by Thomas Perry
Carl Beeman made most of his money on rodents. He knew everything about mice and rats: how they had made their way into a building, what they had been eating, how long they had been there, how many there were. He would climb into an attic, go down into a basement, walk slowly around the outside of the house, a skilled hunter scouting the habitat before he made his plan.
As the summer went on, Beeman began to talk to Prescott while he worked, teaching him in low tones just above a whisper, and Prescott learned. The owner of the house was a bystander: the business was between Beeman and the mice. The adversaries understood and recognized each other, engaged in a primal battle for dominion over this space. The human beings whose names were on a paper filed in the county courthouse were as irrelevant to Beeman as they were to the mice. Although these people, in a way, fed and housed both sides of the struggle, they took no part in it and seldom saw the places where major battles were fought. Beeman was a good enough businessman to be sure the customers saw the casualties—rodents he carried out in plastic bags that didn’t need to be transparent but were.
Slowly, Prescott discovered that Beeman respected and sympathized with the mice. They were perfectly normal animals doing what animals did. They struggled for food, a warm, dry place, and safety. They had a good strategy: they shared a house with another, larger species that used it almost exclusively during daylight, so they used it mainly at night. The attributes of the larger species rendered it harmless to mice except for one quirk of evolution: the big, slow daylight creatures had Carl Beeman’s phone number.
Each campaign was carried out over a period of a week, with Beeman using a variety of tactics, checking daily to see how each had worked. Had he blocked all the entrances? Had the corn treated with strychnine been nibbled? Carried off? What were the mice doing on their side—chewing their way out? Prescott sighed. It was thirty-five years later now, and he had become Carl Beeman. He had been right about this adversary, and he had picked the right way to get the adversary to call. It had taken Prescott only a couple of days to select the right poison and deliver it. The killer might spend the next couple of days walking around ignoring it, but it would gradually work its way in and begin to hurt.
The killer would call again. He had to, because the need was hardwired into his brain. He didn’t just have to practice until he was smarter and stronger and more powerful. This was his destiny, the little play that he had been inadvertently raised to act out. He had been struggling to defeat the enemy that was older and bigger and had somehow always thwarted him and kept him down but had, at the same time, been oddly invisible, missing, impossible to even identify. Prescott stared at his hands. To volunteer for that role in this particular drama, a man would have to be crazy. He pushed the REWIND button on the tape recorder, picked up a pen, and waited to copy the words onto a notepad.
5
Prescott spent his days getting ready. Everything he would need had to be laid out, examined, taken apart, then packed in exactly the right order. When that had been done and redone, he passed the time in the big central library in downtown Los Angeles scanning old issues of newspapers on microfilm. He carried with him the list of cities that the killer had mentioned—Columbus, Phoenix, Houston, Pittsburgh, Danville, Biloxi, and Los Angeles—and the months when he had supposedly visited each one.
Each night, Prescott set up his bed on the couch in his office. He had selected the suite for nights like this. It was in a high-rent high-rise office building on Wilshire Boulevard. The other tenants included a few financial managers for the very rich, and several attorneys who had clients with high visibility and rapidly fluctuating reputations, so the security men downstairs were the cold-eyed suspicious sort rather than the kind who could be sent out to bring you lunch or get your car detailed. After hours, the elevators required a key to work. His office was on the ninth floor behind an unmarked polished oak door that had been reinforced on the inside with quarter-inch steel panels. The building’s upper windows were one-way glass, and Prescott’s wall on the hallway side was lined with tall filing cabinets that looked very businesslike but were filled with unopened reams of blank paper. If a bullet went through the wall and pierced the back of a filing cabinet, there was no chance it would come out the front.
He slept within a few feet of the telephone on his desk because he knew the killer’s call would come at night, almost certainly between two and five. The killer would know as well as he did that this was the time to take an enemy off guard. It was when sleep was deepest, and when police raided armed suspects. This killer would feel the need to stake a claim on the night.
