Pursuit

by Thomas Perry

  Prescott looked at the spot near the entrance where the manager, who had served as maître d’, had fallen, and two customers had stepped over him to be shot trying to tug open the padlocked door. There was a table set for one. Prescott went back to the picture of Donna and Gary. There was a napkin on the floor beside Donna’s hand. He patiently went back through the pictures, searching. In ten minutes, he knew.

  Donna Halsey and Robert Cushner had been together for dinner at a table for two. It was late, and there was only one waiter on duty. He had served everybody, and now he was against the wall chatting with the manager while they waited to close up. In the kitchen, the cook had stopped making food some time ago, and had begun the cleanup. The other waiter had nearly finished clearing the tables.

  At Robert Cushner and Donna Halsey’s table, things were slower than at some of the others, but the party of two were nearly finished. It was easy to see what had happened. Donna Halsey took great care of her most crucial attribute, her looks. She had ordered something small and low calorie. Robert Cushner had a big slab of meat and a cloud-shaped pile of mashed potatoes. To make the inequity more pronounced, this was a guy who was full of himself. He had struck it rich a few days before. He was out with a very attractive young woman. He did most of the talking, while she gave him admiring glances and nodded her head a lot. Soon she was sitting before an empty plate.

  The waiter had cleared her plate and silverware, and probably a wine glass, leaving her sitting with a napkin in her lap and a place mat, talking with Robert Cushner, the former computer guy, while he finished his entrée.

  The killer stepped through the swinging door from the kitchen. He saw Cushner with a fork on the way to his mouth: bang, through the forehead. The killer had already seen the second half of his contract, and it took no time to move the gun to the left. Now Prescott saw it clearly. The second round was intended for the side of Donna Halsey’s head, but the first shot had made her jump, rise from her chair with her napkin still on her lap. Instead of her right temple, it had hit her right side. The killer had not missed: Millikan and the police had not been wrong. But now other things were happening. People were in motion. The killer focused on the doorway, and took the easy shots like a harvest: the maître d’, the two customers pulling on the door handle, the waiter. He had done all of that in four or five seconds, from just inside the door without moving his feet. He shot the two parents and the two little girls, then detected more motion in the corner of his eye, and turned his attention toward it.

  The woman he had hit in the side had managed to take a couple of steps away from him. As she collapsed, Gary the mechanic tried to reach for her, then dropped to one knee to bend over her. He saw the killer take his first step toward her, and in a horrified, involuntary act, tried to hide and protect her by putting his own body over hers.

  The killer took one, two, three steps, and aimed downward. Shot one went through the man’s head. Shot two went to his back. Both of them had gone through into the woman. The killer could see she was dead.

  He looked to his right, gathered up the two spent casings on the floor, and put them into his pocket. Then he walked back toward the kitchen door. The rounds he had fired before were all in the same area: one for Cushner, the male target at the first table, one for Donna Halsey. One for the maître d’, one for the waiter, three for the pair of diners at the door. Four for the family. He picked up the shells, turned off the lights, stepped through the kitchen, carefully staying out of the stream of blood running across the tiles into the drain. He replaced the empty clip in his gun, stepped out, closed the steel door behind him, and walked off, feeling a growing elation as each step took him farther away and deeper into the darkness. He had gotten it done with incredible efficiency and speed, and left nothing to indicate who had done it.

  He had fulfilled the contract—gotten both of them. The client would be pleased. Prescott considered who that might be. Maybe it was the wife, whose husband had just made twenty million but hadn’t yet gotten around to telling her because he was too busy celebrating with another woman. Prescott would have to look into that. The man had been first, but the one shot three times was the woman. Sometimes it was worth stopping just to count.

  Prescott stacked the pictures and reports neatly, reinserted them into the envelope, and put the envelope into his suitcase. He began to fold his clothes and put them on top. He thought about his decision to begin the long drive tonight, and decided he still liked the idea. At night there would not be much traffic, and by sunup he could be half-way to Louisville. He had given the picture to Millikan, so there was no reason to stay in Buffalo. By morning Millikan would have given the picture to the police with a big lecture on how important it was, and sometime tomorrow the killer would be gone.

  19

  Varney saw the black of night beginning to fade into a dim blue, the big old trees and the shrubs and lawns of Delaware Avenue lightening to green again. In about forty-five minutes the sun would be up, and the people who had vacated the streets of the city for him would be climbing into their cars to infest the world again. He had not found Prescott.

  The way Prescott had stayed invisible was not mysterious: all he had needed to do was use a false name to register in a hotel and stay there. But Varney had not expected him to do that. All night long, he had expected Prescott to be around the next corner, or waiting inside one of Varney’s haunts, or sitting in his car outside one of the downtown hotels, waiting for Varney to try to find him.

