Pursuit: A Novel

33

In daylight, the farm appeared to be a perfect place. The area had the quiet bleakness of a land that was remote, wild, and sparsely populated, like a thawed tundra. This far north the growing season was short, so the fields Varney saw on the way had already been cut to stubble, the crops harvested with the first chill. Varney couldn’t tell if Kelleher’s farm had even been planted this year. The vast level plot that ran from the road to the left side of the house and took up two-thirds of the acreage looked patchy and unkempt compared to the land on other farms. The stubble was interspersed with weeds. The rest of the farm was covered with thick deciduous woods, all the trees looking exactly the same age. He wondered about that until his second visit.

On his second trip he passed through Hinckley in the daytime, and picked up a tourist map. There was a paragraph on the back about the various attractions, and one was the Hinckley Fire Museum. He read more closely and learned that all the land for miles around here had been old forests that had been logged in the nineteenth century. The cutters had trimmed the brush from the lumber and left it where it fell. When a fire started in 1894, the land had burned uncontrollably, leaving nothing. All the trees had grown in since then.

When Varney reached the road where the farm was, he did his first daylight reconnaissance. The utility vehicle that had been parked outside the house was gone this morning, and no other vehicle was visible, so he guessed that Kelleher had gone out, and probably lived alone. He paid particular attention to the woods that covered the right side of the farm. Since the left side was low stubble and weeds, it would be a bad place to cross on foot.

He knew he was teasing himself, relishing the planning phase because he had been so anxious to get back to work. He knew that most likely, planning was unnecessary. He could have sat in Minneapolis waiting for the phone call, driven right up here that night, pulled up the farm road to the house, kicked in the door, shot Kelleher, and driven off. There were few cars on this road in the daytime, and almost none at night. Minnesota north of Minneapolis was not as crowded as the places where he had worked before. He had driven up here twice, about ninety miles each way, and had not seen a single police car. He’d had to drive around in Hinckley to see a few parked by the station so he would know what colors they were painted. He had also searched out a state police barracks along the interstate highway to look at state police cars.

Varney studied the road near the farm for the best place to park his car. The landscape presented extremes. Long stretches of road were flanked on both sides by endless, swampy, treeless fields where red-winged blackbirds perched on cattails, their weight making the shafts bend, so that they bobbed in the wind as they called to each other. The rest was either farmers’ fields or thick forests of the uniform twenty-foot deciduous trees like the ones on Kelleher’s land.

When he had first seen them, he had assumed they were young, but now he supposed they must have been what sprouted after the fire over a hundred years ago, and they’d been stunted by the weather. Every place he saw a grove that looked promising he slowed down to look closer and saw an obstacle. In many places, there was a drainage ditch beside the shoulder of the road, or a fence. In other places, the trees had grown in too dense a pattern for a car to slip in between them.

When he worked in cities, he could always find a safe place to leave a car. Cities were full of commercial buildings with small parking areas behind them. Sometimes he would park his car in a shopping mall or the lot of a big apartment complex, where it would become invisible, just one of a hundred. Here it was different. He could hardly leave a car on the shoulder of the road, because it would be the only one visible for miles. He considered leaving the car in Hinckley. There was a big hotel and casino run by the Ojibwe Indians there, with hundreds of cars in its lot. But it was too far from the farm. The casino was surrounded by long stretches of straight, empty highway where a solitary walker would be a novelty. People didn’t go for pleasant ten-mile hikes beside roads around here. There was a big state park a few miles away, where people could hike along the St. Croix River if they wanted to.

As he drove back to Minneapolis, he thought of various ways to handle the problem of transportation. He was already as far south as Mounds View before he hit upon the right one. For the rest of the drive, he worked out the details until he was satisfied.

For the next few days, Varney stayed in Minneapolis and prepared. He would get up early each morning, go down to the exercise room on the fourth floor of the hotel, and use the weights and machines before the other guests were up. Then he would step through the locker room to the pool and swim for an hour. Then he went up to the room, took Mae to breakfast, and walked the streets with her until lunchtime. He drove her to the Mall of America and bought her some clothes, took her to parks with little lakes in them, looked at the Mississippi. In the late afternoon, he drove to a park where people jogged after work, and joined them. He and Mae went to dinner at a different restaurant each evening, and when they were back in the room, he turned his attention to his equipment. The kind of meticulous care he used was best done in quiet times like this.

Varney put on thin rubber gloves, and thoroughly cleaned his three pistols. He bathed each part in solvent, wiped it clean, and put a thin layer of gun oil on it, then reassembled the weapon without putting any fingerprints on its internal parts. He used the same procedure with each magazine, then loaded the magazine with ammunition without touching any of the rounds with bare hands. Then he put the pistols into plastic bags and returned them to his suitcase.

He treated his clothing with equal care. None of the clothes had anything memorable or distinctive about them. The brands were all national, the brand names and even size labels cut out. He did not do this because a police force would not be able to find out these things if they had his clothes. He did it because he wanted to make them work harder. If they had to learn the brand name by cut, material, and pattern, it would take time. And that information would give them nothing, because there was nothing special about the clothes.

He washed the soles of the shoes he planned to wear and put them into a plastic bag so no fibers from a hotel rug or a car’s interior would stick to them.

His precautions were meticulous and painstaking, but they dispelled the worries that distracted him. He knew a shell casing left near the body would not carry a fingerprint. If he got blood on his clothes, or was seen wearing them, he could change and throw them away. He could drop his gun in a ditch and not give it another thought, because his guns were all ones he’d stolen in burglaries years ago in California.

Mae watched him making his preparations, never coming near the belongings he spread on the table in their room or speaking to him during his period of meditation on risks and countermeasures. It was only after he had performed all the rituals and put away the tools and clothes that she moved within ten feet of him. She said, “Are you done?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“It’s interesting, the way you do things. So careful, everything in a certain way. It’s kind of like a doctor or something.”

He gazed at her in wonder. She didn’t get it. She kept pushing forward, and she sometimes came right up close to figuring something out, but she just wasn’t paying enough attention after she got there. She was doomed always to think she understood things when she didn’t.

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.