Pursuit: A Novel

14

It was late at night when Varney approached the darkened one-story commercial building on the corner. He could see that it had been divided into three storefronts facing Cumberland Avenue. He walked along the street behind it at first to see if there was a car parked in the small blacktop lot, but there was no vehicle. Next he walked back on Cumberland to the storefronts along the street side.

The back windows of each section of the building were small and high, with permanent iron bars to prevent burglaries. Only one had a rear door, and Varney could tell by the position that it opened into the tiny grocery store. None of the windows along the back was lighted, and one even had boards nailed up across it from the inside.

He moved farther off and then came around the block to see the front of the building from across Cumberland. The only possibility seemed to be the one with the boards over the rear window. Prescott could not have rented the grocery store, and the window of the thrift store was hung with a rack of used women’s dresses, while the back was shelves of shoes and ancient toasters and toys. But the store on the end was in a state of remodeling of some sort. The front window was covered with brown butcher paper. Maybe Varney had made a mistake about the address.

He had used a telephone directory on the Internet. He had typed in the phone number and clicked on SEARCH, and found this address. But maybe the phone number was an old one for the store that had been in this building and had gone out of business, and the number had been reassigned to Prescott. The website claimed all the numbers were automatically updated every day, but how could he know whether that was true?

Varney looked around. There was a pay telephone on the wall in front of the liquor store. He made his way to the store, put in two quarters and dialed the number, then set the receiver on top of the telephone and trotted across the street. He moved around the building, put his ear close to the boarded-up back window, and listened. He heard the faint ringing of the telephone. There was a click, and a recording. “You have reached the offices of Prescott Enterprises. Please leave your telephone number and your name, unless you wish to remain anonymous. Your call will be returned within twenty-four hours.”

Varney walked back to the front of the liquor store and hung up the telephone, then kept walking. Prescott had found his suitcase, opened it, and seen the plane ticket to Buffalo. Then he had gotten the pictures made somehow, and come here. He was in the process of setting up a local field office, like he was the F.B.I. or something. Prescott was not a single frustrating experience that he could put behind him and forget. Prescott was a monster. Varney had somehow, unaccountably, attracted his attention, somehow awakened him. He had come, and he kept coming and coming. He couldn’t be scared off or ignored. He had to be killed.

Varney circled the place warily, looking this time at all of the sights besides the new office. He looked at nearby windows for signs that somebody was watching, scrutinized the eaves of buildings for surveillance cameras. He walked up and down the streets around the neighborhood searching for closed vans that might be listening posts. Then he simply left. If Prescott was watching, how could he let Varney come into sight and disappear again? He couldn’t.

Varney walked, scanned, and listened, his body poised to run, his hand close to the pistol in his jacket, his mind concentrating on the buildings ahead. He evaluated and chose the spaces between buildings ahead where he would duck out of sight, the straight passages where he would sprint, the dark pockets where he could crouch and wait for Prescott to come running after him. He kept walking until he was sure: he had not made a mistake. Prescott had.

He went to his car and drove home. It took Varney an hour to gather his equipment, make a few modifications and adjustments, and drive back to Prescott’s new office. A rule of Varney’s discipline was keeping a small but well-chosen supply of the implements of his trade. Now he went through his inventory, running in his mind each of the possible problems that could occur. In Los Angeles he had tried to succeed by speed and audacity, because he had not known enough about his opponent. This time he prepared.

When he returned to the neighborhood, he parked his car in an unoccupied space in a lot behind a big three-story apartment building two streets from Cumberland. Then he took his small backpack and walked to the store. He looked in where the butcher paper didn’t quite reach the edge of the front window to be sure that nothing had changed in the past hour. There was nothing in the plain white room but a metal desk, a chair, and a few two-by-fours and sheets of plywood left by the carpenters.

He stepped to the door. He had two locks to defeat, a dead bolt and a double-plunger door lock. Probably Prescott had assumed that if he found the place, he would not be up to that, but Prescott had been wrong. Varney had done more than break into a few crummy apartments. When he had worked with Coleman Simms, he had learned.

During those years, when they weren’t traveling, they had stayed on Coleman’s ranch in California. He remembered a day when he had awakened in his room upstairs, and known instantly that there were strangers in the house. He had looked out the window and seen no vehicles, but that had not dissuaded him. He had taken the pistol from under the unused pillow beside his, crept down the stairs, and listened.

