Pursuit: A Novel

36

Prescott gave a disappointed, sad shake of his head. “So much for that.” As he stood up, he began the quiet process of clearing his mind. He had always seen the telephone as the last, surest sign. If this guy had carried it and never pressed the key, Prescott would not have been sure. Only if he used it as a way to surprise Prescott and kill him would Prescott be certain.

Prescott could have ended this an hour ago, when his night scope had detected the bright glow of another human being’s heat moving through the woods. He had predicted, in a general way, each move that this man would make. Prescott had placed in his path some signs to suggest that Prescott might be too much for him, and pointed him toward the way to survive.

He supposed it had always been this way. He had wasted his advantages and held back each time since he was a kid. An unexpected memory that was more physical than mental gripped him. There was Anthony Meara in the street with his friends already moving to block Prescott’s way on the sidewalk. Meara had been a senior, and Prescott was two years younger. It was not the sort of fighting that had gone on in earlier years, two boys engaging in the series of elimination matches that established each grade’s male hierarchy. This had been something else.

Meara had stood in the center of the walk: maybe all he wanted was to force Prescott to step off the sidewalk to get around him. Prescott had no desire to fight over a sidewalk he could never own, so he veered a bit to the right. But Prescott had moved from city to city with his mother twice by then, and he had been in fights, so he was ready. He heard the faint whisper of the cloth of Meara’s shirt, a scrape of a shoe moving across concrete, and reacted. He raised the books clutched in his left hand to the side of his head in time to make Meara’s first strike a glancing blow that knocked them flying, the pages flapping somewhere out of Prescott’s vision as he spun and delivered the jab with his right.

Meara had not been expecting a counterpunch. The jab caught the bridge of his nose, and made him stagger back as both hands shot up to cover the hurt. Prescott instantly turned on the other two and charged three steps, knowing that they would scramble a distance off, then stop and drift, uncertain. He turned again to make the same charge toward Meara. He knew that if Meara retreated now, it was over.

But Meara was already in motion, hurling his body toward Prescott, trying to take advantage of his momentary inattention to push him into the brick wall of the building and hammer him there. Prescott made a quick half dodge, tripped him up, and gave him a push to speed up his motion. Meara bounced off the wall, fell to the sidewalk, and lay there. He was clutching his shoulder, moaning a little. It didn’t seem to Prescott that he could be that badly injured. “My shoulder.” It was a half-whispered croak. “It’s busted.”

Prescott glanced at the two others, who were now at least fifty feet away, moving sideways like runners taking a lead and keeping their eyes on the pitcher’s mound. When he met their eyes, they began to back away. Prescott’s wrath began to cool. There was no reason to be afraid, and he couldn’t leave Meara here with a broken shoulder.

“Help me,” Meara whispered. Prescott stepped closer. The plea was so unseemly that he felt pity. He had started to kneel when the shoe kicked up from below his vision. It moved with incredible speed, missed his groin, brushed the front of Prescott’s shirt, and barely nicked his chin, so that his teeth clicked together. Prescott changed. The kick, the surprise of it and the sudden jump to save himself from it, made the adrenaline surge. There was an instant when he saw with clarity the sequence of events, the simple fact of what Meara had done, and quickly passed beyond knowing into judgment.

Meara was up and charging toward him again to take advantage of the ruse. Prescott’s body devoted its strength to getting both of his hands on Meara’s left shoulder. He gripped the shirt, some of the flesh, and swung him back into the brick wall. Meara caromed off it, and this time Prescott met him. He aimed his blows at the head, delivering them with the heels of his hands, not to punch him but to drive his head into the wall.

In a few seconds Meara was on the pavement again and Prescott went about picking his books up from the ground, stacking them, and then lifting the stack into his left hand. He looked up suddenly.

Forty feet off, one of Meara’s friends exclaimed indignantly, “You killed him!”

Prescott put a faint smile on his face. “If you come near me again, I might kill all three of you.”

Afterward, the three had tried to use those words to get him into trouble with the police and the school administrators, but the version of the story they provided had not been convincing. There had been some kind of quiet investigation, and it had turned up stories of the three attacking lone students on their way home from school and stealing lunch money, watches, and rings.

