by Thomas Perry
Prescott knew that he needed to appear careful and methodical. The man owned a business, after all, and since the business involved handing a firearm and ammunition to a total stranger and telling him to fire at will, he was understandably anxious. Prescott sent a new target down the wire, emptied the pistol of its spent casings, set them on the shelf neatly, held the weapon so the muzzle was low and downrange, then reloaded and fired his second six into the bull’s-eye. He cleared the pistol again, brought the target back, and took his time getting around to unclipping it, so the owner could satisfy his curiosity. Prescott was getting used to the feel of the gun, so this time the pattern was even tighter. He kept at it, showing the man that he was a consistent, practiced, competent marksman, and that he was never careless. That part was important.
When he had finished, he brought the gun up with the cylinder open, and set it on the counter. The man had warmed up considerably. “You’re a hell of a shot.”
Prescott said, “Shooting relaxes me. I spend a lot of time on the road, though, so it’s hard to keep my hand in. When I’m away from home I try to keep a list of places where I can fire a few rounds.”
“You come through here often?”
“Never have before, but I expect to be in the neighborhood for a month or two. I’m a civil engineer, and there’s a project going up near Philadelphia that I have to keep an eye on.” He paused. “Maybe you can help me. I live in California and I don’t travel with my own firearms. You know where I can pick up a gun around here?”
“What are you looking for?”
“What I’d like would be a good used nine-millimeter. I’ve been looking for a couple of days, but haven’t seen anything I liked. Something like a Beretta Model 92. Maybe a Glock or a SIG if one turned up.”
The man looked disappointed. “You know, I sold a Model 92 about two months ago.” He seemed to feel uncomfortable, and said, “I wasn’t the one that sold it, really. It’s just that when somebody has something to sell, they usually tell me, and I mention it to the people who come in and ask.”
“I hope you get a commission,” said Prescott. “It’s only fair.”
The man looked down slyly. “Well, yeah. Usually I get ten percent.”
“I’d like something right away, so if you hear of anything, keep me in mind.” He started to go, then said, “In fact, I’ll tell you what. I’ll be in the neighborhood for a while. If you find something for me today, I’ll pay you twenty percent above the sale price, and what you get from the seller is between you and him.”
The man looked pleased. He held out his hand. “I’m Dave Durbin. What’s your name?”
Prescott said, “I’m Mike. Michael Kennison.”
“I’m going to put in a call to the gunsmith who maintains our weapons for us. He refurbishes used guns and resells them. If you’ll hang around for a few minutes, I’ll find out what he’s got right now.” He retreated behind the counter with the Plexiglas window and went to his desk.
Prescott could hear him on the telephone between the rounds fired on the range. Durbin held his hand over his free ear and spoke loudly. “He’s not just the average customer, he’s a real shooter . . . and he’s a friend of mine, so I’d like to find something good for him. Nine. He wants something like a Beretta or a SIG. Got anything?” In a moment he hung up and beamed as he came to the window. “He’s just down the road, so he’ll bring a couple of things in here for you to look at.”
Prescott smiled. “Well, that’s great. Thank you very much.”
Durbin seemed to notice the revolver on the counter. “Hell, this thing’s got to be cleaned anyway. Why don’t you go back and shoot until he gets here? I’ll call you.”
Prescott bought another box of bullets and went back to the range. Fifteen minutes later, as he was unclipping a target from the pulley, he turned and saw Durbin with another man, knocking on the Plexiglas to get his attention. He lifted his ear protector and shouted, “I’ll be right out.”
He carefully unloaded his pistol and took it out into the open space behind the range. The man with Durbin was a tall fat man in his sixties with white hair in a crew cut. He was holding a hard-sided suitcase.
“This is Billy,” Durbin said. “And this is Mike. Why don’t you come on into the office?”
The area behind the glass was more like a booth than an office, but it had a desk. Prescott and Billy went in, and it was slightly quieter there, with an extra layer of Plexiglas separating them from the range. Prescott began to understand Billy after a few minutes with him. He was a retired machinist who worked on guns as a hobby. The reason he had driven here was that he wasn’t interested in making a deal for a gun with a total stranger unless he was in the presence of third and fourth parties who were also armed. He opened his suitcase on the desk, and Prescott could see pistols arranged neatly on a stenciled cutout foam rubber pad in rows of three.
Prescott looked respectfully at the guns. He spotted a Beretta Cougar in a space that didn’t quite fit it. He said to Billy, “May I?”
Billy nodded, and Prescott lifted it and looked closely at it. The slide was worn, the barrel burned out from too many rounds. He set it back without comment, but Billy said, “Dave told me you wanted a Beretta, and that’s the only one I have now. I can work it over for you, get a new barrel, maybe reblue the slide. But that Walther over here is good, and you can have that right away. It’s a P99, a year old. Been fired maybe once, and the woman who owned it didn’t like it. Little bitty thing—she liked the name because of James Bond, but when she fired it, she found it a little hot for her. I traded her a nice .38 Special and a hundred bucks.”
“What are you asking?”
