The Face-Changers (20 page)

Jane said, “I assume we don’t have to worry about anybody who’s in the house right now?”

Sid Freeman shook his head so that his shaggy hair whipped against his forehead. He pushed it back. “Worry about the kids?” He gave an amused snort. “They’re my greatest possession. They’ve eased the way out of my midlife tragedy and into my reclining years. I picked the first pair up to help me do some hunting – you know, to put Christie and Quinn to rest. They turned out to be ferocious – no hesitation, unencumbered by thoughts, either first or second. And they’re sleek and beautiful to watch, like tigers. So I kept them and got some more. Four so far. I’m hoping they’ll breed. But you don’t want to climb in the cage with them, if you know what I mean: Sid Freeman doesn’t indulge in the marital arts except with blue-haired ladies of his own generation. For you, of course, I’m willing to accept false ID.” Jane gave a little smile and shook her head slowly from side to side. “Not if you were driving the last bus out of hell and I was made of ice cream.”

Sid Freeman shrugged. “Which, incidentally, is not an inaccurate description of your present predicament.”

“That’s how I know,” said Jane. “I asked myself what I’d do for you if you got me out of this, and the answer already came back: ‘Not a thing.’”

“You’re not a spontaneous person,” he chuckled. “But you wouldn’t be here if something weren’t making your little heart go pitty-pat. What is it?”

“Top of the list is that I had to hot-wire a car in an airport lot in Akron, Ohio. It’s on the street with two suitcases on the back seat.”

“J.C. saw it when you got out of it. Old Chevy?”

“That’s the one,” said Jane.

Sid Freeman stood up and walked across the foyer into the kitchen. Dahlman could hear him muttering, and then two or three pairs of feet walking across the floor and a door closing.

When he returned, he said, “They’ll dissolve it for you and bring in the bags.” He stared at Jane in a leisurely way. “Is that it?”

Jane nodded at Dahlman. “I take it you know about him.”

“Sure,” he said. “They said he took a hot one from a constable somewhere.” He suddenly poked his finger toward Dahlman. Although Dahlman was five feet away, the surprise made him involuntarily tighten his pectoral muscles and cringe to protect the wound, then wince at the pain it caused. “Right there.”

Jane said, “He’s been sewn up, he’s got antibiotics, but he’s going to need to stay in one place for a while and rest.

While he’s healing, I go out and prepare a place for him to be somebody else, do the necessary shopping, and come back.”

“Big shopping?”

“I’ll be gone one week, two at the outside. We both stay two more weeks after that. During that time you help me cook up a first-rate identity: family pictures, school records, work history, credit record, driver’s license, the works. And I want a second identity that’s almost as good, in case he’s spotted using the first one. I could do it alone, but each step takes time and I don’t want to use time that way right now. When we leave, it’s in a good car with a clean title.” Dahlman watched as Sid Freeman’s face took on a new expression. Dahlman could tell it was only an approximation of a face Freeman had once seen that had carried concern and regret, which he had found intriguing. “Ah, Janie,” he moaned.

“Where have you been? You’re such a prize.”

“I quit doing this about a year ago, on the stupid assumption I could have a life,” said Jane. “Anything on that list you can’t handle?”

“Let’s see,” said Freeman. He squinted down at his fingers as though he were counting them, then waved the whole hand.

“All of it.”

“Why not?”

“Janie, Janie, Janie,” he said softly. “You disappear without a footprint – which, after all, is what anybody with a brain always thought you would do – but men you come scratch at my door, wet-puppy style, and talk as though you’re still a fixture of the landscape. You nodded off, times changed, annelids turned.”

“Annelids look pretty much the same on both sides,” she said, unperturbed. “Now, human beings – ”

“Sid’s not human,” Sid interrupted. “He’s humanoid: two arms, two legs, wears corrective lenses, takes money.”

“Oh, money,” said Jane. “If we’re just haggling about price, let’s hear numbers.”

“Sid doesn’t haggle,” he said. “Janie, I love you more than I hope for tomorrow’s dessert. But I can’t do business with you this time. I just let you in because you remind me of my mom.”

“So your kids aren’t chopping the Chevy for me?”