Coleman had been sitting in the kitchen talking to two men when Varney had appeared in the doorway. Coleman had looked up.

“This is him,” he had said.

The two men were dressed like workmen, in jeans and identical light blue work shirts with names in embroidered script above the left breast pocket—Dave and Tim. They looked at Varney a bit anxiously, and Varney knew that the two men were all right: Coleman must have told them who he was.

Coleman said to him, “Dave and Tim are locksmiths. They’re going to teach you.” It had been much harder than community college. For five weeks he had studied books and diagrams of shafts and tumblers and springs and cylinders. Each day he had practiced the use of the pick and tension wrench on door locks that Dave and Tim had mounted on boards. Under their supervision he had taken locks apart and studied their mechanisms, then put them together again.

At the end of the five weeks, he and Coleman had gone out of town to do a minister. It had struck Varney as a joke. The man was the pastor of a huge congregation in Kansas who had a foundation devoted to lobbying for laws to outlaw the teaching of evolution, and it brought in millions of dollars a year. Most of the donation money came from a few rich men who were bent on raising the issue once again in a series of trials that would be made into a feature-length documentary film. But the real prize was still in the future. The minister had just signed a contract to put the church’s weekly service on television.

This had been a problem for another preacher who already was on television in that part of Kansas. He didn’t want the competition, so he had visited one of his parishioners in his temporary home in Leavenworth, Kansas. The parishioner was a reformed man doing long time, but the word Varney got from Coleman was that his preacher had convinced him that the other preacher was a heretic and false prophet, and probably a precursor for the Antichrist. The prisoner had gotten the word to the right people, and those people had gotten to Coleman.

Varney had gone to the preacher’s big brick church at night and seen moving shadows on the ceiling of an upstairs office. He had found the outer doors locked, but he had used his new skills to pick the lock on a maintenance door that led into a small room just off the sanctuary that was full of folding chairs and tables. He had pulled his gun and made his way upstairs to the office, quietly placed his hand on the doorknob, and found it locked. He had picked that lock too, swung the door open quietly to reveal a reception area, and had seen the preacher, a tall, heavy man in a pair of suit pants and white shirt but no coat, forty feet away inside an inner office. The preacher had looked at a sheaf of papers he held in his right hand, and then begun to speak and wave his arms with animation. Varney had crouched in alarm, then realized the man was rehearsing a sermon in front of a mirror. He’d watched the preacher raise both hands, his hair in disarray and his eyes wild, and say, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” before he’d fired a shot through both doorways into his right temple.

The day after he and Coleman had returned, Varney had gone back to his locksmith lessons for ten more weeks. He learned about house locks, car locks, commercial locks, and dead bolts. It was only after he had mastered the traditional skills that they had introduced him to electronic pick guns and magnetic bolt-sliders that could do the same things more quickly.

He opened the shiny new locks on Prescott’s office door in seconds. He pulled the door open and slipped inside, then let the door swing gently shut without touching the inner doorknob. He walked directly to the back of the dark room, found the desk by the glow of the answering machine, set his backpack down, and looked around him, waiting for his eyes to reach their maximum adjustment to the near darkness.

Everything about this place was right, as though Prescott had been on Varney’s side. The front window was covered with brown butcher paper, so very little light came in or escaped, and a passerby would not see Varney unless he put his eye to the uncovered edge. The back window had been boarded even though it had bars on it. Only the single side window was functional, and it was covered with blinds.

He decided there really was no reason he had to work in complete darkness. He reached into the backpack and took out his Mag-lite, adjusted the beam so it was narrow and bright, and let it play along the floorboards and the baseboards and the suspended acoustic ceiling tiles, then over the desk itself. It was perfect: one room, twelve feet by fifteen feet, with only the desk and chair in it. Even better, there was only one entrance. Varney rigged the pipe bombs very carefully. There was one taped under the center of the desk, with the switch set against the back of the top center drawer, and the drawer a little bit open. If Prescott sat in the chair to listen to his phone messages, he would push in the top drawer of the desk, complete the circuit, and the bomb would cut him in half.

