by Thomas Perry
“Just watch the road,” he muttered. He was fast and flexible from his years of martial arts training, and he easily rolled over his seat into the back of the car. He looked over her shoulder at the windshield. “Keep heading north for a couple of hours while I get some sleep.” He lay on the back seat and closed his eyes.
“Okay.”
He could hear in her voice a quiet, sad resignation. She sounded as though she was being punished. He supposed that she must know he was back here to escape her meaningless, empty talk. He was aware that there was a range of feelings he could select from and she would accept. He could be sympathetic, curious, apologetic, or even angry. He knew that people felt those things and expected him to act as though he felt them too, and he knew how to do it: how his voice should be modulated, how his face should look. But he did not feel any of them. Sometimes he imitated emotions, practiced them as he practiced his other skills, because they were useful. Right now he didn’t need the practice, and he didn’t need to know anything she was saying, and didn’t need to manipulate her into doing anything. He closed his eyes and let the steady hum of the tires on the pavement below his head soothe him and put him to sleep.
He awoke a couple of hours later, and she was still driving steadily. She went a little bit slower than he had, but she was careful and methodical and had put them a good hundred and thirty miles on. He said, “How are you holding up?”
“Fine,” she answered. “Just fine. But I’m not sorry you woke up just now. I’d like to stop again, if you don’t mind.”
“No,” said Varney. “I’m hungry.”
They parked at a truck stop, went inside, and sat in a big booth with red vinyl seats and a Formica table. Varney ordered a hamburger, then took it out of the bun, cut it up, and ate it with the garnish of lettuce, tomato, and pickle. Mae asked, “Why do you do that? If you’re worried about gaining weight, the milk and meat both have fat in them.”
He said, “I eat what I need. I need protein for my muscles. Milk builds bones. Everybody needs plants.”
“Why did you ask me to come?”
He stopped chewing and looked up. Her eyes were in his, searching for something. He swallowed. “I like having you around. I thought you might want to get out.”
“Why don’t you like to talk to me?”
“I never said that.”
“You never said anything much,” she said. “We’ve been together for three months. You never even look at me, except at night, naked. And then you don’t talk.”
“I look at you other times,” he said. He put on a false expression of apologetic concern that he had once seen on a man trying to keep his wife from embarrassing him with a fight in public. “I’ve had a lot on my mind,” he said quietly. It occurred to him that it sounded right because the man had said exactly those words. He tried to remember what else the man had said, but couldn’t. “I’m not much of a talker,” he said. “I think about you a lot, though.” He considered saying he would talk more, but it would be like breaking a dam. She would spend the rest of the trip yapping in his ear like a little terrier, and he would have to dream up things to say in return, as though he wanted to keep her talking.
“You never talk about yourself, or where you came from, or anything.”
He was astounded. It was like inviting him to step off the top of a building, and she should be smart enough to know that. “None of that stuff is very pleasant. If it had been any good, I’d probably still be there, having a good time. Instead, I got out as soon as I could.”
“You don’t have to tell me, if it makes you sad.” She reached under the table and gripped his forearm. “I was doing a lot of thinking while I was driving. Kind of catching up, because I didn’t have any time to think before we left. I was thinking that maybe we could use this trip the way some married people do, to make a fresh start, maybe make everything new again.”
He had no choice now. His hand was still clenched in a fist on his thigh. He opened it and put it over hers, then watched her look of discomfort turn into a smile. He said, “I think that’s a good idea.”
She gave his hand a quick squeeze and released it, but as she looked at her plate the smile lingered on her lips.
When they had finished eating, Varney pulled the car to the gas pumps at the end of the lot and refilled the tank. Mae didn’t begin again until he had gotten into the driver’s seat and begun to drive back to the highway. She said, “We didn’t really need gas. We’d only gone about a hundred and fifty miles.”
He resisted the impulse to shut her up. He said gently, “Remember what we said before we left?”
“I think so.”
“This is a business trip. Sometimes in my business some small thing goes wrong, and you’ve got to get away as fast and as far as you can. You don’t know in advance when that’s going to happen, or you wouldn’t let it happen. If we went a hundred and fifty miles, we used a hundred and fifty miles’ worth of gas, right?”
“Well, sure, but the tank holds—”
“It doesn’t matter what it holds,” he interrupted. “It had a hundred and fifty miles less in it than it could have. If things go wrong, you’ll be real glad to be able to get an extra hundred and fifty miles away from it before you have to stop and show your face or run out of gas. It’s a problem that never happened, because I solved it ahead of time. It’s one more thing we won’t have on our minds to distract us.”
She looked at him with appreciation. “I’m sorry.”
“What?” She had surprised him again.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “That was what you meant when we were leaving. That you wanted me to do what you told me to, no questions asked. I was just afraid that if you got gas now, then you wouldn’t want to stop again for a really, really long time.”
