Pursuit: A Novel

23

Prescott had stayed in Louisville watching Rowland’s Fine Jewelry for another week before he saw the delivery. Two couriers drove up to the rear of the store in a rented car and parked. The younger one then pressed a bell to let someone inside know they were there. A tall, thin man in a tailored suit and starched white shirt with French cuffs opened the door. He looked up and down the alley, then at all the roofs and windows of buildings he could see, then looked in each direction again while the two men went to the trunk of their car.

Prescott was in the window of his hotel three blocks away, watching through a spotting scope that he had mounted above the curtains. He did not consider himself an expert in the jewelry business, but he was confident that few customers entered a store through a fire exit, and even fewer needed to open their trunks. This was some kind of delivery. He was not sure whether it was legitimate or not, but he watched for signs. The younger man stopped, looked around, then stood still and erect while the older man leaned into the trunk, reaching for a briefcase. The younger man’s left hand hung at his side in a position that had to be practiced. When he turned the other way, his right arm hung straight and his left bent. He was keeping a hand close to the floor of the trunk. Prescott switched to sixty power and focused on the open trunk. There were two identical silvery titanium cases about the size of a suitcase, but below them, just under the rim of the trunk, was a towel laid over something. Prescott refocused. A hand came into his field of vision and adjusted the towel. Prescott caught a dull gleam of Parkerized steel. There was a momentary glimpse of a muzzle with a flash suppressor, and the distinctive high front sight. He thought he saw the end of a rounded triangle over-and-under foregrip, but his mind might have added what it knew was there. The two men had an M-16 in the trunk, set where the second man could pluck it out and start firing: if something ugly happened, they could make it much uglier.

Prescott adjusted the scope to look closely at the older man’s face. He had graying hair, a small cut and a layer of scar tissue above the right eye. The eyebrow seemed to have an interruption there, where the hair had stopped growing. He seemed to have done some boxing; he was right-handed; he had managed to keep his head down, but had neglected to duck some notable jabs.

Prescott raised the scope to the younger man. He had a strange look about him. It was the hair. At first, Prescott had been fooled. It wasn’t the sort of toupee that some old men had, that jutted out like a thatched roof of a cottage, and it wasn’t the kind that was just a shade off the color of real hair. It was actually a pretty good wig. The problem was that when this young man had put it on, or maybe later, in the car, it had rotated a bit, so the lowest point in the back seemed to be a couple of degrees to the right, and the front a couple of degrees to the left. When the trunk slammed and the two older men went inside, the young man reached up with both hands and adjusted it, then stepped in and closed the door.

Prescott had planned simply to watch the car until they came out, but he changed his mind. He already had the license number and description. He had been expecting an unobtrusive visit, what he had come to think of as a minimal visit. Stolen jewelry was an easy commodity to move. A ninety-year-old woman could carry as much as anyone could sell. Sending two grim-looking characters with an assault rifle was hardly necessary, and didn’t contribute much to the security of the merchandise.

It occurred to Prescott that he might be seeing something other than a delivery. Maybe whoever had acted as middleman in the Donna Halsey killing had decided that Rowland was not a man to trust with any secrets. The wig might just be incidental, a sign that the young man had lost his hair early, but it might be that he was wearing a disguise because he was about to grease Rowland.

Prescott took his suitcase, hurried down to his car, and got behind the wheel. He had planned to wait, but he could see no purpose in waiting while these two blew Rowland’s head off. He drove to the front of the jewelry store, parked, and stared through the glass doors in the center. He could not see Rowland or his visitors, but there were two armed security guards near the door, three jewelers talking to customers at the glass cases, and another who was watching a group of browsers to see which one would try to catch his eye first. Prescott continued on around the block. He let his body relax. The two men weren’t here to kill Rowland in front of all those people.

Prescott came around the last corner and waited until he saw the two men driving out of the lot. He followed them up the commercial street and out onto the highway, then settled back into his seat and turned on the radio. They had not been close enough to see his car well, and now he was far behind them. The car he was driving was a dark green compact that was so much like a million others that when he parked it, he had to remind himself of the license number so he could find it again. He let up a bit more on the accelerator to allow a couple of cars to pass and move back into line between him and the two men ahead. Unless the two men were much better at this than he thought they were, he had disappeared. No, he corrected himself; he had never existed.

