Pursuit: A Novel

19

Varney saw the black of night beginning to fade into a dim blue, the big old trees and the shrubs and lawns of Delaware Avenue lightening to green again. In about forty-five minutes the sun would be up, and the people who had vacated the streets of the city for him would be climbing into their cars to infest the world again. He had not found Prescott.

The way Prescott had stayed invisible was not mysterious: all he had needed to do was use a false name to register in a hotel and stay there. But Varney had not expected him to do that. All night long, he had expected Prescott to be around the next corner, or waiting inside one of Varney’s haunts, or sitting in his car outside one of the downtown hotels, waiting for Varney to try to find him.

Varney wasn’t even sure why he had expected Prescott to appear during the night. He decided it was that he had gotten used to a rhythm, like the rhythm of two men in a fistfight. At first they had danced around a bit, made a few feints and jabs. Then Varney had tried to win the quick way—not an exploratory tap, but committing himself to a sudden, hard attack that would take Prescott before he was ready for anything serious. Prescott had been ready to brush it aside, and the counterpunch had been immediate. Varney had gotten used to a pace that was fast and intense, based on heart rate and the adrenaline that had already infused both of them. But Prescott had unexpectedly dodged, and now he was dancing again, out of reach and gathering his strength.

That bothered Varney. He had been awake for two nights, struggling and maneuvering to move in on Prescott, wasting his anger and determination. He had spent the night exhausting himself, and Prescott had been in some hotel sleeping on crisp, clean sheets and getting stronger and sharper for their next encounter.

Varney stopped at a gas station to fill his tank, drove back to his house, and went upstairs. He showered and lay on his bed. The sounds of cars began to reach him from the street outside, a low, steady hum that was usually soothing. This morning it irritated him, because it reminded him that he was used up, and the rest of the world was in motion. Prescott would be getting up fresh and rested, probably putting some new scheme into operation. Prescott and the police, and all the forces of pursuit and punishment, would be talking and planning and putting themselves into position, while Varney was here alone, unconscious in a room with the shades drawn. He rolled over, couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t get his mind to stop foraging for things to worry it.

Varney sat up and looked at the clock. It was six o’clock already. He reached for the remote control and turned on the television set. The head and shoulders that came on belonged to a woman about his age who had perfected that dumb, teasing, “I know something you wish you knew” look. She was saying, “You’ll hear if this morning’s humid weather might surprise us with a change later in the day. We’ll have footage of a melee outside last night’s school board meeting, a three-alarm fire in Cheektowaga, and a picture of a man the police would like your help in finding. We’ll be right back!”

Varney moved to the foot of his bed and put his feet on the floor. The first commercial was for cars. He had seen it at least a hundred times, and it had annoyed him the first time. There was a commercial for a financial-services company that couldn’t quite reveal what it was selling but featured close-up shots of people who looked sick with worry. Then there were a few shorter ones that seemed to have been recorded with a home video camera to advertise a florist, a Lebanese restaurant, and a company that sold appliances but seemed to think that today air conditioners were the only ones people wanted to hear about.

At last, the woman reappeared, sitting behind a desk with a pile of papers in front of her and a pen in her hand. As the camera moved in on her, she said, “Buffalo police have released a picture this morning of a man they want to question in connection with a bombing at a Cumberland Avenue building. He is between twenty-five and thirty years old, six feet tall, and weighs about one hundred and seventy-five pounds.”

There was the picture: Varney, staring out of his television set at him. The extreme definition of the color image that Prescott had somehow gotten made Varney’s face as clear as the woman’s on the television screen.

His stomach tightened in a spasm. He was up, stalking the room as the woman continued. “If you know this man or have seen him, call the special hot-line number at the bottom of your screen. Police have emphasized that he is armed and very dangerous. If you should see him, they ask that you do not approach or attempt to detain him. Instead, dial 911, and let them handle the situation.” She took the sheet from the top of her pile and set it aside, giving her special disapproving look. Suddenly she smiled, and turned her head to the side. “And I see Hal Kibbleman has joined us to give a hint of what he has in store for us in the weather department. Are you going to keep us in suspense, Hal?”

Varney punched the power button and the woman vanished. He went to the closet and began to pack. The house deed had a false name on it, and his habits had kept him from being too much in the sight of people in the neighborhood. He had been gone much of the time since he’d bought it, and when he had been here he had stayed out of synchronization with the people who got up in the morning to go to work. It might take Prescott and the police some time to find the house.

When his suitcase was packed, he put it into a plastic trash bag so it would look as though he were simply taking out the garbage when he brought it outside. He considered leaving a booby trap to welcome the inevitable intruders—maybe using the natural-gas pipe and an electrical switch—but that would be time-consuming, and it would involve a kind of concentration that didn’t fit his mood right now. As he thought about it, he realized that he wouldn’t get much pleasure out of it, and it might not even be practical. The police had him firmly in their minds as the mad bomber of Buffalo, so an explosion was precisely what they would be expecting. He was better off getting out of here, letting them find the place, and leaving nothing around that was especially incriminating or revealing. He was certain he could accomplish that, because he had always planned to leave that way. He had stored his guns and ammunition in this single room. As soon as he had used one on a job, he had gotten rid of it before he came back to Buffalo.

