by Thomas Perry
Varney pushed the desk toward the corner of the room. He bent at the knees, tipped it up on its end, and prepared to climb up on it to reach the ceiling, then stopped. Prescott had selected this place. He had chosen everything in it, and modified whatever wasn’t suited to his purpose. Prescott was cunning, calculating in a way that nobody Varney had ever met had been. He was perfectly capable of seeing that the desk could be tipped up on its end and used to climb to the ceiling.
Varney looked around him. Prescott had made sure the room had four brick walls. Varney could tell by the feel of the floor under his feet that the addition had been built on a concrete slab. Could Prescott have neglected the roof? He had probably had a layer of corrugated steel laid in, covered with tar paper and asphalt. He had thought of everything else. What had Prescott not known?
Varney looked down at the floor. The only thing that Prescott had not known was what Varney would do, what Varney would bring with him. Varney tipped the desk again and brought it back down.
He stood on it to reach the back window, then used his knife to loosen the screws in the plywood that covered the glass. He removed the square, opened the window, and examined the steel bars. He could tell by feel that the bars were in a frame anchored in the brick by four bolts at the corners.
He lifted his two pipe bombs from the floor and set one in the frame at each of the two lower corners outside under the windowsill. He opened his backpack and took out the third pipe charge he had brought but not installed, and used duct tape to secure it to the frame at the third bolt. Then he set himself to rewiring the three bombs in three parallel circuits, so the electrical current would reach all three at the same instant. He spliced the three entry wires and the three exit wires into two little twists. He took the insulated cord from the answering machine, cut it, stripped an inch of it, separated the two wires, and spliced one to each of his two twists.
Varney brought the window down, leaving only enough space for his cord. He used the rest of his duct tape to cover the glass, then screwed the plywood back over the window. He pushed the desk into the rear corner of the room near the electrical outlet, and crawled under it with his backpack. He used his knife to cut two small squares of cloth from the bottom of his shirt, rolled them into balls, and stuck them into his ears, took off his jacket and wound it around his head so it covered his face, ears, and neck. He curled into a ball under the desk and felt for the plastic plate of the electrical outlet. He opened his mouth to keep his eardrums from blowing out, took three deep breaths to calm himself, then inserted the plug.
The noise was so loud the air seemed to turn solid. The concrete foundation under him jumped to slap against his body as though he had fallen. He was aware that the big, heavy metal desk hopped above him and came down askew. The hand that he had extended to insert the plug had been punched aside so hard it tingled.
Varney lay still. He felt as though he had been injured in some way, jolted like a person in a high-speed crash, shaken by an impact so that his joints were strained and everything inside him had been shaken. It was silent. He tested his muscles and found he was able to stir, and when he did, his presence of mind gathered itself out of fragments and returned. He remembered he was in a hurry. Time was passing. He slowly crawled out from inside the desk and pulled the jacket off his face.
The room was dark, the air so thick he could barely breathe. He held the jacket over his nose and mouth and found his flashlight with his knee. He turned it on. The air was a cloud of plaster dust, but he could see that up and to the side, the plywood had been blown inward off the window. About half of the acoustic tiles in the ceiling had been knocked out of their metal frame, and the others were tilted, the frame still swinging on its wires.
He moved to the window, and his heart stopped. The bars were still there. He moved closer. They weren’t at the right angle. He reached out and gave the nearest bar a push, but it burned his hand. “Shit!” he hissed, drawing his hand back and sticking it in his mouth. But he had seen the bars move. He pushed the desk the couple of feet to the side so that it was under the window. He lay on its surface and kicked at the bars with his feet. They moved, then jerked out farther. He kicked again and again, until the lower bolts were out of the brick. He rolled, stood on the desk, used his backpack to brush the broken glass off the sill, then used it to hold the bars away from the wall. He eased himself onto the small window.
He stopped for a moment to shine his flashlight around the inside of the office to be sure he had left nothing. Then he lowered himself to the ground, trotted up the dark street for a half block, cut into the backyard of a house to reach the next street. He heard the faint, faraway sound of sirens. Lights were going on in houses, the glows of lamps falling in squares on the spaces of darkness where he had wanted to walk, so he dodged them, ducking low and stepping quickly along the walls. He broke into a run. He was out of the box. He could breathe the soft, cool air of night.
15
Buffalo was not a huge town. Whenever Prescott had asked somebody how to get to his next stop, the person would say, “It’s about fifteen minutes away.” In Los Angeles they would usually say, “It’s about an hour from here,” and they would mean on the freeway, if traffic was moving. Earlier today, he had sometimes found himself in sluggish spots, but not like the ones at home. By evening the lines of cars had thinned out, and the fifteen-minute drives could be done in ten.
He had made twenty-two stops before it got to be too late in the evening to go on. He had made a list of the places where this particular killer probably spent time. There were only seven gyms in the area that would have appealed to this man. Those were the ones that were fairly new and spacious, had huge numbers of people coming in each day, and catered to the twenty-to-thirty crowd. The small, hard-core places that were in tiny, dark buildings and smelled of ancient sweat would not have seemed safe to this man: his best defense was protective coloration. The old iron works where men turned themselves into something like small steers would have been too intimate for him. But Prescott was sure that this killer was in the habit of going somewhere to work out, so he had put pictures in every gym where nobody stopped him.
