by Thomas Perry
“Into what?”
“I met a guy. His name was Mike Kelleher. He was a luggage thief.”
“You mean like in airports?”
“Yeah. He was the sneakiest bastard I ever saw. When he first talked to me, I went to watch him work one night. It was like he was invisible. People would be on the pay phones, he’d walk past, and their carry-on bags would practically get up and follow him. He would go to the baggage pickup, and if some idiot would stop on the way there to take a piss, Mike would have claimed his bags and be gone before he got there. He knew every trick. So I talked to him, and found that he was a great thief, but no businessman.”
“Why not?”
“He would get the bags, take them to his apartment, pop the locks with a screwdriver, and go through them. He took jewelry, money, stuff like that. Then he went out and dumped everything else. I say, ‘Mike! What are you thinking? Some woman has five hundred bucks cash and three thousand in clothes in her twelve-hundred-dollar Louis Vuitton bag, so you take the cash and toss everything else?’”
“Sounds stupid.”
“It was. He had first-rate hands and a third-rate brain. But first-rate hands are not a small thing, so I made a deal with him. He steals a suitcase. We open it together, only not with a screwdriver. I pick the lock, or cut the padlock off, or fiddle the combination. He takes the money, just like before, and we split the jewelry. I get the luggage, the clothes, whatever else there is, and pay him twenty-five bucks a bag. That works out for a while. I get enough bags, buy some more wholesale, and open up a shop in San Francisco. I also find lots of stuff Mike missed: electric toothbrushes with hollow handles and the good jewelry inside, secret pockets full of credit cards and traveler’s checks, a surprising amount of drugs. It grows into a good little sideline.”
“It does sound good.”
“I noticed a few inefficiencies, so I worked on those. Mike trains eight people—four women and four men, I insisted on that—to take bags off the conveyors in L.A. These are people who look right. No nineteen-year-olds, no minorities that the cops always jump just on spec. I work it out so every one of them is carrying a ticket for a flight to San Francisco. They go into the baggage claim, see the right chance, grab a bag. Do they go out to the street like thieves? No. That’s when cops grab you. If somebody misses his bag, what does he do? He looks first at that door, and runs out looking to see who took it. So what my people did was pick up a couple of bags, hand them off to another person, who walks back in the other door, checks the bags to San Francisco, and goes up the escalator to the departure gates. He flies to San Francisco, claims the bags, and delivers them to my store.” He stared into the distance. “It worked. Everything we tried worked. I bought the car washes, and made money on them, too.”
“So what happened?”
“Michael Jameson Kelleher.”
“What about him?”
“He never told me that he had a problem, and I didn’t ask him hard enough questions, I guess. He had a conviction. It made sense to me later. The reason he was so good was that he had been doing it a long time. Only nobody starts out being at the top of his game. They learn by making mistakes, and if you’re a thief, a mistake sends you to jail. Mike made a second mistake: not a big one, but big enough. He goes to the airport too often to oversee the way things are being done. The cops spot him, recognize him from his picture, and hustle him off to one of those rooms you see in airports with nothing written on the doors. They bullshit him into thinking they have tapes of him. He figures out that this time his sentence is not going to be a short one. It’s his second time, and this time he’s clearly the boss, and the thing looks very big and organized. He spills his guts, rats us all out, and agrees to keep running the business like nothing has happened until they have enough evidence on us: special bags that are marked with paint that shows up only on ultraviolet light, videotapes, the whole thing.”
“You got convicted. What happened to him?”
Prescott’s jaw worked, the muscles on the side of his face knotting and smoothing out, over and over. “Nothing. He’s not charged with anything. The cops have it all on me, without him even testifying. There’s a tape of them going through my shop in San Francisco and nearly every bag glows in the dark, a tape of me paying a couple of thieves. The state declares my house, my two car washes, my bank accounts, stocks, and bonds to be stolen money, and confiscates them. I have some money hidden, but just about all of that goes to keeping my lawyers paid and working. I get ten years. I serve four and a half, which, with good behavior, counts as nine. Then I serve another six months on probation. So at the end of five years, all I have left is two assets: the Corvette outside, which was registered in the name of a girlfriend—she dumped me, so they never made the connection, but she was honest—and a whole bunch of stuff from suitcases that I’d hidden and never gotten around to selling off before I was arrested.”
“This stuff?” Hobart held up the package of watches and jewelry.
“No, that’s gone. This I picked up around Chicago over a period of a few months before I came here.” He shook his head sadly. “I had to go back to second-story work, just to build up some capital again.” He narrowed his eyes. “I never stop thinking about Michael Kelleher. You know where he is now?”
“Where?”
“Retired. He actually lives on a farm up in Minnesota.”
“A farm? What for?”
Prescott shrugged. “When the whole thing went south—me, the eight thieves, all my businesses—nothing happened to him. He’d made at least a million or two. They didn’t charge him with anything, so how could they take it? I know that the reason he left L.A. was that he thought I’d get out and come looking for him.”