At the moment, the house contained no more firearms than many of the houses in this city: a Steyr Scout short-barreled rifle with a ten-power scope, a Remington Model 70 hunting rifle in .308, and three nine-millimeter pistols. He had thirty rounds of ammunition for each firearm. Two nights ago, he had used up his supply of black powder, blasting caps, and pipes for the bombs. All he had left were two rolls of copper wire and a couple of homemade switches. He put them into a second garbage bag with the guns, carried everything out to the car, and returned.

He spent twenty minutes checking to be sure the timers were set right, the faucets were closed on the hoses to the washing machine, the windows locked. He wiped the smooth surfaces with a rag to make the collection of fingerprints a bit more difficult. He had been careful since he had moved into the house to keep out of the dummy apartment downstairs, and had regularly wiped down the items in the upstairs apartment that he habitually touched. He was fairly certain that a real expert would find some prints, but it would take time, and there would be old prints that belonged to other people mixed in.

He went to the desk and collected all the paper. As a habit, he saved very few receipts or bills, and he kept them all in the same place. He used a post office box for his mailing address, so nothing came here. All of his precautions were tempered by the knowledge that a genuine expert could not be fooled forever if he were ever turned loose in this house. Varney could not keep him from connecting the house with a name or two and maybe the post office box, but he could make each step maddeningly complicated and eat up lots of hours making the expert follow trails that didn’t lead to an actual man.

He did one last check and closed the door, holding the knob with the rag in his hand. He got into his car and drove onto the street, eager to get out of Buffalo. Varney knew that the police would already have given his picture to the agencies they habitually dealt with: the Canadian officials across the bridges over the Niagara, the New York State Police, and the local cops all over this area. He stayed away from the border and avoided the Thruway, with its entrance and exit booths. He drove the secondary roads. He followed Main Street until it was just Route 5, and then it merged into Route 20. This part of the state was the bed of an ancient, larger great lake, scraped smooth and flat by glaciers. The roads were straight and broad and fast.

As soon as he was outside Buffalo, passing through old towns that had become suburbs, he began to feel slightly better. If he could just stay awake and keep driving for a few hours, the trouble would fall behind. He had spent years studying the habits of pursuers. He knew that the only nationwide manhunts were a creation of television networks. Policemen were municipal employees who answered to city councils selected by local taxpayers. The only time they paid much attention to what was going on in some other city was when they had strong reasons to believe that an identifiable man was about to arrive in their town to kill somebody in particular. The circulars and wanted lists came in by the thousands from distant places, and piled up until they were filed away. Pretty soon, all the faces looked alike.

In a half hour he was nearly thirty miles from the house approaching Silver Creek, and while he thought about that, he had traveled two more and gone past it. He was cruising along at fifty-five miles an hour without a traffic signal to delay him, and the nearest cars a quarter mile ahead or a quarter mile behind. The drivers couldn’t actually see him: he was just an assumption they made because a car couldn’t be moving along a public highway without a driver.

After an hour, he knew that he was out. The open roads were beginning to be more open, with long stretches of farmland that didn’t seem to have anybody in evidence to work it. There were small clusters of buildings at crossroads that did not deserve to be called villages: they seemed to exist only as excuses to have a lower speed limit for a hundred yards so people driving past could read homemade signs that said FRESH STRAWBERRIES or CORN, or have time to notice that there was a gas station on the corner.

Varney kept going. He wanted to give himself enough breathing space, and he knew he wouldn’t have it until he had gone far enough to be out of the range of Buffalo’s television stations and in the zone of some other city’s stations, where somebody else’s picture would be on the news.

Varney tried to make himself feel better. He had been the one who had gone after Prescott, and he was still healthy, still free, still anonymous. He had gone right into Prescott’s trap and come out of it unharmed. Reminding himself of those things did not help. Prescott had hounded him out of Buffalo: Prescott had made him run away.

He let the car slow down a bit, toying with the idea of going back. Prescott wasn’t some petty irritant. When he thought of Prescott, his stomach tightened, his heart began to pound, and after a minute, his jaw began to hurt from clenching his teeth. It wasn’t only what Prescott had done, it was what Prescott was, and what he thought. When Varney had listened to him talk he had felt it instantly. Prescott was so sure of himself, so full of confidence that he was better than Varney—the tone of his voice said, “Well, look at us, the two of us. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”—that Varney had found himself tense, coiled to spring at him, even though he was miles away and the only connection was an electrical impulse over a telephone wire.

Varney sensed something else about Prescott, and he wasn’t quite able to grasp it. Prescott was an impostor. He was a fake; the personality was something assumed in order to fool Varney. It was as though he had constructed an identity, a false one, just to use against Varney. Maybe it was only that he wasn’t as fearless or as invulnerable as he pretended to be: like a bully who sensed some weakness in a smaller kid and set about systematically probing to find out what it was, tormenting him by building himself up and making the victim feel smaller. But Varney had been getting a strange feeling that maybe Prescott was something else: that the face he had constructed was there to make him look more ordinary than he was—that he was actually worse than he seemed, and that if he showed his real face, Varney would dismiss the idea of fighting and escape him.