Prescott believed that this man also spent some time shooting. He was too accurate not to be getting regular practice. Prescott had found only four ranges in the area where people were allowed to shoot handguns, and all were private clubs. None of them seemed to Prescott to fit his image of the man. Two of the clubs were meeting places for men cradling Purdy shotguns over their forearms and wearing sport coats with suede padding patches at the right shoulders. The other two were a bit more plebeian, but both seemed to consist of older men biding their time until hunting season—not practicing, exactly, but rehearsing.
Prescott was not hopeful about the gun clubs. They didn’t feel like places that would attract this killer. But men engaged in a pastime sometimes saw others engaged in the same pastime without socializing, so he knew the clubs were not a waste of time. He had left his pictures and moved on. He had tried a few gun shops, but he had not felt hopeful about those, either. Nobody who engaged in shooting sports wanted to be reminded that guns were used to kill people. The topic was depressing, and the shopkeepers were not enthusiastic, because it might put a damper on sales. But Prescott had kept at it until he had hit all the larger stores.
All that had to happen was that the killer come along and see his own picture, so any place might work. He put a few pictures up near big shopping malls. Then he drove back toward his new office. It would be one more day before the place was exactly as he wanted it, but he had begun posting the pictures as soon as the trap was strong enough to hold a man.
It was late when he returned to the spot where he had planned to park while he watched his office, but when he reached Cumberland Avenue, he could tell that he had arrived too late. There was a crowd of people in sweatshirts and T-shirts, and even pajamas and bathrobes, all gathered in the street and staring toward his building.
He could see
four police cars, two of them with flashing light bars above their roofs, alternately turning his building red and blue; two that were dark; a fire truck; and an ambulance. He pulled his car to the curb and stared through the windshield. He forced himself to breathe normally. He hoped there wasn’t another body, some innocent bystander who happened to be in this man’s way at the wrong time. He hoped it was . . . He didn’t finish the thought. The ambulance doors weren’t open, and it wasn’t in a hurry to get moving, so either there was nobody in it, or the occupant was dead.
He got out of his car and walked up the street toward the low building. As he came closer he could see the police officers milling around in front, on the sidewalk and the street, but there seemed to be more of them in the back. He came to the corner, and started down toward the rear of the building. He could see the yellow POLICE LINE tape blocking the entrance to the little parking lot, and now he could see a big panel truck. He slowly, patiently made his way through the crowd to the police tape, saying over and over, “Excuse me, that’s my building. Excuse me, that’s my office.” People parted, not so much to make room as to spin their bodies to the side so their heads could turn enough to see him. When he reached the tape, he took out his wallet, opened it, and waved it at the nearest cop.
The cop was a tall black detective who had been giving orders to a couple of uniformed officers at the edge of the parking lot. The detective’s eyebrows went up as he looked at Prescott, and Prescott watched him decide that whatever this man meant by waving his wallet around, it had better be pertinent.
“Did you want something, sir?” The controlled tone was a warning to Prescott.
“Yes, officer. My name is Prescott. I’m the one who is renting that space on the end, there.”
The detective’s eyes followed Prescott’s gesture to the building. He reached down and pulled up the yellow tape so Prescott could step under it. “We’ve been looking for you.” He led Prescott into the lot, and Prescott saw the rear window. The bars had been torn out of the wall, but not as though they had been pulled. Bricks around the window were chipped and cracked apart. Above and below the window, there were big, fan-shaped marks that were part black carbon, and part gouges and nicks.
“What kind of bomb was it?” he asked.
The detective glared at him sharply. “What kind were you expecting?” He led Prescott around the building to the front. “This is Mr. Prescott,” he said to the two uniformed cops loitering beside a patrol car. “Let them know we’ve got him.”
The two cops quickly and expertly whirled Prescott around and began to frisk him.
He said evenly, “I’m not carrying anything dangerous.”
The cops finished patting him down, then one of them conferred in a whisper with the detective, and returned. He didn’t handcuff Prescott, just opened the door to the back and said, “Have a seat.”
Prescott ducked down to sit, and the side window just ahead of him shattered, showering the inside of the car with bits of flying glass. The report of the rifle reached Prescott a half breath later. He was already curled into a crouch. He ducked to the pavement and rolled as the next three shots punched through the door of the police car. The two cops scattered, one to the rear of the car and the other to the front, where they knelt, drew sidearms, and aimed uselessly into the darkness, their heads swiveling to find the target.
Prescott’s mind carried several thoughts at once: The bullets had not exited through the opposite window, so the angle meant the killer was high. Prescott’s roll was a practiced move, and he knew that it had taken him much farther from the car than the killer would anticipate. The old sniper’s motto burned in his brain: “If you run, you’ll just die tired.” He had to get out of sight.