Billy acted as though he had never considered the question before. He thought, calculated, estimated. “Four hundred would probably do it.”
Prescott examined the weapon, and saw that Billy was only exaggerating the gun’s condition slightly. He transferred it to his left hand and held out his right to shake with Billy. Billy started to take it, then held back. “I’m not actually a licensed dealer, so I don’t have no papers for you. I’ve got to trust you not to get in trouble with it.”
“I’ll try not to,” said Prescott, smiling. He opened his wallet, took out four hundred-dollar bills, and handed them to Billy, who stared at them for a moment, folded them, and put them under the foam rubber in his carrying case. Prescott chatted for a few more minutes, then said, “Well, it’s time for me to get back to Philadelphia. Thanks again.” As he left, Durbin escorted him to the parking lot. Prescott handed him a hundred-dollar bill. “This is for your trouble, Dave.” In another minute he was on the road again. He drove northwest as far as Binghamton, New York, then turned in his rental car and rented another with New York plates.
He continued west, assessing his progress. He had his gun, a high-end nine-millimeter that had been gone over carefully by a gunsmith, cleaned, oiled, and in perfect working order. It was probably still registered to its first owner. Billy might very well have been lying about the woman who had only fired it once, but it didn’t matter. No attempt to trace it would lead to Roy Prescott. If an investigator ever traced it far enough to force Billy to admit he had sold it illegally, he could only say he had sold it to a man named Mike Kennison who had told a story about a construction project in Philadelphia.
Prescott had a clean, fast rental car with 250 miles on its odometer. He had his pictures, so good that they were probably better than photographs. He supposed that he should be feeling amazed at how easily this was going. But there was something about the hunt this time that was a bit different, and it disturbed him.
At each of these stops, he had devoted himself to studying the people around him, and found that his old ability to figure out what he needed to know had sharpened and expanded. He knew more about them than he had ever known about the people he had used and left before. He could tell things about them from the way they held their heads or walked or moved their hands. He looked into their faces and rea
d things: stupid misconceptions that they stubbornly clung to in the face of all evidence, bad decisions they had made years ago and still thought about sometimes and regretted. He sensed the things they worried about late at night, and he saw the courage and will it took when they woke up each morning to take up the weight of their lives again.
No, he decided, knowing wasn’t the odd thing about this trip. He had always been good at analyzing people instantly because his life sometimes depended on it. He had been like a dog sniffing for danger and always smelling more subtle things in the process, noting them and pushing them aside to think of things that would help him survive. What was different now was that he was interested. The isolated qualities he had noticed had grown into parts of stories. People were poor, lonely creatures who had come into the world unready and helpless, and by adulthood had only partly managed to change that, and by the time they’d made much progress, they had already started to die. That was what was odd, that feeling.
He supposed that the change had come from spending too much time visiting the mind of Cara Lee Satterfield. He had stared so hard at her paintings for so many hours that he had begun to see what she was actually doing when she made a portrait of a person. What she did was an abbreviated version of what old portrait painters had done. In old paintings, a man would be standing in the foreground, staring at the painter, and at his feet and behind him and beside him in artistic arrangement would be the symbols of his trade—orb and scepter, guns and swords, maybe astrolabes and maps, as though those were the contents of his mind. A woman might have children, lapdogs, flowers, fans, pens and paper. Somehow Cara Lee Satterfield had managed to show what her model had in his mind without the objects. It was as though she had painted the whole portrait—the props, the face, the expression in the eyes, the subtle curl of the lip—and then painted over the objects that had inspired and stimulated the face to assume that habitual pose.
What worried Prescott was the eerie feeling that the sudden expansion of his receptivity was beginning to give him. It could be a sign that he was now reaching a new level of perception that was going to make him harder to beat. But it could be what people felt after they’d had a premonition. They took a long, quiet look around them, appearing to an observer as though they were counting the leaves on the trees, memorizing the exact blue of the sky, saying good-bye to the world.
13
Varney had very carefully, cautiously made the trip to Buffalo in stages. His first step had been to buy a set of clothes that didn’t smell like seawater and gasoline. He didn’t try to get on a big transcontinental airliner like the one he had taken west, because he was intensely aware of what Prescott must be thinking. As soon as Prescott had gotten his message about the people at the hotel in Marina del Rey, he would have gotten into his car again and driven to Los Angeles International Airport. He might think that Varney had gotten out right away, gotten onto a plane and left town, but Prescott had undoubtedly been around long enough to know that things were hardly ever that simple. Chasing a man down often just involved following as well as you could and waiting for something to go wrong for him.
Varney had driven his rental car to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, gotten on a plane belonging to an airline he had never heard of that seated about twenty-five passengers, and flown to Las Vegas. From there, he had flown to Toronto, taken a bus to Niagara Falls, walked across the Rainbow Bridge into the United States, and then taken a cab south to Buffalo.
He had arrived late at night. The house was east of Delaware Avenue, off Hertel Avenue in a neighborhood that was full of big nineteenth-century two-story houses with wooden porches and little squares of front lawn that a person could just about cover with a blanket. Someone had told him once that it had been part of the era when they’d been built: people were just moving off farms and into towns, and the epitome of being modern and prosperous was to be able to walk out the door onto a pavement in as few steps as possible without interference from things that grew in mud.