Prescott followed them very carefully and conservatively. They drove south 175 miles to Nashville and stopped at two more jewelry stores. One was called Patrickson’s, and it looked to Prescott as though it catered to people in the country-music business who needed to wear jewelry the people in the back row could see sparkling. The other was called Bangles n’ Batik, and it seemed to be for younger women who went in without men and bought earrings and things for themselves. Then the two men made a stop that was closer to what Prescott had been expecting: a pawnshop. It had one window with a row of guitars hanging like dead turkeys in a butcher’s shop, and another that looked like an indoor garage sale. He added the address to his list and drove around the corner to fill up his gas tank and use the rest room, then parked on a side street where he could see the men’s car.

Prescott had been following people for over twenty years, and he was good at it. Part of the trick was to relax and let the quarry make all the decisions. Prescott never missed a chance to top off his gas tank, use a rest room, or stretch his legs. When he went inside to pay for the gas, he bought snacks, bottled water, and a road map. If there were items of clothing for sale, like baseball caps, he bought one, and wore it for a while to keep his silhouette from becoming too familiar.

When he was in motion, he never had fewer than two vehicles between him and the one he was following. He always picked the lanes on the right or directly behind his prey, because they were the hardest for the driver ahead to watch. He sometimes did tiny things to change the appearance of his car from the front. He would lower the left sun visor and clip a folded map to it, then take it off after a time and lower the right. When the other driver stopped, he went around a block before he stopped, or went on past and pulled over. He never waited where the other driver could see him, and never started up after him until the man’s car was nearly out of sight.

The two men left Nashville in rush hour and began the 210-mile drive to Memphis, so by the time they had gone far it was late afternoon. Prescott turned on his headlights for a stretch, then turned them off again until the rest of the cars turned on theirs.

In Memphis that evening, the routine was nearly the same as it had been in Nashville. The two men stopped at three jewelry stores. This time one of them was a huge place that seemed to exist mainly to sell wedding and engagement rings at a deep discount, and the others were midlevel places in blocks that were lined with restaurants and women’s clothing stores. The next stop was the one that interested Prescott. The two men pulled into the parking lot of a shopping mall, parked, and walked down the street to a store with a banner that said USED AND RECONDITIONED APPLIANCES. EASY CREDIT.

When they came out, they drove to another part of town and went into an office on the second floor of a small building that seemed to be a poor man’s financial-services conglomerate: check cashing, car loans, bail bonds.

By the time they had finished their business it was nine o’clock. The two men checked in at a big hotel on Airways Boulevard, and went out for dinner. Prescott didn’t care where they went for dinner, or what they ate, so he stopped following. He went to a car-rental agency, traded in his green car for a blue one, checked in at the same hotel, bought a simple dinner at the coffee shop, then went to sleep. At four-thirty, his alarm woke him. He showered, dressed, had breakfast in his room, and checked out of the hotel, then waited down the street where he could see the hotel parking lot.

He had guessed correctly. The men were out at six, loading their silvery titanium cases into the trunk of their car. They set off for the north, and Prescott guessed that they must be planning to drive the 283 miles to St. Louis. The younger man drove this time, and Prescott could tell the difference. He was faster, always pushing the speed limit a bit, weaving in and out of lanes as though his impatience was not with the slow pace of the cars he passed so much as with the sameness of driving. He had been confined in a car for at least a couple of days now, and the act of simply keeping a vehicle aimed in the right direction with the wheels between a pair of painted lines was not enough to occupy him. Prescott drove steadily, staying well back and keeping his own speed constant. After all of the young man’s maneuvering, he would invariably find himself stuck behind a truck that was slowly inching ahead of the one beside it, and Prescott would make up the difference, still hidden in a pack of other cars that made his invisible.

In St. Louis, there were two stops at jewelry stores, and then a stop at a big bar called Nolan’s Paddock Club, which Prescott judged must live off a small stage with a walkway that was pictured on the sign outside that said LIVE NUDE GIRLS. This was the first building where the two men had led him that had no windows through which he could watch them, so Prescott waited until they had gone inside, then followed to see who would meet them. When he entered, they were just passing through a lounge toward the right side of the stage. A big, bespectacled man behind the bar seemed not to acknowledge or even notice them, but he lifted a hinged section of the bar and stepped off, and didn’t seem to be surprised when the two followed him. The three disappeared through a door near the stage.

Prescott heard a sudden deep, repetitive sound like the thumping of a big engine, and realized after a moment that it was recorded music with the bass turned up too high. A few men in the poolroom drifted into the lounge, and then a blond woman who could not recently have been described as a girl, but who was arguably live, stepped out onto the stage and began to remove parts of a sequined costume, fulfilling the promise of the sign outside. She seemed monumentally uninterested in the whole empty ceremony, and had the expression of a woman alone in her room removing the clothes she’d worn to do some gardening. Prescott bought a beer and went to the men’s room. When he returned, the woman looked about ready to get into a shower and pick up the kids from soccer practice. He put a tip on the bar for the bartender, tossed a bill to the woman, and went outside again to wait.

