by Thomas Perry
Jane spent a few minutes watching the car from the hallway before she slipped into it and drove toward the freeway entrance. Now that she was in the city where the face-changers expected the woman to come, she felt the need to take every precaution. She knew the Los Angeles freeway system well, because she had used it other times with other runners. She put traffic jams between her and cars that might be following, and twice used ramps to slip off one freeway and onto another going in a different direction before she emerged near the address.
First she drove a circuit of the neighborhood, looking at other apartment buildings and single-family houses. There were no windows that had opaque shades with the rollers set too low so someone could look out above them, no flashes in the bright sunshine that could be lens reflections, no men loitering on balconies in the middle of a workday. She drove around again, studying the vehicles parked nearby, paying particular attention to vans and four-wheel-drive vehicles parked along the streets. There were none with men sitting behind the wheel, none that pulled out when they saw her approach for the second time.
Jane parked on the street near Janet McNamara’s apartment building, took out her suitcase, and walked into the little lobby that passed through the building and looked out on a small, desolate swimming pool. She avoided the elevator and walked down the hallway and up the stairs, listening for the thuds of feet, the sounds of a television set, for anything that would tell her who lived here and where they were at the moment, but she heard nothing.
When she found apartment 208, she stopped and studied the floor to see if there was any indication of wires under the thin industrial carpet, then cautiously inserted the key in the lock and opened it. A tiny piece of red fluff, like lint from a sweater, was released by the door near the hinge and drifted to the floor in the hallway. Jane smiled. It was an ancient trick for determining whether anyone had been here without going inside to check. If the fluff was there, then there was nobody inside waiting for her.
Jane slipped inside, locked the door, and looked around her. The apartment was small and simple, but the face-changers had furnished it in advance to keep Janet McNamara from making mistakes while she did it herself. Jane went into the bedroom, looked in the kitchen drawers and cupboards, the refrigerator. They had even bought her enough food so she wouldn’t have to go out until she had been here for a week.
Jane searched for the best hiding places. She moved a chair from the kitchen into the living room and stood on it to unscrew the grate from the heating duct high on the wall across from the entrance door. Then she took one of her video cameras out of the suitcase, set the lens to manual and focused on a space near the doorway, used a piece of tape to cover the red light that showed when it was on, pushed it two feet back into the heating duct, and replaced the grate.
On her way out she replaced the bit of red fluff, then went down the stairs to the street. The building next door had an apartment for rent, but when she had roused the manager and gotten him to open it for her, she found that the windows afforded her no view of Janet McNamara’s apartment. She would have to do this the hard way. She watched the neighborhood for two more hours, then drove back to the motel.
When Jane walked in, Janet McNamara was on the bed watching television. She turned it off as though she were hiding something. Jane turned it back on. “No need to turn it off for me.” There were two men in suits chatting about futures and options across an oddly shaped marble table. In a second or two the men were replaced by a table of figures.
Janet McNamara gave a comic wince. “They told me to start weaning myself away from the market stats, so I won’t be tempted to invest.”
Jane sighed. “They’re right about investing. I know very little about you, but if I were looking for you, that’s one of the ways I’d go about looking. I’d buy all the mailing lists of investors I could.”
“I know,” said Janet.
“On the other hand, somebody should have told you that you can’t expect to last very long if you go against all your preferences.”
“I don’t remember hearing that.”
“Watch the channel you like. Please yourself in quiet ways. While your enemies are standing around watching airline terminals and hotels at all hours, you want to be curled up in a cozy place feeling content. You’ll last forever, and they’ll give up.”
“I like that,” said Janet. “Of course, in my case it doesn’t have to be forever.”
Jane glanced at her without letting her see. She still didn’t get it. The face-changers had convinced her that she just had to slip away for a while to outlast some imaginary death threats, and had gotten her to do things that would make it too hard to ever go back. “Maybe not,” she murmured, and hated herself for it. She hated herself more for what she was about to say. “The apartment is fine. In the morning I’ll check once more, and then move you into your new home.”
27
Jane entered the building alone. She made her way to Janet McNamara’s hallway and up to her door, then opened it and watched the piece of red fluff fall to the floor. This time she let it stay there. She used the kitchen chair to climb to the vent in the living room, then removed the grate, retrieved the video camera from behind it, and played the tape back on fast forward, staring into the eyepiece. The tape was a still, unchanging shot of the closed door. She slipped the camera into her bag and went out to get the woman who was not Janet McNamara.
Jane brought her inside and closed the door. While Janet walked around the little apartment looking dazed, Jane told her, “I’m positive nobody has been here since I came in yesterday, and nobody seems to be watching from a building or a car around here. That’s the best I can do.”
“It’s … cozy, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“It’s kind of small and tacky. The apartment.”
