The Face-Changers (54 page)

She decided that she would need to keep up with where he was, too. She had to make him talk. “What, Quinn?”

“It occurred to me that we have a problem.”

“Do we?”

“If I moved away from this wall – say, toward the door –

you would shoot me through the window, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s possible,” she admitted. “I don’t like you.”

“But you’re behind the tree. If you move away from it, I’m going to be able to pop up and shoot you before you could get to the next one.”

“Assuming you have another gun where you can reach it.” She ventured a glance around the tree at the window. He was letting her see the end of the barrel over the windowsill. She aimed the pistol at it and waited. Just a tiny bit of his hand would be enough. The barrel disappeared.

“Janie? You here to see Sid?”

“I just saw Sid,” she answered.

“Oh,” said Quinn. “Hey, do you smell fat burning? Sid must be in hell already.” He laughed. “Courtesy of you.”

“How did I manage that?” she asked.

“Sid died for your sins. I couldn’t let you tell him that all this time the one sending him runners was me.”

“You mean he didn’t know? He really thought you were dead?” Of course, she thought. She had not caught Sid lying, because Sid had not been lying. He had been fooled, too.

Quinn laughed. “How else was I going to leave Sid and take a lot of Sid’s money with me?”

“What about the lovely and talented Christie?”

“She’s really dead. Nothing to do with me. Got killed in New York, I heard.”

Jane was silent for a long time. Had his voice come from a different spot? She listened for fainter sounds that might be movement.

Quinn broke her concentration. “You know, there’s one good way to get out of this, Janie.” He was still under the window.

“Maybe more than one.”

“I said one
good
way. I can do everything Sid ever did, and you seem to be back in the trade. We could get pretty rich if we’d help each other.”

“Great offer, Quinn. But your last partner seems reluctant to give you a reference.”

“You know what really killed him?”

“Besides you?”

“He didn’t get out enough,” said Quinn. “He lost touch. He knew zero. He sat here all alone, waiting for everybody to come to him, and without me – ”

“All alone?” said Jane. Was it possible he didn’t know?

“Yeah, all alone,” Quinn repeated. “He sat here on his fat ass. He didn’t even change the locks after I got killed. So ten minutes ago, I walked right in and – ” Jane said, “Quinn, listen to me. Get out of that house. Get out now.”

Quinn laughed again. “I head for the door, you pop me through the window? Sure.”

“No, you don’t understand. Sid wasn’t alone. He must have sent them out on some errand. I swear I won’t go near the window. Just get out now. They’ll kill us both.” She took three steps from the tree.

The barrel of Quinn’s gun appeared above the windowsill, and Jane dived back toward the tree. She heard the gun spit four or five times, and a stone near the base of the tree jumped upward into the weeds.

She lay behind the tree listening. She had not heard a car pull up on the street, but now she heard doors slamming and running feet. She was not sure whether Quinn’s sudden silence meant he was listening too or he was just moving to another window to get a better shot at her. Then she heard the roar of the Ingram MAC 10 tearing his body to pieces.

Jane lay still as a young girl appeared at the window. Jane could tell this was the one she had seen hiding at the top of the stairs on the night she had come here with Dahlman. The girl pressed her thin, feral face against the metal bars and her sharp eyes stared out into the dark.

Then Jane heard the voice of the boy she had seen that night. “What – you think somebody went out through the bars?”

The girl bristled. “Maybe I need some air. Do you mind?”

“He’s dead, and the other old guy is dead. You want to be dead too?”

The girl sighed in heavy annoyance. “Go pack the car. I’ll look around for money.”

Jane heard the boy’s shoes on the floor, hurrying out of the room into the foyer. The girl stayed where she was for a moment, then moved toward the door after him. She looked down at the body. “Bye, Sid.” Her voice sounded like the voice of a little child. Then Jane heard her move out into the foyer after the boy.

Jane stood, wiped the gun off, and left it on the ground. She whispered, “Bye, Sid,” picked up the cellular telephone she had brought, and moved off into the darkness toward her car.