“If that was what you meant, you should have said it,” he muttered. He was silent for a mile, then remembered that he had determined to keep her happy, or at least pliable, for the duration of the trip. “Anytime you feel like stopping, just let me know.” He turned to look at her, to let her see the benevolent expression he had placed on his features. “I’ll be happy to stop. We should be enjoying this.”
That night they stopped at a motel in Wisconsin. Mae took a hot bubble bath, then asked him to get in, and let him soak for a long time. Then she had him lie on the bed so she could give him a massage that was long, elaborate, and led seamlessly into sex. When it was over and Varney was lying on the bed listening to Mae’s breathing settling into the soft, slow cadence that meant she was asleep, he looked back on the day. Talking to her in exchange for peace and all the extra attention had not been a bad bargain. But he would have to be vigilant. Women didn’t seem to care much about sex. They tolerated it to get things, and it was simple human nature that when they had traded any kind of service for something, they felt entitled to it. She would probably want more and more talk.
The next morning after his exercises, they took showers and had breakfast, then drove on. She was bursting with chatter about everything they passed, even calling out the license plates for different states. He answered direct questions and grunted now and then to show he had heard, and that seemed to satisfy her. By nightfall, they were in Minneapolis. He had her be the one to check them into a big hotel downtown. Then he left her in the room while he used the exercise machines and went for a swim in the indoor pool.
They ate in the hotel restaurant and then went back upstairs. She didn’t seem surprised when he took off the coat and tie he had been wearing, but when he began to put on jeans and sneakers, she said, “Do we have to leave already?”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to do anything. I’m driving up north to take a look around.”
“At night?”
He turned and leveled his eyes on her, without answering.
“I did it again,” she said. “I didn’t mean to.”
He said, “It’s easy, and it’s safe. This way I can look at the town where he lives, see where the
police station is, what the traffic is like at night, maybe drive past his house. They don’t move the roads when the sun goes down, but people won’t get as much chance to look at me.”
She jumped up from the bed. “Can I go?” She saw his frown, and said quickly, “If I drive, you could get a better look. If there are people, you could even duck down, and they’d never have a chance to see you.” She hesitated. “You’re not going to kill him tonight, are you?”
“No,” he admitted. “Put on jeans and we’ll go.”
The road up as far as Hinckley was a big, fast interstate. It would be an easy route to choke off if things went badly. But he supposed that the chance to cover a lot of miles quickly on the way out of there was likely to be worth some risk. The roads after Hinckley were smaller, but fast too. There were very few cars at night, and the only traffic signs had pictures of deer on them and warnings. When Varney came to the last intersection before the road where the farm was supposed to be, he pulled over to the shoulder and let Mae drive.
The farm was everything that Varney had hoped. The house and barn were set back at least three hundred yards from the road, at the end of a gravel drive. The best part was the trees. There were at least forty acres of woods on the west side of the farm that stretched from the southbound highway almost to the house. He could see lights in the upper windows, and a sport utility vehicle beside the barn, but no people. He had Mae drive the next ten miles so he could see where the other houses were, all the way to the next town. Then he had her drive back past the farm and beyond it to the junction with the southbound highway.
He took over and drove back toward Minneapolis, feeling contemptuous. People who knew somebody might kill them always seemed to do the wrong things. They went to live in some remote, deserted area like this, and thought that made them safe. What it did was make them slightly easier to find, and much easier to kill.
As Varney drove, he saw that Mae had dozed off. He used the solitude to construct a mental list. He would have to give Tracy a call from a pay phone to give her the number of the hotel. Tomorrow he would pick up a few items that might be useful: a shovel, for one thing. He couldn’t count on a rich guy from California even having one, let alone leaving it where Varney could find it. He would drive back up and take a look at the place in daylight. Then all he would have to do was wait for Tracy to call and tell him it was time to drive up here and pull the trigger.
33
In daylight, the farm appeared to be a perfect place. The area had the quiet bleakness of a land that was remote, wild, and sparsely populated, like a thawed tundra. This far north the growing season was short, so the fields Varney saw on the way had already been cut to stubble, the crops harvested with the first chill. Varney couldn’t tell if Kelleher’s farm had even been planted this year. The vast level plot that ran from the road to the left side of the house and took up two-thirds of the acreage looked patchy and unkempt compared to the land on other farms. The stubble was interspersed with weeds. The rest of the farm was covered with thick deciduous woods, all the trees looking exactly the same age. He wondered about that until his second visit.
On his second trip he passed through Hinckley in the daytime, and picked up a tourist map. There was a paragraph on the back about the various attractions, and one was the Hinckley Fire Museum. He read more closely and learned that all the land for miles around here had been old forests that had been logged in the nineteenth century. The cutters had trimmed the brush from the lumber and left it where it fell. When a fire started in 1894, the land had burned uncontrollably, leaving nothing. All the trees had grown in since then.
