The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  Jane ran up the next driveway toward the back of the house. She could hear heavy feet pounding the sidewalk along Brian Vaughn’s street, then moving more cautiously up the driveway behind her. She could see this house had a six-foot board fence like the one behind Vaughn’s. She had no time to look for a gate. She ran hard, took two long steps, sprang upward to grasp the top of the fence, and used her momentum to roll over it. She came down hard in the middle of another flower bed. She fought the urge to rise to her feet instantly. Instead she crawled ten feet on her belly along the bottom of the fence.

  When the men fired through the board fence, they pierced it several times at the place where they had seen her go over it. She stood and dashed straight for the space between this house and the next. She couldn’t run for her car. They were so close behind her that she could not hope to get it unlocked, climb in, and start it before they shot her. Instead she cut across the front lawn of the house, across the sidewalk and the street, then along the opposite row of houses to put the bodies of parked cars between her and her pursuers.

  Jane ran for the corner of the fifth house, where she remembered there was an alley that separated the residential stretch of street from the beginning of a small business district. The alley was a logical place to park a car, so she had walked the route she was taking now in daylight and in the dark. It had turned out to be wrong: the far end opened on a municipal parking lot. It had been blocked by a row of steel posts set in concrete so only pedestrians could get into the parking lot that way. But she had kept it in mind because it had looked so right. She decided that tonight she would take it at a sprint, going as fast as she could run over the rough, potholed pavement where they would have to tread with caution. If some of them were following her in a car, this would be the place to strip away that advantage.

  Jane glanced over her shoulder at the block of houses behind her, trying to detect moving figures, then turned to enter the mouth of the alley.

  The sight of the man made her gasp. “Hold it!” he called. “F.B.I.”

  Jane veered away from him and dashed up the sidewalk along the first storefront. She had timed everything wrong. The face-changers had arrived hours early, and so had the F.B.I.

  Now she could hear the footsteps of the F.B.I. agent on the pavement behind her. She knew she had to run faster, to make her legs pump harder and stretch for distance at each pace. She had done this to herself. She had intentionally put herself in the way of a group of men who were coldly, pragmatically violent. Next she had intentionally attracted the attention of a government agency whose whole purpose was meeting people like that with overwhelming force. But then she had failed to get out from between them.

  The only way she had to get out of it now was to bet everything on her speed, to keep herself from thinking about how it felt to run blind into the darkness, what would happen if she twisted an ankle or didn’t see an obstacle. She had to throw herself into the space ahead of her and hope that nothing had been left there that wasn’t imprinted on the map she carried in her memory.

  She turned up the next alley, looking for a place to hide. She ran a few paces, then saw the steps. A three-story brick building ahead and to her left had steel rungs built into the side so maintenance people could climb to the roof. She had no time to stop and judge exactly how much of a lead she had on the F.B.I. man, or to figure out the positions or numbers of agents with him. She had to move before she could think, or the lead would be used up. She came to the building at full speed, jumped high so her foot landed on the third rung, and began to scramble up. She knew she had to get out of view before the F.B.I. agent reached the alley entrance, so she raised her face to the night sky and climbed.

  She could hear his feet on the sidewalk beyond the alley now, and they seemed to be hitting much more rapidly than she had expected. She tried to climb faster. Her foot slipped, her body dropped, but her terror had made her hands clutch the rung above her so tightly that when her arms extended, she stopped. She hung for a second, found her footing, and began to climb again. She was more timid now, cold and breathless. Maybe all she would have to do was get above his normal eye level, and he would pass.

  She heard one foot hit hard, then stop. His voice was below her, off to the left. He called up to her, “Stop, or I’ll have to shoot.”

  Jane had been half-expecting the words, as she had heard them in her imagination for years. The sound was not as she had expected. The words were softer, less angry and brutal than they had been in her mind. He wasn’t shouting them out so some witness would testify later that he had killed her legally. The words were for her, to remind her what they both knew he was supposed to do.

  Jane gritted her teeth, gazed up at the sky, and thought, “I did this.” Her legs pumped and her arms stretched above her, following her eyes up into the sky. As she climbed, she listened for the loud noise and relaxed her muscles to receive the pain. She was aware that there had never been the night when the average F.B.I. agent could not drop her in one shot. She had not climbed more than thirty feet of the way up, and he was maybe another thirty feet from the foot of the ladder.

  Why was he hesitating? Was he deciding whether he had meant it? No, he must be aiming. Jane climbed faster, and the shot came. It was so loud that she cringed, trying to protect her ears with her shoulders. Then there was an aftersound that hung in the air as though the report had jarred the molecules and changed them somehow. She scrambled higher.

  That had been the warning shot. The next one was going to shatter her spine. Her right hand reached up for the next rung and slapped down on a flat, abrasive surface. Her hand had touched the roof.

  Her fingers spread to get a firm hold on the level, featureless spot. She forced herself to relinquish the left hand’s grip on the last metal rung to press both palms downward, pull herself up onto her belly, and slither onto the flat, tarry surface.

