by Thomas Perry
For the past twenty years or more, Prescott had hunted men. He had devised a great many deceptions and snares. Always, the purpose of them was to put Prescott and some killer in a place by themselves, where no external force could intervene.
It had been a mind-enlarging experience for some of them, a moment when they had suddenly realized that their most deeply held belief about themselves was completely wrong. Even mired in the self-hatred and guilt that had given them a certain attraction to risk, their desperation was not dependable. It had only worked in their favor while they were courting risk, playing with it, doing things that might put them into real danger but probably wouldn’t. When positive, verifiable danger arrived in the form of Roy Prescott, they found that their immunity to fear had involved a certain amount of self-deception.
Prescott was a man who would not give up, could not call for reinforcements, and would not stop coming. For him, defeat while he was still alive was not unthinkable merely because he had made a rule for himself that he wouldn’t allow it; it was unthinkable because it had not, literally, been thought. Each time he met one of these men, he had already determined that only one of them was going to be able to walk away. Tonight, Prescott was having his own moment of revelation. This killer was not as different from Prescott as the others had been. He was doing what Prescott would have done.
Suddenly Prescott stood up. The killer wasn’t gone. Prescott moved through the doorway quickly, striding along at his full height. He stepped around the building. He found the detective he had spoken to before, crouching beside a black-and-white patrol car, the microphone in his hand and his eyes on the tall trees on the far side of the next row of houses. When he saw Prescott, he looked as though he were watching a man in the process of stepping off a cliff. “Get down!”
“No need,” said Prescott. “He’s not up there anymore. He’s moved a couple of blocks down.”
“What are you talking about?”
Prescott allowed one of the other cops to lurch closer and pull him down behind the police car. He said patiently, “He’s not interested in bagging a cop tonight. He’s completely focused: the only person out here he can even see is me. He broke into my office carrying a bomb he was going to use to make a booby trap. He saw that he was locked into the office, so he used the bomb to blow off the bars on the window. Then he went out there to wait, because he knew that sooner or later, I would show up.”
“Interesting story,” said the detective. “So what?”
“So I know where he is. He saw me arrive, he took his shots, and he knows he missed. For a lot of people, that would be enough. There are a few dozen cops around, and he can’t fight all of us. But for him that won’t be enough.”
“Won’t be enough?”
“He knows I must have driven here. He saw the direction I came from when I walked up to the building. He knows that right now you’ll think he’s gone home, because it’s the only sensible thing for him to do. But he hasn’t, he’s just moved down the street a couple hundred yards.”
“What for?”
“To get a clear, unimpeded shot at my car.”
The detective’s eyes passed across the faces of two uniformed cops moving toward Prescott. “What is it that you’re trying to get us to do?”
“Make it look like the emergency is over. Send everybody out of here except a few cops who look like they’re collecting evidence and a couple to secure the scene. Then you hide two cars out of sight up on that end of the street, and two at the other end, and let me walk down to my car alone. He’ll make another try.”
The detective’s eyebrows knitted and his face acquired a fluid expression: genuine surprise that shaded off into a smirk. For a moment, he made his features assume a parody of contemplation. Finally he said, “This is a case that’s beyond my previous personal experience. I do have a certain memory for things I’ve seen and heard. One of them is that most of the time, when you get a small, nondescript building that gets its windows blown out by explosives, it turns out that it isn’t because somebody blew it up. What you find out is that it was an accident. Somebody was using the place to build bombs, and made a mistake or didn’t know how to store them.” He turned a steady gaze on Prescott. “Now, you may be telling me the truth, and your theory may even be correct. But I did notice that we had a certain amount of quiet around here until the officers started to put you into their patrol car to take you downtown. Then somebody started shooting, and what got hit was the car, which has POLICE in foot-high letters down the side of it. Now, what I’m going to do is similar to what you want. You could even call it a compromise.”
“Compromise?” said Prescott.
“Right. I’m going to move out most of these people, just as you requested. I’m going to leave a few officers to secure the scene so the forensics team can do their work. If there is some kind of maniac who is down there waiting to shoot you in your car, he’s got to stay where he can see it. I’ll have units stationed all around it, where they can move in if he shows himself. What I won’t do is let you walk down there by yourself and get into your car.”
“Then he won’t show himself.”
“You seem to be an intelligent man, too intelligent to imagine you can get in and drive off. But you also seem too intelligent to think it’s a good idea to walk in front of a rifle. It’s a contradiction.”
Prescott shook his head. “He’s down there, and this is the chance to get him. All he wants is me. The other officer already took my wallet and keys. You can hold on to them, and I can’t drive away.”
“Thank you.” He turned to the two uniformed cops. “Take him downtown.”
The two policemen began to help him to his feet. “He’s only here because it’s my place.”
The detective’s expression turned stony. “It was your place until a bomb went off in it. Now it’s a crime scene, and that makes it my place.” He said to the cops, “Take him around the back, and up the side street to the east, so you can’t be seen from the front of the building.”
Prescott sighed and shook his head wearily. He let the two cops handcuff him, then push him into the back seat of a car. As they drove off, he didn’t look back at the building again.