When Varney reached the road where the farm was, he did his first daylight reconnaissance. The utility vehicle that had been parked outside the house was gone this morning, and no other vehicle was visible, so he guessed that Kelleher had gone out, and probably lived alone. He paid particular attention to the woods that covered the right side of the farm. Since the left side was low stubble and weeds, it would be a bad place to cross on foot.
He knew he was teasing himself, relishing the planning phase because he had been so anxious to get back to work. He knew that most likely, planning was unnecessary. He could have sat in Minneapolis waiting for the phone call, driven right up here that night, pulled up the farm road to the house, kicked in the door, shot Kelleher, and driven off. There were few cars on this road in the daytime, and almost none at night. Minnesota north of Minneapolis was not as crowded as the places where he had worked before. He had driven up here twice, about ninety miles each way, and had not seen a single police car. He’d had to drive around in Hinckley to see a few parked by the station so he would know what colors they were painted. He had also searched out a state police barracks along the interstate highway to look at state police cars.
Varney studied the road near the farm for the best place to park his car. The landscape presented extremes. Long stretches of road were flanked on both sides by endless, swampy, treeless fields where red-winged blackbirds perched on cattails, their weight making the shafts bend, so that they bobbed in the wind as they called to each other. The rest was either farmers’ fields or thick forests of the uniform twenty-foot deciduous trees like the ones on Kelleher’s land.
When he had first seen them, he had assumed they were young, but now he supposed they must have been what sprouted after the fire over a hundred years ago, and they’d been stunted by the weather. Every place he saw a grove that looked promising he slowed down to look closer and saw an obstacle. In many places, there was a drainage ditch beside the shoulder of the road, or a fence. In other places, the trees had grown in too dense a pattern for a car to slip in between them.
When he worked in cities, he could always find a safe place to leave a car. Cities were full of commercial buildings with small parking areas behind them. Sometimes he would park his car in a shopping mall or the lot of a big apartment complex, where it would become invisible, just one of a hundred. Here it was different. He could hardly leave a car on the shoulder of the road, because it would be the only one visible for miles. He considered leaving the car in Hinckley. There was a big hotel and casino run by the Ojibwe Indians there, with hundreds of cars in its lot. But it was too far from the farm. The casino was surrounded by long stretches of straight, empty highway where a solitary walker would be a novelty. People didn’t go for pleasant ten-mile hikes beside roads around here. There was a big state park a few miles away, where people could hike along the St. Croix River if they wanted to.
As he drove back to Minneapolis, he thought of various ways to handle the problem of transportation. He was already as far south as Mounds View before he hit upon the right one. For the rest of the drive, he worked out the details until he was satisfied.
For the next few days, Varney stayed in Minneapolis and prepared. He would get up early each morning, go down to the exercise room on the fourth floor of the hotel, and use the weights and machines before the other guests were up. Then he would step through the locker room to the pool and swim for an hour. Then he went up to the room, took Mae to breakfast, and walked the streets with her until lunchtime. He drove her to the Mall of America and bought her some clothes, took her to parks with little lakes in them, looked at the Mississippi. In the late afternoon, he drove to a park where people jogged after work, and joined them. He and Mae went to dinner at a different restaurant each evening, and when they were back in the room, he turned his attention to his equipment. The kind of meticulous care he used was best done in quiet times like this.
Varney put on thin rubber gloves, and thoroughly cleaned his three pistols. He bathed each part in solvent, wiped it clean, and put a thin layer of gun oil on it, then reassembled the weapon without putting any fingerprints on its internal parts. He used the same procedure with each magazine, then loaded the magazine with ammunition without touching any of the rounds with bare hands. Then he put the pistols into plastic bags and returned them to his suitcase.
He treated his clothi
ng with equal care. None of the clothes had anything memorable or distinctive about them. The brands were all national, the brand names and even size labels cut out. He did not do this because a police force would not be able to find out these things if they had his clothes. He did it because he wanted to make them work harder. If they had to learn the brand name by cut, material, and pattern, it would take time. And that information would give them nothing, because there was nothing special about the clothes.
He washed the soles of the shoes he planned to wear and put them into a plastic bag so no fibers from a hotel rug or a car’s interior would stick to them.
His precautions were meticulous and painstaking, but they dispelled the worries that distracted him. He knew a shell casing left near the body would not carry a fingerprint. If he got blood on his clothes, or was seen wearing them, he could change and throw them away. He could drop his gun in a ditch and not give it another thought, because his guns were all ones he’d stolen in burglaries years ago in California.
Mae watched him making his preparations, never coming near the belongings he spread on the table in their room or speaking to him during his period of meditation on risks and countermeasures. It was only after he had performed all the rituals and put away the tools and clothes that she moved within ten feet of him. She said, “Are you done?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s interesting, the way you do things. So careful, everything in a certain way. It’s kind of like a doctor or something.”
He gazed at her in wonder. She didn’t get it. She kept pushing forward, and she sometimes came right up close to figuring something out, but she just wasn’t paying enough attention after she got there. She was doomed always to think she understood things when she didn’t.