Stealing Faces Read Free

paused by the table, smiling at him from under a raft of loose auburn hair. Her name tag read   DEBBI .
    “Not quite yet,” Cray said. “Perhaps you could bring me another drink.”
    “Right away.” Her smile brightened, and she shook her ringlets of red hair as she walked away.
    Cray watched her go. She was most cheerful, a healthy and vital young animal, but he wondered how long her high spirits would last if he took her into the mountains tonight and used her for sport.
    The prospect did not entice him. He could do better.   Debbi   the waitress was too youthful and unformed to be really interesting. It was preferable to select a mature specimen, ripe for harvest.
    He needed to find a woman who was alone, or who could be separated from her party. He would target his victim, trail her to her home or hotel room, then carry out the abduction. He would find a way to do it quietly.
    Cray let his gaze travel around the room. A fair number of the tables had filled up since his arrival.
    In a general sense he knew what he was looking for, but he had no precise image in mind. She might be tall or short, blonde or brunette or red-haired. She might be of any race. He liked them slender, never younger than sixteen or older than forty-five, but those were his only criteria.
    Most of the patrons around him were couples, but a pair of unattached women sat at the bar, talking to the bartender and watching   Monday Night Football   on a large, muted TV.
    There were no other solitary women in sight ... except one, seated in a far corner.
    Cray glimpsed her face, half-concealed behind a wide-brimmed straw hat. For an instant she seemed to meet his gaze, and then she averted her head slightly, a movement so subtle as to be almost natural.
    “Here you go.”   Debbi   the waitress, returning with Cray’s second margarita.
    He accepted it with thanks, then held the cold glass in his hand.
    It was a hand that trembled now, only a little, and not so obviously that anyone would notice. He sat motionless, afraid to lift the drink and perhaps spill it. He studied the distant city in the window.
    To the southwest he could see the lighted towers of downtown   Tucson . Downtown, where he’d gone on Saturday night, only forty-eight hours ago. A street fair had drawn him there, a monthly bacchanal that attracted throngs of students from the university and other locals in search of fun and distraction. The scene had been crowded and noisy. Bands played on street corners, a blare of drums and amplified guitars and caterwauling voices. People threw money into open guitar cases at the musicians’ feet, because it was expected of them.
    University students, back for the fall semester, yelled primal challenges at the night sky. Here and there a juggler or a magician would attract an audience, as their counterparts had done in medieval markets and Roman festivals.
    Human nature never changed, because at its root it was not human at all. It was something older.
    Cray had been musing on this as he wended, supple as smoke, through the noise and shadow-flicker of the crowd. The subject often occupied him. He had written a book, well received, to explore part of it—the less dangerous part. The title had been   The Mask of Self.
    He’d thought of masks while his eyes, narrowed and alert, scanned the swirl of faces around him. What part of these people was unique? Not their attire or grooming, their mores and tastes, not even their thoughts. What, then? Their souls? And what was the soul, if not the primordial part of them, predating words and ego? What was the soul, if not the beast within?
    Yet they did not release the beast. They kept it caged and hidden. They hid it even from themselves. They wore masks, all of them, masks of flesh—smiling or frowning masks, as unreal as the stylized faces worn by Roman actors in the last decadent days of Empire.
    He saw those masks and yearned to strip them off and see the bare truth beneath, the truth that