A short time later, the two men emerged, and began to drive north on the interstate highway again. They drove the 246 miles to Indianapolis. Prescott now had a clear sense of the way the two men worked. There was nothing about any of the stops they had made to indicate that they had not made them all fifty times before. In each city, the people they met all had been expecting them and were ready to transact business. No stop ever took longer than a half hour, and some took as little as five minutes.

They went to jewelry stores, Prescott guessed, primarily to sell jewelry stolen in another town. Most could be safely resold as estate jewelry. If it was too distinctive, a jeweler could break it up and reset it as new. But in each city they also drove to some blighted neighborhood to stop in a different kind of business: a pawnshop, a bail-bond office, a used-appliance store. In Indianapolis it was a barber shop and an agency that specialized in placing domestic help. None of those places sold jewelry, but all of them were places where it was possible that people who came into possession of valuables of suspicious provenance might turn up. Those were the pickup points, where fresh supplies of stolen jewelry came from.

From Indianapolis, the men drove the 110 miles to Cincinnati and stopped in the evening at a small office building. Prescott saw them go inside and up a staircase, carrying their titanium cases. He waited for the usual half hour, and then saw them come outside again. He had expected them to find a hotel, but they did not. The older man drove the younger to an apartment complex, waited until his partner had gone to an upstairs walkway and opened his door with a key, and then drove on. Prescott followed him another fifteen minutes to a small suburban tract, where he turned into a driveway and put his car in the garage. Cincinnati wasn’t a stop on the route. It was home.

Prescott drove back to the center of town and spent the evening watching the small office building where the men had made their final stop. He had coffee down the street at a table near the window in a coffee shop, then browsed at the front window of a bookstore, looked at clothes in two different stores, and went for an evening walk that took him up the streets to the sides and back of the building. By ten o’clock the pedestrian traffic had become too thin to hide him, so he returned to his car and drove off.

By then he had seen everything that interested him. No customers or clients had come to the small office building during that time. The only arrivals had been two more pairs of men, and that told him this had to be a far-flung operation. The two he had followed had traveled to Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, and Indianapolis—five major cities in four states—and returned to their home base in a fifth state in under three days. He checked the odometer of his car and added the figure to the one from his last car: a bit over eleven hundred miles. If the other two-man teams did anything like as much traveling, the network would include cities in twelve states.

There would be no trouble selling merchandise in cities where it wasn’t hot. The best part was that there was no need for any of the jewelers who were buying stolen merchandise to know which city it had come from, who had owned it, who had stolen it, how long it had been missing. There was no need for them to know much about the people in Cincinnati who ran this business, or even that they were in Cincinnati. All they needed to know was that they were buying goods at prices that meant they couldn’t be anything but stolen, and that two men would show up now and then to sell them some more.

Prescott was careful not to assume he knew more than he did. It was possible that the office in Cincinnati was not the tip of the pyramid. This might be one of three or twenty-three regional syndicates that all paid into some larger, uglier national confederation. It might be a franchise that paid a percentage to the Mafia. It might be a secondary invention for the convenience of a silent partner who was washing cash by converting it into jewelry and back. Prescott could not be sure of the exact structure of the business, but that did not, for the moment, matter.

Prescott was sure he had found a route that Rowland the jeweler might have used to hire a killer. During the time when he had watched and studied Rowland, he had found no other way in which Rowland could have met or spoken with serious criminals. Rowland had probably had a difficult time getting himself to make the request out loud. He was a rich, established businessman. Even if there were people who knew he wasn’t quite respectable, they didn’t know anything specific enough to harm him. It was a risk. He had probably started to speak on a couple of occasions, and changed his mind, or maybe made a joke out of it. Then he had said something like, “I’ve got a problem, and I wondered if you knew anybody I could hire who might be able to help me.” They would have made him say it more plainly, because it wasn’t the sort of request that could be acted on without clear understandings. Then the word had traveled upward from the two jewelry couriers, and eventually made it to the killer.

Prescott decided to spend the night in a good hotel, then turn in his rental car in the morning at the airport and get a midday flight. After some consideration, he altered his plan and headed straight toward the airport. It would be better to get out of here now. He already knew the place where he would have to get his request into the system, and it would take time.