The Face-Changers (2 page)

“I think they’re coming,” she said.

The dark woman didn’t look surprised. “Are they the ones we have to worry about, or could they just be police?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen them. They would just call me on the phone.”

The woman’s eyes kept flicking upward to the rearview mirror, then settling on the ramp ahead so she wouldn’t hit anything. “I guess we’d better assume they are, since they don’t seem to own a siren. F11 have to lose them while you go get your traveling money. It’s Light and Fayette?”

“Yes.”

“All right. We’ve got about an hour and forty minutes left, so this will be tight. Here’s what we do. I can get us into the neighborhood in the next five minutes. I’ll let you off somewhere nearby, and keep going. You go into the storage place and pick up your money, then meet me wherever I let you off.”

“Okay.”

“Then get ready.”

Janet watched the rear window while the dark woman took several quick turns, sped down a narrow street lined with row houses, cut across a parking lot, then emerged on Light Street and drove past the intersection at Fayette. Finally, she turned in at the Harbour Court Hotel. There was a brick portal like the mouth of a cavern, then a circular patio with a fountain in the middle to keep cars moving around it in a circle to the lobby entrance.

The dark woman said, “Go through the hotel and out the other side. This is where I’ll be. Don’t look for the car, look for me. Now, move.”

Janet slipped out of the car, the doorman dodged in front of her to open the door, and then she was in. She heard the sound of a car scraping its undercarriage, then turned her head to see that the black car had turned into the driveway too quickly just as the dark woman was accelerating to bring the green car around the fountain and out to the street. The two men inside seemed too intent on following the little green car to glance in the direction of the hotel entrance. They just leaned their bodies inward against the centrifugal force as they made the circuit, then bounced out again.

Janet hurried across the lobby, then out the other door, and nearly ran up the street toward Fayette. She stepped into the storage building’s entry, rang the doorbell on the counter, and spent a few seconds catching her breath. It took three more rings to bring the clerk, who opened the cage and led her up to her storage cubicle. She was worried already. She had not exactly told the truth when she had allowed the dark woman to think the money was where it could be picked up quickly.

When she had locked the door behind her, she went to the big box where the winter coats were hanging in a row covered with dry cleaner’s bags, and slipped her leather carry-on bag from between two of them. Then she began retrieving letter-size envelopes, each with ten thousand dollars sealed inside it, and placing them in her bag.

She took four from inside a pair of high leather boots she had not worn in years, two from coats that had inner pockets, three from the inside of Aunt Rosalie’s giant casserole dish that had come to her because it didn’t fit in any relative’s cupboard, and had not fit in Janet’s either. There was one envelope inside the little door in the back of the big wind-up clock that chimed every hour loudly enough to wake anyone trying to sleep in any dwelling smaller than an English manor house. Two were rolled inside the stemmed glasses and covered with tissue paper, and one slipped between the crystal decanters. She had once thought them pretty, but now anything associated with drinking made her depressed. It took a moment to push the bad painting of a sailing ship out of its thick frame and remove the false backing, then almost as long to collect the loose hundred-dollar bills she had packed there into their envelope.

There were two envelopes taped inside the carved Tibetan mask. She had been told that what the mask was vomiting through its fanged maw was supposed to be good luck, but she had never been able to feel comfortable about a culture so alien that it imagined good luck looked like that. She figured faith always worked that way – believing something frightening and unappetizing would be just the thing to make you happy. She supposed that attitude was why she had never married. Suddenly she wished she had a girlfriend with her so she could have said that aloud, but she was alone. At the moment, that woman waiting in the car was as close as she could come to a friend, and Janet somehow knew that the dark woman wouldn’t have laughed.

She found one envelope behind her graduation picture, one in the battery compartment of a bulky old-fashioned portable radio that held four batteries, and three more tucked in with the receipts she kept with her old tax returns. That made twenty-one: two hundred and ten thousand. Oh, and five thousand in her purse. She had gotten into the habit of carrying that with her in case the very worst happened and she didn’t even have time to come here.

