by Thomas Perry
“What’s going on?” Christine asked.
Jane said, “I had hoped to avoid doing anything as risky as this, but nothing that wasn’t risky has worked. When that man pretending to be a policeman came to you, he gave you a phone number that you were supposed to call and ask for Jane. Dial it.”
Christine frowned and looked at her, but she could see that she wasn’t supposed to say anything. She dialed the number and handed the telephone to Jane.
Jane listened for a moment, then broke the connection. “Try again.”
Christine dialed the number again; Jane listened, then hung up. “They must have found the body.”
Christine picked up the receiver, dialed the same number, and listened to the voice. “The number you have reached is out of service. If you feel you have reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again.” Christine set the receiver down.
Jane took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I was hoping they needed to keep that number open, because they had other runners out who might need to get in touch. But they’re too smart. They must have used it for initial contact only. Maybe they used it just for you.”
“What were you going to do?”
Jane sighed. “Tell them I had embezzled some money and needed to disappear.”
Christine realized that her mouth was open. “You wanted to be their client? But they saw you.”
“Two of them did. One is dead.”
“Still …” said Christine.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jane said. “It isn’t going to happen.” She walked into the bedroom, tossed the bag of money on the bed, and looked at the shopping bags doubtfully. “Those might fit you.”
“I can’t believe you were going to do that.” She realized that she sounded foolish. “What are you going to do now?”
Jane shrugged. “Go back to Minneapolis. If I can find more of their runners, it’s possible I’ll learn who they are, where they are …”
Christine looked at her for a moment. She couldn’t keep it a secret, but she wasn’t sure how to admit she hadn’t told Jane everything. “Other runners? Like me?”
“Yes,” said Jane.
“Then I guess I have something to tell you. It didn’t seem like it was important, and I kind of forgot—”
“Tell me.”
“I was in Baltimore when the policeman told me to call the number. The woman on the phone said to wait on a particular corner. A car drove up and a man took me to an apartment, and explained what I had to do: get plastic surgery, collect money, and get ready to go. Then they flew me to Chicago, put me in another apartment, and had me wait some more. I lived there for a long time—a couple of months—and they would come about once a week with groceries and things. They said they were getting ready to move me someplace where I could live permanently. I kept asking, ‘Where am I going to live?’ and they’d say, ‘We’re looking for the perfect place,’ or, ‘We’re getting it ready.’ Each time they had some agenda. Once they took my picture for IDs. Sometimes they told me things about how to stay hidden, brought me new clothes … things like that. There was a closet in the apartment that was locked. One day they opened it up, and it was filled with boxes.”
“What kind of boxes?”
“About the size that copy paper comes in. About a foot wide and two feet long. They were all wrapped in brown paper and sealed with packing tape. One of the men put stickers on them and they carried them away.”
“Stickers?”
“Mailing labels.” She looked a little uncertain. “I wasn’t supposed to go near the closet. One man would carry a couple of boxes down to the car, and when he came back, the other would carry a couple. After a while, they got careless, and they were both outside at once, so I looked: 80183 Padre Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101.”
“Why do you remember the address after all this time?”
Christine made a face. “I had this stupid idea that it was like the underground railroad or something. Somebody had been in this apartment first, then got moved to the next place. That meant that the address in California was where I would go next. So I thought about it a lot. One day one of the men asked if there was any reason I couldn’t live in California, so that made me sure. I didn’t find out that I was wrong until I saw the address on the driver’s license Sid Freeman gave me that night. Ten minutes later you were there.”
“And you forgot?”
“Not exactly,” said Christine. “I figured it was the place where you would take me.” She frowned. “I’m wrong a lot.”
Jane was pacing, looking at the wall, then turning and walking toward the opposite wall. The intensity of her eyes frightened Christine. “Is there anything else that you saw or heard that I don’t know?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“What about the name? Was there a name on the labels?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “It was C. Langer. I wasn’t going to snoop, but I glanced at the pile of boxes and that was what I saw first. It looked like the name was ‘Clanger.’ It seemed like a joke, at first.”
Jane spoke quietly, as though to herself. “It is a joke.”
Jane was quiet again for a full day. When Christine awoke the next morning, Jane was in the living room as usual, but she was not finishing her exercises. She had used the time to make a transformation.
She had braided her hair and rolled it into a bun behind her head. She was wearing a pair of photosensitive glasses with big lenses that made it difficult in the bright morning light to tell what color her eyes were. She had replaced her usual jeans and sneakers with a light gray skirt and jacket. It wasn’t as though she was a different person, Christine decided. It was as though she was a different type of person.
Christine had gotten used to thinking of her as a sort of athlete—someone who wasn’t exactly deprived, but who denied herself, subjected herself to some kind of harsh, unforgiving discipline. The physical changes were minor, when Christine analyzed them, but the attitude of the woman before her was different. The word that came to Christine’s mind was “spoiled.” Jane looked like the kind of woman who spent a week out of every month in some spa having massages and wraps and special diets. She looked like the pampered and ignored wife of some fancy doctor.
