by Thomas Perry
It was not going to be without risk. He had to make his way to that window, open it farther, and slip inside without letting Kelleher hear him. Nobody who thought there were people who wanted to kill him went to bed without having a gun where he could reach for it in the dark. Varney moved to the corner of the house and judged the possibilities. There was a low roof over the front porch that he could easily climb onto, but he would still be twenty feet from the open window. No tree was near enough to let him climb and jump for the sill. Even if he could have done such a thing and held on, it would have made a lot of noise.
He looked down and saw the pipes on the ground. He raised his eyes to the window, then judged the length of the nearest pipe. He stepped closer to it. The material was hard and heavy and smooth like iron, but it seemed to be made of some kind of ceramic material. He knelt and looked at the open end. It was rougher inside, and narrower. The rim seemed to be three quarters of an inch thick.
He stepped to the center, squatted, and lifted the heavy pipe, then adjusted his grip to find the balance point, and walked toward the house with it. He set it down. Then, below the open window and about ten feet from the house, he used his knife to dig a hole in the lawn. He set the end of the heavy pipe over the hole. He went to the other end and lifted the pipe, hand-walking up its length until the pipe was vertical and the butt end of it was in the hole. Then he stepped between the pipe and the house and slowly, carefully, stepped backward, letting the pipe tip toward the house until its upper end rested against a clapboard beside the open window.
Varney went to the end in the hole and tested its immobility, then gripped it as high up as he could reach and pulled himself upward until he was straddling it. The pipe was at a steep angle to the house, but it was not difficult for him to shinny up to the top. He was beside the window. He lifted his pant leg, pulled the knife out, punched a small slice through the screen, and used a finger to slip the hook out of the eye. He pulled the screen out a bit, and slowly pushed the window open wider. Then he eased himself carefully off the pipe into the window. When he was inside, he pulled the screen back and slid the hook through the eye so it wouldn’t make a flapping noise.
He moved to the side of the window before he stood, so he would present no silhouette. He waited and listened. His heart was beginning to speed up again. He had done this a hundred times, and each time still felt like the first. The moment after he had crossed into the enclosed space where the target was, his eyes always grew sharper, his muscles stronger. His ears heard every sound. Sometimes he was sure that he had other, forgotten senses that most human beings had thrown away with soft living. Everything they did worked to insulate them and pad them and put them to sleep. He often felt that he could detect objects in the dark by the changes their weight made in the elasticity of a man-made floor under his feet. He used differences in the motion of the air on his face to help him find a doorway.
He slowly, carefully screwed the silencer onto the barrel of his pistol and disengaged the safety with his thumb. He became still again and listened. Moving silently was not just a question of care, but of time. He had certainly made sounds when he had come in. If they had reached Kelleher’s ears, maybe he had explained them to himself. But his subconscious mind would not be so easily reassured, and it was incapable of forgetting anything. Down there below the level of thinking, Kelleher’s mind would be waiting to hear them again, its instincts aware that noises at night were never good news. Varney had to be sure the next sounds he made did not come too soon.
Varney was a being that moved through the night with heightened alertness, as though his skin had been peeled off and his nerves exposed. He could feel the rhythms of the enemy. He knew he did not have to wait for any particular number of minutes. He had to wait until the mind in the other room had listened long enough. When it had, it would stop. Any sounds he made would not be grouped with the first sounds as a pattern that had grown consistent with danger. They would be random sounds, maybe the noises that wooden houses made as they settled or stood up to a breeze.
The time elapsed and Varney advanced, placing each small step gently so his foot set flat and distributed his weight evenly. When he was satisfied the floor would not creak, he cautiously let more of his weight onto that foot as he moved the other foot forward. He kept his knees flexed and his body low, in an attitude that would let him leap ahead, back, or to either side, or drop and roll more quickly than an opponent’s mind would be likely to expect. If Kelleher saw him, what he would see was not the shape of a human being—something six feet high with a discernible head and shoulders. He would hesitate while he tried to distinguish it from the shadows and resolve it into something he knew.
As Varney moved into the hallway, he felt an urge to put away the gun. The metal, the weight were jarring to his mood. This felt like a time to slip in like a shadow and use only his hands, the strike chosen by the position in which he found Kelleher’s sleeping body. But Varney knew he was being foolish. He was letting his eagerness overwhelm his judgment, just because he was so excited to be working again. He would step into the room, see the head against the whiteness of the pillow, and sensibly fire a shot into it. Then he would spend some time searching for the money.
He stopped at the side of the doorway and listened. He could see the window, a bit of a bathroom floor through an open door, a chair, a dresser with a mirror. He leaned outward until he could see a bit of the reflection of the bed. There was a quilt in a dark shade that he couldn’t quite decide in the dark was blue, but no lump. Kelleher must be sleeping on the near side, the part of the bed that he couldn’t see in the reflection. Varney raised his right arm in a crook, so the pistol was pointed up, pivoted around the door frame to move inside the room, brought the pistol down to aim at the head of the bed on the near side. The bed was empty.
Varney let his pivot continue so he spun to face the bathroom. Nobody was in there.