Janet took a last look at the old things she had stored in the cubicle. She had judged all of them ineligible for space in her condo, but she had never been able to rid herself of any of them.

She knew that as soon as the lease on the cubicle ran out, they would end up in a Dumpster. She felt a tearing sensation at the thought, paused for a moment, then retaped one envelope on the back of her graduation picture, under the frame cover.

She went out to the counter, where the clerk was waiting.

“Is there any way I can pay in advance for the next five years?”

“Five?”

She had said it without thinking it through, and tried to concoct a reason why he shouldn’t think she was doing something crazy or illegal. “Yes. I figure with inflation, I’ll save money over the long run.”

He shrugged, and she could tell she had been wrong about him. If forced to think about it, he would probably have said that she was stupid, but he cared so little about her that he didn’t bother. He reached under the counter and produced a blank rental agreement like the one she had signed four years ago. “Sign it, and I’ll figure the charge.” He punched a calculator on the counter and did some elaborate mathematical operation while Janet’s brain silently screamed, “Just move the decimal point to the right! Four eighty a year. Forty-eight hundred, divided by two, is twenty-four hundred.”

He said, “That will be… forty a month… times twelve months… times five.” Janet waited while he gave her a chance to prepare for the shock. “Two thousand four hundred.” She had been counting out hundred-dollar bills while he’d completed his computations. “Here.” She handed him the money and waited while he wrote up a receipt.

As she left the building, she felt a little better, a little smarter. Two hundred thousand was enough running-around money, and this way, when she came back to Baltimore, she would at least have something – a little cash, a few objects that belonged only to her. She had even avoided writing a check, which would eventually be mailed to her condo and tell someone she had a rented storage space.

She glanced at her watch. It had taken her twenty-three minutes. She had used too much time. The dark woman had probably thought she would walk in, grab the bag, and run.

Janet hurried up the street toward the hotel, hating herself once again. She had worked hard for that money, invested it prudently each week for years, then carefully, over the past few months, had converted it to cash in five-thousand-dollar increments. She had hidden the cash in the way she had invested it: a little here, a little there. If the worst had happened, and someone had broken into her little storage area, she had hoped he might find one envelope and run away, assuming he had found everything. She had not considered that her chance of safety might be slipping away in the time it took her to gather it all.

The cold, steady breeze from the harbor punished her tender face as she hurried toward the hotel, but Janet felt that she deserved it. She had been too slow-witted to explain in advance to the woman who was helping her that the money would take time. That was unforgivable. Had she even made sure the woman knew that what those men had threatened to do to her wasn’t just beating her up or something? Yes. She had told the person on the telephone all about it. The one on the telephone had been a woman too, or she might not have been able to say some of the words. The dark woman might even have been the one on the telephone.

Janet hurried through the hotel entrance, then walked as casually as she could across the marble floor of the lobby. She had been in the habit of wearing business clothes to the plastic surgeon’s office. She had wanted to make the people there think she was a busy professional person, because being busy and prosperous seemed the same as being respectable. But now the disguise that had given her courage was making things worse. The high heels had always been just fine for getting out of a taxi cab and walking fifty feet to the waiting room, but now they were hurting her feet and making noises on the marble floor like a horse clopping down a cobblestone road. And the new sensitivity of the skin around her middle since the liposuction and tucks made her underclothes feel as though she were harnessed up to pull a carriage.

Janet kept her eyes ahead of her on the big glass doors across the lobby. A sliver of green made her hold her breath and stare, but when she saw it again, it was only the doorman in his green generalissimo’s uniform lurking outside the door.

There didn’t seem to be a green car out there. Janet veered to the left a little so she could see the spot to the right of the door that was the logical place for the green car to be waiting, but she couldn’t achieve enough of an angle.

