by Thomas Perry
“What made him shave his head?”
“It was really hot earlier this summer, and he said it made him feel better. But then he had to wear the wig, and it was worse than his own hair. Another one got a tattoo this spring. Him she didn’t even bother with. She made Nicky pay him off and fire him. Come over to the sink. Bring the chair.”
She wrapped towels around Varney’s neck, leaned his head back against the sink, and washed his hair. He listened to her words, but only so he could keep responding and prevent her from falling silent. He liked the sound of her voice. He liked even better the feel of her fingers massaging his scalp and the smell of her perfume.
He was aware that a long period of time was passing, but he liked it. He was only half aware of what she was doing to his hair, but was always aware of her person—when a hip brushed against his shoulder as she moved to the counter to get something, or a thigh touched his when she leaned close to snip his hair. Finally, she looked at him sharply, stepping around him to see him from every angle. Then she turned him around in the chair and let him look into the mirror.
He was shocked. His hair was light brown and short, but the brown was not uniform, like a dye job. It had some lighter highlights and some darker parts, like the real hair of a man who spent some time outdoors. “That’s something,” he said. “I really look different.” He had seen men who looked like him. He had seen hundreds of them. It was like looking into the mirror and finding that he was invisible.
“Do you like it?” she asked, trying to seem indifferent.
“It’s . . . perfect,” he said, looking at her in the mirror.
She was behind him, and their eyes met in reflection, but hers lowered to avoid his. She put both hands on his shoulders and began to turn him around. “Oooh,” she breathed.
“What?”
“You’re so tense. I guess I kept you in the chair too long. We’d better take a break before we go on with this.”
“I’m okay,” he said.
She began to knead his shoulders and the cord of muscle on each side of his neck. “You just sit back and relax for a minute, and let me take care of you. Close your eyes.” She worked on his shoulders and upper back. It felt soothing, the small hands moving tirelessly on him.
He felt awkward. After a short time, he said, “Thanks,” to end it. “That’s fine.”
She said, “We have to wait for an hour or so while your color sets.” She pointed to a high, narrow table across the room that he had not noticed. It had a thick mat on it. “Why don’t you get up on the massage table? I’ll give you the full treatment. Take off your shirt.”
He went to the table, took off his shirt, and sat on the edge. She removed her lab coat and laid it across a desk. She was wearing a halter top and a pair of blue jeans. He began to wish . . . he didn’t allow himself to form a specific image. She walked to the table and immediately began to unbuckle his belt, her eyes on his to gauge his reaction. “I said I’d give you the full treatment.”
Two hours later, when Tracy returned, she knocked on the door to the outer office. Mae went and turned the knob to unlock it, then went back to the sink. Tracy stepped inside and said to Mae, “Did you two make good use of your time?” Mae stopped putting away bottles and cleaning the sink long enough to nod slightly. She began putting things back into her traveling bag.
Tracy looked at Varney. “Why, sugar! Look at you! I thought it was my boy Nicky for a minute. Come out here with me!” She had her arm around his shoulder, and she pulled him quickly through the doorway to her office. Varney had only a second to look back at Mae and try to smile, but she was looking in the other direction, as though he had already gone.
Tracy closed the door on her and kept him moving toward her desk. “You look great, like a different man, and a good-looking man, too. That’s the tricky part. Most disguises make you look uglier, not better. That Mae really is an artist, isn’t she?”
He nodded. It seemed that she had said everything that was necessary.
“Did you like her?”
He supposed that he had to say it. “Yes. Like you said, she’s really good at hairstyling.”
“No,” she said, and pinched the back of his arm. “Did you like her?”
Varney hesitated, but the look on Tracy’s face was almost a leer, the half-averted eyes bright and knowing, the coy smile making the cheeks wrinkle like the skins of overripe tomatoes.
“Yes,” he said. “I liked her a lot.”
“Good,” said Tracy. “Good. Then you can keep her for a while. It’ll make it easier for her to get the rest of your changes done—take you shopping and so on. Whoever this person is that’s after you, he isn’t looking for a couple.”
“You mean, she’ll stay with me?”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“Is she a hooker?”
Tracy stopped and put her hands on her hips, her head tilted. “How could you say such a thing? Of course not!” She pulled him, leaning close to him. “Don’t think that way. It would hurt her feelings. A girl can’t get by on cutting a little hair and doing makeup consultations. Once in a while she does little favors for close friends, and maybe they’ll give her a few extra dollars, that’s all. Nothing that’s not perfectly tasteful and refined. I could tell she liked you and would be willing to make you one of those close friends.”
“How could you tell that?”
“Women have ways of communicating without cupping our hands around our mouths and shouting like hog callers, you know. You don’t have to engage in any embarrassing discussion about this. If you’d like, she’ll just go home with you now. You’ll pay me, not her.”
His curiosity easily overwhelmed his revulsion at Tracy.
“What’s her fee?”
