by Thomas Perry
“How is he protecting himself?” asked Varney.
“He wants to get you all hired and ready to do it. Then he goes back to California and establishes a clear, solid alibi. I’m not sure what that will be. Getting himself tossed in jail would be the best, but I doubt that he’ll do that. Anyway, when he’s sure he’s all set, he places a call from a pay phone to my friend. My friend calls me from a pay phone. I call you from a pay phone. No calls get traced later. You kill the guy in Minnesota, a couple thousand miles from where the client is. Everybody lives happily ever after. Or, practically everybody.” She smiled. “Satisfied?”
“Not quite,” said Varney.
She looked shocked, then mystified. “Sugar, what more could you want? Are you scared?”
“No,” said Varney. “How is the payment going to work?”
“Oh,” she said happily. “He’ll pay a hundred grand.”
“No,” Varney said. “I asked how. If the police know he’s the one who wanted the guy dead, and the guy dies while he’s got an alibi, they don’t give up. They’ll watch him for a while to see who he pays.”
She shook her head in delight. “It won’t happen, and if it did, it wouldn’t do any good. The police don’t know he has this kind of money—or any money. He had some hidden when he went to prison. Nobody knows about it. And,” she added proudly, “I took care of the rest.”
“How did you do that?”
“I set it up so he pays in advance. He already gave the hundred thousand to my friend. You get fifty thousand as soon as you agree. My friend holds the rest. When the killing is done, my friend passes along the other fifty. There’s no transaction that involves the client—or even takes place in the same state.”
Varney let some of his suspicion show. “You set that up, huh?”
“Well, of course I did, sugar,” she purred. “I can’t count on some strange client to protect me. He’s never done this before.”
Varney nodded, his tongue exploring the outer surfaces of his teeth. “So I get fifty in advance and fifty at the end, both from you.”
“That’s what I said,” Tracy agreed, her eyes settling on her fingernails, as though she were checking their length.
“I’ll do it,” said Varney.
“That’s smart, honey,” she said. “It’ll do you good. I just hate to see a young man lolling around, aimless, no use to himself or anybody else. It’s time that you pulled yourself together and stopped letting Mae lead you around like a little puppy dog, don’t you think?”
He said, “When you’ve got the fifty thousand, the name and address, call me and I’ll come around to pick them up.”
She brightened and opened the top drawer of the desk, pulling it into her belly. “Got them.” She handed him a thick manila envelope that felt like money, and another with some folded paper inside. “I expect the call to come from the client to my friend sometime around the fifteenth. Think you can be ready by then?”
“I’m ready now. I expect I’ll go where he is and have a look ahead of time.”
“Don’t forget to always leave me a phone number where I can reach you.”
“I won’t.” He opened the big envelope and got a peek at the hundred-dollar bills while he slipped the smaller envelope inside it. He lifted his shirt, pushed the manila envelope into the top of his belt, and tucked his shirt in over it. He glanced at Tracy, and saw she had been watching the process.
She saw him notice, and shrugged naughtily. “See you, sugar.”
He said, “While I’m gone, I want Mae in my apartment. Alone.”
She looked surprised. “Well, of course, as far as I’m concerned. You’ll have to make that clear to her. But I certainly won’t put temptation in her way.”
He nodded without bothering to look at her to detect the lie. “I’ll call you with a number where you can reach me.” He stepped out and closed the door. As he walked down the long, deserted hall, he noted all the things that were wrong with the deal. Tracy had said the price was a hundred thousand. That meant that it was more—probably two hundred—and she had taken a hundred out. There was no way in the world she would act as broker without a cut. She probably had to give the middleman something, but there was no question in Varney’s mind who would end up with most of it. She had also used her position as purveyor of information to exercise power over Varney, to drag out the process and watch him squirm, using every chance to impose her superior smile and tell him how worthless he was. She had sensed that this news was about to make him stronger, and she hadn’t been able to resist trying to weaken him, sucking away his strength like a tick.
He noted each of these things, but he only noted them and set them aside in his mind. The news was better than Tracy had imagined, and he only tallied the problems to remind himself that he knew them. He was no longer about to be penniless. He was walking along with fifty thousand dollars pressed against his belly under his shirt, with another fifty on the way. He was going out on the road again to find an enemy and cut him down.
Even the lies that Tracy had fed him about the job were good. She had made it sound as though this target was some hapless, stupid loser who had once simply gotten caught and squeezed and had the cops go easy on him. Varney didn’t believe it. Nobody would pay a hundred thousand, let alone whatever Tracy had really charged, to exterminate a man like that. Anybody who had served time would know fifty guys who would take out somebody like that for a thousand dollars.
The client was clearly a smart man. Tracy had not set this up. The client was the one who had fashioned the deal this way, because he had known that the police would suspect him, and he had known what they would do to prove he had done it. He had also known better than to hire an assassin directly. He was the one who had placed two intermediaries, two bloodsucking parasites, between him and anybody who hunted men for a living. He knew that the only likely way for him to get caught was if Varney screwed it up and traded him for a lighter sentence. This way, Varney couldn’t. But the client couldn’t tell the police who Varney was, either. All either of them could sell to the police was an intermediary who was next to worthless. Varney felt a certain respect for this client. It was good to know he was standing in for a man who was worth something, but who simply was too hemmed in by circumstances to go kill his own enemy.