Jane brought herself back to the business of resettling. She had seen this before in runners of her own who were used to having money. It was probably made worse for Janet McNamara because she had spent her life in old eastern cities with big, heavily ornamented buildings. Los Angeles was alien to her. Jane stepped back into her role. “It’s small and cheap because it gives you a low profile. These apartment buildings are full of young women from somewhere else who work as receptionists or secretaries or shop clerks. They don’t make a lot of money, and they spend most of it on clothes and car payments and going out. What you want to do is make yourself look so much like them that a stranger would need a microscope to pick you out of the crowd.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Janet. Her voice was not enthusiastic. “Am I on my own now?”
Jane had not yet decided how to bring up the next issue, and this seemed like an opportunity. “Not yet. There will be a person who comes to be sure you’re settled. He probably won’t know why you didn’t take the plane. Don’t tell him.”
Janet’s head spun to look at her. “Why not?”
Jane had hoped this woman would be exhausted and preoccupied enough to lose her curiosity, but she had not. Jane waved a hand in a vague gesture. “Another standard procedure that protects everybody. We try to compartmentalize everything. But there’s always one of us who wants to know what everyone else is doing. It’s pretty hard to pry information out of a person who keeps secrets for a living, so people ask the client.”
Janet’s expression seemed to move through suspicion into certainty. She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you’ve been doing to me, isn’t it? You’ve been asking me all these questions, and the reason you didn’t know the answers already was that you weren’t supposed to.”
Jane smiled sheepishly. “Caught me.” She let her face reflect the uneasiness she was feeling. “But I wasn’t doing it out of idle curiosity. There are a couple of guys in this scheme that I’m not sure about. They seem unprofessional.”
“What do you mean, ‘unprofessional’?”
Jane shrugged. “Arrogant, overconfident. Maybe a little too casual about the rules. That’s the k
ind of person who gets caught. They may be fine. But if I’m right, I don’t want them to know too much about how the rest of us do things. So if somebody asks, tell them you saw a man staring at you at the airport, so you slipped out and took a bus.”
Janet looked a little worried. “I’ll try.”
“Succeed,” said Jane. “It’s important. If one of them finds himself in a jail cell some day, one of the things he’ll think about is what he has to trade. If it’s you, then you’re in deep water. If it’s all of us, then you’re in deep water with no lifeline.”
Jane took a last look out the window of the bedroom, then said, “Good luck.”
Janet gave a brave little smile. “Thanks. I don’t know if there was anything to worry about, but thanks for being on my side. It made me feel a little better about everything.”
“Good,” said Jane, and slipped out quickly so she wouldn’t have to look into those trusting eyes. She made her way down the stairs, then out the door and around the building, reassuring herself that there was no sign that the face-changers had arrived early.
She knew it wouldn’t be long. They had dropped a runner at an airport with a plane ticket four days ago, and she had never shown up at the end of the line. She knew they must have spent the first three days the way she would have: examining everything they had done to find a mistake, then trying to discover whether the runner had been picked up by the authorities for some mistake of her own.
Jane walked down the street to the spot where her car was parked, got in, parked again on the street behind the building, and began the long wait. For the first two hours she walked. The days on the road had made her muscles feel slack and her joints stiff. She was used to exercise and motion, and the walking helped her get over the feeling of confinement. When the face-changers came, they would case Janet’s building as she had, and look for the same signs she had: heads in parked cars, windows in nearby buildings that looked as though they were being used for surveillance. A lone woman walking down the street looking as though she belonged here would be of no interest to them.
After she had walked enough, she spent some time driving. She bought gas, ate a quick dinner at a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away, then changed her clothes to avoid becoming familiar to the people who lived in the neighborhood.
Jane wondered whether she was making a mistake. She could have told Janet the truth, then taken her away and resettled her. She could have done it on the first night in Minneapolis. No, she reminded herself. At that moment it would not have worked. The woman believed the face-changers had saved her from people who were going to kill her. Jane was just some woman who had appeared from nowhere. But maybe now, after spending four days with Jane, the woman would believe what she said. No, Jane had gotten her to believe, and then spent the whole trip lying to her.
Jane knew it didn’t matter whether she could have done something else. She hadn’t. She had done this. She had put the woman right where the face-changers hoped she would be. Now Jane would wait for the contact person to show up, and follow him. Nobody would know that she had ever seen Janet McNamara. Jane would learn about the face-changers without sacrificing Janet. That was important. Having Dahlman tell the authorities his story was a pointless exercise. Having a second client of the face-changers describe the disappearing process and identify some of the people who had arranged it would be another matter. As long as Jane left the woman where the face-changers had put her, she would be safe, and Jane could come for her whenever she was ready.
At ten, the lights in Janet McNamara’s apartment went off. At eleven, Jane drove by the building again, and the lights were on. As Jane moved her car to the end of the block, she studied the cars parked nearby. The face-changers always seemed to work in two-man teams, so she was looking for a car with one man in it who might be waiting for a partner who had gone inside. She walked past the building and glanced into the lobby, but there was no one loitering there. But when Janet had met the bogus policeman, he had been alone. The man who had taken her to the Minneapolis airport had been alone. Maybe they only used pairs to kill someone.
She studied the building. The lights were still on in Janet McNamara’s apartment. There were other lights on in the building, but only in the stairways and halls. Eleven o’clock wasn’t that late.