Varney armed the bomb, then went to work on the main charge. This one was set at the edge of the floor, covered only by a paper wrapper left over from the already installed wallboard. He ran the wire around the room, pushed it into the space below the baseboard, where it was covered by the new industrial carpeting and could not be tripped over. Then he set the end of it to a pair of magnetic sensors made for a burglar-alarm system. One would go on the door and the other on the jamb. When the door opened, the magnetic contact between them would break. That would permit a magnetic switch to trip, giving the electrical current a path down the wire. A less thoughtful man would have wired the blasting cap right into the circuit, but Varney had imagined the entire sequence. He had put the blasting cap into a parallel circuit with a time-delay relay. The door would open, five seconds would pass while Prescott stepped inside, closed it, took a couple of steps toward the desk, and then the cap would initiate the bomb. The narrow room would be filled with flying bits of the metal pipe, mixed with a pound of nails.

As he thought about it, Varney wondered if five seconds were enough. Maybe he should set the relay to ten. That way, Prescott could get all the way to the desk and close the drawer to set off that bomb first. Most likely, the main charge would go off after Prescott was dead, but that would be fine. He decided against the change. Prescott was not a stupid man. In ten seconds, he might have time to see that something had changed, and maybe even to disarm the charge.

Varney took his backpack, ran his light around the room one last time to be sure he had not left anything showing, then walked to the door to pull the two wires under the lower hinge. That way, he could connect the two wires to arm the circuit only after he was outside. He brought them to the spot, then reached up to put his hand on the knob, and knew there was a problem. The knob was a simple brass one, with no inner lock button or keyhole. It turned, but when it did, there was a spongy, unchanging resistance, not a spring pushing it back to its original position. He rotated it a full turn without feeling any effect. He switched on his flashlight again. The knob was a dummy. It was mounted on a steel plate that was welded to the steel door.

He stood and tugged, but it had no effect. The front door had been rigged so that it would not open from the inside. Varney felt a growing sense of alarm, but he knew what to do. He would take the pins out of the hinges and get out of here. He shone his light on the center one. The head of the pin was welded into the top bracket. He moved the flashlight. They were all dummies, welded in place. The real hinges were invisible and beyond his reach, built into the jamb.

Varney examined the parts of the front window that were not covered with butcher paper. He looked at it from an angle, then shone his flashlight along the edge. The glass wasn’t the regular kind. It looked about three quarters of an inch thick, and the edge was set deep into the steel frame. The outside had the same steel grating across it that the windows of the other storefronts had. He moved quickly to the smaller window at the side of the building. It was the same.

Prescott’s little office was not an office at all. It was a trap. Once a man was inside it, there was no way out. He would have to sit in here until Prescott came for him and opened the front door. Varney’s eyes went narrow with anger and hatred. His breaths came in short, rough rasps that dried his mouth. He felt as though the veins in his arms were swelling with the blood surging into them. He wanted to tear his way out of here, punch and kick his way through the wall, but he had to think. Prescott might already be on the way. Whatever Varney did, it had to be now, and it had to work.

The outer walls of the building were brick. But maybe the wall that separated this small room from the grocery store was just the usual frame of two-by-fours covered with wallboard. He took out his knife, selected a spot a yard from the corner of the room, and carved away a bit of wallboard. He worked in a circular motion, making a little pile of gypsum and plaster at his feet. Finally, the blade went through. He worked the knife around to make a bigger hole, his heart beginning to beat with anticipation. All he had to do was cut away a foot and a half between a pair of studs and the same size hole in the wallboard nailed on from the other side, and he would fit through. He could arm the circuit of the main bomb without the bother of connecting the last wires from outside. He would slither into the grocery store, go out the rear door to the parking lot, and he would be gone. Then Varney’s blade hit something that made a skritch sound.

He turned on the flashlight, shone it into the hole in the wall, and saw the rough, reddish surface. It was brick. The little office was not just a walled-off section of the grocery store; it was an addition. The brick had once been the outer wall of the building, and it was still there.

Varney stood still. He was surrounded by brick on four sides. He looked up at the suspended layer of acoustic tiles. Whatever was up there, it couldn’t be brick. He glanced at his watch. He had been in here for twenty-five minutes already. Prescott could be here at any moment—might already be out there waiting in the dark for him—and he was wasting time. He reached gingerly under the desk behind the center drawer and disconnected the wires, then pulled the pipe bomb out.

He felt as though Prescott had his arm clenched around his throat, choking off the air, making him flail around desperately, tiring himself with futile struggling. He could picture Prescott, not as just the tall, thin, middle-aged man he had seen slouching in the car in the California parking lot, but as he really was: the cold eyes watching him with sadistic amusement, the thin lips curled just a little at the corners in a mocking smile.

