by Thomas Perry
The telephone rang, and she gave a small jump. It had not rung in the five days since they had arrived. She flopped on the bed and reached for the telephone on the nightstand. “I’ll get it.”
“No,” he said. “I will.” He lifted the receiver on the desk. “Yes?”
“Sugar!” came the high, oily voice. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” he answered, “it’s me. Did you get the call?”
“About fifteen minutes ago, sugar. The client just called my friend, and said he’s all set in California.”
“For how long?”
“What?”
“How long is he going to be accounted for? How long have I got to do this?”
The voice turned honey-sweet and dumb. “Well, I don’t really know. My friend didn’t tell me, and I didn’t know I was supposed to ask.” The voice seemed to gel and turn cold. “Aren’t you ready by now?” There was a distorted windy sound, and he could imagine her blowing smoke from a cigarette across the receiver. “I’m not about to call him back. I’m standing at a pay phone at a 7-Eleven way across town, and he—”
“Forget it,” said Varney. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. See you in a few days.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“I just told you. I rushed out to a 7-Eleven after dark alone just to do this. Not to mention setting it all up and waiting a week for a stupid phone call.”
His jaw worked, his teeth clenched. After a moment he said, “Thank you.”
“That’s more like it. Good-bye.” She hung up.
He placed the telephone back on its cradle, walked to the closet, and put his special suitcase on the bed. He was concentrating now, getting himself ready, and Mae’s voice was an irritant. “Was that the call?”
His concentration was broken. “Uh-huh.” He took the plastic bags that contained his clothes, tools, and weapons out and set them on the bed, examining them once more, then returned them to the suitcase.
“Can I go with you?”
He turned to her, his brows knitted. “I’m going up there to kill somebody.”
“I know,” she said, but her features were pinched together in what looked like confusion. He supposed that she must be surprised that she wanted to go, and wasn’t sure whether she was being stupid. “I won’t bother you or get in the way. I won’t even talk if you don’t want me to.”
“Why do you want to go?”
She shrugged. “I just thought it might be nicer.” Then she tried to carry an idea to him, but she didn’t seem to know exactly what it was, so she talked around it. “For you, you know? Somebody to listen if you wanted to talk afterward, maybe to drive if you got tired.”
He was intrigued. She had absolutely no comprehension of what this was, or how it felt to be the one who did it. But she had been sitting here in silence, talking herself into doing exactly what he wanted her to do. He had been expecting he would have to fool her or threaten her, but she was practically begging him. It made him curious, so he ventured, “It’s not going to be fun. You could stay here in this fancy hotel and get some sleep.”
She looked upset, as though she was being forced to drop a comforting pretense and admit something. “Please. I don’t want to sit here all alone wondering what’s happening: if you’re going to come back for me, or if I’ll just be sitting here for days.”
He let enough time pass so she would believe he was slowly working his way through her reasons and overcoming his surprise at her request. “All right,” he said. “Get ready.”
She stood and flung her arms around him. “Thanks, Jimmy. You won’t regret it.” Then she released him. “What do I wear? Something dark?”
He went to the closet, pushed hangers aside, pulled a couple out, and tossed them on the bed. “These will do.” The hangers held a pair of black tailored pants with a razor crease, and a dark blue blouse.
“What about—”
He anticipated her question. “These.” He tossed a pair of flat black shoes onto the bed. They were ones she had worn once when they had gone for a walk. She looked at the outfit critically for a second, then seemed pleased. She quickly began to dress.
When they were both ready, Varney said, “Okay. Now we clean up. We don’t know if we’re coming back to Minneapolis or not, but probably we won’t. So we pack. We wipe off everything that’s smooth and might hold a fingerprint: doorknobs, faucets, the phones, the desk, TV, everything. Use a towel.”
Twenty minutes later, Varney stopped and threw his towel on the bathroom floor, and she imitated him. “Check the wastebaskets,” he said. “Anything in them, we take.”
She stood still. “They’re empty. I wiped them off because they were smooth, so I noticed.”
“Good. Now we go.”
They took the elevator to the ground floor, and Mae paid the bill in cash and checked out while Varney waited in a big armchair across the lobby near a table that held a white telephone.
They got into the car and Varney let Mae drive for the first stretch. It was dark, and after a half hour they were beyond the range of most of the cars being driven north by commuters. It was safe for him to change his clothes in the passenger seat.
“You know, I had an idea,” he said.
“What is it?” She kept taking her eyes off the road to look at him, and that made him nervous. He had intended to let her drive all the way up so he could stay fresh, but he was tempted to change the plan.
He said, “The problem with that farm is that there’s no good place to park where people can’t see the car from the road. What if you drove me near the farm, stopped for just a second while I got out, and took off? You could give me, say, two hours to go the rest of the way on foot through the woods, drop the hammer on this guy, hide the body, and walk back. What do you think?”
“What do I do then?”
His confidence that he had constructed a good plan began to seem optimistic. “You come back, stop the car again, and pick me up. We leave.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, while you’re gone. Do I just keep driving for an hour and then turn around?”