Sometimes it felt to Varney that Prescott was a man that he hated not just because he was an enemy, but because he was familiar. It was as though Prescott were the vague, dark presence that he had sensed just out of sight, that he knew was coming for him, or sometimes was just forming, coalescing, when he awoke, sweating, from a bad dream.

Varney drove across the line into Pennsylvania, and a couple of miles beyond, before he realized that he had done it. Being in a new state made him much safer, but he refused to let himself be reassured. He was going to be smart this time. He would keep going into Ohio, and try to get as close to Cincinnati as he could before he slept.

He crossed the border before noon, and made Cleveland an hour later. He stopped there for a hamburger and some coffee, then got on Route 71 and drove south toward Columbus. It was over 140 miles away, but when he arrived, he stopped at a gas station, filled the tank, and bought some more coffee. Cincinnati was now just a bit over a hundred miles away.

It was evening before Varney reached the edge of Cincinnati. He was so tired he had begun to feel dizzy. He knew he needed to stop somewhere and sleep, but he had to take a look at the office building first, just to convince himself that it was still there. He drove through the streets, heading vaguely toward the river until he reached Colerain Avenue and let it take him to the center of the city.

He drove past the building slowly. The old two-story structure had been built in an era when it probably hadn’t seemed odd for a commercial building to have a peaked roof like a house, and there had been no compelling reason to build higher, at least in this part of town. But the place was better than it looked: the rooms inside had hardwood floors and big, solid doors, and the red-brick facade was dirty but intact. Varney could see nothing about the place or the streets around it that had changed since he’d last seen it.

He had been here only twice before, with Coleman. The first time, Coleman had warned him. “They’re going to be friendly, and easy to get along with, but don’t let yourself get too comfortable, and don’t mouth off to Mama.”

“Mama?”

“Yeah, and don’t call her that.” Coleman blew out a breath impatiently, in that way he had of signifying that everything he said was something any sensible person should already know but somehow Varney didn’t. “Her name is Tracy. She’s the one you have to pay attention to. She has three sons, Roger, Nick, and Marty, and they’re the ones who run the business. All she runs is them.”

“You mean they’re a bunch of Mama’s—”

“No, that ain’t what I mean,” Coleman interrupted. “Any one of them would cut you just for the fun of seeing you bleed and dance around, and that’s the problem. They can’t trust each other, don’t even seem to like each other much. They’re about a year or two apart in age, so I don’t even know which is older. They all had different fathers, and even God doesn’t know where they are or what became of any of them. The boys each know that the others won’t listen to them, but that they will listen to her. She’s what keeps them from turning on each other. Maybe they like her, or think she’s smart or something. Or maybe she’s just a convenience, so they can work together. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

Varney had followed Coleman up the stairs and into the carpeted hallway. As he passed each door, he read the sign on it: CHOW IMPORTERS, LTD., RECTANGLE TRAVEL, PINEHILL REALTY SERVICES, CRESTVIEW WHOLESALE. Coleman did not stop until he reached the Crestview Wholesale door. Coleman knocked, then entered, and Varney went in with him.

The woman sitting behind the desk was peculiar. She had the hair, the makeup, and the body of a woman about thirty-five years old, but there was a wrinkling about the pale, almost transparent skin of her bare neck and hands that struck him. It was not so much a contradiction as a warning, like a slight puckering on a peach that told him the fruit had been offered for sale much, much longer than it was supposed to be.

“Sugar!” she shrieked. She got up, tottered around the desk on high heels, smiled, and kissed Coleman on the cheek. “I’m so sorry to make you come all the way here for your money, but Roger and Marty and Nicky can’t get away just now, with all the salespeople already on the road, and—”

“It’s okay,” said Coleman unconvincingly. “I don’t mind a bit.”

She smiled in a way that would have been—and maybe once had been—kittenish, but struck Varney as mentally deranged. “I knew you’d understand.” Then her eyes passed across Varney on their way somewhere else, and she stopped, brought them back, and looked him up and down. “You brought him?”

Coleman nodded, and to Varney it seemed a reluctant nod.

“This is him.” To Varney he said, “Say hello to Tracy.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Varney murmured.

Her eyes seemed to glow for an instant, then to fade again. “Oh, you’re just right,” she said. “A cop would run right over you without even stepping on the brakes because he didn’t notice you were there.” Then she half-turned and said in a stage whisper, “Besides, you’re cute.” She continued the turn and went to a filing cabinet across the room, unlocked it, pulled a thick envelope out of one of the files, and handed it to Coleman.

Tonight Varney could see lights on in the upper windows. He made a quick decision, stopped the car a block past the building, and walked back. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door that said CRESTVIEW WHOLESALE, then entered. Tracy was sitting at the desk. When she looked up, she took a moment to focus on his face, then stood. “Sugar!” she squealed, and hurried toward him on her spike heels, her arms extended toward him for a hug.