by Thomas Perry
After three meetings, Varney realized that he would have to get money to pay for the ammunition he was using. He stepped up his burglaries and moved his hunting ground to neighborhoods far from his college. Now he would go to a neighborhood at dusk and spend an hour or two walking and looking. Then he would select the best house to rob.
That was how he started his own gun collection. He always began by looking for money and jewelry, and now that he was in houses where middle-aged men lived instead of tiny apartments where students lived, he began to find guns. He was good enough with a pocketknife and screwdriver to open some doors and many windows, so he often had time to hit three or four houses in a single night. He had trained himself in years of exercise and martial arts so he could easily use a tree or a drainpipe to climb to a vulnerable upper window.
Using his stolen guns, he sharpened his shooting skills with the same determination he applied to everything else he chose to do. He slyly courted the attention of the club members. He let the accuracy purists believe he was a natural ally in their debates about bullet shape, muzzle velocity, and barrels. He listened with sincere attention to the tinkerers and let them teach him to dismantle, clean, lubricate, adjust, and modify his weapons. He also assented to the ROTC cadets’ belief that all target shooting was preparation for the future moment when the bullet must burrow its way through living flesh.
He joined them in separate outings to a combat range, firing rapidly at flat comic-book villains with bristly jowls and sneering lips who mechanically popped up or lurched forward at him. Combat shooting became his strongest event; he outdid his two companions on his first day. He had been training his reflexes to be quicker, his coordination more finely tuned, and his muscles stronger in eight years of martial arts. By breaking into houses while people slept, he had been training his eyes and ears to an acuity that had gone beyond response and become intuition.
Varney had been slowly, doggedly making himself into the vision of perfection he had invented when he was a child. He was an adventurer. He still had to show up at classes at the community college, but the work remained easy. He had enrolled with the intention of going on to a university at the end of two years, so he took a standard liberal arts curriculum. But the college served a clientele of students who had finished high school without being able to read comfortably or to make much sense of algebra, so keeping up with them did not distract Varney much from pursuing his other activities.
After a year, he was burglarizing difficult houses, bigger buildings with broad, open lawns, high fences, and alarm systems. He got more cash and better jewelry. He also found some merchandise he had never seen in smaller houses. They were certificates—stocks and bonds with elaborate scrollwork and filigree borders like his diploma. He took them because they looked valuable and weren’t heavy, but after a few months, he had too many of them in his apartment to ignore. One day when he went to Wally’s Pawnshop, one of the places where he sometimes sold his loot, he brought a few and asked Wally about them.
Wally shrugged and shook his head. “That’s not a business I can get into.” He lifted his hands to keep them far from the stock certificates, in an exaggerated gesture.
Varney asked, “Then where do I go?”
Wally winced as though something in his belly had begun to hurt him. “I’d forget it.”
The boy persisted. “You said it’s not business you do. But if it’s a business, somebody must do it. Who?”
Wally’s resistance did not weaken. He said quietly, “A little guy can’t do anything with securities. The only ones who can are big—people you don’t want to know.” He could see he was making no impression. “People you don’t want to know you.”
Varney let the subject drop, but he did not forget it. He was not a petty businessman like Wally, he was an adventurer. A week later, he tried asking another of his buyers. This was Dave, proprietor of Genuine Gems. Dave was not as cautious as Wally. He muttered, “I could get you in touch with some people.”
The fences were all nominally independent, but nearly all of them did some business with a group they called the wholesalers. When they bought merchandise of suspicious provenance from people like Varney, they would keep it out of sight. About once a month they would be visited by a pair of men who would look the stuff over and make an offer. The wholesalers would also offer the local shopkeeper a variety of merchandise picked up the same way in other cities. By a combination of barter, haggling, and cash payment, a deal would be struck. They would take the local valuables, leave the valuables from elsewhere, and move on to the next city.
Dave agreed to offer these men the securities at the standard price—2 percent of face value. He explained to Varney the realities of the business: a good diamond ring of a carat or less from across the country would go quickly, with little risk. Anybody could sell it. A thousand shares of Microsoft had to be handled in special ways, and only certain people could move them. As he put it, “You have to be huge.” Selling stolen securities involved big, dangerous maneuvers, like forming a corporation, having the corporation obtain a business loan and letting the bank hold the securities as collateral, then converting the loan to clean, untraceable cash and the corporation to thin air. Another way was to actually pretend to be the man whose name appeared on the securities, use them to obtain credit, and buy pieces of merchandise—jewelry, cars, even houses—then resell the merchandise and leave the buyer, the credit underwriter, and the original merchant to fight it out. All of these methods involved big numbers, complicated transactions, and the ability to keep institutions from asking any of the right questions.
