by Thomas Perry
If that way was blocked, there was a big high school a few blocks down Magnolia. Varney was sure he could move through a big campus like that without being an obvious outsider. He had learned a long time ago that it was easy to take advantage of people’s reluctance to stop a stranger and ask rude questions. It took them a long time to convince themselves that somebody should, then that nobody else would, and then to check around them to be sure they would be safe if the answer turned out to be unpleasant. By then he could be around the next corner and out the door on the other side of the building. He considered for a moment. Yes, the high school would be best. After all the news about shootings in schools, no cop would see a high school as a place a man like Varney would try to hide: it was too foolish.
Varney parked and went into the library. There was a sign beside the computers explaining the rules for use. He had to go to the reference desk to give his name, and that would only get him a half hour of computer time. He sighed, then walked off between two shelves of books to pretend to browse while he studied the reference desk and thought about unseen risks. He could perceive none. There was nobody else using the computers at the moment: the kids were in school, and everyone else seemed to be looking at books. He walked up to the desk, showed a bored librarian his stolen California driver’s license, and wrote the owner’s name on a sheet of paper. Two minutes later, Varney was on the Internet, reading an article about Prescott.
He sat in the old, cool building, half aware of the chattering on the other end of the room near the circulation desk. He knew it would suddenly go quiet if he had a problem. He read the article again. He had chosen the Los Angeles Times because it was Prescott’s hometown paper, and because it was still one of the big, fat papers that seemed to report on everything. Most of the papers in the country had shriveled over the years to tabloid size, and carried more short wire-service clips and syndicated columns than local news.
The title was “Five-Year Search Comes to an End.” It was about Prescott going after some guy named Spinoza who had been selling cocaine out of a house somewhere in L.A. County: Hawaiian Gardens? How the hell could they call a town that? The cops had raided the house, but the guy had already gotten out. He’d shot three little boys on the street nearby, because he knew three kids with holes in them would distract the cops. He had escaped and used his connections with his suppliers to hide in Mexico.
The reporter scored a lot of points against the L.A. police. Instead of getting the cooperation of the Mexican authorities, they had kept looking in Spinoza’s old L.A. haunts. Then the crush of an additional thousand murders a year moved the three little boys’ case into a kind of limbo: it was solved, just not closed. It was at that point that the neighborhood began collecting money and calling it the Three Boys Fund. By the fourth anniversary of the deaths, and with the help of large donations from a few rich businessmen, the neighborhood had collected enough money to hire their own hunter. They had asked around and kept hearing of Roy Prescott.
Varney looked up from the screen, his eyes moving across the circulation desk, a nearby window, and the doors while he thought. Prescott had already been well known five years ago. A bunch of poor, ignorant people in an apartment complex had heard of him from more than one source, and what they’d heard had convinced them to pay him to go after Spinoza.
He skipped down to the police spokesman’s statement: “We don’t approve of citizens seeking protection for their neighborhoods by giving money to men who may or may not be honest, or competent, and who, in any case, care nothing about the best interests of the community. In this instance, the issue was not even the safety of the neighborhood. It was revenge, pure and simple. As for Mr. Prescott, the district attorney’s office is studying his actions for possible prosecution, as, I believe, are officials in Matamoros, Mexico, and Browns-ville, Texas.”
Varney scrolled back up the column. Prescott had refused to answer any questions, but the story was clear. He had gone into Mexico alone, worked his way from person to person until he had found, not Spinoza, but Spinoza’s new route for moving in and out of the United States. He had waited for Spinoza near Brownsville, Texas, then caught him in Matamoros, Mexico. The details were missing, but the essentials were there: Spinoza was dead and Prescott was not.
Varney scrolled downward through the article, then returned to the opening display. Under the caption “Also in Today’s L.A. Times” was the title “Long Hunt Ends in Matamoros.” He clicked on the words and, in a moment, saw something forming on the screen that he had not dared to hope for: a photograph. His eyes jumped to it eagerly, then squinted in frustration. It was not very clear. The article said it had been taken by an American tourist in a car in Matamoros just after the shooting of Spinoza. There was a covered body lying in the street. Three uniformed men, all dark and about the same height, were leading a lone man toward a car. He was light-haired, a head taller than they were, and lean. He was walking away, but he had turned his head slightly to the side to look down at one of the policemen, so Varney could almost see a vague profile of the face, but not quite. Looking more closely at it only made the picture dissolve into the diagonal rows of tiny dots that composed it.
Varney’s half hour was up. He went back to the reference desk to sign out, then signed in on the next computer. He found other articles. There was one in the Denver Post. Prescott had followed some guy into the mountains in the spring and hunted him all summer through the resort towns. There was one in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that said he’d gotten himself arrested so he could look for a man in a parish jail. There was one in Minneapolis where he had beaten some serial killer to death with—his bare hands? No, there was something about a crowbar.