He had to stop himself from saying, “Who gives a shit?” He supposed the question was not as stupid as it had sounded. She was right. It could make a difference. He looked at his watch. “By the time you’ve dropped me off, it will be around midnight. It’s probably better not to be driving around alone. After you drop me, go back to Hinckley, park in the lot at that hotel that says Grand Casino. It’s probably the only place you could go around here that’s not suspicious. Go inside and play the slot machines for a couple of hours and come get me.”
“Is that safe?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Places like that are full of security people. It’s probably safer than a bank.”
“But those places have surveillance cameras, don’t they?”
He nodded, mildly surprised that she knew. “Yes, they do. If they get you on tape, you know what it will show? That you were in a casino pumping quarters into a slot while this guy was getting killed. And there’s going to be fifty other women doing the same.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I just never thought like this before.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Now I’ve got to do some thinking, so I’ll have to be kind of quiet for a while.” He stared ahead at the road, going over each part of his plan, forming an image in his mind of himself performing each step. Within a few minutes, he felt his heartbeat had begun to go faster, stronger, his muscles had begun to feel ready. He put on his thin, tight goatskin gloves, lifted the plastic bag that contained his weapons, and set it on his lap. He took out two of the pistols, both Beretta Model 92’s like the police used, a silencer, and two extra ammunition clips, and slid the bag under the seat. He slipped the knife into the short sheath, strapped the Velcro strips around his ankle, and covered it with his pant leg. He put the silencer, magazines, and one pistol into various jacket pockets, then pushed the second
gun under his belt at the small of his back and covered it with his jacket. They were nearly to the exit for Route 48 now, and when he saw it, he said, “Pull off here.”
When they passed the brightly lit sign for the casino he said, “That’s the place where you go.” He pulled out his wallet and said, “Put this in your purse. There’s about two thousand in it. Use what you need to keep gambling. Nobody in a casino bothers you if you’re gambling.” Then he had a sudden worry. “Don’t drink alcohol, or try to buy drugs. When this is over, you can get as fucked up as you want.”
“I won’t,” she said, sounding hurt.
He was silent again until after she had made the turn onto the smaller road and was headed toward the farm. She had gotten them here without his having to point out the last few turns, so he felt reassured: she wouldn’t get lost on the way back. She said, “Let me know where to stop.”
He watched the sights going by for a few minutes. When they passed the farm, he looked and his heartbeat strengthened again. The SUV was parked there, and one light was on upstairs. He was here. When Mae had gone a half mile down the road, Varney looked back and saw no headlights. He said, “Right here. Stop.”
He slipped out onto the road and closed the car door, then stepped back onto the shoulder. As he turned to go, her voice cut the silence.
“Wait,” she called.
He stopped, his senses searching the area for danger, his mind racing. He glanced at her to see what she had meant. She looked as though she knew she had made a mistake. She said, “I just wanted to say good luck.”
His eyes flared, but he said, “Thanks,” and stepped into the woods at the edge of the road. He saw the lights fade, heard the engine accelerating, and then submerged himself in the silence and darkness.
34
Varney took his bearings by looking up to find the North Star, gauging the angle of the road, and then looking for a landmark to aim at. The sky was incredibly clear and the stars appeared big and close, but the woods were too thick to allow him to pick out a landmark on the ground. He knew the approximate direction he wanted, so he set off.
There was something about the night woods that created its own propriety. He found himself stalking through the forest quietly, as he had practiced in Ohio. As he walked, occasionally he startled small animals that rustled the brush and scuttled off. He was in only about a quarter mile before he heard something different ahead. A thicket shook, making a hissing and crackling, the leaves on the ground crunching as something heavy exploded out of the thicket.
He dropped and crouched, the pistol out of his belt and in his hand before his mind even attempted to interpret the sounds. The thumping of feet rapidly moved off somewhere ahead and to his right, and the silence flowed in to fill the vacuum again.
Varney stayed coiled and motionless for a long time, his ears straining and his eyes slowly moving back and forth, up and down. A deer: it had to be a deer, he thought. It had been absolutely still, maybe lying down, and he had approached so quietly that he had startled it.
He slowly stood. He switched on the safety of his pistol, but he didn’t put it away. He reached into his jacket pocket, found the four-inch tube of the silencer, and carefully screwed it onto the custom-threaded barrel. He stepped forward again, this time feeling the cadence of his heart, almost hearing it as it raced, then slowed again. He was probably being foolish, he chided himself. There was nothing to be uneasy about as long as he didn’t get startled in the dark and step in a hole.
He had become accustomed to walking in fields and woods at night in Ohio, but this was not Ohio. It had felt the same at first, but it wasn’t. There were deer. What about bears? Up here there could easily be bears. These woods and farms had covered all the land that was high, and the rest was marshes and streams, so this was where they would be.
He plotted his course again by mentally tracing his path back to where he had begun, then extending the line forward through the thicket. He kept going steadily, not letting himself be as quiet now as he had been. If there was something big up ahead, he wanted it to have time to get out of his way.