On the fourth night at three A.M. the telephone rang. Prescott gave himself one ring to clear his mind, one to take a drink from the glass of water beside the telephone so his voice would not sound dry and scratchy from sleep. Then he picked up the receiver. “Yes?”
There was the breathing on the other end again. The anonymity the killer had relinquished by being goaded into speech the first time was something he seemed to believe he could get back, even though part of his mind must have known that Prescott recorded his calls.
Prescott said, “Oh, it’s you, breather. What’s up?”
What answered him was a whisper. “Just making sure you’re where I wanted you to be.”
“Yep,” said Prescott. “You can stop looking over your shoulder for now, and get some sleep. I’m not in that much of a hurry. I’ll get to you when I’ve gotten my schedule cleared. I’ve got a chore that’s a bit more important than you are right now.”
The whisper was angry. Prescott’s overconfidence was ugly, like a swelling that needed to be lanced. “Didn’t you check the jobs?”
“What jobs?”
“Phoenix, Houston, Pittsburgh . . .”
“Oh, your list of cities,” said Prescott. “I was going to make an attempt, but when I had a minute, I couldn’t see much in it. Los Angeles and Houston each have over a thousand homicides a year. You taking credit for all of them, Slick?”
“No.”
“I did try Danville, because that seemed like it might be a manageable number, but I don’t seem to find any mention of anybody dying in any interesting way in the month of May.”
“Abel Tucker.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s the one I got there. In L.A. it was Donald Pearson. In Houston it was Sidney Obermeyer. That ought to be enough.”
“Well,” Prescott said doubtfully, “I’ll check and see if I can dig up your press clippings. But what are they supposed to tell me—that you’re bad?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s better if I show you what I do.”
Prescott sensed that something about the voice had changed. He decided to concede something. “I’ve seen what you do.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Nope,” he said. “I tried it once, when I was young and optimistic, but it doesn’t fit with this kind of life.”
“Who do you love?”
Prescott chuckled, hoping that the alarm he was beginning to feel was not audible in his voice. “Nobody.”
“There must be somebody you care about, somebody that will get your attention.”
Prescott had been listening attentively to the voice. He had begun to identify the change he had heard. The voice had started out querulous and sullen, but as the words had begun to be about killing—not the people he had killed, but about plans to kill someone new—it had gained strength. It had deepened, gotten quicker and more lively. The change was shocking, frightening. This was not the sort of killer who could be convinced to go off and do something else just because it was safer or more lucrative. Killing wasn’t hard. It didn’t scare him or worry him or repel him. As soon as he had started thinking about it, talking about it, he was confident and eager. Prescott had to deflate that mood, make him think differently. “Well, as I said, Slick, you’ll have to wait your turn. I’ve already got somebody else who needs my attention right now. After I’ve got him, I’ll get to you
. Just in case you lose your nerve again, where should it be?”
“Where?” The voice was genuinely confused.
“Sure,” said Prescott. “You think you can handle it, we’ll meet someplace.”
There was a silence on the other end that was part amazement and part outrage: How could this man think he was that stupid? The fact that Prescott had even tried this was proof that he was utterly sincere in his contempt. Varney gave a quiet, voiceless chuckle that came out as empty air. “I think you need a demonstration first.”
“Killing some unsuspecting little old lady is not going to convince me of anything, so don’t bother.” Prescott’s own voice sounded a little hollow to him. He knew this man really was thinking of murdering somebody else, just to rattle him. He had to stop it.
“I don’t mind. It’s no trouble. It’ll be easier to talk to you after.”
Prescott forced his face into a false smile, in the hope that it would change his voice subtly to hide the concern he felt. “Do I strike you as somebody who cares about strangers?”
“Yes. You do. It’ll be a cop. Maybe two. Just so you know I don’t have to do easy ones.”
Prescott said, “No! Come and get me, not them.”
“Them first. Then you.”
Prescott heard the click as the killer hung up. He pushed the button to get a dial tone, and quickly punched in a number.
