The Face-Changers (18 page)

“You think I should turn myself in and take my chances at trial, don’t you?”

Jane shrugged, and slowly blew out a breath. “It’s a hard question. Most of the time, if someone is wrongly accused of a crime, I would say yes. If there’s evidence of your innocence that I haven’t heard, I would still say yes. Is there?”

“Not evidence in the sense you mean. A lifetime of decent behavior doesn’t seem to qualify.” He was silent for a moment. “How do you think I would do at a trial? Be honest.” She squinted ahead at the road. “You’ve already been arrested. They got you a lawyer, everyone listened to your story two or three times, and they sent you to have your head examined. This is not a verdict, of course, but I think it’s pretty consistent with what you could expect next time. Since you’re clearly able to understand what’s said to you, I would also guess that it was done as a necessary formality. You would be declared sufficiently sane to participate in your defense, and would stand about a seventy- to eighty-percent chance of being convicted.”

“How can you put a percentage on it?”

“That’s about how the average defendant does in a murder trial in this country. Your chances are actually a bit worse, but it’s unrealistic to guess how much worse.”

“Why would mine be worse?”

“A lot of reasons. One is that you’ve been made to look very clever and sneaky. You can’t deny you escaped from a mental lockup by drugging someone, or that you slipped out of the hospital in Buffalo. Juries don’t like that kind of defendant, because they assume he’s a liar. Judges don’t like them either, so the close calls would go to the prosecution. The people who framed you have already had weeks to clean up any loose ends, and the police have had more weeks to examine the faked evidence, so I can’t hold out much hope that the frame will fall apart of its own weight.”

“I can’t live with this kind of injustice,” said Dahlman. “I can’t let them get away with what they’ve done.” Jane sighed. “Then maybe the best thing to do isn’t to disappear, and I’m not the person you need right now.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not in the business of ensuring that justice is done.

I’m just one small person, not smart enough to assume I always know what justice is, let alone imagine that I can make things happen that are neat and symmetrical enough to qualify as fair. What I do is take people who are about to be killed and move them to places where nobody wants to kill them. If you want to disappear, you come to me. If you want something else – revenge, keeping your enemies from hurting someone else, peace of mind, justice, I’m not interested.” Dahlman was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, “I’m convinced that justice is a positive, verifiable, obtainable goal.

I need you to keep me out of jail, but I’m not going to give up.

I won’t lie to you about that.”

“Fine. Just don’t imagine that you and I are going after these people ourselves.”

“If that’s necessary, I’ll do it.”

“Really?” said Jane. “Then I guess you’d better do as much weighing and measuring in advance as you can.”

“What do you mean?”

“The authorities aren’t looking for the people who framed you. That leaves only you to do something about it. But if you see any of them again, they’ll be armed and trying to kill you.

Will you let them?”

“Well, no,” he said. “The last time it happened I was under the mistaken impression that you wanted me to help ambush and shoot them. Naturally, I refused. But letting them kill me doesn’t serve justice. I would try not to let them do it.”

“Would you try with a gun?”

“I would certainly be reluctant, but if there were no other way to preserve my life – and what I know – then maybe I would.”

Jane shook her head. “The ‘no other way’ argument doesn’t work in real life. When it happens, you don’t have ten hours to work through each alternative to predict whether it will necessarily result in your death. You don’t have ten heartbeats.

You see them and shoot, or they see you and shoot. It’s not about good and evil; it’s about who gets to feel the eleventh heartbeat.”

He nodded. “I suppose it could happen that way. There could be circumstances – ”

“Yes,” she interrupted. “There could. And while you’re preparing for diem, you’d better start working on the most likely of the circumstances.”

“What’s that?”

“There are – how many? – maybe five evil men searching for you. They’re not using magic. They’re probably watching TV to find out where you turn up next so they can go there too. The TV reporters get their information from the police.