A high-pitched electronic ring twittered to his right. It was so loud to Varney’s ears that he dropped to a crouch and aimed at it, his muscles rigid. But the only object in that direction was the dresser. The sound came again—a telephone. The small lozenge-shaped shadow on the surface was a cell phone. This time he saw the rows of keys light up as it rang. He had to stop it.
He snatched it up, pressed the button, and clamped it to his ear as he crouched beside the dresser, listening with the other ear for footsteps.
“Hello, Slick,” said the voice. Varney’s stomach sucked inward. There seemed to be no air in the room, and he had to force himself to take a breath. It was Prescott.
35
Varney’s whole being seemed to him to be toppling into the silence: Prescott was waiting for him to answer. His instinct was that anything Prescott wanted was something that would hurt him somehow. But he could not break the connection, lose touch. “I can hear you breathing,” said Prescott. “I know it’s not Michael J. Kelleher, because I made him up. And it’s not as though I don’t know where you are. I know where I put the phone.”
Varney took a moment to swallow and be sure his voice would sound right when it came out. “I’m listening.” He held the phone away from his ear, so he could detect it if there was a sound of Prescott’s voice coming to him through the air in addition to through the telephone’s earpiece. An echo, a slight time dissonance would tell him where Prescott was. He stepped to the doorway.
“That’s better,” said Prescott. “I apologize for scaring the shit out of you by ringing the phone.”
There was no sound that Varney could hear that had not come from the telephone. He said, “I’m not that easy to scare.” He concentrated on keeping the anger and hatred out of his voice. He peered into the hallway, but there was no visual sign of Prescott, either. The hallway was just a hardwood corridor with the two bedrooms he had entered, and four closed doors—one at either end, one on his right on this side of the house, just before the railing of the staircase, and another across the hall from it. Wherever Prescott was
, he couldn’t see Varney, but he knew which room Varney was in. That had to change.
“That’s good,” said Prescott. “Fear and anger cloud a man’s judgment sometimes, and right now I think you need to be clearheaded.”
“Why is that?” Varney quickly slipped across the hall into the other room and paused just to the right of the doorway with his back against the wall. He held the phone away from his ear again and held his breath as he strained his ears.
“Because you’ve got a problem. I wanted to talk to you now, and let you know there are a couple of options, before they get used up.”
Varney’s chest felt as though it would burst with frustration. He still could not get his ears to detect a sound of Prescott’s voice coming to him from somewhere inside the house. He knew it was happening: Prescott had to be in the house, but Varney’s ears were not sensitive enough to pick it up. He blew out the air in his lungs as he stepped silently toward the window. He knew Prescott would hear it as an expression of contempt, but it wasn’t loud enough for Prescott to hear except through the phone. He took another step and looked out the window. He sidestepped, still not sure, getting worried.
“I wouldn’t bother with that,” said Prescott.
“What?”
“Just because I bought you those pipes and let you have the use of one of them doesn’t mean I’ll let you use it forever.”
Varney leaned close enough to the window so his face touched the screen. He had been right. The pipe he had leaned against the wall of the house beside the window had been moved. He could see it on the grass below. He quickly ducked and pivoted, then stopped, protected by the wall. Prescott could be out there with a rifle and night-vision scope—must be, Varney decided. The outer wall was a stupid place for Varney to be. Its solidity was an illusion. Even a common hunting rifle would put a hole through it. He went low again and retreated to the inner wall by the doorway. “What do you want?” he hissed. “Haven’t you had enough of trying and losing?”
“It’s more a question of what you want,” said Prescott. “You’ve got a problem to solve.”
“So what’s my problem?”
“Here’s the way it looks to me,” said Prescott. “You’re alone, on foot, in a pretty remote place where there are not a lot of people. There’s no crowd to fade into, and not much to distract anybody like me. At the moment, you’re in a house that I selected. You know I’m not far away, but you don’t know exactly where I am. I could be outside with a rifle, waiting for you to try to get out a window. You’ll be out there hanging by your fingertips in your dark clothes against those white boards for a good second or two. Tomorrow morning I can go hose off the siding and go up on a ladder to patch the holes. Of course, maybe I’m in the room right next to you with the door closed. Or one of the others. If you open one to go out a different window, it’s entirely possible I might be sitting in a comfortable chair holding a shotgun loaded with double-ought. The cleanup would take longer, but I’m a patient man.”
Varney said, “You think I haven’t thought of all this?”
“I suppose you have. I don’t want you to dwell on the specifics. I want you to think past them. I’ve got you in a predicament. I want you to know that you don’t have to die. There are other ways through this.”
“Like what?”
“You leave anything made out of metal in that room. You come out. I run a metal detector over you, to be sure nothing slipped your mind. You would have to tolerate handcuffs on the ride into Hinckley, and probably again when they transport you down to Minneapolis, but after that you’d be in a private cell.”
Varney thought he saw a movement at the edge of the woods. If that was where Prescott was, he would have been in position to see Varney arrive, watch the business with the pipe, see him come into this room. Varney stared out the window at the spot. “What difference does it make if I let you shoot me or I let them kill me in some gas chamber?”