“To kill him?”
Prescott stared at him. “What would you do?”
Hobart considered the question for a moment. “I guess the same. Why haven’t you?”
Prescott’s jaw was working again. “They know it.”
“Huh? Who knows it?”
“Kelleher, for one. That part is good. I hope the son of a bitch has nightmares every night, and can’t eat a meal without getting a bellyache and throwing it up. But the part that’s bad is the L.A. police. They knew it like they could read my mind. My probation officer used to give me lectures about it, after five years. The last time I checked in with him, he said it again.” He frowned. “Anything happens to Kelleher, I’m going away.”
“Would you kill him?” asked Hobart. “I mean if you had a foolproof way to do it and get away with it?”
“In a second.”
“There may be a way,” said Hobart. “If you’ve got the money, I may be able to get somebody to help you.”
31
Varney walked toward the office, wary of the world around him, reading the sights as though he were working. For many paces he kept his eyes ahead and unfocused, so they would not be looking directly at anything, but receiving messages from the matrix of sights. Anything that moved was alive or dangerous, and his eyes would focus and evaluate it, then release it and go unfocused and receptive again. He used tricks to check behind him: reflections in windows, pauses and turns that were studied and small and unthreatening but gave him a chance to sweep the street behind. He did not limit his view to the street level but scanned roofs and upper windows while they were still far enough away to make turning or raising his head unnecessary, then swept them again as he passed. His ears were attuned to the sounds of motion and life—footsteps, sudden changes in the pitch of a car engine, a click or slide of metal on metal—because motion and life were the sources of all possible trouble.
He felt his pride in his senses, his cunning, his strength slowly returning, but he was restless and dissatisfied. He had been in a terrible period of his life ever since he had heard of Roy Prescott. He felt as though he had come upon a mangy, growling dog in the sidewalk, and on an impulse—not even a decision—given it a half-hearted kick to get it out of his way and teach it a lesson. It h
ad not yelped and slunk away with its tail between its legs. It had clamped its jaws on his ankle and held on. After that, everything had turned painful and hard. He felt as though he still could not get loose. Everybody that he had met since then had gotten the better of him, because he had not come to them whole and well. He had been feeling the steady grinding of those teeth on his ankle, already through the flesh and into the bone, and dragging the dead weight of that big, filthy, mangy dog. He had let his control of his life go—not in a decision, but in a fit of preoccupation—and had not been able to clutch it again. He was nearly broke, his money leaking away in Tracy’s complicated assessments that made him pay for every second he was in Cincinnati, every moment of invisibility.
He had concentrated all of his mental energy on maintaining a small, private discipline. It was not even a plan, just a way of holding on to who he was. After the first week here, he had been shocked and alarmed at what he was doing to himself. He had been letting himself lose his edge. He had been letting his muscles go slack and his perception dull and his will weaken, and these were the same as dying. That day, he had begun to perform his old workouts. When he had felt the agonizing suspicion that doing them was harder than it had been a month ago, he had increased the number of repetitions, added new exercises, run farther, slowly increasing his workouts until they took half the day. He had walked wherever he went, sharpening his sense of the rhythms of the city, using his ears and practicing his night vision so that his mind would supply what his eyes could not see.
After a time, he had begun to shop for places where he could again practice the skills he used in his work. He had gone to a karate dojo and joined advanced classes that met two evenings a week. He had gone to a second dojo and joined an advanced class in judo that met two more. Advanced classes in martial arts were very small, made up almost entirely of men, all of them wearing black belts. They were much more highly skilled than anyone Varney would be likely to meet in the normal course of his trade. They helped him practice how to detect an opponent’s intentions from tiny physical changes, then block, dodge, roll, and retaliate ever more quickly.
He had not felt comfortable about going to a shooting range. There were few of them in the area, and he knew that at least some of the customers were sure to be off-duty policemen or people who worked with policemen. He didn’t want to be distracted by wondering whether one of them might have seen a copy of the picture Prescott had given the police in Buffalo. He drove around the area and found four pieces of land that were big enough and empty enough and so overgrown with scrub trees and weeds that they could not be used or even visited by the owners much.
He would go at night with his pistol hidden in his coat and walk the woods and fields. He would tread silently, aware of the way the moonlight fell on him and the shapes of trees and bushes behind him. He listened for the sounds of small animals in the brush, testing his patience and alertness by trying to find birds in their nesting places, and to surprise the skunks, raccoons, opossums, and field mice, which moved only at night.
He followed rituals, sometimes walking in the night landscape with his pistol broken down, the pieces secreted in different pockets. When he detected his prey, he assembled the weapon in the dark without looking at it: slide, barrel, recoil spring, trigger and sear, grip. He loaded one bullet into the magazine and slid the magazine into place. Then he screwed the silencer onto the barrel. He practiced until he could do it quickly, all without making a sound that would alert an animal to his presence. He would study the position and attitude of the animal, match it to the features of the landscape. Finally, he would cycle the single bullet into the chamber. That noise would startle the animal. It would panic, skitter toward a hole or a brush pile, or take flight, while Varney took his single shot.