She quickened her pace, goading herself with the foolishness of taking the time to pay advance rent on her storage space. Her sudden reluctance to part with a pile of gewgaws too old and tasteless to keep in her home was going to get the dark woman killed, and then Janet. They both could have been out of Baltimore by now if she had only kept walking past that counter.

She reached the door and looked out, but the green car wasn’t in the courtyard. As she craned her neck to look toward the street beyond the portal, she felt the presence of someone behind her. She stepped aside to let them out the door.

The voice was almost in her ear. “Stay out of the doorway.” It was the woman. She took Janet’s arm and led her toward the steps leading up to the restaurants on the second floor.

“What happened?” Janet whispered.

“They were nastier about letting me lose them a second time.” She changed her direction slightly, and they skirted the stairway, went out the door, and emerged on Light Street.

“The car is down here.” She brought Janet down Pratt Street, then turned into a parking area for the Convention Center. The car was parked between two big vans.

Janet came closer. The rear window had a small, round puncture, a milky circle of pulverized safety glass, and around it, a radiating spiderweb of cracks. She knew instantly that it was a bullet hole, and she noticed that it was not on the left side, behind the driver’s seat. It was on the right, where they must have thought she was crouching. The dark woman acknowledged her thought.

“Don’t worry about that. Just get in. We’re taking too much time.”

Janet obeyed, wondering how anyone could not worry about that. She listened for some kind of assurance that what had caused the bullet hole was over, but none came. The car began to move away from the Inner Harbor, and she looked through the side and rear windows for the black car. What met her eyes were last glimpses of familiar sights – the National Aquarium, then the World Trade Center, and lots of other buildings that she had never been inside, but that she somehow felt she knew because she had driven past them so many times.

In minutes they were on the 295 expressway, then the 195, and every sign announced the approach of Baltimore/Washington Airport. But the dark woman pulled off the expressway and glided onto Dorsey Road, then stopped at a hotel near the southern edge of the airport.

“We’ll have to take a few quick precautions,” the dark woman said. “Come in.”

She hurried into the nearest wing of the hotel with Janet struggling to keep up, and moved down the carpeted hallway, then into a room. She hurried to the closet. “They’ve seen you, and they’d be fools not to have figured out you might be heading for the airport.”

“What can we do?”

“Get rid of everything they’ve seen, and show up a different way.” She laid some jeans and a sweater on the bed, then tossed a pair of thick-soled running sneakers on the floor.

“Put these on.”

Janet put on the jeans and sweater, then sat on the bed to tie the sneakers, and the dark woman knelt on the bed behind her to braid her hair in a way she never wore it. “There’s an airport shuttle that stops at all the hotels along here. Maybe we can catch it. They’ll be expecting to see the car.” The woman took a small suitcase out of the closet and opened it. She put Janet’s bag of money and her business suit and blouse into it. “Check the suitcase at the curb. You can’t carry a bag of money on a plane and not have them run it through the X-ray machine, and maybe look inside. After you get to Chicago, throw the clothes away. Once they’ve seen an outfit, it’s dangerous.”

Janet tried to look in the mirror over the bureau, but the woman took her arm and pulled her to the door. “It’ll have to do.”

As they walked down the hallway toward the reception area, Janet thought about her appearance. She had not been allowed to see whether it was attractive, but it certainly was better. The clothes had a different look, but also a different feel. The running shoes made her a couple of inches shorter, and they made her walk differently, too. The woman seemed to know dozens of little tricks and shifts and be able to put them into play so quickly that the effect was not a collection of small details, but a transformation.

The dark woman left her and went to the front desk. She spoke to the clerk, then looked up over the clerk’s head at the clock on the wall, and returned to Janet. “The shuttle bus is already due, so it should be here in the next minute or two.” Janet said, “Are you coming with me?”

“No. The way to
get
past them is to lose everything they’ve seen – the car, the clothes, the hair, and me. They’ll be watching for two women, and once you’re in the building, there’s nothing I can do for you that the airport police can’t.”