As she drove, she made three telephone calls. The first was to an apartment in Cleveland, the second to a retirement home in Carlsbad, and the third was to the Minneapolis Police Department.

As soon as she had made the last call, she stopped the car at a parking lot beside a picnic area overlooking the Mississippi.

There was only one street lamp near the entrance to the lot.

She drove to the far end of the pavement and turned off her lights. She left the car running, got out, walked across the lawn to me edge, and hurled the telephone into the slow, dark water.

Jane turned and walked back to the car. She sat down in the seat, pulled the safety belt across her chest, and fastened it.

She put the car into gear and began to make a wide turn toward the entrance.

“Jay-nee…” It was a soft, female voice, like a song just above a whisper. It made the hair on the back of Jane’s neck stand.

Jane’s foot hit the brake and the car jerked to a stop. She whirled in her seat to look behind her, and what she saw made her breath catch in her throat.

The woman’s face was illuminated in the glow of the single street lamp. It looked supernaturally pale under the long, black hair, but the red lips were set in the same amused, knowing smile that Jane remembered. “Jay-nee,” came the voice again.

Then came the horrible, mocking laugh. Jane could see the big, square-looking .45 pistol held just above the woman’s lap with the muzzle aimed at the center of Jane’s backrest. They both knew the car seat wouldn’t stop the bullet.

The voice rose to a normal volume. “Say something.” Jane said, “Everybody around here seems to come back from the dead. First Quinn, now you.”

The woman looked irritated. “Not exactly. I’m not Christie anymore. Quinn and I figured you must be dead, so I died too, only the death I came back from was yours.” Jane said, “You’re supposed to be me? That’s why you grew your hair long and dyed it. You’re Jane?” Christie shrugged. “I was the only one who had the qualifications. I got rich at it. Did you?” She seemed to enjoy the thought for a moment, then said, “You surprised me tonight, though.”

“By staying alive.”

Christie nodded. “I knew you were coming. I sent Quinn in to do Sid, so you could be Little Red Riding Hood, and Quinn could be the wolf. I spent the evening driving around, waiting for a rental car like this to appear in the neighborhood.”

“Why?”

“If the one who came out of the house was Quinn, great. If Sid came out, still okay: I could make him believe anything –

that I was Quinn’s prisoner or something. But if the one who came back was you---What could I do?”

“Christie,” said Jane. “You don’t have to – ”

“I’m not,” Christie interrupted. “I’m sick of the whole business. Without Quinn or Sid, it’s too much trouble. I wanted to let you know. Drive back to the dark part of the lot and park.

When you get there, I’ll get out and you drive off. I’ll be watching until you’re out of sight, so don’t do anything strange. Don’t even look back.”

Jane turned the car and drove in the direction of the river.

Christie was lying. There was no reason in the world for Christie to do anything now except pull the trigger. Jane pressed her foot down on the gas pedal a little harder. The car was moving faster now, slowly gaining speed. She had not turned the headlights on when Christie had appeared, and she didn’t turn them on now, in the hope that Christie would not notice just how fast the car was moving.

The voice came again. “Slow down.” Jane said nothing. Christie was more alert than she had expected. There was no hope of hiding the speed now, so Jane accelerated rapidly. The faster she was going, the fewer options Christie would have. It was already too late to shoot and jump.

“Stop the car or I’ll blow your head off.” The car left the pavement and bumped onto the uneven surface of the lawn without losing speed. Jane watched the rear-view mirror and saw the arm come up carrying the gun, then swing hard at her head.

Jane ducked to avoid the impact, but the gun caught the back of her head in a glancing blow that knocked her forward and made her see a red afterimage. Then she realized that the car
t
had already reached the end of the grass. It shot outward, and it felt for a moment as though they were suspended in the air, and then the car began to fall. Jane’s seat belt seemed to tighten and drag her down out of the sky.

For a second she was aware that Christie was rising behind her in the back seat, both hands pressed against the ceiling to keep it away from her. Jane straightened her spine and sat up in her seat, looked out the windshield, and tried to see the surface of the river below. It was all darkness. She waited a second, then another, and then came the shock.