  Varney wasn’t even sure why he had expected Prescott to appear during the night. He decided it was that he had gotten used to a rhythm, like the rhythm of two men in a fistfight. At first they had danced around a bit, made a few feints and jabs. Then Varney had tried to win the quick way—not an exploratory tap, but committing himself to a sudden, hard attack that would take Prescott before he was ready for anything serious. Prescott had been ready to brush it aside, and the counterpunch had been immediate. Varney had gotten used to a pace that was fast and intense, based on heart rate and the adrenaline that had already infused both of them. But Prescott had unexpectedly dodged, and now he was dancing again, out of reach and gathering his strength.

  That bothered Varney. He had been awake for two nights, struggling and maneuvering to move in on Prescott, wasting his anger and determination. He had spent the night exhausting himself, and Prescott had been in some hotel sleeping on crisp, clean sheets and getting stronger and sharper for their next encounter.

  Varney stopped at a gas station to fill his tank, drove back to his house, and went upstairs. He showered and lay on his bed. The sounds of cars began to reach him from the street outside, a low, steady hum that was usually soothing. This morning it irritated him, because it reminded him that he was used up, and the rest of the world was in motion. Prescott would be getting up fresh and rested, probably putting some new scheme into operation. Prescott and the police, and all the forces of pursuit and punishment, would be talking and planning and putting themselves into position, while Varney was here alone, unconscious in a room with the shades drawn. He rolled over, couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t get his mind to stop foraging for things to worry it.

  Varney sat up and looked at the clock. It was six o’clock already. He reached for the remote control and turned on the television set. The head and shoulders that came on belonged to a woman about his age who had perfected that dumb, teasing, “I know something you wish you knew” look. She was saying, “You’ll hear if this morning’s humid weather might surprise us with a change later in the day. We’ll have footage of a melee outside last night’s school board meeting, a three-alarm fire in Cheektowaga, and a picture of a man the police would like your help in finding. We’ll be right back!”

  Varney moved to the foot of his bed and put his feet on the floor. The first commercial was for cars. He had seen it at least a hundred times, and it had annoyed him the first time. There was a commercial for a financial-services company that couldn’t quite revea
l what it was selling but featured close-up shots of people who looked sick with worry. Then there were a few shorter ones that seemed to have been recorded with a home video camera to advertise a florist, a Lebanese restaurant, and a company that sold appliances but seemed to think that today air conditioners were the only ones people wanted to hear about.

  At last, the woman reappeared, sitting behind a desk with a pile of papers in front of her and a pen in her hand. As the camera moved in on her, she said, “Buffalo police have released a picture this morning of a man they want to question in connection with a bombing at a Cumberland Avenue building. He is between twenty-five and thirty years old, six feet tall, and weighs about one hundred and seventy-five pounds.”

  There was the picture: Varney, staring out of his television set at him. The extreme definition of the color image that Prescott had somehow gotten made Varney’s face as clear as the woman’s on the television screen.

  His stomach tightened in a spasm. He was up, stalking the room as the woman continued. “If you know this man or have seen him, call the special hot-line number at the bottom of your screen. Police have emphasized that he is armed and very dangerous. If you should see him, they ask that you do not approach or attempt to detain him. Instead, dial 911, and let them handle the situation.” She took the sheet from the top of her pile and set it aside, giving her special disapproving look. Suddenly she smiled, and turned her head to the side. “And I see Hal Kibbleman has joined us to give a hint of what he has in store for us in the weather department. Are you going to keep us in suspense, Hal?”

  Varney punched the power button and the woman vanished. He went to the closet and began to pack. The house deed had a false name on it, and his habits had kept him from being too much in the sight of people in the neighborhood. He had been gone much of the time since he’d bought it, and when he had been here he had stayed out of synchronization with the people who got up in the morning to go to work. It might take Prescott and the police some time to find the house.

  When his suitcase was packed, he put it into a plastic trash bag so it would look as though he were simply taking out the garbage when he brought it outside. He considered leaving a booby trap to welcome the inevitable intruders—maybe using the natural-gas pipe and an electrical switch—but that would be time-consuming, and it would involve a kind of concentration that didn’t fit his mood right now. As he thought about it, he realized that he wouldn’t get much pleasure out of it, and it might not even be practical. The police had him firmly in their minds as the mad bomber of Buffalo, so an explosion was precisely what they would be expecting. He was better off getting out of here, letting them find the place, and leaving nothing around that was especially incriminating or revealing. He was certain he could accomplish that, because he had always planned to leave that way. He had stored his guns and ammunition in this single room. As soon as he had used one on a job, he had gotten rid of it before he came back to Buffalo.

  At the moment, the house contained no more firearms than many of the houses in this city: a Steyr Scout short-barreled rifle with a ten-power scope, a Remington Model 70 hunting rifle in .308, and three nine-millimeter pistols. He had thirty rounds of ammunition for each firearm. Two nights ago, he had used up his supply of black powder, blasting caps, and pipes for the bombs. All he had left were two rolls of copper wire and a couple of homemade switches. He put them into a second garbage bag with the guns, carried everything out to the car, and returned.