The police reactions could all have been written by the L.A. police spokesman. They hated him. Some implied that he had butted into a high-profile case just in time to get paid some outrageous fee when the police would have solved it anyway. All of them said something disparaging about his “methods.” He used excessive force, disregarded public safety, ignored the rights of suspects, paid bribes, or made threats to informants. It was all pretty much what the average police force did, but they didn’t care for having him do it too.
Varney looked up and studied the library again, waiting for a sign that he was still safe. He watched a group of children—two boys and two girls—get dragged into the entrance by a woman who was too openly irritated to be anything but their mother. That made him relax again. If the police were outside, they might not do anything overt, but the one thing they wouldn’t do was let a bunch of extra kids in the front door.
He signed off the Internet, stood up, and walked outside. He strolled across Magnolia Boulevard to the bigger section of the park as he re-examined Prescott’s remark. When Prescott had asked him if he had done any research, he had meant that if Varney thought Prescott was going to be able to have a squad of cops doing his bidding, then Varney didn’t know anything about Prescott. Now, why would he want Varney to know that? Was it because he wanted Varney to think that killing Prescott would be easier than he had imagined? Maybe all he had wanted was to have Varney stumble across the picture of him that was impossible to make out, and feel helpless. And whatever the police thought about Prescott, they would do just about anything to get the man who had left the two dead cops in the park.
He got into his car and drove along Magnolia past the high school, but did not get onto the freeway for many blocks, until he was sure that he had not been followed. At Woodman he found another entrance ramp, drove west on the Ventura Freeway, then turned south on the San Diego Freeway. He was thinking of the way to get Prescott. Reading about him had not helped Varney find any vulnerabilities.
In those articles, Varney had read accounts of Prescott shooting about three people, killing some guy in a hand-to-hand fight, chasing another into a mountain forest where he’d had a suspicious fatal fall. Prescott had found people in seven or eight different ways in places that had little in common. Varney saw nothing in th
e stories that would tell him what Prescott was likely to do this time. He remembered that there was a man named Donald Ramirez interviewed in the Hawaiian Gardens case. Ramirez was a very common name, but Varney was pretty sure there would not be a lot of Donalds in the phone book. Maybe he would give this guy a call. If Varney pretended to be considering hiring Prescott, a satisfied customer might tell him things that had not been in the newspapers five years ago.
Varney got off the freeway at Marina del Rey and drove to his motel. It was a long, low building across the Pacific Coast Highway from the harbor, where thousands of yachts were nosed up to the docks nearly touching each other, and the masts of sailboats looked from a distance like the forest they once had been. Varney took comfort in the motel’s design. It was built in the shape of an enormous horseshoe. The outer sides of the building showed only a row of room doors leading directly to the large parking lot, with one small window for each room. The inner side of each room had a sliding glass door that led out to an inner court dominated by a heated swimming pool.
The motel was easy for him to find, because it had a high row of shrubs with big white flowers at the edge of the parking lot, and they were all in bloom. He approached the entrance to the parking lot, but he hesitated and let his car go past. There was something he did not like. Varney kept going for another block, then turned into a lot near the boat harbor and parked. He sat still for a moment, then got out.
What he had seen was a brand-new dark blue Cadillac parked at the edge of the motel lot, backed into a space. It was much farther from the building than the other cars. When he was working, Varney spent much of his time in motels, and he knew that motel guests seldom parked farther from the building than they needed to. They had to carry their own luggage in and out, and they liked to keep their cars close, in the belief that proximity discouraged car thieves. Often he saw cars stranded far out in a lot as this one was, but they were always the cars of guests who had arrived late the night before when the lot was full, and slept late in the morning while the rest of the guests checked out. This car had not been in the lot when Varney had gone out this morning.
Varney would have ignored the car, but he thought he had seen a man sitting behind the steering wheel. His speed and the flowering shrubs along the sidewalk had blurred and partially obscured his view. It wouldn’t hurt to walk the block to the motel and be sure. He turned away from the harbor onto the next street, then walked toward the side of the motel next to the parking lot.
He came around the building where he could see the man in the car without being seen. The man was tall, with a long left forearm resting on the top of the car door. His head had that same look that Coleman’s had once had, the sandy hair cut close at the sides with a bit more at the top combed straight back, high cheekbones, and a slight squint of the eyes in the sunlight. He compared the man with the profile he had seen in the hazy newspaper picture from the old case in Mexico. Prescott had let Varney see that dim, unfocused picture of him walking away as a taunt, just another attempt to unnerve him. But it had confirmed Varney’s sense of Prescott’s size and body type.
This was Prescott. It had to be. He was parked so the car was aimed at the door of Varney’s room. If he chose, he could wait until Varney had driven in and gone into his room, then pull the car across the lot entrance to block the way out. If Varney saw him and ran, he could tromp on the gas and run him down.
Varney turned and walked along the side of the building farthest from the parking lot. There was only one way this could have happened. Prescott had somehow gotten the license number of the rental car last night, used it to get the number of Varney’s credit card, and found the motel name through a credit check. Varney gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. He had been stupid to park in the underground garage at Prescott’s building. He had planned that when he was at the controls in the lobby, he would erase all the surveillance tapes. He must have missed one for a camera recording the license numbers at the garage entrance. At the time, he had figured Prescott was just a self-promoting blowhard, like the professor on television. Varney had planned to fly here, terrorize him with the deaths of the cops, then come for him and disappear, all in a day. He had been careless.