“Give me five hundred for each day that you keep her, and I pass it on. And don’t worry about extras. No big tip or something later. I have to be careful with Mae. If she had that much all at once, she’d go right out and buy enough cocaine to kill herself. You’d be trying to do her a favor, and in about three days, they’d be pulling a sheet over her head in the emergency room. So as a favor and a mercy, I just dole money out to her. It stretches the money for her, so she always has plenty to get by, even when she’s not working at all. And she never has enough to hurt herself.”
Varney thought for a moment. “All right.”
“Good,” said Tracy. She hesitated, to show there was something else on her mind.
“Something else?”
She looked at the closed door across the room in mock concern, then leaned closer to him. He could feel her breath on his cheek. “She’s . . . a little short right now. She didn’t say it, but I called her only about an hour before you were supposed to be here, and she wasn’t doing anything. Rushed right over, just to get some hairstyling work. And the . . . extras, they weren’t my idea, I can assure you. She saw you and asked me if it was okay if she went a little further in being nice to you. So I think we should try to give her a little advance, don’t you?” When Varney stared at her without answering, she prompted, “It’ll put her in a much better mood, I promise.”
Varney was aware that he was being fleeced, but he remembered the sight of Mae after the clothes were gone. In spite of himself, he wondered what a better mood would be like.
“How much?”
Tracy shrugged apologetically. “Let’s see. I already paid for the makeover she just did. That was eight hundred, but I’ll just make that my present to you. Let’s give her a week’s worth on account. Thirty-five hundred. I’ll give her some in advance, and show her I’ve got the rest in hand for her.”
Varney took the roll of bills he had brought out of his pocket and counted thirty-five of them. He was being robbed, but he decided for the moment not to care. Tracy took the money, disappeared into the other room for a couple of minutes, then came back in and shut the door, and waved good-bye to him.
When Varney stepped out into the hallway, he found Mae standing near the
other door, leaning against the wall with the strap of her travel bag over her shoulder. When he came to within a few feet of her, she wordlessly pushed off, turned, and began to walk with him. When they were out of sight in the stairwell, she put her hand lightly on his arm. It was a comfortable gesture, just as though she were his girlfriend, and they were walking home together from a day at the office.
23
Prescott had stayed in Louisville watching Rowland’s Fine Jewelry for another week before he saw the delivery. Two couriers drove up to the rear of the store in a rented car and parked. The younger one then pressed a bell to let someone inside know they were there. A tall, thin man in a tailored suit and starched white shirt with French cuffs opened the door. He looked up and down the alley, then at all the roofs and windows of buildings he could see, then looked in each direction again while the two men went to the trunk of their car.
Prescott was in the window of his hotel three blocks away, watching through a spotting scope that he had mounted above the curtains. He did not consider himself an expert in the jewelry business, but he was confident that few customers entered a store through a fire exit, and even fewer needed to open their trunks. This was some kind of delivery. He was not sure whether it was legitimate or not, but he watched for signs. The younger man stopped, looked around, then stood still and erect while the older man leaned into the trunk, reaching for a briefcase. The younger man’s left hand hung at his side in a position that had to be practiced. When he turned the other way, his right arm hung straight and his left bent. He was keeping a hand close to the floor of the trunk. Prescott switched to sixty power and focused on the open trunk. There were two identical silvery titanium cases about the size of a suitcase, but below them, just under the rim of the trunk, was a towel laid over something. Prescott refocused. A hand came into his field of vision and adjusted the towel. Prescott caught a dull gleam of Parkerized steel. There was a momentary glimpse of a muzzle with a flash suppressor, and the distinctive high front sight. He thought he saw the end of a rounded triangle over-and-under foregrip, but his mind might have added what it knew was there. The two men had an M-16 in the trunk, set where the second man could pluck it out and start firing: if something ugly happened, they could make it much uglier.
Prescott adjusted the scope to look closely at the older man’s face. He had graying hair, a small cut and a layer of scar tissue above the right eye. The eyebrow seemed to have an interruption there, where the hair had stopped growing. He seemed to have done some boxing; he was right-handed; he had managed to keep his head down, but had neglected to duck some notable jabs.
Prescott raised the scope to the younger man. He had a strange look about him. It was the hair. At first, Prescott had been fooled. It wasn’t the sort of toupee that some old men had, that jutted out like a thatched roof of a cottage, and it wasn’t the kind that was just a shade off the color of real hair. It was actually a pretty good wig. The problem was that when this young man had put it on, or maybe later, in the car, it had rotated a bit, so the lowest point in the back seemed to be a couple of degrees to the right, and the front a couple of degrees to the left. When the trunk slammed and the two older men went inside, the young man reached up with both hands and adjusted it, then stepped in and closed the door.
Prescott had planned simply to watch the car until they came out, but he changed his mind. He already had the license number and description. He had been expecting an unobtrusive visit, what he had come to think of as a minimal visit. Stolen jewelry was an easy commodity to move. A ninety-year-old woman could carry as much as anyone could sell. Sending two grim-looking characters with an assault rifle was hardly necessary, and didn’t contribute much to the security of the merchandise.