In a few minutes he was feeling better, concentrating on what he had to do. It was simpler than most of the jobs he’d done since he had moved into the upper level of his profession. People only put out the big money he commanded when the job was risky or complicated. In this case, it was only risky and complicated for the client, and whoever he was, he had taken care of most of that himself. He was going to be the suspect, so he had established an alibi, paid in advance, and gotten out of the way. He had even done the work of finding Kelleher himself, so there could be no mistake.
Varney was not a believer in taking work lightly. If you were good enough to do the job, then usually the way you got destroyed was by chance. The best always assumed that something was going to go wrong, and calmly watched to see what it was going to be this time. Some visitor would show up at the front door just as you were waiting for the target to answer it. You would have your car’s muffler go just as you were driving off, trying not to be noticed. Guns jammed, fires either went out or roared into life so fast that you could hear sirens before you made it out the door.
Over the past few days, he had anticipated as many of the possible problems as he could, and fixed them. Nobody would see his car parked here. Mae was in a casino alone, and when she drove off, she would still seem to be alone. If his gun jammed, he had another in his jacket pocket. If that failed, he had a knife. If Mae didn’t come, he could walk back to the house and take Kelleher’s car, or even sneak into town at that time of night and probably hot-wire one. He reviewed his preparations and contingency plans, and found they were adequate. The real certainty was inside Varney. He had exerted self-discipline over the past couple of months, and stayed strong and ready. He had tirelessly worked on his body, his concentration, his skills, his alertness. Trudging out here to pop some solitary traitor was almost beneath him, but he didn’t mind. The job had come at a time when he needed to get back to work. He needed a kill.
He sensed that there was more light between the trunks of the trees ahead, and quickened his pace. In a few minutes, he was sure. A hundred feet to his left, he caught sight of stubble and bare ground. He had made a near-perfect diagonal from the road across the woods, and at some point had passed over an invisible line onto Kelleher’s property. He stayed well back, where the brush was thick and the trunks of trees made him invisible from outside the woods, and kept going until his eye caught the glow of an electric light just below the canopy of leaves.
He turned toward it and moved forward from tree to tree, until he could see the house. The light was still on in the upstairs window—undoubtedly Kelleher’s bedroom. Downstairs, everything seemed to be dark. Varney moved closer, still gliding ahead only as far as the next tree that he could stand behind, then stopping and watching the house for a time while he planned his next advance.
The SUV he had seen from the road was a dark blue Lincoln Navigator. He could make out the name on the back, the beige leather upholstery of the back seats above the window, and the license-plate holder from a lot in Minneapolis. The vehicle was new, and expensive. He felt a moment of empathy for his client. This weasel had handed the client to the police, and managed to hold on to some serious money. He had bought a big farm and a new vehicle, and if he could live up here, he had no need to work.
For the first time, it occurred to Varney that this job might be worth more than he had been offered. All this money had come from some kind of theft that this Kelleher had pulled with the client, and so there was a fairly strong possibility that some of it was here in cash. Varney checked his watch. It was twenty after twelve already. He needed to set aside twenty minutes to get back to the road, and that left an hour and twenty minutes for him to accomplish everything he was going to do here. The thought made him venture closer, his eyes now scanning the eaves of the house for floodlights that might be connected to motion detectors. The roof of the farmhouse was stee
p and the eaves were high, so he could see clearly: they were bare. There were no warning signs on the lawn or windows that belonged to an alarm company. He supposed that way out here there might not even be such a thing. But he exerted the self-discipline and made himself do the walk-around he had planned. He unscrewed the silencer and put away the gun.
He stayed far from the house as he walked around it, but moved closer when there was cover. He looked at the eaves and gutters all around, studied windows, doors, the foundation. When he had made a full circuit, he had confirmed that there was no sign of an armed security service that answered alarms, but there seemed to be a system of some kind installed. Visible through a window was a keypad near the front door with glowing red and green lights.
At the rear of the house was an open stone patio that looked as though it had been laid recently enough to be the work of the current owner. There was an irregular pattern of sandstone slabs with sand between them, and just one lawn chair in the center not far from a small portable barbecue. Just as Varney was moving in that direction, the light in the upper window went out. He looked at his watch. It was nearly twelve-thirty.
The barn was a small one, not the kind that had been built to house forty cows, but the kind where machinery was parked on the lower floor and bales of hay were stored in the loft. The door had a padlock on it, but it was unlocked and the hasp open at the moment, so he supposed there was nothing of interest inside.
He found the septic tank, and in the dark it looked to him as though it had probably just been replaced, because it had been covered with turf strips that still had lines between them, and there was a hatch that seemed nearly new. There were a couple of long, four-inch pipes on the ground, and he supposed they had something to do with it.
Then Varney made a lucky find. The upstairs window that had been lit was open about two inches, and so was the one on the other side of the house directly across from it, probably to set up a cross-breeze. If the alarm system was on but the upstairs windows were open, then the alarm was only protecting the ground floor. He could go in the window across the hall from Kelleher’s room without setting off any bells and whistles.