He came up from his shoulder roll already leaping forward, because the shooter would already have adjusted the elevation of his rifle for the next shot. Prescott dived at an angle to the left, and the shot he’d known was coming pounded into the sidewalk to his right, throwing chips and powdered concrete into the air. Prescott saw the open door of his office and scrambled into it as the next shot pierced the carpet at his feet. He moved to the left, and three more shots smacked the thick bullet-proof glass of the front window and ricocheted into the sidewalk.
He could see by the light of the empty-framed rear window that the office was a ruin. The desk was moved, the ceiling tiles were covering everything. He could see that the answering machine was on the ground, its cord severed. He heard an insistent beep. Could the telephone have survived? He looked at the phone jack and followed the cord a couple of feet before it disappeared under acoustic tile. He could not ignore the sound. He leapt across the open doorway to the most likely area, kicked a few tiles aside, and found it. He pushed down the button under the cradle, heard a dial tone, and punched 911. He spoke calmly and crisply as soon as he heard the click, cutting into the voice. “We have police officers under rifle fire at Cumberland Avenue and Maplestone Street. The sniper is up high about one block to the west, possibly on a roof. He is a white male, twenty-five to thirty years old, one hundred seventy-five pounds, dark brown hair.” He heard a female voice begin to say, “Who—” but he interrupted, trying to be sure all of it was said, if only to be preserved on the tape recording that kicked in on emergency lines. “It is essential that the units responding approach from the west, behind the sniper.”
“Yes, sir. What is your—”
He left the phone off the hook and stepped away quickly. He knew that the shooter was out there trying to change his angle enough to fire into the doorway. Prescott couldn’t close the steel door, because the first cops to arrive had battered it so much it had bent inward. He wasn’t sure whether the police officers outside were calling in contradictory messages on their radios. He couldn’t tell from their actions whether they knew that he was the only target.
He waited, looking at the ruined room, piecing together what had happened. The front wall and part of the floor had been peppered with holes. He looked more closely and saw a couple that were perfect outlines of short roofing nails, and a few that looked like jagged strips of scrap metal: a pipe bomb.
The killer had not come here, pounded in the back window, and tossed in a bomb. He had come in here to set up a booby trap, and gotten stuck. He had used his bomb to free himself. Prescott slowly overcame his shock. He had been surprised that the man could have found the place and coolly destroyed it so quickly. But he had not. The desk had not been blown into the safest corner of the room: it had been pushed there by the killer. He had used it for protection from the blast.
He thought about the man, and the hairs on the back of his neck began to rise. The man had fallen for the trap, just as Prescott had predicted. But he had not uselessly pounded on brick walls, or waited for Prescott with the gun he’d brought, or even sat in the corner and used that gun to blow his own brains out. He had placed the antipersonnel bomb he’d prepared at the only possible exit, the weakest part of the trap, maybe eight feet from his own head, and set it off. He was like a wolf caught in a trap that was willing to gnaw through its own leg to get away.
Prescott heard a sudden volley of shots, all in rapid succession, the popping sounds of handguns. He listened for the louder, sharper report of the rifle, but it did not come. One of the cops must have gotten optimistic and mistaken a shadow for the real thing. The wolf had already slipped off into the night.
16
After the first salvo, the shooting stopped, and the silence returned. Prescott sat with his back against the brick wall and waited. There would be a SWAT team searching the streets to the west, and then some kind of sweep of the neighborhood before the police would be willing to relinquish their state of readiness. Everything about these situations worked that way. It was oddly comfortable for a man used to fighting to be crouched behind a car with a gun in his hand, even when he knew that the car was not much protection from a high-velocity rifle round, and that a suspect with a good scope could pick out the place on his chin tha
t he had nicked with his razor that morning. Readiness was something that cops found hard to give up. As long as they remained in a standoff, the opportunity was prolonged: there was still a chance to see the shooter and get him. The moment the bosses gave the all-clear signal, the chance was over. The man who had shattered the public tranquility and done his best to kill somebody had gotten away with it.
The end of the emergency was also the end of clarity. A man cornered while firing a gun at police officers was finished. But if he stopped and got rid of the gun before they saw him, he entered the realm of lengthy, unpromising investigations, painstaking accumulations of evidence, formal accusations, and snide counterattacks by defense lawyers. Prescott was sorry for the cops. They felt the way he did.
He had done his best to take advantage of his chances, but each time, the same thing had gone wrong: this killer had gotten to the trap before it was fully cocked and baited, and gotten out again. This time he had done it especially convincingly, and Prescott had found himself doing shoulder rolls on a concrete sidewalk to get himself out of the crosshairs. Now he seemed doomed to sit here in his own brick-and-mortar box waiting for first light to show at the window so the cops would feel safe enough to finish arresting him.
He had gone into this with a strange, almost unnatural feeling that he understood this man. He had looked at the sights that the killer had seen, put his feet on the spaces where the killer had stepped, and discovered that he could imagine the killer’s thoughts, maybe even think them. But tonight this killer had done the unexpected, and the unexpected was something unnerving. He had done what—given the predicament he was in and what he had to work with—Prescott would have done.