What that means is that the next person to aim a gun at you probably isn’t going to be some slimy, conniving criminal who helped murder four of your friends. It’s going to be some kind of cop. A good guy: in fact, the best of the good guys, because he not only hasn’t done anything evil, he’s taking a risk to protect people. And he believes in justice as much as you do.

What are you going to do about him?”

She waited a few seconds while Dahlman tried to sort it out. Then she said, “I’ve been hoping all we had to do was keep you out of sight for a while, and let the police clear you.

Now I don’t know if that’s going to work. All I can promise is that I’ll try to keep you alive. I can’t make things come out even.”

It was two in the morning when Jane pulled off the highway into a gas station and stopped beside the row of pumps. The attendant in the little lighted building stood and stared out from behind his counter, and Jane studied him. He was probably nineteen or twenty years old, with a three-day growth of beard that had taken him much longer to grow, and a tattoo on the back of his left hand that he was going to live to regret someday. The only feature of it that she could see clearly was a spiderweb.

Jane said to Dahlman, “Sit tight while I pump the gas.

Look away from him while I open the car door, because the light will come on.”

She started to open the door when Dahlman said, “Wait.” She closed it again. “What?”

“I’d like to go to the men’s room, since we’ve stopped.

How do I get the key?”

“I’ll get it for you.” She kept her eyes on the gas station attendant. He seemed to be unconcerned now; he had gone back to watching the television set behind the counter, having reassured himself that he wasn’t about to be robbed.

“Anything else you want – a soft drink, candy? Tell me now, before the light goes on again.”

“No,” said Dahlman. “No, thank you.” Jane walked to the little building and pulled the door open.

She could hear the television above the hum of the big refrigerator beside the door: “Los Angeles pulled a game ahead of the Padres in the West with a one-hit shutout at Dodger Stadium…”

She placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and said,

“I’m at pump number five. And do you have a key to your men’s room?”

The boy pointed to a key attached to a board on the wall above her head. She took it and turned to leave. She kept her eyes on the glass door of the refrigerator and watched his reflection. His head and chest were visible above the counter, and his eyes now fixed on her and remained on her as she walked away. She reminded herself that this was not a customs official in a foreign airport. It was a normal teenaged boy whose interests were limited to cars, music, and what he was staring at right now.

When Jane reached the car, Dahlman got out; she handed him the key and turned her attention to filling the gas tank while she watched the boy over the roof of the car.

The boy seemed lost in some kind of cogitation. He had stopped staring at the television. She hoped he was just waiting out a commercial, but then she saw that wasn’t it. He came around the counter with a mop in his hand. Jane’s mind worked on him. He was not the sort of person who had a mania about cleaning: there were packages of gum and cigarettes in the rack on the counter that would stay there forever because they had a film of dust on them. If his boss had told him to mop the floors, he would do it at the end of the shift, and that was not likely to be between two and three in the morning. It would be at six or seven.

She watched him closely. The boy left the cubicle and walked toward the men’s room with his mop. He had no bucket. Jane turned off the pump, capped the tank, and moved quickly toward the lighted building.

Inside the cashier’s station she worked frantically. She pulled the telephone cord out of its socket and stomped on the plastic connector, then jammed the wire back in. Then she stepped through the inner door into the mechanic’s shop and gazed around her hungrily for anything she could use. There was a set of tire chains hanging on the wall. She took it, then hurried outside.

Dahlman was just coming out the men’s room door. The boy edged past him with the mop. As soon as he was inside, Jane slipped the tire chain over the doorknob and clasped the other end of it around the upright pole that supported the overhanging roof.

Dahlman stopped, shocked. “Are you insane?” he hissed.

Jane seemed not to hear him as he followed her back into the shop. “How can he fail to suspect something if you lock him in the men’s room?” Jane picked up the hammer on the workbench. There were wrenches of various sizes hanging from nails on the wall. She used one of them to pry out the nail it had been hanging from, then the two beside it.