“I guess this means you’re leaving again.”
“Yes,” said Jane. “I have a few things to tell you before I go, because this time I may not make it back.”
Christine found herself backing away. She wished she had never told Jane about Santa Barbara. When she felt the chair against her calves, she realized what she had been doing, and sat down.
Jane said, “You know that you’ve been used by the people you paid to help you. What you don’t seem to know is this: there never were any death threats. It’s just a way of drumming up business—selecting the ideal runner. There was no risk for them, because nobody was after you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I was using you to get to them. I told you that much. You deserve an apology, but you won’t get it from me. If I had it to do over, I’d do it again. Now I want you to spend some time thinking about what you’re going to do.”
Christine heard the words, and it occurred to her that she had been trying to avoid saying them to herself. She said, “You mean if you don’t come back?”
“If I don’t call you or show up here within a month, then I’m not coming. If you think you can make a decent life beginning then and starting from here, without ever going back, then do it. If you think you can’t, call the number that I left by the phone in the kitchen and ask for Mr. Marshall. Tell him everything that happened.”
“Who is he?”
“An F.B.I. agent. He’ll arrest you.”
“Arrest me? I could go back to Baltimore and get arrested. Why should I call him?”
“He’s working on the case of Richard Dahlman, the other runner I told you about. You can give him answers he can’t get any other way. The details from his c
ase will make what happened to you a lot easier to believe. If you help him, he might be able to help you find the least painful way back to where you started.”
Christine’s eyes welled up. Not tears, Christine thought. I don’t want to cry now. “That’s what you think I should do, isn’t it?”
Jane looked at her, and Christine could see that she was feeling sorry for her. “I don’t know. The decisions I’ve made for you haven’t done you much good. This one’s yours.”
“Please,” she said. “You know, but you’re not telling me.”
Jane touched her arm and spoke quietly. “This isn’t your life. This is just a nasty detour, like a sickness.” She picked up her suitcase and went to the door. “Give us both a month. No more.” She opened the door and slipped out.
32
Jane found her seat in the airplane, sat down, and felt a cold, empty sensation in her chest. She was about to go west again, away from Carey instead of toward him. She had spent most of the summer trying to find people who had done terrible things and left Richard Dahlman to take the blame. But Richard Dahlman was in a pleasant retirement home in Carlsbad, and the one who was surrounded by policemen, watched, and suspected was Carey. It couldn’t go on much longer. Something Jane tried had to work.
She slowly forced herself to stop thinking about Carey and tried to think instead about what she had to do to set him free. But every time she tried to plan what she would do when she arrived in Santa Barbara, she began to lose her resolve. It was impossible to think about Santa Barbara without bringing back a horrible memory.
Harry the gambler had been so hot that she had not wanted to know where his final hiding place would be. She had been afraid that she would be caught and that whatever they did to her would make her reveal it.
She had taken Harry to Lewis Feng’s shop in Vancouver, where she could buy him a whole prefabricated identity, not just a few good papers like the ones she could have bought from Sid Freeman. Lewis Feng had not dealt in new names. Lewis’s specialty had been creating unoccupied spaces in the universe, then holding them until the right customers arrived with the right sums of money. The driver’s license, the credit cards, the Social Security card, the car registration, even the apartment had been obtained in advance and kept current, waiting for the right purchaser. Most of Lewis’s customers had been rich ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia who foresaw that some day they might want the chance to slip into the United States. But Lewis had kept a number of surnames that weren’t necessarily Chinese. So Harry had filled the space of Harry Shaw, and Jane had left him in Vancouver.
Harry had made no mistakes. He might have lasted forever if Jane had not met another runner who had convinced her that he, too, deserved the very best kind of identity, one with an impeccable provenance and enough age. Jane had taken John Felker across the country into Canada and left him at Lewis Feng’s shop. The next time she had seen Lewis Feng she was staring at a picture of him in a newspaper above an article that called him “the victim.” The next time she had seen Harry she had been looking down at him from the rim of an open grave. And the next time she had seen John Felker, he had been busy cycling the bolt of a rifle for his second shot at her.
Lewis Feng had placed Harry in a small apartment on a quiet street on the outskirts of a medium-sized community at the edge of the country. Harry had been killed in Santa Barbara. Jane reminded herself that it was a coincidence. Harry had been put there because it was a place where a lot of middle-aged people could be seen doing nothing. It was a place where Harry would not be able to play the horses in person. If he wanted to organize a game of cards, he couldn’t be stopped, but in Santa Barbara he probably would not find himself sitting across the table from other pros, who would know who he was and what his location would be worth to them.
The face-changers must have picked Santa Barbara for similar reasons. It was still a place where a stranger could appear to be minding his business without having a business that was evident. There were a couple of colleges, lots of tourists, lots of conventions, lots of retirees from someplace else. It was a place where you could give a runner a history and assume it wouldn’t be deeply scrutinized.