Varney hesitated. If Prescott had that kind of lead, what was he doing here? He could have given Varney to the police. Varney remembered the newspaper articles. They had been printed over a period of ten or twelve years in different states. There must have been dozens of times when Prescott had collected enough information to turn somebody over to the police. But it didn’t appear that he had ever done that. He always wanted to make the kill himself.
Varney turned the corner of the building, considering what he would lose if he just kept walking: his suitcase contained some clothes and personal items that Prescott might be able to use in some way. There would be hair from his brush, fingerprints on the latches. He had left his plane ticket in the suitcase. He had thrown away the stub of the ticket he had used to get here, but the return ticket was still in the suitcase. He had hidden it in a slit he had made in the lining. A thief probably wouldn’t find it, but he could not leave the suitcase for a man like Prescott.
He wanted to kill him. Prescott was sitting in that car in a shady spot, probably listening to the radio and patiently, contentedly staring at the door of Varney’s room. Varney tried to formulate a strategy. He had no gun. But he could come through the bushes behind Prescott’s car, be at the open window in a second, try to disable Prescott’s left arm and maybe get a hand to his temple, eyes, or throat. But it was midday, and the car was in the open, far from any others. Prescott might see him coming. Prescott wasn’t just some guy sitting in a car, either. He was here in the first place because he was expecting Varney, and he undoubtedly had a gun he could put his right hand on in a second.
Varney was not going to try it. He would have to be satisfied with simply getting out clean. He entered the motel through the back of the lobby on the other side of the building, then walked along the side of the pool in the interior courtyard. He stopped to feel the water, then moved on until he came to his room. He knew the sliding glass door was locked, because he had locked it himself. But the lock was a simple mechanism. The latch was a hook that went over a little bar in the frame. By the time he got to it, he already had his thin plastic phone calling card out of his wallet. He stepped close to lean against the edge of the door, inserted the card between the frame and the window, and pulled the card up. The latch came with it, and he was inside.
Varney closed the drapes, went to the closet, lifted his suitcase, and checked to be sure it was still locked. Then he snatched a damp towel from the bathroom floor, wiped off all the knobs and surfaces he might have touched, slipped out the sliding door to the courtyard, and walked along the pool to the lobby. He stopped at the desk to accept and sign the bill that had been charged to his card, and to turn in his key. He had taken a risk, then compounded it by taking the extra time to clean his room and leave the right way, but he judged that it would give him peace of mind later. The man at the desk had to go into a back room to get the paperwork. Varney could see filing cabinets and the corner of a desk through the door. He saw the man quickly leafing through a card file as he spoke to someone in the back room. Then he found the registration card and the credit card slip and returned. Varney heard another door open and close.
As Varney signed and pushed his key across the counter, he became aware of a rattling noise outside, but dismissed it. There was nothing Prescott would do that made a sound like that. The rattle grew louder, now and then punctuated by a bump-bump. It was just a maid pushing her cart along the side of the building. His heart sped up. The maid! That’s what the clerk had been doing in the back room—sending the maid to make up his room for the next customer. Prescott would see her go in. He took his slip and picked up his suitcase. As soon as Prescott saw where the maid was going, he would come straight to this desk to learn when Varney had left. Varney had to do something, and as each second p
assed, choices went with it. He turned and moved to the rear door, went out on the courtyard side, and walked back along the pool to the room he had just vacated. As he reached the sliding glass door, he saw the maid grab the two plastic rods to whisk open the curtains to get more light to work.
Varney smiled at her, quickly opened the sliding door, and slipped in past her.
“Sir?” she said, a little frightened. “Forget something?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I just want to take a quick look.” He stayed in the shadows near the closet and stared out past the cart she had used to prop open the door. He could see the parking lot, but his mind stumbled. The dark blue Cadillac was still there. How could Prescott not have seen the maid? But then he saw that the head behind the wheel was gone. Prescott was out of the car.
Varney moved to the side of the door. Prescott wasn’t coming to the room on foot. The maid was pretending not to watch Varney, but he could see that her head was held in a stiff-necked angle to keep him in her peripheral vision. He took out his wallet and handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he muttered. “Might as well go out this way.”
She didn’t answer, but as she watched him sidestep past her cart and out the door she seemed relieved.
Varney looked up and down the building in both directions, then began to walk quickly toward Prescott’s car. The suitcase was small, but he hated the weight and imbalance it forced on him, and the visibility of it. If he could ditch it somewhere, he would be just a man walking down the street. With it, people were going to see him, remember him, wonder if he was on foot with a suitcase because he was skipping out on a hotel bill, or if he was a thief. He couldn’t leave it, because Prescott might find it and use what was in it to hunt him. As soon as he was away from here, he would try to find a place to open it and at least remove the plane ticket.