Varney pushed the desk toward the corner of the room. He bent at the knees, tipped it up on its end, and prepared to climb up on it to reach the ceiling, then stopped. Prescott had selected this place. He had chosen everything in it, and modified whatever wasn’t suited to his purpose. Prescott was cunning, calculating in a way that nobody Varney had ever met had been. He was perfectly capable of seeing that the desk could be tipped up on its end and used to climb to the ceiling.

Varney looked around him. Prescott had made sure the room had four brick walls. Varney could tell by the feel of the floor under his feet that the addition had been built on a concrete slab. Could Prescott have neglected the roof? He had probably had a layer of corrugated steel laid in, covered with tar paper and asphalt. He had thought of everything else. What had Prescott not known?

Varney looked down at the floor. The only thing that Prescott had not known was what Varney would do, what Varney would bring with him. Varney tipped the desk again and brought it back down.

He stood on it to reach the back window, then used his knife to loosen the screws in the plywood that covered the glass. He removed the square, opened the window, and examined the steel bars. He could tell by feel that the bars were in a frame anchored in the brick by four bolts at the corners.

He lifted his two pipe bombs from the floor and set one in the frame at each of the two lower corners outside under the windowsill. He opened his backpack and took out the third pipe charge he had brought but not installed, and used duct tape to secure it to the frame at the third bolt. Then he set himself to rewiring the three bombs in three parallel circuits, so the electrical current would reach all three at the same instant. He spliced the three entry wires and the three exit wires into two little twists. He took the insulated cord from the answering machine, cut it, stripped an inch of it, separated the two wires, and spliced one to each of his two twists.

Varney brought the window down, leaving only enough space for his cord. He used the rest of his duct tape to cover the glass, then screwed the plywood back over the window. He pushed the desk into the rear corner of the room near the electrical outlet, and crawled under it with his backpack. He used his knife to cut two small squares of cloth from the bottom of his shirt, rolled them into balls, and stuck them into his ears, took off his jacket and wound it around his head so it covered his face, ears, and neck. He curled into a ball under the desk and felt for the plastic plate of the electrical outlet. He opened his mouth to keep his eardrums from blowing out, took three deep breaths to calm himself, then inserted the plug.

The noise was so loud the air seemed to turn solid. The concrete foundation under him jumped to slap against his body as though he had fallen. He was aware that the big, heavy metal desk hopped above him and came down askew. The hand that he had extended to insert the plug had been punched aside so hard it tingled.

Varney lay still. He felt as though he had been injured in some way, jolted like a person in a high-speed crash, shaken by an impact so that his joints were strained and everything inside him had been shaken. It was silent. He tested his muscles and found he was able to stir, and when he did, his presence of mind gathered itself out of fragments and returned. He remembered he was in a hurry. Time was passing. He slowly crawled out from inside the desk and pulled the jacket off his face.

The room was dark, the air so thick he could barely breathe. He held the jacket over his nose and mouth and found his flashlight with his knee. He turned it on. The air was a cloud of plaster dust, but he could see that up and to the side, the plywood had been blown inward off the window. About half of the acoustic tiles in the ceiling had been knocked out of their metal frame, and the others were tilted, the frame still swinging on its wires.

He moved to the window, and his heart stopped. The bars were still there. He moved closer. They weren’t at the right angle. He reached out and gave the nearest bar a push, but it burned his hand. “Shit!” he hissed, drawing his hand back and sticking it in his mouth. But he had seen the bars move. He pushed the desk the couple of feet to the side so that it was under the window. He lay on its surface and kicked at the bars with his feet. They moved, then jerked out farther. He kicked again and again, until the lower bolts were out of the brick. He rolled, stood on the desk, used his backpack to brush the broken glass off the sill, then used it to hold the bars away from the wall. He eased himself onto the small window.

He stopped for a moment to shine his flashlight around the inside of the office to be sure he had left nothing. Then he lowered himself to the ground, trotted up the dark street for a half block, cut into the backyard of a house to reach the next street. He heard the faint, faraway sound of sirens. Lights were going on in houses, the glows of lamps falling in squares on the spaces of darkness where he had wanted to walk, so he dodged them, ducking low and stepping quickly along the walls. He broke into a run. He was out of the box. He could breathe the soft, cool air of night.