“They like the activity, so I threw that in as part of my lapse into sentiment. On the house. Besides, I can’t leave a thing like that on my doorstep and expect to do business. But Sid can’t fill your shopping list of goods and services.”

“Why can’t he? Did Sid get too rich in the last couple of years?”

He scowled. “Let’s explore your problem.”

“That’s better. How much will it take?”

“You have this baggage with you, this multiple-homicide suspect, escaped from custody in two states. You know more about the rest of this game than anybody alive. You tell me who’s hunting, what they’ll use, and where the game ends.” Jane glanced at Dahlman, then answered. “If he were on his own, it would be over already, but he’s not.” Sid Freeman shook his head. “I mean starting from now.

Anybody making odds will say it ends by some TV zombie recognizing him and calling the police. The boys in blue don’t need to go it alone, because the F.B.I, has already invited them to call in. So they do, and pretty soon there’s a battalion. Are they then going to say, ‘Come out with your hands up’ loud enough for him to hear and reload? No. They’re going to batter down walls and make everybody for miles around gulp tear gas. You and Foxy Grandpa will have many more holes than you started with.”

“Will you miss me?”

“Will I have time? The next day, the F.B.I, demonstrates its zero tolerance of the brand-new Fleeing Felon Problem it just discovered by tracking down whoever gave you the papers, the car, the clothes, and whatever else they found near your bodies. They won’t get me, of course, but they’ll need somebody. They could scare clients, choke off a couple of my sources and suppliers. Very inconvenient. And for what?”

“What has it ever been for, Sid? Money.” He stared at her body from the feet up to the neck. “If you were carrying mat kind of money among your various curves I’d see it, and you wouldn’t leave it in a hot car, so it’s on a pay-later basis, right?”

“I could get more during my shopping spree.”

“I don’t want to be depressing, but this time wanting to come back does not mean I’ll hear your footsteps on my front porch. When your suitcases get here, I’ll drop you someplace.

Final word.”

“You know who framed him,” Jane said.

Sid’s face froze in its mask of annoyance. It stayed mat way for a few seconds. His mouth opened once to say something, then closed again. Finally the mask vanished and was replaced by another, softer one. “You drop off the radar screen for a couple of years. Do you think you invented the disappearing business, so you can take it with you when you go?”

She stared at him intently. She tried to remind herself that her instinctive feeling of dread didn’t matter for the moment.

He knew something. “Who is it?”

But Sid shrugged. “There are some people, and they’re doing pretty much what you always did, only they’re not going about it in this eccentric and self-indulgent way.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re in a business, and they act like it. They charge what they can get, and they don’t turn somebody away because he offends their nostrils. They give him what he can pay for. This, as you know, is a theory of business I subscribe to. On occasion they’ve sent to me for specific items of merchandise.”

“Sent to you?”

“Yeah. They send the runner to pick up things, but don’t come with him. There will be this typed list of stuff, practically pinned to his shirt, and he’ll have the money in cash. I’m talking about runners who know zero. If I let them out the wrong door, they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to the car.”

“Like who?”

Sid threw up his hands. “Do I suddenly know names?

Some up-and-comers from business school who looked at me like I wanted a handout for wiping their windshield.”

“Any women? Kids?”

“No kids so far. A couple were women, but the kind that when they say ‘the market’ they don’t mean a place you buy groceries. They’re just men with suits that cost more and don’t come with pants.”

“And not one of them ever made a mistake and said who sent them?”

“Never.”

“Did you ask?”

“Be assured,” said Sid Freeman. “They always say it was a friend of theirs. But these are not people who would know enough not to say. Someone told them.”

“What did they buy?”

“Not much overlap. What some of them wanted might get them a job as night watchman in a junkyard. One of the women got the full glamour makeover – birth, Social Security, credit, diplomas, transcripts, job references, old tax returns, doctored photographs of her standing in front of the Denver capitol building hugging one of my guys who was cleaned up to look like a boyfriend, passport, shot record.”

“You came up with all that, and she said nothing? It must have taken a month.”

“You have to understand that this is a very unpleasant young woman who came to Sid’s door with a suitcase full of money. No incentive to establish a social relationship, and Sid doesn’t haggle.”

“Didn’t the proportions strike you as wrong?”

“They did seem a bit off,” said Sid. “But I kept an eye on the television and checked a lot of newspapers and magazines.