Prescott’s laugh carried with it everything that Varney hated. It was the laugh of a man who didn’t think he would ever have to worry about the things that were tormenting Varney, but more important than this, it was arrogant, superior. Prescott said, “You ought to know better than that. If they did get through a trial and prove anything, it wouldn’t be good enough to get you executed. The evidence they have isn’t that strong. They can’t say, ‘This guy has been taking money for putting people in the ground for years.’ They have to pick one and prove you did it.”
“If you think I’d get off, what are you doing this for? I thought you had given up, gotten off me.”
“I’ll never do that,” said Prescott. The sound of his voice was quiet, almost gentle, and the effect was horrible. “I have two reasons. If you go in, get booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and all that, I’m not the only one who knows you. If you ever kill somebody later, you’re a manageable police problem. They’ll pick you up. They’ll know all about you, your habits, the way you do your work, so they’ll recognize it.”
“What’s the other reason?” Varney still didn’t see movement out there.
“That’s different,” said Prescott. “That’s for you. Maybe if you got a little time where you would have to stay put and talk to somebody—”
“Psychiatrists?” The anger tightened his throat so his voice came out choked.
“Your own lawyer would call a few in the minute anything about the case looked ominous. It’s your escape hatch if I’m wrong and some real evidence turns up.” He paused. “I really think you’ve had a problem for a long, long time. It must be hard. I’m not interested in killing you, kid. I’ll be satisfied just to make you stop.”
Outrage gripped Varney’s chest, pushing his words out in streams. “You lying bastard. I read about you in the papers. Everybody you ever went after is dead. You’re a fucking snake. Did you tell them all you were going to take them to a nice doctor? Did you get them all to put on handcuffs before you shot them?”
“Neither one,” said Prescott calmly.
“Bullshit!” Varney snapped. “You’re the one who’s afraid. You’re in the same business I am, and you know I’m better than you. I’m going to cut your fucking head off and stick it on a post.”
He heard Prescott sigh. “I guess I’ve said everything I wanted to. If you change your mind, press 1 on your phone. It’s programmed to dial me.” The telephone went dead.
Varney watched the bushes at the edge of the woods more intently, and he saw the movement again. He silently mouthed the words, “I’ve got you.” He was moving before the plan had solidified in his mind. Prescott was out there thinking he had the only advantage that mattered. Varney turned off the cell phone and slipped it into his jacket. As soon as he cleared the doorway he began to run. The upstairs hallway was dark because the doors of bedrooms were closed, but the wooden railing began and he put his gloved hand on it and let the hand slide along it to orient him as he moved forward. The railing made a curve and headed down at an angle into the dark. He took the first stair, lengthened his stride to take three at a time, and his foot stepped onto nothing.
Varney’s body dropped downward, but his right hand tightened in a reflex to stop himself, clutching the railing in a desperate grab. His right arm elongated in a sudden, wrenching tug. His left hand held the pistol, but as his body swung and his chest slammed against the side of the staircase, the hand pawed at the wood to cushion the impact, and his legs swung into the void. He dangled there for a moment, swinging back and forth. He stuck the pistol into his left jacket pocket, and hung by both hands. He looked down.
The staircase had been sawed off just below the first-floor ceiling. The drop to the floor looked to him like fourteen or fifteen feet, but below him the floor was not clear. The stairway lay intact on the floor, as though Prescott had run a chain saw across it where it connected to the upper floor and let it fall. If Varney had not been gripping the railing when he had stepped off, he would be lying across those triangular ridges that used to be steps. He probab
ly wouldn’t be dead, but it would have been impossible not to have broken some bones.
Varney took a second to move through a series of thoughts. Prescott was out in those bushes, but Varney had seen them shake, so he might have been preparing to move on. If he was heading inside, then it was to catch Varney hanging here by both hands. If he wasn’t coming in, then Varney had to get out in time to see where he was going. Varney could pull himself up and go tie bedsheets together to lower himself down, but that would take time. If he dropped from here, the only place he could land was the jagged stairway.
He hung by his left arm, pulled his belt off with his right, slipped it around the base of the corner post of the railing, and threaded it through the buckle. He lowered himself to the end of the belt, where he was clear of the ceiling and the upper steps of the staircase, held it with both hands, and bent his legs to start himself swinging. He swung a couple of times, until he judged that his momentum would carry him out over the part of the foyer he could see was clear of obstacles, then let go. The floor seemed to tilt and rush up at him, but he managed to break his fall by hitting on the balls of his feet with his knees bent and translating his forward motion into a roll. He came to rest near a fireplace at the end of the room, rose to his feet, and realized his pistol must have slipped out of his jacket pocket.
He crawled quickly back toward the ruined stairway, felt the familiar shape of the pistol under his hand, and grasped it, already planning. In order to take down the pipe that Varney had left at the window, Prescott had to have been on that side of the house, hiding in the low bushes that separated the house from the stubble fields. Varney moved to the opposite side, and unlatched a window that faced the woods. He tried to lift it, but it was closed too tightly. He looked more closely and let out a breath through his clenched teeth. Prescott had used six-penny nails to secure the windows. He would have to use one of the two doors, and Prescott would probably have booby-trapped one and be making his way through the brush toward the other with a rifle.