The wholesalers were not big enough to accomplish schemes of that sort. When they sold Varney’s certificates, they were only acting as middlemen for much larger interests in New York. It was this transaction that brought Varney to the attention of the people Wally had told him he didn’t want to know. The money was, for Varney, a fortune—nearly forty thousand dollars. To them the money was a tip. But there were certain things about the young man that interested them. The securities had come from twenty-two different robberies, done over a period of a year. This meant he had the qualities of patience and caution, which they admired, and secretiveness, which they worshiped. They advised the wholesalers to keep an eye on him and watch his development. It was well known that people who did not take their advice were the very definition of stupid and did not deserve to live.
The wholesalers already knew quite a bit about Varney. Several of their fences had purchased items from him, and each confirmed what the others said. He was quiet, steady, and reliable. He was a relief to them, after the legion of mentally impaired, volatile maniacs who came in with something they’d taken in a smash-and-grab or a purse snatching that they expected would keep them in crystal meth for a month.
But the wholesalers were waiting. They knew every aspect of the stolen-merchandise business in a way that no young sneak thief could know it, and they knew that the odds would catch up with Varney. When the inevitable happened, that would be the test. Either he would cease to be a factor in the local trade, or he would kill somebody.
One night, he went into a rich neighborhood in San Francisco that he had never hit before. He walked for a time, trying to select a house. The night was unusually warm, and he could hear the faint hum of air conditioners coming from some of the houses, which told him the windows were all closed and latched. There were lights on in the windows of others. Now and then, if he lingered near a house too long, a dog would bark, and he had to move on. Finally, he found one that seemed not to present too many obstacles. He stood outside the gate for a few minutes, listening and studying the building. Then he saw something that made him decide.
He was over the fence and up the broad lawn like a shadow. He climbed a trellis, careful to place his hands and feet where they would not tangle with the climbing roses. He reached the second floor, where there was an open window. He was sure that a place like this would have an alarm system, but whatever circui
t included an open window had to be turned off. He slit the screen with a knife and slipped inside a bedroom. There was no one in the bed.
He moved to the doorway and cautiously looked up the hall. There were bedrooms, all with their doors closed, and no sign of light under them. At the other end of the hall was a faint glow. He froze and waited. There was no sound. The light was not like an incandescent lamp, so he decided to look more closely. He slowly moved up the hallway. The glow was a computer screen. There was a screen saver, with colorful tropical fish moving from left to right and disappearing. He took two deep breaths. It was all right. The room was an office, and the computer was probably left on all the time. There was nobody awake. He was halfway down the hall toward the office, so he decided to start his search for valuable items there. He heard a creak behind him that might be a person in one of the bedrooms. He retreated to the nearest door, but found the room absolutely empty, with nothing to hide behind. He knew he had time for only one more guess. He stepped to the office, slipped just inside the doorway, and waited.
He had chosen wrong: the room was not empty. He heard the hollow rattle-scrape sound behind him, and knew it: a handgun being grasped and lifted from the wooden bed of a drawer. He gave it a half second, so the man’s arm would be in motion, rising toward the level of his chest. Then Varney abruptly squatted, slapped the floor with the palm of his hand, and dived across the open doorway.
The gun went off and punched a hole in the wall where Varney’s chest had been. Varney caught a glimpse of the man while he was in motion. The man was about forty years old, crouching beside the desk wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and his black hair was tousled. He must have been working at the computer and fallen asleep on the couch. The man popped up, startled by Varney’s low dive, and pointed the gun downward. The man overcompensated in aiming his second round, this time firing into the carpet at his own feet.
Varney rolled, brought his knees up to his chest in a crouch, then quickly did something that was not what anyone else would do, and few could do: he sprang up, took a running step up the wall, pushed off, and hurled his body into the man with the gun. The man was knocked down, his head hit a chair, and the gun bounced on the carpet. Varney picked it up, fired it into the man’s forehead, checked the magazine to be sure it had a few more rounds, then went down the hall to the room where he had heard the creak.
He opened the door and found it empty, then opened all of the others. He returned to the office and considered his situation. Maybe the reason the man had kept a gun in this room was that there really were valuable things here. Varney could see the gun had come from a small, open door on the right side of the desk, with a key sticking out of the lock. He pushed the door open a bit farther with his foot, and saw that it was a small safe, with three shallow drawers, like trays. The gun must have been locked in there in the front of the safe.
Varney wanted to run, but he kept the fear under control. The house was big, a stone structure set back on about two acres of land, but there seemed to be nobody here except the man. The only open window was down the hall where he had come in. If the three shots had not been heard by the neighbors in their big houses, then the danger was over.
He put the gun into the back of his belt and began to empty the contents of the drawers while he listened for sirens and car engines. There were banded stacks of cash, a couple of fancy watches, two gold rings, and a sheaf of documents that looked to Varney like stock certificates. When he had what he could carry, he went down the hall, out the window, and down the trellis.