There was nobody who looked like her, no disappearances of famous people, or of anybody about the same time who rated a line of print.”

Jane’s eyes rested on Dahlman, but he sensed that she was listening to something. “Your boys are back.” Sid looked away from her. “See how reliable? The future is in good hands.”

Jane was still staring at Dahlman. “What about him?” Sid looked at Dahlman too. “What about him?”

“How did you know he wasn’t some madman who really had killed his friends and run off? If you got the story from television, what was there that told you?” Sid stared at her uncomfortably. “I think it was his cunning plan to go live in a farmhouse. Was he going to stay there forever? Who would buy that as a plan? I mean, not counting the police.”

Jane shook her head. “The world is a wondrous place, Sid.

Naive credulity is rampant. What did they buy from you? The photographs they left in his house?”

“Just the gun. That’s how I remembered the name. It was a tricky business, because it had to come from a legitimate dealer that never saw the buyer, but be registered in the name Dr. Richard Dahlman.”

“Registered?” said Jane. “Then it was a suicide gun?”

“That’s what I think now, after all the dust that got kicked up. I think the idea was to shoot them both and put the gun in his hand. Maybe they figured it was safer to just kill her: no matter how hard the police look at a murder it’s still a murder, but a murder-suicide doesn’t always include a real suicide. If the suicide doesn’t hold up. they start looking for somebody else.” He frowned at Dahlman. “They obviously put too much confidence in police marksmanship.”

Jane said, “Are you going to help us, or not?”

“I still like money,” he said. “But something in my mind keeps telling me, ‘Janie and these faceless guys are about to bump into each other. Who’s coming home to dinner?’ Your suitcases are waiting.”

Jane walked to the door, picked up Dahlman’s suitcase and reached for hers, then saw the keys beside the handle. She could see that the papers beneath them were a car registration and a pink slip with no names on them. She straightened and turned toward Sid Freeman.

“Just fresh horses, that’s all,” he said. “It’s the quickest way to get him out of my place of business.”

Jane drove the new car down the hill and along the parkway beside the lake. Dahlman stared ahead for a few minutes. Then he said, “It’s astounding. I’ve been rejected by even the worst criminals.”

“Oh, Sid’s okay,” said Jane.

“‘Okay’?” Dahlman said. “He has no mercy, no morality, no – ”

“Don’t get launched, or I’ll be listening to what he doesn’t have all night. He got us out of a very hot car and into one we could keep forever if we were careful. That’s more than any number of nice law-abiding citizens could do. He also told me some things we might have died finding out.”

“He probably told you lies… nonsense,” said Dahlman.

“He’s probably on the telephone right now, telling the people who are after us exactly where we are.” Jane shook her head. “Once you’re in a car, he doesn’t know exactly where you are.”

“I don’t know that he’s not following us.”

“I do.” She sighed. “Sid doesn’t have a set of rules. He has to make his decisions as they come up. All things being equal, he would rather I lived than mat my enemies did. He knows that he can’t affect the outcome, so it’s unwise to try too hard.

But he gave us what we needed.”

“He said several times his only interest is money.”

“Nobody is only interested in money. Sid wants to be important, and he lives on impulse, so he needs money. But the way he gets money means he has to live in isolation in a house with bulletproof walls and armed guards. He won’t sell us out.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“To those ‘faceless guys,’ as he calls them?” said Jane.

“They have not endeared themselves to Sid. They’ve been so careful to be sure he doesn’t know who they are that he can’t get word to them to negotiate a price for us. He resents that, and he resents them. They don’t come in person to talk to him.

I do.”

As Jane drove through the night, she thought a bit about Sid’s dead companion, Christie. She had always been the one in the background, floating around like the bad fairy. Jane could picture her now, with her anorexic body, close-cropped red hair, and nocturnal pallor, watching with a smug look on her face as though Sid’s visitors were there for some sadistic amusement of hers. It had come as a surprise to Jane that Christie’s sudden absence had made so little difference – not to Sid, but to anyone. Jane had always suspected that Christie had done most of the thinking – concocting the plans and then cajoling and manipulating Sid into executing them. But the atmosphere of the strange household, an uneasy tension between agonizingly slow, patient scheming and temporarily suspended violence, had not changed since Christie had died.