About five hours later, when the detective came into the interrogation room, he looked at Prescott with frank irritation. He sat down at the table across from Prescott and set a file in front of him that was already half an inch thick. “I’ve been reading about you. I also read the statement you gave Lieutenant Mussanto. Does your statement contain any inaccuracies that you know of?”
“No.”
“How about your record?”
Prescott asked, “Where did you get it?”
“It was faxed to us by the Los Angeles police.”
“Then it’s probably close enough. It was last time I looked at it.”
“You think this is the same man who killed the two police officers and the security guard in the office building in L.A.?”
“I know it is.”
“I can see why you don’t work at home.”
Prescott nodded, but said nothing.
“What is either one of you doing in Buffalo?”
“I think he’s been living here. I don’t know how long. I came to find him.”
“Looks like he saw you first.”
Prescott sat in silence, neither conceding the point nor contesting it, merely waiting.
After a time, the detective nodded, then took a deep breath and let it out. “There’s a local ordinance against remodeling your own office so a person who goes in can’t get out: a fire regulation. The fine will be a thousand bucks, and they’ll send you a summons you can pay by mail. I’ll try to get you out of that, but when firefighters get called out on something like this, they’re pissed off. It doesn’t seem fair to them to have to get shot at.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you try to get me out of it?”
The detective stared down at the
closed file folder for a moment. “What would you have done if I had let you go down to your car by yourself?”
“Tried to draw his fire,” said Prescott. “If I could survive one miss, I figured I could probably get to him. He was up high somewhere—I think closer to the car than he’d been to the office. It’s hard to hold a moving man in the field of a powerful scope. Lowering your aim when a man is running toward you fast is hard to do. The scope is mounted above the barrel, so if you try to look past it, the gun itself is in your line of vision.”
Prescott saw that the detective was listening politely, so he continued. “I picked out his problem when he shot the first time. He had a lot of rounds: at least ten in the magazine. He’s young and angry, and he let the fact that he had a semiautomatic rifle make him squander that first shot. The first recoil kicked the barrel up, and so he had to horse it down for the next one, and that gave me time to duck and roll. He’s better than that, but I think he let his anger overcome his judgment.”
“So you could get him. If you survived one miss,” the detective repeated.
“Yeah. That would let me see the muzzle flash.”
“I see,” said the detective. “If I’d known more last night, I still wouldn’t have let you do it. But I would have been sorry—curious to see what would have happened. It’s why I want to get you out of the fine. You don’t need a fine, you need to be put in a home somewhere so you don’t do this anymore.” He paused. “You can pick up your belongings at the desk.”
Prescott took a cab to his hotel and requested that his locked cash box be removed from the main safe. He brought it upstairs, opened it, and took out the gun he had bought in Pennsylvania. From now on, he would probably be needing it.
17
Varney drove the route he had run just twenty-four hours ago. Now it was a different landscape. He had chosen Buffalo a few years ago because it was a town that had everything he wanted. It was big enough to hide in, but not big enough to require a lot of work to stay alive in it. Houses were cheap and sturdy, traffic was sane. The stories about the winter weather had not been exaggerated, but it had been that way forever, so the people could hardly be taken by surprise when it happened. They had plows out beginning their routes while the snow was still three inches deep on the ground, and all the people knew how to handle their own problems. He liked being at the edge of the state, where he could slip over a border to Canada, or be in Pennsylvania in an hour and a half, even Ohio in two.
Now his refuge had been spoiled. Prescott had transformed it in a day, made it into a rotting, deteriorating place that seemed to him to be dirtier and uglier each moment he stayed in it. He wanted to leave, to never have to look at it again. It took an act of discipline for him to travel this landscape of squat, old brick buildings that housed little shops that had spent decades looking as though they were going out of business. It was a hot, humid night, and he drove slowly, studying the people out walking on the sidewalks.
They all looked grotesque to him: a fat old couple, the husband’s big belly jutting out over his belt buckle, almost pendulous, the bottom of his T-shirt stretched not quite long enough to cover it; the wife in a tent dress that hung down loose in front but still made a kind of detour in back to settle on the shelf of her ponderous buttocks. The young men seemed to stare at Varney, drunk and menacing and stupid, some in the baggy shorts that appeared here the second the snow stopped falling and seemed to be worn continuously until the snow returned. Twice Varney went around a block because he saw a tall, rangy man alone on the street. When he got a closer look, the man was not Prescott.
Varney parked across the street from his gym where he could see into the lighted windows. The heart patients were in the back row on the treadmills and stationary bikes as always, plodding along with the same preoccupied look, listening to their pulses in dull fear. He could see the interior window too, where the late class of women were all bobbing up and down on stair-steps in a soundless dance in front of the mirrored wall. The poster he had taken from the bulletin board had not been replaced. Maybe that meant that Prescott would be here soon to put up a new one, but maybe it meant Prescott no longer needed the posters, because someone from the gym had called him. Maybe Prescott was somewhere nearby, waiting for him to come in for a workout. Varney turned his eyes to the streets again, looking for any sign that would indicate which it was. He started the car again and circled the block, searching, and then moved on.