The car seemed to stab downward into the water at an angle. There was a bang as the airbag exploded out of the hub of the steering column and flattened Jane against her seat and, at the same time, a heavy thump as Christie was thrown forward behind her. Almost immediately, Jane heard a rushing noise in the dark, like a waterfall, and then the sensation of cold water on her feet.

It took Jane a second or two to determine that she could move. She fought the airbag to free her right arm, unbuckled her belt, and slipped sideways to the passenger side. She fell against the dashboard. The car was sinking front-first, the heavy engine weighing it down.

The water began to rush in faster. Her legs were in water up to the hip. Then she could hear more water, and she could feel that it was coming in through the weakened seal around the windshield. Jane listened, but she couldn’t hear Christie, so she tried to stare between the front seats toward the floor of the back seat.

At that moment, Christie moved. She pushed off against the back of the driver’s seat and brought the pistol around.

There was a deafening report, and the airbag beside Jane deflated. Then Christie climbed higher onto the back seat, and Jane ducked lower.

Jane let the torrent of water coming through the open side window pour over her. She held herself against it with all the strength in her legs, and groped for the door handle. When she found it, she grasped it and stayed down. The water was up to her chest now, then her neck, and she held only her face above it. She knew that no human being could open a car door against the rush of water. She would have to hold on to the door handle and wait until the door was completely submerged.

The seconds went by, while Jane listened for another shot.

Then she could hear nothing, because the water was up over her ears. She lifted her face above it to take a breath of air, pushed down on the door handle, put her shoulder against the door, and used her legs to press against it. The door opened.

Jane slipped out and swam. She counted her strokes: one, two, three; her head broke out of the dark water, and she gasped in a breath.

Jane swam on the surface to the little margin of pebbles and mud on shore, pulled herself onto it, then looked back.

The front of the car was completely underwater now. The only parts visible were the rear window, the trunk, and a bit of the roof, but it was sinking. Suddenly there was a shot, and a hole appeared in the rear window.

“No!” Jane shouted. “Get out the way I did! Swim down to the door!”

But there was no way Christie could hear her. There was a series of five muffled shots, and Jane saw bits of glass sparkling in the muzzle flashes as they exploded upward out of the rear window. Christie had created a ragged row of punctures, but she had not created an exit for herself. The car sank more rapidly, and the water reached the rear window.

Christie’s shoe kicked against it once, making it balloon outward an inch or two; then the leg was pulled back to kick again when the rear window collapsed inward and Christie disappeared. The water poured in, and me car sank from sight.

Jane jumped to her feet and ran a few yards downstream, where the lazy current had carried the car, then sloshed back into the water until it was up to her thighs, and ducked into it.

She dived downward, trying to reach the car. But the water was black, and she could not find it. She tried over and over, but her hands touched nothing except soft mud and stringy weeds. There was nothing that felt like metal. After what could have been ten minutes or a half hour, Jane crawled back onto the shore and lay there, panting.

Before she had fully regained her breath, she forced herself to stand. She took one last look at the slow, untroubled surface of the river. Then she turned away and began to walk.

Early one morning in late August, a young woman with long black hair parked her rented car in a small lot around the bend from the Glen Iris Inn at Letchworth State Park in Livingston County, New York, and walked along the park road to one of the narrow paths leading down into the gorge of the Genesee River. She descended the steep steps cut into the cliff in a zigzag that sometimes took her within a foot or two of the top leaves of a tall tree, then came back again beside the trunk and then passed once more near the place where the roots had dug in among the rocks. The land had been made a park in the 1860s, so the woods were thick and old. She emerged from the shadows of the trees, walked the last hundred feet on flat weedy ground, then stepped out on a smooth stone ledge above the water.

She looked around her and listened. The river was shallow here, and it made a whispery sound as it rushed over the rounded pebbles and flat shelves. She could hear the birds above the wooded path she had just left, but there was no sound of a human being yet. In an hour or two, hikers and picnickers would be crowding the trails, making the last, sweet week before Labor Day loud with their usual desperate enthusiasm. But now it was just a Seneca woman standing alone by the Genesee River, and this could have been any morning since the last Ice Age.