All of the houses had long ago been broken up into apartments and rented to students and young families. He had spent a couple of days and nights in the neighborhood before he had given it his approval. About half the men he saw on the street were not easy to distinguish at first glance from himself. The bars in the area were mostly old neighborhood taverns that lived off their kitchens. There were two newer establishments that sold draft beer to students, but they didn’t have the sort of music or live entertainment that attracted unruly crowds and the police cars that attended them.
He had bought the house and moved into it without changing the provisions the previous owners had made to split it into an upper apartment and a lower. The lower floor had furniture in it from the last tenant, so he kept it and put timers on the lights to make it look occupied, and to avoid walking into a darkened entry and finding someone waiting. He lived on the upper floor. It had a side entrance with its own staircase, but he had bolted it off so that opening it from the inside required a key, and opening it from the outside was difficult enough to be effectively impossible without causing visible damage.
Varney approached his house on foot and in concentric circles. He studied the cars parked in the neighborhood, then the buildings that were close enough to offer a good view of his windows. This took a bit of time and patience, because nearly all of the houses were rentals, and even in a short period away, a tenant might have been replaced. He connected parked cars with apartments, looked for dog bowls or toys left out, or familiar curtains, lampshades, framed pictures that were visible from the street. The last place he studied was his own.
He had no theory on how Prescott might have gone about finding his real address this quickly, but that did not convince him that it would be impossible. Prescott was the enemy, and the enemy always had the resources of authorities at his disposal. It was the nature of authorities to be shadowy, potentially numberless, and possessed of capabilities that were most worrisome because they were unknown. Authorities didn’t necessarily advertise everything they could do. In Varney’s mind, the authorities did not merely include police agencies but also everyone else who imposed rules: the phone company, the credit card companies, the post office, the airlines.
Varney watched his house patiently as the lights went on and off, the television sets he had tuned to particular stations cast their bluish glow on the upstairs and downstairs ceilings. After he had seen enough, he entered: nothing had been changed, nothing touched since he had left.
Varney waited indoors through the first day, and then another, a gun always within easy reach. He watched from the upper windows of his house, trying to see into each car that passed, to stare at the face of each pedestrian. He slept on a mattress on the floor of the upstairs kitchen beside the door, so he would hear anyone mounting the staircase.
After three days, Varney began to feel assured that Prescott had not used some esoteric method to locate him. Varney had simply been alarmed by the miserable way things had worked out in Los Angeles. He was now convinced that he had let his imagination go too far: he didn’t know the way Prescott could find the address, because there was no way.
He concentrated on analyzing his defeat. He had been overconfident about his ability to fly into a distant city, pop the target, and vanish, all within a few hours. He had done it so many times before that it had come to seem routine, then obligatory. He had not taken into account the fact that this target was more dangerous than usual, and that by killing the two cops, Varney had announced to him that he was on the way. Prescott had been ready for him.
He consoled himself with the thought that the whole episode could be considered less than a defeat. Prescott was supposed to be the best, the invincible hunter, after all, and Varney had walked into his office under his nose, taken out the two armed security guards, and walked out again. He wasn’t sure how he had failed to erase the videotape that showed his rental car in the parking garage, but it had been a new building with a complicated system. When Prescott
had tried to ambush him at the motel, Varney had left him standing around like a moron. The more Varney thought about it, the more certain he was. The mistakes he had made had not been so shameful. The hours he had spent shivering in the water under the dock were his own secret. Prescott didn’t know how he had escaped: he had vanished like a ghost. Varney had won: he had made Prescott look sick. It was time to forget about Prescott and go back to his regular life.
The next morning, Varney went to the grocery store to buy fresh food, then walked to breakfast at Sterling’s Diner. He bought the Buffalo News and carried it under his arm until he got to his booth, taking pride in each act of normalcy as he completed it. Going after Prescott had just been a momentary lapse in judgment, that was all.
He resumed his usual warm-weather routine. He ran in Delaware Park for an hour, and ended the run at the gym. He had spent two days doing very little for his body, so he decided to make this a full workout day. In a few days he would probably be working again, but a few days could easily stretch into months. Discipline was the reason for his success. He kept himself alert, busy, and in training during the slow periods.
He ran the circuit of the park around the small lake, past the marble columns at the back of the History Museum, down near the old pavilion by the shore, along Delaware Avenue, then beside the high, spike-tipped brick wall around the zoo.
Sometimes he could hear the animals on the other side of the wall, but he could always smell them. There was a thick, acrid barnyard smell that made him veer outward a bit. There were always a couple of soccer games on the flats, and he looked without slowing down. The white-and-black ball looked big and bright on the deep green lawns. While Varney was running each day, he often thought of the park as his. That was why he usually didn’t run in the early morning or the evening. He didn’t like it when other people were jogging too. The people who were doing other things were simply sights, put there to amuse him, but the joggers tended to follow him—even to try, with futile gasping breaths, to run with him for a stretch.