Jane got off the plane in Sacramento, then took the whole day driving south down the long highway through central California, and arrived in late afternoon. Santa Barbara still looked pretty and peaceful to her, wedged in the pocket between tall mountains and the ocean.
When she parked on Anacapa Street and walked to State Street, she could see that the pedestrian traffic was thicker and faster and busier than the last time. Visitors were the city’s main industry, and it looked to her as though business was expanding. The parts of lower State Street that used to cater to fishermen and divers and surfers had been replaced by a mall that might have been moved in one piece from Beverly Hills. Jane had stayed alive by reading changing configurations of people, and this change was one that added to her safety. It was not hard for a strange woman to stay invisible on a street crowded with strangers.
Jane waited until night to drive to Padre Street and find the address Christine had given her. It was a small white house with a low porch and a tiny patch of green grass between that and the sidewalk. The front windows were blocked by opaque white horizontal blinds, but she could see tiny slices of light behind them.
Jane drove past the house once each hour. The lights were still on at midnight, but were off when she came by at one. At two she made a list of the cars parked on the street nearby, because they probably belonged to people who lived on the block in houses that, like C. Langer’s, had no garage. One of them was probably C. Langer’s.
At three she parked her car around the corner and walked to the house for a closer look. The night was warm, and the smell of jasmine was overpowering. She left the deserted street and walked quietly beside C. Langer’s house. The windows were the sliding kind with wooden sashes and a latch between the upper pane and the lower. They were all closed and the latches locked, but there were no signs of an alarm system. Jane studied the lock on the kitchen door and the placement of shrubs between the windows and the street, then walked the fences along the sides and back. By the time she returned to her car she was confident that if she needed to, she could get in without making much noise or being visible from the street.
It wasn’t a bad spot to place a runner. It was quiet and private without looking as though anyone had gone to any effort to make it so. It had three good ways out—two that would put C. Langer on another street in ten seconds. That was the way to keep a runner alive: keep her out of sight, and give her an escape route she could use if something went wrong.
Jane stopped herself. She had unconsciously slipped into the assumption that C. Langer was a woman, just because Chris was a woman, maybe because the house looked like a woman’s. But Sid Freeman had told her that most of the clients he’d seen had been men. C. Langer was probably a man. It was also possible that this runner wouldn’t be some stockbroker who had driven drunk, or a banker who had been unable to keep customers’ accounts from merging with his own. There was no guarantee that the face-changers wouldn’t take on a runner who was dangerous. If they were in it for the money, a client was anybody who had the fee.
Jane stayed down the street in her car until it was nearly light. When she saw movement behind the blinds just before six, she pulled away from the curb and drove around the corner. She didn’t want to try for a first look at C. Langer at a moment when she was the only person on the street, and C. Langer could see as well as she could. She drove down to the beach to find a hotel where the dining room opened for breakfast early.
Jane spent two days learning about C. Langer’s car. By a process of elimination she learned it was a red Mazda Miata. It struck Jane as an impossible choice. Sporty little cars attracted attention, even if they weren’t expensive. Convertible tops were easy for a thief to slash open to get the radio, and a runner had to be careful to stay off police blotters. It was possible that C. Lang
er had a second car hidden somewhere and that this was a decoy, the one he or she wanted watchers to get used to seeing.
Jane was curious enough to try to find it. California law required drivers to carry proof of insurance, and C. Langer would be careful not to break any laws. Jane waited until after the street was dark and empty, then cut a slit in the convertible top that was just big enough to let her reach inside and open the door. She found the insurance card under the visor on the driver’s side, wrote down the company and policy number, and went home.
The next day she called the company and gave the woman who answered the policy number. She said she was a loan officer and C. Langer had used the car as collateral on a loan. Was the insurance on it current and valid? Liability, collision, and so on? Payments made on time? Cost of policy? Were there other vehicles on the policy? There was also a new Ford Escort, and the woman gave her the license number.
It took Jane another day to find the Escort. There were few places in Santa Barbara that would do for a runner’s car. It had to be accessible at any hour, it had to be close to where he or she lived, and it had to be unobtrusive. Jane found it in a carport behind an apartment building two blocks away.
It wasn’t until she had been studying the house and the cars for three days that she saw C. Langer come out the front door, walk down the steps, and get into the Miata. C. Langer was a man in his early thirties. He wore a crisply pressed pair of khaki pants, Top-Sider shoes, and a short-sleeved polo shirt. He had the sort of sunglasses that Jane had always favored for her runners, with big photosensitive lenses that kept a bit of tint in dim light and became practically opaque in the sun. He looked lean and walked with more energy than he needed to expend, and his skin showed that he spent quite a bit of time in the sun. Even in the short walk to the car he was watchful. His head was high and his eyes were in motion, scanning the middle distance from left to right as though he had been taught to take in the sights one sector at a time to avoid missing anything. Jane stepped on the accelerator of her car so she would be beyond the corner before he could get around to looking at her.