, surveying the damage to the exterior. Scratches were grooved into the side panels, where the mesquite brush had stripped away the finish. A few cactus spines were stuck like porcupine quills in the other tires, but none had penetrated deeply enough to cause another flat.

  All right, then. He would change the tire, and then he would drive away.

  Drive where? Home, he supposed. There was no place else to go. He surely wouldn’t find her at the motel again.

  Cray looked around him. The Tucson Mountains lay to the south; somewhere west was the Tohono O’Odam reservation. East, there was a road. He saw a sparkle of traffic. Sandario Road, probably. A two-lane strip of blacktop running north-south. Not a major artery, but crowded enough in the first phase of the morning rush.

  She would have walked there. The distance couldn’t be much more than a mile. And at the roadside she would have stuck out her thumb and waited.

  She might be waiting still. Might be, but he knew she wasn’t. Not too many cars would pass before someone stopped to pick up a pretty blonde woman in distress.

  Afterward, what would she do? Call the police, identify him as Sharon Andrews’ killer? Possibly.

  But the authorities were unlikely to believe her. They might carry out a perfunctory investigation. He could handle it.

  Cray nodded, his lips pursed tight. Yes. He could handle anything Kaylie McMillan could do to him.

  In his wallet he carried a duplicate key to the Lexus. He used it to open the rear compartment, where he kept a full-size spare tire and a jack.

  Kneeling in the dust, he changed the tire. The wheel itself was slightly bent, but he could drive on it.

  He replaced the jack and shut the trunk, and then very calmly he jacked back the slide on the Glock, taking aim at a tall saguaro.

  But it was not a saguaro.

  It was Kaylie.

  “Die,” Cray said.

  He snapped the trigger once, and a bullet pockmarked the saguaro’s trunk, scaring a cactus wren from its burrow.

  “Die.”

  A second shot nicked one of the long, drooping arms.

  “Die, you little whore. Die as you should have died, twelve years ago. Die and die and die and die....”

  He went on firing until the gun was empty and the saguaro was a punch card of drilled holes.

  It, at least, would die.

  Something had to.

  Cray got into the Lexus and turned on the engine, then began the long drive home.

  14

  “Bad night?”

  Elizabeth took a moment to register the question.

  She knew the driver was looking obliquely at her, sizing up this strange, scared, barefoot woman who had appeared on the shoulder of Sandario Road in the predawn darkness, carrying a purse and a canvas satchel and hoping for a ride.

  “You could say that,” she answered finally.

  Something more was obviously required, some narrative to satisfy the man’s curiosity. She could claim she’d had a fight with her boyfriend and run from his parked car. Or that her own car had broken down on a back road.

  There were many things to say, but she had no strength for any of them. She remained silent.

  Daybreak bloomed over the mountains. A glaze of pink light spread across the pale, tired land.

  “So where am I taking you?” the driver asked.

  She looked at him. He was an Indian, perhaps sixty. Age had filled out his face and grayed his ponytail. His hands on the steering wheel of the old Dodge Rambler were thick and meaty and lightly liver-spotted.

  He reminded her of Anson, her father-in-law. There was no physical resemblance, only a similarity of character. Both of them were men well worn by the years, men whose squinting eyes had seen too much darkness ever to fully trust the light.

  “I’m staying at a motel.” She couldn’t remember the name. “It’s off Interstate Ten, near Silverlake Road. But if it’s out of your way—”

  “Not really”

  “I appreciate this.”

  “Don’t worry about it. What’s your name?”

  “Paula Neilson,” she said, using one of her old identities. Lying about such things had become habitual with her.

  “Wallace Zepeda. What brings you to Tucson, Paula?”

  “Just ... personal business.”

  “Personal business. Well, that’s clear enough. Me, I’m in the security field.”

  She flashed on the fear that he might be a cop, a detective or an undercover officer or something.