Millikan approached the telephone on the table beside his favorite reading chair in the living room with foreboding. These days nobody called Millikan after ten at night, and a deviation from the expected was not welcome to him. The telephone began its second ring, and he snatched it up to silence it so it wouldn’t ring again in the bedroom and wake his wife. “Hello.”
“Millikan.”
Millikan controlled his irritation, then let it out slowly. “I thought you weren’t going to call me again. I’m doing what you asked.”
“It worked. You can stop now. He’s called me twice. But there’s something I can’t keep to myself.”
“What is it?”
“He’s going to kill a cop.”
Millikan was silent for a moment, trying to overcome his shock and concentrate. “Why?”
“To show me he can do it—no, that he will do it. He wants me to sweat. He’s going to show me that he can do just about anybody, anytime he wants. Then he’ll come for me.”
“Jesus,” muttered Millikan. “Did he say when, or where, or anything?”
“No. He’s neurotic—defensive and hostile—but not delusional. Whatever is wrong with him makes him aggressive, but it doesn’t seem to make him reckless.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because if I call the police and tell them who I am and what I heard, they won’t do what they need to do. If you tell them, maybe they will.”
After Varney had pushed down the hook on the pay telephone to sever the connection with Prescott, he had stood with the phone to his ear for a minute or two, surveying the area around him to be sure there was no one nearby who might have overheard. Now he hung up the telephone and began to walk. That son of a bitch thought he was stupid. He could hardly contain his rage. He was not going to be as easy as Prescott seemed to think. Varney was not stupid, and he was beginning to work on exactly how he was going to prove it.
He was walking along Hertel Avenue in Buffalo in his sport coat, carrying a grocery bag from the store where he had stopped to make the phone call. He watched a police car drift up the street past him, knowing the car wouldn’t stop. He knew the profile they were trained to look for, and he had made himself look different from it. He looked like a young man whose wife had sent him out after midnight because they were out of formula for the baby. Varney was not stupid. He had even been to college before he’d left California.
It was only a two-year college, but he could have gone to a four-year place. He just didn’t have the money. As it was, he’d had to be inventive just to eat and sleep under a roof. He had left home at the beginning of summer, when high school ended. He had seen a HELP WANTED sign in the window of a hamburger place, and worked there for a while. He had gotten an idiot pleasure out of laying the burgers on the tray and popping them into the oven, then timing the french fries and getting the shakes lined up just in time to get the burgers out and bagged and on the hot table in time to sell them.
Then in August, the manager had taken him aside at the end of the shift and asked him if he wanted to train to be an assistant manager. Varney had looked at the manager—Darryl Sams, his name was—and it was as though he had suddenly awakened from a dream. That had been all it took, looking at Darryl. He was chubby, with narrow shoulders and pants that went up to his solar plexus. He wore a tie in the colors of the franchise that was too short. His small, close-set black eyes were dumb and worried about nothing visible, the way a dog’s were. Darryl meant well, but Darryl was Exhibit A. He was what Varney would become if he stayed and worked hard for ten years. He could get a new paper hat that said MANAGER and get to come home from work smelling that same smell of rancid cooking fat every night.
Varney had been filled with terror that turned into anger. He’d had to get out, to burn up this temptation: this looked like an opportunity, but it was a trap, an offer of slavery made when he was just a step from starving. Varney was making so little money that when he dumped the burgers that had been too long on the hot table, he always secretly diverted one for his dinner. Darryl was trying to look like a benefactor, but he was the enemy. Varney turned a wry, malicious stare at the small, dumb, eager eyes. “Are you shitting me?” he asked. “You think I want to end up flipping burgers when I’m thirty-one?” Darryl was thirty-one. It had only been a week since the girls at the cash registers had put a candle on a hot cherry tart and sung “Happy Birthday” to him. His smile flattened, his dumb eyes seemed to cloud over, and his chubby face slowly turned pink with hurt and humiliation.
Varney said, “I was going to quit this week anyway.” He thought quickly. “I’ve got to leave for college. This is my last day.”