Jane cautiously stepped around the building to the driveway and peered at the back of the building. The building’s parking lot was built to hold ten cars, but there was only one car in it. Eleven o’clock wasn’t that late, but it wasn’t that early, either. At eleven o’clock there should be cars. Her mind raced. She knew why there had been no sounds when she had come here during the day. She had assumed that everyone must be at work, but she had been wrong. There was no “everyone.” It was just Janet McNamara, and she had a visitor.
As Jane moved to the back of the building, the logic of it seemed simple and inevitable. The face-changers were in the business of hiding people, and they were doing it on a large scale and planning to stay in business, maybe even expand. They would need places for lots of people. Why not buy an apartment building or two in big cities? A runner had to be in constant fear that he might do something that would arouse the curiosity of his neighbors. But a fugitive had little to fear from his neighbors if his neighbors were fugitives too.
Jane tried to fight off the decision that she was about to make. The most important thing for her to do was to stay out of sight until the visitor was in his car, and then follow him. But when Jane had conceived the idea, she had thought that this apartment building was full of people. The fact that it wasn’t might not change anything. But it might mean that the man in Janet McNamara’s apartment could kill her and there would be nobody to hear it. The risk had suddenly become unacceptable.
She hurried up the stairs, then slipped into the hallway and stole along the corridor until she came to the door beside Janet McNamara’s. She tried the doorknob, but it was locked. She put her ear to Janet’s door. She could hear nothing but a pair of muffled voices in conversation. She stepped back to the other door and took out her pocketknife. She carved out a little of the wood beside the knob until she could fit the blade beside the jamb. She inserted it to nudge the bolt to the side, then pushed the door open.
Jane closed the door and moved across the room, then quietly opened the window closest to Janet’s apartment. She could hear the voices more clearly now. The tone still seemed even and monotonous, but she looked around her. If the tone changed, she would need something she could use as a weapon.
The apartment was furnished exactly like the one beside it. She looked in the kitchen for knives, but found there were none. That was more than an oversight. It could hardly be anything but a precaution to keep the runner who would live here from committing suicide. No, she decided. It was to protect themselves from a runner. If all a runner wanted was to kill himself, then anything would do—an open window, an electric socket.
Jane turned on her heel and stepped to the pole lamp by the couch, unplugged it, and began to dismantle it. She removed the shade, unscrewed the bulb and socket from the pole, and disconnected the insulated wires from the switch. She pulled the cord all the way out of the long wooden pole, unscrewed the heavy metal base of the lamp, and removed it. She looked around the apartment. There were no extension cords. She ran to the closet and found a vacuum cleaner. She pulled the cord out all the way, then cut it and brought it across the room. It was at least twenty feet long. She listened at the window for a moment. There was tension in the voices now, but she still couldn’t make out any words.
She knelt on the floor and worked faster. She ran the vacuum cleaner cord all the way up the hollow wooden pole of the lamp. She reconnected the ten-inch loop frame that went around the bulb to hold the shade in place. She pulled the two sides apart so they were two prongs, then connected the two bare wires at the end of the cord to them.
As Jane worked, she was acutely aware of the sounds of the two voices in the next room. They were louder,
more rapid. The woman’s voice had a cry in it now. She was scared, maybe hurt. Jane ran into the hall, then plugged the cord into the wall outlet beside her. She put her ear to Janet McNamara’s door and heard her say, much louder, “Don’t. You don’t need a gun.”
Jane rapped on the door, ducked back, and waited. The footsteps were heavy: the man. She held the pole in both hands. The door handle turned, the door opened an inch, then stopped.
Jane said, “I was going by outside and heard someone yell. Is everything okay?”
Her tentative, apologetic female voice made the man sure it wasn’t the police or armed men who had heard, so there was no tension in his voice. “Oh, sure. We’re fine. Just a little family discuss—”
Jane hurled her shoulder against the door. She felt no resistance as the door swung freely six inches inward, then hit something solid. Then it swung inward again and she fell into the room. The man was staggering backward, his hands cupped together covering his nose and mouth.
As Jane regained her balance, the man’s eyes opened and he reached under his coat, groping for what could only be a weapon. Jane shouted, “No guns!” and jabbed the prongs of her pole lamp against his elbow. A line of blue lightning flashed between the prongs.
The jolt stung the man into a reflex like a spasm. His left hand chopped down from his bleeding nose and lip, his right hand shot out of his coat, and both lunged for the pole. Jane yanked it backward, but he was too quick.
His hands missed the wooden pole, but the metal prongs wouldn’t come away from him. His body jumped, froze, then gave a convulsive jerk, and the lights in the hall went out. The man collapsed to the floor.
Jane poked at him with the pole, and heard the woman scream, “Stop it!”
Jane kept her eyes on him as she said quietly, “The electricity’s off. The circuit breaker popped.” She opened his coat with the pole, quickly crouched to snatch the pistol out of the shoulder holster, then retreated two paces and aimed it at his chest. She waited a few seconds, then cautiously knelt and put her hand on his chest. She moved the hand up to his carotid artery, then took it away.