The Face-Changers Read Free Page A

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