Prescott supposed that he had been making the same intentional mistake all his life, maybe because he had required clarity—not for any authority, but for himself—before he could do what he had been aware at the beginning he would probably have to do. This time, he had actually thought a couple of times that the obstacles he had put in the killer’s way might have served as more than psychological barriers. The guy had actually taken a step off the stairway into empty air before he had saved himself. He had fallen into the deep end of the empty pool. It would have been nice if Prescott could have found him lying there with a broken leg, unable to go anywhere. But Prescott had watched, and he had been awed by what he had seen. This guy was good: so good that maybe Prescott had been lucky to notice him now, before he got any better.

Prescott sighed. He supposed he had just gotten his kick in the face, so it was time to go out and take this man off the census. Prescott took another look out the cellar window, raised the bolt of his rifle, pushed the detent to release it, pulled it all the way back, and lifted it out. He slipped it into the space beneath the old couch he had been sleeping on for the past few nights, up under the torn cloth into the zigzag springs, then left the useless rifle in plain sight, leaning against the wall. He moved toward the cellar stairs, feeling the weight of his weapons on his body without needing to touch them with his hands. He climbed the steps silently, stopped at the landing, and listened. Then he moved to the back door and slipped outside into the darkness.

Prescott stayed low and moved quickly. He was aware at each moment that the reason he had to be out here was the same as the reason why it was the worst idea in the world. Millikan had seen it instantly, months ago. This was a young, alert, agile man who had, for some reason that Prescott would never really know, begun at a very early age to train himself to kill people, and then somehow gotten himself into the underground market so that he’d had plenty of practice. This man could not be allowed to go on, get stronger, get smarter.

Prescott moved with measured, even paces across the open in the part of the yard that he was sure the killer could not see. Right now his opponent was near the telephone Prescott had left in the brush, wondering why he had been allowed to go there and fire his weapon without drawing Prescott’s fire. Probably there was nothing in his collected knowledge of human behavior—surely of combat—that could explain it to his satisfaction. He did not know that Prescott, before he could foreclose all the offers and options, had to see the kick swinging toward his face. After the killer had thought about it for a few minutes, he would conclude that the telephone had been placed there to attract him. He would think Prescott wanted his exact location so he could zero it in his sights, take one calm, leisurely aim with the rifle propped to steady it, and cap him.

Prescott held his pistol muzzle-downward in his hand, and floated smoothly and silently into the woods. He knew exactly where he wanted this man to go next, and he was fairly certain he knew how to get him to go there. It was mostly a question of making all of the other places seem impossible.

He made his way along the edge of the woods. He had walked every yard of the woods alone at night while he prepared. He had wanted a piece of forested land, because it made the place seem easy and appealing. It would seem to be a simple matter for this killer to move nearly to the house without being seen. But it also deprived the killer of a car. He would need to leave it before he entered the woods. Once he was here, he was not getting out easily. Getting out meant running through the woods and coming out tired and scratched and maybe injured on an empty rural road on foot.

Prescott was ready. First he would go about denying the woods to the killer. He set the trip wires of his booby traps along the margin of the woods, then made his way to the tree on the edge of the forest that he had chosen in advance. From here he could see the spot where he had left the telephone. He rested his arm in the crook of the tree, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger. He fought down the recoil, fired four more times so he was sure the muzzle flash had been visible, then ducked and ran back the way he’d come. He heard the thuds of bullets pounding into the trees behind him, knocking chips of bark into the air. He was impressed by how quickly the killer had returned fire, and how accurately. But the shooting reassured Prescott: if the killer was lying on his belly in the brush on this side of the house, he was not up and running.

Prescott slipped in the back door, locked it, pushed a new magazine into his pistol, then moved to the front door. He reached up and flipped the light switch beside it. Outside, the light was painfully brilliant. The floodlights Prescott had installed in the trees above the line of brush where the killer had hidden poured down in a bright, white halogen light that seared the eyes and made the leaves on the bushes shine. Prescott waited. He knew there were only two ways for the killer to react, and either one was going to put him in front of Prescott’s sights one final time. He crouched by the window to see which way it would be. The killer could turn and try to run off across the huge open field of old corn stubble, a five-minute run with nothing that rose higher than his socks to obscure the view of his back. Prescott believed he had already closed that possibility: in order to scare him into falling into the empty pool, he had fired a rifle. This killer would know enough not to run across empty, open land, and he could not stay in the suddenly lighted bushes. He had seen Prescott’s muzzle flash coming from the woods, so he wouldn’t go in that direction. But he knew there was one place left where the odds would be about even.