At other times, he would stop in the brush, assemble the pistol with his eyes closed, slip it into his pocket, then move ahead, waiting to startle any animal out of its hiding place. When it happened, he drew and fired.
Now, three months later, Varney’s daily life was still out of control, a bundle he had let slip, that was rolling and bouncing downhill, coming apart and spilling its contents. He still had done nothing about that. Maybe it would all be lost and destroyed, and maybe later he would go back to gather up all the bits and pack them together again. He would not be able to make that decision until it had bounced to the bottom and stopped. For now, he would tolerate the unpleasant sensation. He had made a different choice. Whatever happened to his money, whatever temporary advantage people took of his vulnerability, Varney had preserved what mattered. He had chosen to save himself.
He knew he had wasted three months, given up planning, lost all of the respect he had earned with one of the syndicates that had often provided him with work. But today he had a feeling. He was beginning to feel that things were about to change. It might have been because he had needed to work on himself this hard, and he had been waiting until the self-improvement process had hit a certain high pitch before he could bring on the next change. But the rest had to do with the consequences of letting go of his life. The disaster was nearly complete. In another week he would be out of money.
There was a strange change in the atmosphere of the office when he stepped inside today. He knew that the reason he noticed was that he had trained himself so assiduously to detect tiny, subtle movements and sounds. Something was different. He looked at Tracy, sitting at a desk across the room, and she was holding herself differently. It took him a moment to realize that it was the angle of her back. Usually she leaned forward on her forearms, looking tired and frustrated. Today she was a little straighter, her shoulders held lower. As he stepped in, she fidgeted before she looked up. She was impatient. Her eyes widened. “Sugar!” she said.
“Hello, Tracy,” said Varney.
“I was expecting you earlier. Before lunch.” She glowered at him, but this time, the expression was not the usual counterfeit hurt feelings because his payment was late. This time it was mock anger, which he was supposed to recognize as a pleasantry.
“I walked here,” he said. “It takes time.”
She watched him take out the cash from his coat pocket and set it on the desk in front of her. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up. “I’ll bet you’re running a bit low about now.”
Varney shrugged, but didn’t answer.
“I was right,” she announced. “Now,” she said in a fake-sympathetic tone, like the one people used to give unwelcome advice to drunks and addicts, “don’t you think it’s about time you got over what’s been bothering you and got a job?”
Varney shrugged again. “I guess I’ll have to do that one of these days.” He hated her. It was amazing to him that his bad luck should have been so relentless and extreme that it was forcing him to listen to this woman doling out these doses of criticism as though she had invented them and provided them for his benefit.
She stared at him with an air of superiority. “Would you even be ready to work if a job came up?”
“Of course I would. I’m healthy and rested.”
She looked at him more sharply. “That’s exactly why I ask. You’re rested, all right: maybe a little too rested?”
“I’m as sharp right now as I’ve ever been in my life. Something will come up,” he assured her.
“It has,” she purred slyly.
“What?”
“I said something has come up,” said Tracy, her eyes gleaming with self-satisfaction. Then the malice crept into her voice again. “I hope you were telling me the truth about being ready to work, because this is not like murdering Duane, who wasn’t expecting it and didn’t see it coming.”
“Then what is it like?” he asked.
“It’s a big job, almost at the level you worked before your . . . little setback,” she said.
“I didn’t have a setback,” said Varney. “I decided to take a break and cool off for a while. I’m ready to work. What is it?”
There was something in his voice
that made Tracy’s instinct for self-preservation kick in. “I didn’t mean to offend, sugar,” she said gently. “I just have no way to know without asking. The job came through a man I know I can trust. He’s been doing business with us for at least ten years. A man he knows has an enemy.”
“What kind of enemy?”
“Some kind of business thing out in California went wrong, the enemy gave him up to the police, and he went to prison.” She stared at him and said reassuringly, “The man I know—my contact—stands between us and the client. The client only knows about my contact, and even my contact doesn’t know about you.”
“Why isn’t the client doing it himself?”
She squinted, as though she did not understand, then seemed to sort it out. “Oh, I get the question. The story is that if this enemy dies, there’s only one suspect. My friend was very clear on that point. The cops in California made some kind of deal with this guy. He turned informant, and in exchange, he got off completely free: everything he did got blamed on our client. This guy even got to keep his take from whatever it was they both did. The cops knew it wasn’t fair, but as usual, they settled for what they could get for sure—one conviction—and let their informant take his chances. If he got killed later, that was his problem. They probably won’t be disappointed. But it won’t stop them from going after our client. They know the client wants him dead. As soon as this guy hits the ground, they’ll be looking for the client.” She paused, and said to Varney with false patience, “Besides, I know it’s probably hard for you to see, but some people might want somebody dead, but not want to actually do it.”