  He spent twenty minutes checking to be sure the timers were set right, the faucets were closed on the hoses to the washing machine, the windows locked. He wiped the smooth surfaces with a rag to make the collection of fingerprints a bit more difficult. He had been careful since he had moved into the house to keep out of the dummy apartment downstairs, and had regularly wiped down the items in the upstairs apartment that he habitually touched. He was fairly certain that a real expert would find some prints, but it would take time, and there would be old prints that belonged to other people mixed in.

  He went to the desk and collected all the paper. As a habit, he saved very few receipts or bills, and he kept them all in the same place. He used a post office box for his mailing address, so nothing came here. All of his precautions were tempered by the knowledge that a genuine expert could not be fooled forever if he were ever turned loose in this house. Varney could not keep him from connecting the house with a name or two and maybe the post office box, but he could make each step maddeningly complicated and eat up lots of hours making the expert follow trails that didn’t lead to an actual man.

  He did one last check and closed the door, holding the knob with the rag in his hand. He got into his car and drove onto the street, eager to get out of Buffalo. Varney knew that the police would already have given his picture to the agencies they habitually dealt with: the Canadian officials across the bridges over the Niagara, the New York State Police, and the local cops all over this area. He stayed away from the border and avoided the Thruway, with its entrance and exit booths. He drove the secondary roads. He followed Main Street until it was just Route 5, and then it merged into Route 20. This part of the state was the bed of an ancient, larger great lake, scraped smooth and flat by glaciers. The roads were straight and broad and fast.

  As soon as he was outside Buffalo, passing through old towns that had become suburbs, he began to feel slightly better. If he could just stay awake and keep driving for a few hours, the trouble would fall behind. He had spent years studying the habits of pursuers. He knew that the only nationwide manhunts were a creation of television networks. Policemen were municipal employees who answered to city councils selected by local taxpayers. The only time they paid much attention to what was going on in some other city was when they had strong reasons to believe that an identifiable man was about to arrive in their town to kill somebody in particular. The circulars and wanted lists came in by the thousands from distant places, and piled up until they were filed away. Pretty soon, all the faces looked alike.

  In a half hour he was nearly thirty miles from the house approaching Silver Creek, and while he thought about that, he had traveled two more and gone past it. He was cruising along at fifty-five miles an hour without a traffic signal to delay him, and the nearest cars a quarter mile ahead or a quarter mile behind. The drivers couldn’t actually see him: he was just an assumption they made because a car couldn’t be moving along a public highway without a driver.

  After an hour, he knew that he was out. The open roads were beginning to be more open, with long stretches of farmland that didn’t seem to have anybody in evidence to work it. There were small clusters of buildings at crossroads that did not deserve to be called villages: they seemed to exist only as excuses to have a lower speed limit for a hundred yards so people driving past could read homemade signs that said FRESH STRAWBERRIES or CORN, or have time to notice that there was a gas station on the corner.

  Varney kept going. He wanted to give himself enough breathing space, and he knew he wouldn’t have it until he had gone far enough to be out of the range of Buffalo’s television stations and in the zone of some other city’s stations, where somebody else’s picture would be on the news.

  Varney tried to make himself feel better. He had been the one who had gone after Prescott, and he was still healthy, still free, still anonymous. He had gone right into Prescott’s trap and come out of it unharmed. Reminding himself of those things did not help. Prescott had hounded him out of Buffalo: Prescott had made him run away.

  He let the car slow down a bit, toying with the idea of going back. Prescott wasn’t some petty irritant. When he thought of Prescott, his stomach tightened, his heart began to pound, and after a minute, his jaw began to hurt from clenching his teeth. It wasn’t only what Prescott had done, it was what Prescott was, and what he thought. When Varney had listened to him talk he had felt it instantly. Prescott was so sure of himself, so full of confidence that he was better than Varney—the tone of his voice said, “Well, loo
k at us, the two of us. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”—that Varney had found himself tense, coiled to spring at him, even though he was miles away and the only connection was an electrical impulse over a telephone wire.

  Varney sensed something else about Prescott, and he wasn’t quite able to grasp it. Prescott was an impostor. He was a fake; the personality was something assumed in order to fool Varney. It was as though he had constructed an identity, a false one, just to use against Varney. Maybe it was only that he wasn’t as fearless or as invulnerable as he pretended to be: like a bully who sensed some weakness in a smaller kid and set about systematically probing to find out what it was, tormenting him by building himself up and making the victim feel smaller. But Varney had been getting a strange feeling that maybe Prescott was something else: that the face he had constructed was there to make him look more ordinary than he was—that he was actually worse than he seemed, and that if he showed his real face, Varney would dismiss the idea of fighting and escape him.

  Sometimes it felt to Varney that Prescott was a man that he hated not just because he was an enemy, but because he was familiar. It was as though Prescott were the vague, dark presence that he had sensed just out of sight, that he knew was coming for him, or sometimes was just forming, coalescing, when he awoke, sweating, from a bad dream.