  “Airport security,” he added, and she saw a smile crease his cheek. “You wouldn’t get past my checkpoint.”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  “Not when the mere mention of the word security turns you as pale as ... well, as a paleface, pardon the expression. You on the run from the law, maybe?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good. I’d hate to be aiding and abetting. Mind if I turn on the music?”

  “Music would be fine.”

  “Better than talking, huh?”

  That smile again.

  She didn’t answer.

  There was an audio cassette half-inserted in the Rambler’s tape deck. Zepeda pushed it in and thumbed the on-off knob, and Creedence Clearwater Revival pumped through the cheap speakers at moderate volume.

  The song was “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

  Elizabeth thought it was a good question.

  She looked at the desert. Cray was out there. Cray, who hunted women in the wilderness the way other men hunted mule deer and javelinas. Cray, with his erudite, impeccably pedigreed opinions on the nature of the human mind.

  No ghost in the machine, he had said. No spirit, no soul, only chemicals.

  And if that was so, then what was murder except a rearrangement of those chemicals into a new form? And where was the crime in that? There was no right or wrong, no good, no evil. There was only better living through chemistry. There was death as sport.

  Blood sport. She tried to imagine what it would have been like. Cray had said he would give her a head start. She would have fled through the alkali flats, cutting her legs on cactus needles, stumbling, falling, rising. She would have fought against panic, but in the end panic would have overtaken her, and then she would have made some thoughtless mistake, and a bullet would have brought her down.

  How long, from start to finish? An hour, maybe. Or less time even than that.

  Elizabeth felt a shudder pass through her as it became real to her—the fate she would have suffered, and how narrow had been her escape.

  And Cray would not give up. She was sure of that. He must have followed her. Perhaps he had reached the Lexus by now.

  She had taken the ignition key, but he probably carried a spare. Even if he didn’t, he was smart enough to hot-wire the vehicle.

  If she had been thinking more clearly, she would have let the air out of the other tires or stolen the distributor cap to disable the vehicle. As it was, he could change the tire and get away.

  And then what? Would he prowl the city night after night in search of her car?

  She knew he would.

  Well, she could leave town, of course. Head to Texas, possibly. A new name, new life. She’d been Elizabeth Palmer for too long anyway. It was smart to change I.D.’s at least once every few years.

  Bu
t Cray would go on killing. He might never be caught.

  Call the police, then. Tip them off.

  She doubted they would believe her. Sure, she could tell them what had happened, but it would be the claim of an anonymous caller. The damage to Cray’s Lexus might help substantiate her story, but she was fairly certain Cray would come up with an explanation.

  She had his ignition key. She could mail it to the police. But what would it prove, except that she had stolen the key somehow?

  In her mind she heard Cray smoothly answering every question. Why, yes, Officers, as a matter of fact, my sport-utility was stolen the other night. Someone must have found the spare key I keep in a magnetic case under the chassis....

  I know, I know, it’s the first place a thief will look. I suppose I just never thought it would happen to me. In any event, the vehicle was taken for a short joy ride. I was lucky enough to find it a mile from here, on a dirt road. One of the tires had gone flat....

  A report? There seemed to be no point in filing a report. My insurance deductible is quite high, so I’m paying out of pocket for the new tire and some other repairs....

  He could persuade them. Unless ...

  She remembered the satchel in her lap.

  Carefully she opened the satchel and took out her photo album and the manila envelope containing her I.D. documents. Then she probed deeper inside, using the flat of her hand to rummage through the items, touching nothing with her fingertips for fear of leaving prints.

  It felt good to look. Cray had violated her privacy by examining her luggage. Now she would return the favor.

  She saw a small pocket flashlight with a red filter. A jewel box with a transparent plastic lid, holding what looked like locksmith tools. An unlabeled vial of clear liquid, probably chloroform. A package of what must be smelling salts. Duct tape. A suction cup. A glass cutter.

  The satchel was Cray’s tool kit.

  And it would incriminate him.

  Burglar’s tools for breaking and entering. Chloroform for carrying out a silent abduction. Duct tape to bind the victim.