It occurred to Prescott that he might be seeing something other than a delivery. Maybe whoever had acted as middleman in the Donna Halsey killing had decided that Rowland was not a man to trust with any secrets. The wig might just be incidental, a sign that the young man had lost his hair early, but it might be that he was wearing a disguise because he was about to grease Rowland.
Prescott took his suitcase, hurried down to his car, and got behind the wheel. He had planned to wait, but he could see no purpose in waiting while these two blew Rowland’s head off. He drove to the front of the jewelry store, parked, and stared through the glass doors in the center. He could not see Rowland or his visitors, but there were two armed security guards near the door, three jewelers talking to customers at the glass cases, and another who was watching a group of browsers to see which one would try to catch his eye first. Prescott continued on around the block. He let his body relax. The two men weren’t here to kill Rowland in front of all those people.
Prescott came around the last corner and waited until he saw the two men driving out of the lot. He followed them up the commercial street and out onto the highway, then settled back into his seat and turned on the radio. They had not been close enough to see his car well, and now he was far behind them. The car he was driving was a dark green compact that was so much like a million others that when he parked it, he had to remind himself of the license number so he could find it again. He let up a bit more on the accelerator to allow a couple of cars to pass and move back into line between him and the two men ahead. Unless the two men were much better at this than he thought they were, he had disappeared. No, he corrected himself; he had never existed.
Prescott followed them very carefully and conservatively. They drove south 175 miles to Nashville and stopped at two more jewelry stores. One was called Patrickson’s, and it looked to Prescott as though it catered to people in the country-music business who needed to wear jewelry the people in the back row could see sparkling. The other was called Bangles n’ Batik, and it seemed to be for younger women who went in without men and bought earrings and things for themselves. Then the two men made a stop that was closer to what Prescott had been expecting: a pawnshop. It had one window with a row of guitars hanging like dead turkeys in a butcher’s shop, and another that looked like an indoor garage sale. He added the address to his list and drove around the corner to fill up his gas tank and use the rest room, then parked on a side street where he could see the men’s car.
Prescott had been following people for over twenty years, and he was good at it. Part of the trick was to relax and let the quarry make all the decisions. Prescott never missed a chance to top off his gas tank, use a rest room, or stretch his legs. When he went inside to pay for the gas, he bought snacks, bottled water, and a road map. If there were items of clothing for sale, like baseball caps, he bought one, and wore it for a while to keep his silhouette from becoming too familiar.
When he was in motion, he never had fewer than two vehicles between him and the one he was following. He always picked the lanes on the right or directly behind his prey, because they were the hardest for the driver ahead to watch. He sometimes did tiny things to change the appearance of his car from the front. He would lower the left sun visor and clip a folded map to it, then take it off after a time and lower the right. When the other driver stopped, he went around a block before he stopped, or went on past and pulled over. He never waited where the other driver could see him, and never started up after him until the man’s car was nearly out of sight.
The two men left Nashville in rush hour and began the 210-mile drive to Memphis, so by the time they had gone far it was late afternoon. Prescott turned on his headlights for a stretch, then turned them off again until the rest of the cars turned on theirs.
In Memphis that evening, the routine was nearly the same as it had been in Nashville. The two men stopped at three jewelry stores. This time one of them was a huge place that seemed to exist mainly to sell wedding and engagement rings at a deep discount, and the others were midlevel places in blocks that were lined with restaurants and women’s clothing stores. The next stop was the one that interested Prescott. The two men pulled into the parking lot of a shopping mall, parked, and walked down the street to a store
with a banner that said USED AND RECONDITIONED APPLIANCES. EASY CREDIT.
When they came out, they drove to another part of town and went into an office on the second floor of a small building that seemed to be a poor man’s financial-services conglomerate: check cashing, car loans, bail bonds.
By the time they had finished their business it was nine o’clock. The two men checked in at a big hotel on Airways Boulevard, and went out for dinner. Prescott didn’t care where they went for dinner, or what they ate, so he stopped following. He went to a car-rental agency, traded in his green car for a blue one, checked in at the same hotel, bought a simple dinner at the coffee shop, then went to sleep. At four-thirty, his alarm woke him. He showered, dressed, had breakfast in his room, and checked out of the hotel, then waited down the street where he could see the hotel parking lot.
He had guessed correctly. The men were out at six, loading their silvery titanium cases into the trunk of their car. They set off for the north, and Prescott guessed that they must be planning to drive the 283 miles to St. Louis. The younger man drove this time, and Prescott could tell the difference. He was faster, always pushing the speed limit a bit, weaving in and out of lanes as though his impatience was not with the slow pace of the cars he passed so much as with the sameness of driving. He had been confined in a car for at least a couple of days now, and the act of simply keeping a vehicle aimed in the right direction with the wheels between a pair of painted lines was not enough to occupy him. Prescott drove steadily, staying well back and keeping his own speed constant. After all of the young man’s maneuvering, he would invariably find himself stuck behind a truck that was slowly inching ahead of the one beside it, and Prescott would make up the difference, still hidden in a pack of other cars that made his invisible.