The next place was the small grocery store where he sometimes shopped. It was about a mile from his house. He always walked there because walking was exercise, but also because it took up time in the evening. He could be out and fight the feelings that plagued him when he wasn’t working: that claustrophobic sensation of being young and healthy and free, but locked up on the second floor of an old house while everyone else was out, the sense of loss and sadness he felt when he looked at a young woman walking past, and knew that he couldn’t just begin to walk with her. Women demanded so much—the right circumstances of meeting, a veiled but still distressingly thorough interrogation that was designed to catch him in a lie—that sometimes he began by being attracted, then felt the attraction turning to hatred.
He studied the interior of the market. He could see the man in his fifties that he thought of as Mr. Smolinski because it was called Smolinski’s Market and he seemed to be the boss. He wore a butcher’s apron that was always filthy from the boxes he carried pressed against his stomach. Varney could see him taking cans out of a carton and stacking them on a shelf. The only customer was a young woman with a baby propped in a shopping cart. It was nine o’clock at night, and Varney disapproved. She should have a baby in bed by now, not be pushing him around in that store under the sickly yellow lights. She was too stupid to deserve to have him.
Varney drove past the little parking area in the back. He could see the woman’s stroller parked beside the door, and wondered how she proposed to get the groceries home. Probably she would pile some of them in the rack underneath, and put the overflow on the poor kid’s lap.
He could see Mr. Smolinski’s car, and another that was nearly always there that he guessed belonged to the semiretarded guy who worked in the back, but there was no car nearby that could be Prescott’s. He drove up and down the two streets on either side of the building, but there was nothing that tempted him to look more closely. He turned his car in the direction of the little office where Prescott had tried to trap him.
As Varney drove, he let nothing escape his notice. Every car that passed was a new opportunity, and Varney looked quickly at the head behind each steering wheel, taking a mental snapshot and comparing it with his memory of Prescott.
He drove by Prescott’s building without letting his foot touch the brake pedal. He aimed the car ahead and stared at the place hard once, but did not come around the block for a second look. There seemed to be no police cars around this evening, and there were no lights on in the building, but he knew that stopping would be a bad idea. He had read somewhere that firemen always took a videotape of the crowd around an arson fire because they knew that arsonists often showed up to watch. He wasn’t sure what the police did for bombs, but it was reasonable to suppose they would not do less. He wasn’t interested in having to kill some cop tonight. All he wanted was Prescott.
He passed a pair of young women walking up the street in sandals and short skirts and tank tops, and was almost tempted to stop. He had found that if there were two of them, sometimes things actually went better. They weren’t as frightened of one man that they hadn’t met in the right way. If they were bored tonight, he might be able to talk them into going into a nearby place for a drink with him.
A couple of times, he had even seen something happen with two girls that had at first seemed to him to be a miracle. He had walked down a street in New York one night a year ago and gotten stopped for a moment by a traffic light. Beside him had been two girls. They were each carrying shopping bags from several stores, and they had obvio
usly been out all day. One of them had said something about needing a drink, and Varney had been inspired. He had smiled as well as he could and said, “You know, that sounds wonderful. I’d love to buy you one.”
The light had changed, and they had started walking. The girls kidded each other all the way across the street, and joked themselves into it. The party of two was three now, and there was a big hotel with a bar right in front of them. One of them said her name was Sherry, and the other Lynn. He was fairly sure they were false names, but he didn’t care.
The miracle had come inside the hotel bar. It wasn’t his hotel, but it had been the nearest doorway and it was expensive looking, so he had chosen it. The miracle was that after one drink, Sherry and Lynn developed a more complicated relationship. Neither one wanted to be shown up by the other as being the less attractive one, the less interesting one. After a time, they stopped teasing Varney and turned to teasing each other.
Neither of them had any interest in him. Each wanted to demonstrate to her friend that she was more desirable to him than the friend was. He sensed that the object was to force him to choose one—ask her for a date or something—while ignoring the other. Then the winner would grandly refuse, as though the man who had rejected her friend was, nonetheless, beneath her. This was very tricky—not a novice’s game, and with painful stakes—because it involved getting Varney very interested without having done or said anything that anyone could define as trying.
Varney simply waited, being sure to pay attention to one, then the other, in equal turns. He made sure that each time, it took a bit more for the one who wanted to regain his attention to get it. What he had been waiting for happened after the third drink. Lynn said she was surprised at the way Sherry was throwing herself at him.
The remark made the competition overt. Sherry said that it had been all in fun, and there was no reason to feel rejected and jealous. In five minutes her icy remarks had driven Lynn from the table and into a cab. Victory had a curious effect on Sherry. She seemed shocked to find she was alone with Varney. She had to convince herself that this was what she had always intended, and that Varney was valu-a pble enough to be worth the trouble. In another ten minutes, she and Varney were in a hotel room. She had her clothes coming off, and no reasonable way of calling a halt to the proceedings without proving to herself that she had been an idiot.