Two days after he sold the securities, he received a visit at his apartment from two of the traveling men who worked for the wholesaler. They had learned that the name on the securities—Robert Haverly—was a name the San Francisco newspapers had printed as the victim of a burglary and murder. Varney had shown the aptitude the wholesalers had been told to watch for.
All these years he had been stubbornly preparing himself for a life that was different, more intense and exciting than the drab busy-ness that occupied other people. Now he had shown that he was ready to find out precisely what that life was.
6
Varney made his reservations so that his flight to the West Coast left the next afternoon. He would land at night. There was no reason to wait even one extra day and give Prescott time to dream up some kind of trap. Varney could use the flying time to sleep and plan.
This, he had decided, must be a virtuoso performance. Its purpose was not practical but psychological. He had listened to Prescott’s laconic, skeptical tone, and it had given him a strong urge to wake Prescott up. Prescott had been overconfident, absolutely certain that he could assume Varney was no threat, although he knew nothing about him. It was time to teach Prescott something about Varney, to let him know that this time he had made a fatal miscalculation.
Varney rented a car at the airport, then drove north past the center of the city into the San Fernando Valley. He had to assume that Prescott would have called the L.A. police as soon as he had hung up, and that by now they were all on edge and preparing to be attacked. He was still in their jurisdiction but far from Prescott’s office, and he was willing to bet that the police here had taken the warning less seriously. All cops patrolling this late at night were tense, suspicious, on guard. They already seemed to have adrenaline trickling into their veins at a steady pace before anything happened, because they were never at ease. He had decided that the place to do his hunting was in the suburbs, where the people were richer and the cops weren’t treated like an occupying army. They would be calmer, and easier to approach.
He had decided that a good place to find what he wanted was a hospital, so he went to Valley Presbyterian because it was the biggest one he knew of in the area. He parked his car a few blocks away on a quiet residential street and walked back. He walked the circuit of the hospital to study the entrances, exits, and parking lots carefully. Then he extended his walk around once more to stop near the emergency room. He found a concrete bench in a little niche that people seemed to use as a smoking area, sat down, and watched.
He had sat for only a half hour in the dark before he saw what he had been waiting for. The police car came up the driveway toward the emergency-room entrance quickly, but without flashing lights. There were two cops in the front seat, the smaller one behind the wheel. The car coasted smoothly up to the curb in front of the emergency-room entrance and stopped. Both front doors swung open, and the cops got out.
The one on the far side of the car was a big man who immediately opened the back door on his side, leaned in, and pulled out a thin passenger who seemed to think there was still a roof over his head. Even after he had taken two unsteady steps away from the car he was still bent over, as though he didn’t want to bump his head. The cop said something to his partner and ushered his charge toward the double doors. The person was not handcuffed, but seemed not to be entirely free, either. He straightened and became recognizable as a teenaged boy in a T-shirt that had been stretched out of shape, and he had a trickle of blood running from his hairline down the side of his temple to his neck. He had to be a victim, Varney decided: a loser.
The shorter cop had come around the front of the car to help but had found nothing to do, and now returned and approached the open door on the driver’s side. Varney could see that this one was a woman. Her dark hair was tied back in a tight bun, and the body armor under her shirt made her look rectangular. The heavy, blunt-toed black shoes she wore seemed calculated to make her walk like a man. She got into the car quickly, restarted the engine, and drove it around the building to a reserved space by the wall at the edge of the driveway.
Varney was up and moving into the darkness along the wall as soon as she started the car. He reached the spot he wanted while the car was still moving, then crouched and froze. He was twenty feet from the driver’s door, behind a large electrical-circuit box in the shrubbery by the wall. He listened for her footsteps as she hurried along the driveway by the dark wall to jo
in her partner in the emergency room. She came along quickly, almost trotting, and he knew from the sound that he had chosen the right place to hunt. She was busy, her brain was fully occupied, and she was not feeling any sense that she could be threatened. She hurried past his hiding place, but he didn’t move until she was two paces beyond him and her peripheral vision would not help her.
He sprang. His right hand delivered a blow to the side of her head to stun her, then moved smoothly to her wrist so she could not reach the big, blocky grip of the pistol in its holster. His left forearm was around her throat. He crushed the trachea and let his weight drag her down, then quickly broke her neck. He pulled her pistol out and stuck it into his belt at the back, then lifted her body and propped it in the driver’s seat of the car with the feet out on the ground and the steering wheel holding her up as though she were sitting there listening to the police radio. He searched the leather cases on her belt for useful tools. He found a set of handcuffs and a short, broad-bladed knife for cutting seat belts to remove accident victims from cars.