Prescott stood back from the window, raised his pistol to shoulder level, and waited for the front door to swing open. After ten seconds, he sensed that something was not right. It was a vague, irritating discomfort at first, then a feeling of distraction. It was a sound. It was an unexpected sound, one he had done his utmost to make impossible. He listened more carefully, hoping it was coming from far away—a freak of the damp night air that had thrown a noise across the empty fields. He stepped to the side window in time to see a bush still shaking, a leaf brushed from it falling to the ground. It was too late for a quick shot from here. The killer was out of the brush now, already too close, moving along the clapboards somewhere near the front of the house.

Prescott tried to listen for footsteps. It might be possible to hear the man’s shoulder scrape against the clapboards, then put five or six shots through the outer wall about two feet up from the floor. But listening had become futile, because the engine sound was louder now. He heard the springs of the car give a squeak, and there was a metallic scrape as the nose tipped down over the deep rut in the gravel drive. He spun and ran for the back door, stuck the key in and opened it, then dashed outside toward the corner of the house, squinting against the searing light of the floods across the yard.

His experience told him not to pause at the corner of the house, because that was where the killer would fire instinctively. He determined to step out beyond it, where the light would be out of his eyes and he would have a full view of the side of the house.

He reached the corner, dashed out, and pivoted. The killer’s shot slashed along the side of the house, leaving a line of bare wood, and ricocheted off into the distance.

Prescott fired. The killer’s left forearm was slapped outward from his body, and Prescott knew he had hit it, but the killer was already moving around the corner to the front of the house. If the wound had slowed him, it was too late for Prescott to see it.

Prescott ran after him, his mind flashing images of the front, trying to predict where the killer would stop to aim. The killer would be ready. Prescott would not. He would have to see, sort out the shapes instantly, and place his one, final shot before the killer put a round through his head. Prescott was almost to the corner before he was sure: practice. This killer was good because he practiced. When shooters practiced, what they became good at was what the ranges offered them: they practiced seeing something pop up, aiming, and shooting it. They practiced leading a target that moved side to side. What they didn’t practice was the target that came in low, moving straight at them. Prescott veered away from the house, came in at the corner and dived, trying to use the moment of fast motion to see.

He saw the human shape on the porch and aimed at it, but the muzzle flash came from somewhere to the left, beyond it. The shot caught the muscles along the top of Prescott’s left shoulder, beside his neck, and sent pain streaking down his shoulder blade. He hit the ground hard, not able to break his fall with his left arm. He tried to aim at the place where he had seen the muzzle flash, but he could make out nothing.

The human being moved away from the door, and Prescott could see better. It was a young woman, thin and dark-haired, and she was bent backward. The killer had his injured arm draped over her shoulder, and the other hand holding the pistol beside her face. She was terrified, her face set in a wide-mouthed, silent wail as the killer held her in front of him and sidestepped off the porch. Prescott aimed, trying to find a bit of the man—an inch or two—where he could put a fatal shot.

“Fire and she’s dead!” The voice was the one Prescott had heard so many times over the telephone, and it had lost none of its bravado. It sounded eager and full of hatred.

Prescott lay still, the gun in his hand useless, the house he had carefully selected and turned into a trap now irrelevant. He watched the killer open the driver’s door, get the girl into it, and slip into the back seat behind her without ever presenting him with a shot he could be sure would be fatal. He watched the car back down the gravel driveway for two hundred feet before it swung around. He watched the Lincoln Navigator in the driveway slump suddenly as a shot pierced the right front tire, then jump a few times as shots pounded into radiator, engine compartment, and windshield. As the car drove off, he pulled himself awkwardly to his feet and hurried to find the cell phone he had left in the bushes.