Before Varney was aware of it, he had already walked a mile from Tracy’s office. He was alive again, in control. He was in the best shape of his life, he was thinking, making decisions, preparing to set off on a hunt. The interruption of his life was over, and he was an adventurer again.
32
Varney was standing by the bed, folding clothes and putting them into his suitcase, when he heard Mae’s light footsteps on the stairs. She had never said anything about Duane, but he suspected she knew about him, because since Varney had killed him, she had never raised the issue of painting the kitchen again. She must have noticed that the tarp that had been in the closet with the paint was missing, and figured out where it had gone. She had also changed the way she entered the apartment. He stood in the doorway and looked across the kitchen at the door. The key in the lock was quiet. The door swung inward an inch or two and stopped, as though she was looking for signs of trouble. She saw Varney, came in the rest of the way, and set the bag of groceries on the kitchen table. “Hi,” she said, watching him.
“Hi.” He returned to his packing, folding shirts expertly and setting them aside. He always took special care with his shirts. They would be the final layer, so when he opened the suitcase he could pull them out quickly and hang them up. When he traveled, he liked to have his clothes professionally washed, ironed, and packaged, because wrinkles made him nervous. Anything that made him the one in a crowd that somebody remembered was dangerous. But this time he was not going to take the clothes to a laundry: he was too impatient to get on the road.
Mae padded around silently, putting away the food she had bought, waiting for Varney to speak, to tell her what was happening. He watched her
for a moment. She was pretty, especially when she was alone with him and preoccupied like this. She was alien, like a different species of animal, with thin, birdlike bones and graceful movements. He kept looking at her while he folded the last shirt he had chosen. She wasn’t too pretty, he decided. She had probably gone all the way to the store and back without having a man stare at her.
“I’m going on a trip,” he said.
“Oh?” She was being careful to sound casual about it, and knew enough not to ask any questions.
He tried to find words like the ones that other people might use, then pitched his voice to sound the way theirs sounded. “Would you like to go with me?”
She seemed to struggle, as though she had never considered that he might say such a thing, and she had to convince herself that it was true. Then she had to select the safest response.
“I think I would,” she said. “If I wouldn’t be too much trouble.” She stood with her shoulders drawn up to her neck in a frozen shrug. “Where do you want to go?”
He let the part about wanting pass, even though it irritated him: wanting to go meant it was just some self-indulgent whim, when it deserved to be dignified with “have to” because it was a job. “Minnesota,” he said. “Up north of Minneapolis.” He hurried to spare himself the annoyance she would cause with her next couple of questions. “We’d be gone for a while, probably at least two weeks, and maybe a month. I’m driving up.”
She stared at him and tiny worry lines appeared on her forehead and beside her eyes. He realized it had occurred to her that maybe he was planning to take her somewhere and kill her. The replacement tarp she had been fearing to see on the kitchen floor wouldn’t be necessary if he took her out in some woods.
He said, “It’s a job that I got through Tracy. We drive up, I do it, and we drive home. It’s a long trip, pretty dull. If you don’t want to come, don’t do it for me.”
The lines disappeared, and her color seemed to return. “I want to,” she said. “I do. I like to go places, and I’ve never been up there.” She was suddenly animated. “I’m so excited.” She hurried to the closet and started picking hangers off the rod and putting them back. “I don’t know what to bring.”
“You don’t want a lot of luggage,” he said. “A couple of pairs of jeans, a couple of sweatshirts, sneakers . . .” He relented. “Maybe one nice outfit. Minneapolis and St. Paul are kind of big, so we may be able to go out a little to good restaurants.”
Mae was a person who could actually be seen in the act of thinking. She got through it like a person feeling a pain passing: a slight knitting of the brows, then it was over. Now it was different. She snatched a couple of hangers, threw them on the bed, went to the dresser, pulled a few items from different drawers as she was talking. “I’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes, if we need to leave right away. If we don’t, I’d like to trim your hair and touch up the highlights a little first.” She paused. “Of course, I can do that when we get there, but if you’re working, you probably want to look as good as you can, right? I mean, as different from the way you used to look.” She didn’t wait for an answer, but jumped to the next thought. “I should tell Tracy that I’m going. We should leave a light on in the apartment, and pull the shades down. Maybe the bathroom light, so it’s dim, like a night-light, and you can’t see it from outside in the day. I’ll just take this dress. If you like this dress?” She held it up on the hanger in front of her body.
Varney decided to defend his concentration from her scattered musings by dispatching all of the questions at once. “The dress will be fine. I’ll leave the bathroom light on. Tracy knows. Bring the hair stuff, and you can do me in a hotel on the way. I’d like to get going.”
He waited until she was in the bathroom before he closed and latched his suitcase, then lifted a second one to the bed and opened it. This one contained his equipment. There were a few pairs of gloves, some hats and shoes, some locksmith’s skeleton keys, a couple of sets of picks, a slim-jim for pulling car-door locks, some Mag-lites in different sizes, three nine-millimeter pistols with spare ammunition magazines, a commando knife with a guttered blade and a nearly flat handle. He added his big envelope to the suitcase, and closed it.