Darryl was so dumb that Varney had managed to distract him from his wound. The smile returned. “Well, good luck, Jim. I know you’ll do great.”
Varney was already taking his apron off. “Damn right,” he said. He headed for the rear door without looking back. Darryl called out, maybe in an extreme attack of stupidity, or maybe because a tiny dose of venom had remained in his system from Varney’s insult. “If you ever need the job back, just come and ask me.”
Varney kept walking for a few steps and then stopped and began to turn around. But then he heard the steel door swing shut and lock. He considered going back in the front door, vaulting over the counter, and beating Darryl senseless, but he controlled himself. He resisted because he was smart, not the kind of fool that Prescott obviously thought he was.
He spent the next few days feeling lost. He had begun the summer sleeping at the house of his one high school friend, until the friend’s parents had made it clear that this could not be a permanent arrangement. After that he had spent a period going to parties. He had walked the neighborhoods surrounding the college listening for loud music. When he found a party, he would join the crowd on the lawn or drift in the front door, left open for ventilation. He would pretend to be a college student from out of town who was passing through. He would meet people and talk them into letting him sleep on their floors. If he couldn’t charm anyone, he would help clean up the litter and mess from the party and then appear to fall asleep in the yard. But after a few weeks the parties had become too exhausting. He rented a cheap studio apartment.
After he quit the burger job he hitchhiked to the community college, showed them his taped-together diploma, and registered. The tuition was free, so he was able to give reasonable attention to his studies for almost a month. Then he needed to turn his attention to supporting himself.
Stealing from college students was unbelievably easy, and he found that he had a talent for it. He would watch s
tudents in his classes, and at the various lunch counters and coffee places around the campus. When he found a girl who had money and salable belongings, he would follow her to learn where she lived. One night he would watch her apartment until she went out, then slip inside and take what he could find. Slowly, by increments, he became an expert.
He began by prying doors with a crowbar he carried in his backpack, or breaking a window. But as he broke into more and more apartments, he became adept at coaxing door plungers and window latches out of their receptacles without doing much damage or taking too long. He became quieter, more familiar with the shapes and proportions of apartments. He learned where obstacles would be placed, where prizes would be hidden, and the way an open space sounded in the dark.
During this period he paid more and more attention to his physical training. He was now a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He made a deal with the master of the dojo. He taught two classes of white and yellow belts in exchange for his own lessons. That gave him more practice and more training. He made a trip every other day to the college gym, where he lifted weights and used the machines, ran on the track, and showered in the locker room.
It was at the gym that he learned about the gun club. He was getting dressed one night when he noticed a small xeroxed announcement tacked to the bulletin board. It said SHOOTING CLUB, then, underneath, THE CLUB IS NOT SANCTIONED BY THE COLLEGE, clearly a condition for posting it on campus. It said the club was made up of college students who were interested in shooting and had discovered they could get price breaks on all sorts of things if they banded together. They had reserved a part of a local firing range for Monday and Wednesday nights at eleven, when older, preferred customers had gone home. Along the bottom of the announcement were tear-off tags with a phone number. He took one and put it in his jacket pocket.
He showed up at the firing range the following Monday to look things over. The club consisted of a dozen young men who seemed to belong to several factions. There were a few farm boys who were bemused by the distaste and dread other students felt for a simple household contraption no more mysterious than a pencil sharpener. There were a couple of fanatical marksmen who had become enraptured by firearms at an early age and spent much of their free time trying to compress a pattern of shots into a one-inch space. A couple of tinkerers seemed most interested in replacing things on their weapons with custom pieces that, to the naked eye, were identical to the original parts but were claimed to be vastly superior. There were two ROTC officer candidates who seemed to be under the impression that some day they would be called upon to fight a war with pistols. Varney had never held a firearm in his life, but that made him more welcome. He was seized upon with missionary zeal, as each of the factions interpreted his ignorance as an opportunity to create a convert. He could not afford a weapon, but each of the members of the club was eager to let him try one of theirs, to instruct him in its use and features and quirks.