“Give me the men’s room key,” she said, and snatched it out of his hand. “Is there a window in there?” He shook his head. Jane rushed past him, knelt beside the door of the men’s room, and began to pound a nail through the door and into the frame. As she raised the hammer for another swing, she heard a loud bang, and there was a hole in the door a few inches above her head. She sidestepped away from the door. She had thought of the possibility of a gun when she had seen that there was no weapon hidden under the cashier’s counter, but she had rejected it. Now the kid was scared and trying to save his life.

She hurried toward the car, but Dahlman wasn’t in it. She ran back and found him inside the cashier’s station, staring at the television. The image on the screen was his own face looking back at him. “I’m on television,” he said. “They’re saying incredible things about me…” He looked at her in disbelief. “I’m a serial killer.”

“I wasn’t able to tell you by the time I realized what he must have seen,” she said. “When I came in, I could hear something about baseball scores. After I was outside I realized that it couldn’t be a game at this hour. It had to be the news.” Jane looked inside the shop again. The vehicle parked in there was a tow truck. She hurried to it and saw the toolbox in the back under the winch. She opened it, and found the precious object she had been hoping for. It was home-made, just a foot-long strip of sheet metal that had been notched about a half inch from the tip. She took it, the hammer, and a screwdriver, and closed the box.

She grasped Dahlman’s arm in her free hand and gently tugged him out to the car, then started it and drove back onto the highway.

“What are we going to do?” Seeing himself on television seemed to have destroyed the last of Dahlman’s confidence.

Jane looked at her watch. “It’s now two thirty-five. He could be in there an hour or so before somebody stops for gas and goes looking for him. But somebody could come along in five minutes. Either way, we’ve got to get as far as we can while we can. I don’t think there’s much chance a kid who works in a gas station won’t give the police a good description of the car, do you?”

Dahlman held up his hands in a gesture of helplessness and shook his head. “I don’t have any idea.”

“It’s obviously been a while since you were nineteen.

Nineteen-year-old boys care about cars.”

“I suppose so.”

Jane frowned. “Don’t go all limp and worthless on me now.

Please. What we do next has got to work, or we’re caught.”

“What are we going to do next?”

“Take the map and look for the nearest airport.” Jane knew approximately where the next airport was, because Akron was only about ten miles away. She had driven Route 224 before.

It ran in nearly a straight line to the west across Ohio.

Policemen looking for people had to watch the big interstate highways that ran in the same direction – 80 in the north and 70 in the south – because people who ran were strangers, and strangers took the interstates.

“Right here.” Dahlman pointed at the road map. “It looks like eight or ten miles, straight ahead. It’s the Akron airport.” Ten minutes later Jane took a ticket from the machine at the entrance to the long-term parking lot, drove in, and began to search for the right car. When she found it, it was a nine-year-old Chevrolet Impala that had good tires and would not have been as shiny if the engine didn’t run. She could see it had no mechanical locking device across the steering wheel, and there were no glowing lights inside that could be an alarm.

She parked beside it and studied it. It wasn’t in mint condition, so it wasn’t somebody’s old friend. More likely someone who traveled a lot had bought an old car he didn’t mind leaving in airport parking lots so he could keep his fancy car locked in the garage at home.

“Get out with me,” she said. “Open your suitcase, and keep your head down, as though you were checking to be sure you haven’t forgotten anything. Warn me if anybody drives into the lot.”

Dahlman opened the trunk and leaned into it to fiddle with his suitcase while Jane moved to the other car. He watched her while she supped the long, flat strip of sheet metal into the space between the Chevrolet’s window and door, and wiggled it a bit.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a slim-jim,” she said. “Tow-truck drivers sometimes carry them because people lock their keys in their cars.” She tugged upward and the lock button on the door popped up.

“Keep looking for cars.”

She sat in the driver’s seat, used the hammer to drive the screwdriver into the space between the ignition switch and the steering column. She pried the ignition switch out of its receptacle with the screwdriver, yanked the wires out of it, and stripped back the insulation a bit. “Bring the roll of adhesive tape from the suitcase.”