  She lay there for a moment, panting, as she finally allowed herself to feel the terror. She assured herself she was up, out of sight, and he had not shot her. She heard a metallic ring, and her next breath caught in her throat. It was the sound of his shoe touching the lowest rung of the ladder.

  She raised herself to her feet and spun her body to look around her frantically. She had assumed there would be something up here—a door, a vent, anything she could pry open to slip down into the building. But she was on a flat, open rectangle of black tar. On all sides she could see the roofs of other buildings, at varying distances. She looked back the way she had come. She couldn’t go back down the ladder, because he was on his way up from the alley. On the opposite side was the street. She whirled her head from side to side. The closest building was the next one along the alley.

  Jane walked, less quickly than she wanted to, toward the edge of the black rectangle where she was trapped and looked toward the other roof. It seemed to be about eight or nine feet away. Jane gnashed her teeth, scared, frustrated, and angry at herself. She was more afraid than she had been when she had thought it would be a bullet. She tried to be rational. There were people who could take a running start and jump twenty-seven feet. This was one-third as far. She was uninjured and in good physical condition. She was a terrific runner.

  But as she was marshaling the arguments, trying to convince herself, she knew that the arguments worked only if she could goad herself into running straight for the gap between the roofs at full speed. If she judged the paces wrong and stutter-stepped, or lost her nerve at the edge and hesitated, she would fall to the pavement below.

  Jane cautiously approached the edge of the roof in a crouch, unable to stand up straight for fear she would get dizzy and topple over. She judged the distance again. It wasn’t that far. It was no more than she could have done with ease on the ground.

  Jane heard the sound of the man’s feet on the metal rungs on the side of the building. She could hear his breathing now. He was a little winded, but there was no tremor or shallowness in his breaths. He wasn’t afraid.

 
She turned away from the edge and paced back toward the other end of the roof. One, two, three, four … she had to try. Seven. She could not stand here and get cornered and arrested by the F.B.I. while the face-changers drove off somewhere. Ten, eleven, twelve.

  Jane took three deep breaths. In a moment he would be up here. She leaned into her first step, to force her left foot to come down and catch her weight. The second was slightly easier, and the third was like a reflex, the fourth unconscious. She ran faster, harder now. Dig, dig, dig. Four steps left—here it comes, one more—and leap! She pushed off with her right foot, then took another half step in the air, her arms flailing for balance. As soon as she was airborne, she knew that she had made it easily. She came down five or six feet past the edge, hit gravel, slipped, and tried to break her fall with the palms of her hands.

  She slid on the rough, loose stones. Her hands stung, her thigh was scraped, but she was alive. She felt her lungs expand, taking in too much air, refusing to exhale until she stopped them. She huffed out a breath, then another. She had made it.

  She got to her knees, then hurried to the edge beside the alley to look down and find the ladder. She lay on her belly to peer over at it. There was no ladder. She had made a horrible mistake. The fact that the last one had a ladder didn’t mean this one did. Reluctantly, with growing trepidation, she looked back at the last building. The man was climbing onto the roof.

  All Jane could see was his silhouette, but she could read his thoughts. He looked quickly around the roof, then at the building where Jane lay. He stepped closer, as though to judge the distance between the two buildings. He saw her. He was thinking, “If she can jump it, so can I.” He backed away from the edge, but he didn’t seem to be looking at the chasm between the buildings. He was looking at her.

  Jane stood and turned away from him to look at the building beyond hers. It was the same kind of jump that she had just made. She walked toward it, then changed her mind. She had no time to count the steps. She sensed the place where she should begin, fixed her eyes on the gap between the buildings, and leaned forward. Her left foot came down, and then the right, and she was in a full run. When she reached the place where she had to spring upward, her foot landed on gravel. She dug in and felt for friction. Her trajectory seemed too flat, too low. Behind her, she heard bits of gravel rolling off the edge. As she flew, she thought, “I’m dead,” but then it didn’t seem so certain. She brought her knees to her chest, hit the next roof, and slid forward on her back. After a second, she heard a handful of gravel hit the ground far below.

  Jane was shaken, and this time the impact had scraped the skin on her back. She glanced behind her and saw the F.B.I. man take the leap to the second building. For an instant her mind interpreted the silhouette as having wings, but she realized that it was just his sport coat flaring outward in the wind as he jumped. He was only one building away again.

  Jane turned and walked only close enough to the fourth building to see it clearly, then backed up and ran for it. This time her steps were sure, and she landed on her feet and took a few steps to stop herself. Then she looked at the fifth building.

  This one was different. The little row of businesses was ending, and the next building was just a big house with a sloped roof. She looked back at the F.B.I. agent just as he made his second jump. He was tall and strong, and whatever he was afraid of, this wasn’t it. He landed hard and trotted forward a dozen feet to stop his momentum, but he was already looking ahead.

  Jane felt despair. A terrible moment was coming. She could see it clearly, and there was no way that she could think of to avoid it. The big F.B.I. agent was alone. She didn’t know why he was alone, and there was no time to wonder. He just was. She could see from the way he carried himself—standing upright and then running ahead to leap each gap between buildings—that he was positive that the woman he was chasing was unarmed. The thought made her reach to the pocket of her jacket and touch the pistol she had taken from Brian Vaughn.