He changed into a comfortable pair of khaki pants, some good, casual shoes, and a blue oxford shirt, pulled down the window shade, and waited. A few minutes later, Mae had filled her small bag and looked at him anxiously.
“Do I look all right?”
“You know you do,” he said. “Hair, makeup, clothes, all that. It’s what you do for a living.” Then he frowned. “That reminds me. Where I’m going now, that’s what I do for a living. If you’re going, you’ll want to listen hard to what I say.”
“I will,” said Mae. “I promise.”
“Start now. Once we leave here, you don’t call anybody on the phone, or anything like that. You don’t strike up conversations with people in restaurants or hotels. What you want more than anything is not to be noticed or remembered. A man or woman traveling alone might get noticed—for different reasons, maybe—but if they’re traveling together, they’re just a couple. The man isn’t dangerous and the woman isn’t available, so people won’t look hard to figure those things out. So you stick close to me.”
She nodded, maybe a little too energetically. He wasn’t sure she really had taken it in and understood. “I know that,” she said. “I’m ready.” He picked up their suitcases and let her open and close the doors for him.
Varney drove out of town with a feeling that was close to joy. He was on the road, with a pretty woman at his side. She was not flashy enough to make him feel visible, but she was pleasant to look at. He knew she probably would have gotten to chattering again if she had been smart enough to realize that she was important to him, that she was the best part of his disguise. He had told her, in case it occurred to her later, but she didn’t seem to have absorbed the full meaning of it.
She was the guarantee that when men looked, they would only let their eyes pass over him on the way to her. If they heard later that somebody had been killed, they would not remember Varney as a solitary young man who looked capable of doing someone harm. They might not remember him clearly at all. He was just another family man on his way somewhere with his wife. She could do some of the driving later, after he got tired. He might even use her to go into motel offices to rent rooms, or into fast-food places to get food, so he could remain completely invisible.
The most important feeling Varney had was elation that he had broken out. He had been like a man in a hospital, his mind like a doctor delivering lectures to him every day that being there was the only thing he could do for the present, while the rest of him was screaming for release. That was over now. He had come away rested and sharp, with an envelope full of money, a clean, honest car, untraceable guns, a companion that he was confident would follow his orders. And somebody had hired him to do what he had always done better than anybody else.
He drove for three hours without stopping, without even having to slow the car for any reason except to keep from speeding. His car sliced between the gatherings of cars ahead, then occasionally edged to the left lane to pass the big box of a tractor-trailer rig and moved back into the right. Much of the time, the road was flat and straight as a surveyor could make it. When there were curves, they were gradual, made without haste, as a boat moves from one compass heading to another.
At the end of the three hours, Mae said, “I’d like to pee, if you can stop someplace,” and he realized that she must have set this time for herself in advance, waiting for a while and hoping he would spontaneously think of stopping, then telling herself she could wait, that she wouldn’t say anything until it got to be three hours.
“Okay,” he said. “Next exit.”
He pulled off the interstate and filled the car’s tank at a gas station while she went inside and got the key to the ladies’ room. He pulled the car away from the pump and parked, went to the men’s room, then came back
and waited. When she came out, he saw her look at the gas pump, then whirl her head around more quickly toward him, an abrupt, unconsidered movement. He could tell that he had scared her. She had come out and seen that the car was no longer where she’d left it, and she had panicked, afraid he had stranded her. He felt a strong distaste. She was weak and stupid, like a child, somebody with all sorts of needs that he would have to take into account.
When she got to the car, she shocked him again. It was as though it had been normal. She wasn’t even embarrassed. “There you are,” she said with a smile. “I was afraid you’d gotten impatient and left me here. Want me to drive for a while?” He nodded, got into the passenger seat, and watched her closely while she drove out onto the entrance ramp and moved into the line of cars. He decided she was competent enough for this and began to relax. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
“Do you like to travel?”
He opened his eyes, astounded that she had not understood that he wasn’t interested in talking.
“I do,” she continued. “It’s one of my favorite things. I just love all of it. Being on the open road, packing, hotels. I never got much chance to do it.”
He controlled himself and asked the question. “Why is that?”
“Oh,” she said, and looked at him uncomfortably. “Just the way things worked out. My parents never seemed to think of it. I got married young, and my husband always said we’d do it, but there was never any money. He was just saying that, because he was like my parents: like a stone that just stays wherever it’s dropped, and doesn’t move an inch unless it’s kicked or something. As far as he would go was saying he would do it, which was more than my parents would do, I guess. They would just say it was stupid. He would lie to me so I wouldn’t try to convince him. If he said yes, but that there’s no money, then I couldn’t say anything, just wait until there was more money. There never was enough. Then that was over, and he was gone, but that meant I had even less money.” She shrugged. “I was doing hair and nails and makeovers, and people had to have regular appointments, so if I went away, then I knew that when I got back, they would have found somebody else. It never worked out.” He unhooked his seat belt, and she looked alarmed. “What are you doing?”