  She stared at the agent’s shape in the darkness. He was what she had told Dahlman to worry about. He was not some evil, greedy psychotic who wanted to turn people into money. He was one of the good guys—the best of the good guys, because he spent all of his time protecting the weak from the strong. She had challenged him to come after her, and he had to do it, but he didn’t have to do it this way. He could have shot her while she was climbing up here, but he had decided that it was better to risk his life jumping from rooftop to rooftop above the sleeping city, where the street lamps were far below and threw no light.

  She watched him moving forward to look at the next stretch of empty space he would have to cross. He would be so easy. She could sit down on this flat surface where she now stood. She could take Vaughn’s Walther P99 in both hands, steady them on her right knee. If she squeezed off the first round just as he went up, she could probably put two or three more into his chest before his limp body slammed into the side of the building.

  Jane took a deep breath and held it for a second, then pushed the air out of her lungs and turned away from him. He was going to be on this roof with her soon. If she let that happen, it was over. She stared at the next building. There was no choice as to how she must do it. The peak of the roof was higher than this flat one, and jumping up there was physically impossible. She would have to leap for the place where the slope matched her level, and hope that after she hit, she would be able to stop herself before she slid the rest of the way down and dropped off at the eaves.

  Jane leaned into her first step and ran hard. She threw herself into the air, then landed with her left leg bent, so both feet and then her left hand hit the shingles. As soon as she felt the impact, she turned a little so her momentum would make her flop onto her belly.

  Jane completed the turn, and stopped. She felt herself begin to slip. She clawed at the shingles with her fingertips, but her face was four inches from the roof and she could see it moving upward past her eyes. She felt the rough, grainy texture moving under her fingertips and nails, then felt her fingers slip down to the next shingle. She grasped at one with her right hand, jammed her thumb under it and pinched it, then did the same with her left. Her arms extended, trying to slow her down as her sweatshirt rolled upward under her belly and she felt the scratchy shingles on her bare skin. Then she stopped. The buckle of her belt had caught on the shingles. She lay there, straining to hold herself and afraid to move.

  She heard the man’s running footsteps, then heard the heavy impact as he landed on the roof of the building she had just left, then four more steps as he stopped himself.

  Jane spread her legs apart and felt for a footing on the shingles, keeping her knees and the insides of her toes touching the roof. When she sensed resistance, she pushed herself upward a little with her feet and reached for the next shingle, then the next. A few inches at a time, she pulled herself up the roof toward the peak like a mountain climber.

  The F.B.I. man was at the edge of the next roof now, looking at her. He called, “This looks like a good place to quit.”

  She pushed his voice out of her mind and reached up to pinch the next shingle between her thumb and forefinger, feeling the strain all the way to her wrist. She used her feet to push her body up to it.

  He tried again. “Whatever happened back there, the penalty for it isn’t as bad as the penalty for falling.” His shoes made crunching sounds on the other roof three times, as though he were sidestepping to get a better look at her. “I can get the fire department to bring you down with a ladder.”

  She longed for it. They would drive a truck up and extend the ladder. Some big, strong guy would climb it to the peak and anchor a rope up there, then lower a harness that would fit under her arms like a mother’s hug, then slowly ease her to the ladder. She looked up, and she could see that she was making progress. Her thumbs and fingers were numb, but the peak looked closer. She put her face close to the shingles and kept climbing.

  Then she reached up, and felt the slightly roun
ded shingles running along the spine of the roof. She put both hands over the apex and pulled, and she could look down the other side to the street in front of the building. She swung one knee over the peak and began to crawl unsteadily away from the F.B.I. man toward the far end of the roof. When she reached the chimney she leaned her back against it, then slid her shoulder blades up it to rise to her feet shakily and look for a way down.

  The loud, harsh sound of the shots made her squat down quickly. Why now? Why kill her now? But the shots had not been that close. They were coming from somewhere below. The face-changers had not run back to their car and driven out of town. They were here.

  Then she heard a different set of shots—one, two, three, four in rapid succession. That had to be the F.B.I. man returning fire. There was an irregular volley of shots from below, then silence. They weren’t shooting at her. They were shooting at him.

  The pause lasted a long time. Maybe after all of that noise they had decided they had to leave. She slowly raised her body against the chimney, then craned her neck to search for the F.B.I. agent. She picked out a shape that must be his on the next roof, crouched and looking away from her along the row of rooftops they both had crossed.

  She kept her eyes turned in that direction. She knew she should be spending this time searching for a way down, but she couldn’t. She saw movement. The F.B.I. agent fired twice, then ducked down. Muzzle flashes erupted far down the line. Jane pulled out Vaughn’s pistol and waited. She thought she saw the shadow of a man appear on the farthest roof and tried to aim, but lost it in the shape of another building. Then another bobbed up from the ladder. She tried to lead them as they crouched and ran, but it was too late. They flopped down on their bellies so she couldn’t see them.