Pursuit: A Novel

39

Prescott stood beside the cluster of pay telephones at the edge of the waiting area for gate A-14 and listened to the electronic voice of his answering machine. “No messages,” it said. He had been hoping that the killer would have been angry enough to leave a message that would tell him something. He hung up and looked at the desk to see if the airline people were ready to begin letting passengers onto the plane, then turned to see how Millikan’s calls were coming.

Millikan was already hurrying toward him from the next set of telephones down the concourse. Prescott could see there was news. Millikan pulled him to the wall away from the other travelers, and said quietly, “The police in Louisville have been leaving messages on my phone all day, and I just reached Lieutenant Cowan.”

“Has somebody there seen him?”

“Worse. It’s Carter Rowland—Donna Halsey’s ex-husband. They found him in his house. He was shot in the head, but nobody heard.”

“He’s moving fast.”

Millikan turned to look at him. “You’re not surprised.”

Prescott shook his head. “He’s cutting all the strings. He’s getting everybody who had anything to do with the job that got him into trouble. I was afraid he might do that.”

“But Rowland didn’t do anything to him.”

“Rowland hired him to do the job in the restaurant. He did it, so Rowland was a satisfied customer. How is he supposed to know that Rowland wasn’t the one who told me how to get in touch with the people in Cincinnati? He can’t know, but now he doesn’t have to wonder.”

Millikan shook his head. “Maybe we should exchange our tickets and go to Louisville while we can still get a look at the scene.”

“Too late,” said Prescott. “No point in going where he was this morning. We’ve got to go to the place where he’ll be tonight.”

When the plane arrived in St. Louis, the sun was already low. Prescott and Millikan had barely spoken to each other. Prescott had spent much of the time on the airplane telephone trying to call Hobart, then Jean, then Hobart again. Millikan had, at first, not been able to reach anyone in the St. Louis police department who knew him. He had not convinced anyone else that he was expert enough to be able to predict that a killer could be expected at Nolan’s Paddock Club. Finally, he had managed to get a captain on the phone who seemed to have some sympathy for his reasoning, but the captain had not been willing to describe to Millikan what, precisely, he was going to do.

The two men strode along the boarding tunnel. Millikan said, “I told the captain the flight number and arrival time, so there will probably be somebody here to get a copy of the picture for the plainclothes guys.”

As they emerged from the tunnel into the waiting area, he pulled Prescott to the side to let the other travelers pass, while he turned his head in every direction, searching for a uniform.

“It doesn’t look like they’re eagerly waiting for us,” said Prescott, and began to walk quickly up the concourse.

Millikan had to trot to catch up. He said, “They could have asked the Buffalo police to fax the picture to them. They might already have it, and be at the bar looking for him.”

“We’ll find out,” said Prescott.

Their pace took them quickly down to the car-rental counter. Prescott had called to reserve a car, so it took only a few minutes before they were on the road. Prescott drove with a quiet determination, always pushing slightly faster than the traffic, weaving in and out when he had to.

When they pulled into sight of the building, all traces of daylight were gone, and the big green sign that said NOLAN’S PADDOCK CLUB was a bright splash of electric color against a black sky. The huge parking lot was already lined with cars, pickup trucks, and utility vehicles. “Is it always this busy?” asked Millikan.

“It’s filling up a little early,” said Prescott. “Let’s hope all the extra cars belong to your undercover cops.”

He pulled into the lot and found a space in nearly the last row of cars facing the side of the building in a dimly lighted sector two hundred feet away. Both men got out. Prescott took another look around the lot, then handed Millikan a few copies of the picture and took a few for himself. He leaned into the car as though he’d forgotten something, but Millikan could see he was collecting the parts of a gun from several places in his suitcase, and assembling it.

Millikan scanned the lot as he spoke. “How do you want to do this?”

Prescott said, “Split up. You go in, stay close to the bar and away from the stage, where you can watch the front door. I’ll try to get in another way and circulate. If you spot a cop, make sure he gets the picture.”

“Right.” Millikan turned and set off for the front door. This was a moment when he had unexpected thoughts. He had a vivid memory of leaving the police force so many years ago. His strongest sensa-tion had been relief: he was never again going to have to walk through the door of an unfamiliar building feeling the weight of a loaded pistol on his body, looking for a face. The memory brought with it a judgment he could only identify as a disappointment in himself. He had struggled all that way—through college, graduate school, the job as a professor—only to be jerked right back in a day. He felt that he should have known he would be doing this again. He should never have let himself imagine it was behind him, or that it ever could be.

As he walked, he was almost unconsciously remembering tactics, preparing himself. If undercover cops were here, he would have to rely on them to spot him and find a way to identify themselves to him. If they were any good at all, he would not be able to pick them out. He had to concentrate on seeing the killer, identifying him first from his picture, and getting around behind him. He knew that tonight was a perfect occasion for one of his nightmares from the old days to come to pass: that he would be in a closed space, squeezed in a crowd of a couple of hundred people, and the killer would open fire.

Millikan acknowledged the thought and set it aside—still there, but not something he could devote any of his consciousness to right now. He had to go in there, quickly scan all the faces that he could see, and then move into a dim spot where he could watch for the right one.

The music grew louder as Millikan stepped toward the building. There was a glow in the doorway, a reddish tint to the shapes he could see, as though the place he was about to enter were on fire. Three big men in jeans, T-shirts, and work boots were walking toward the door from his right. He judged that they had been working at some kind of construction site until dark, and that it must be at least thirty miles away if they had just arrived. He made sure he reached the threshold after they did and edged in behind them, using their bulk as a way to shield himself from view for a few seconds while his eyes ranged the faces of the crowd ahead, searching for the one right configuration of features.

Prescott studied the small, unmarked metal door at the side of the building. It was the one where he had seen Jeanie and Hobart watching him depart one afternoon three months ago. It was closed, and he was sure it was supposed to be rigged not to open from the outside. Its purpose was as a fire exit, not an entrance. But Prescott had learned early in life that a great many of the things that were supposed to operate under strict rules did not. When Jean and Hobart had come out that day, no alarm had sounded.

He went to the door, tested the thumb latch, and tugged the handle. He remembered the kitchen door at the rear of the restaurant in Louisville. This one reminded him of it. He was not absolutely certain that the two were identical, but they were at least similar. In Louisville, the killer had gone back there and found the door propped open. He had slipped inside and killed the cook. But the part of that night that mattered to Prescott right now was not what the killer had done. It was what he had been expecting to do. The killer had locked and chained the front door of the restaurant, and only then had gone to the rear of the building. Even if he had come up the alley earlier and seen that the door was propped open, he could not have known that it would stay open. He had been certain—not guessed, but known—that if he had come back and found it locked, he would be able to open it.

Prescott turned his head to survey the parking lot. He could see no shape of a head in any of the cars or trucks on this side of the building, and for the moment, there was no sign of a man on foot. He knelt by the door, extracted the pick and tension wrench he carried in his wallet, and worked on the lock. It took only a moment to line up the pins along the cylinder, but he did not open the door. He stood, leaned casually against the wall as he returned the pick and tension wrench to his wallet, shifted the pistol in his belt at the small of his back to make it easier to reach, and surveyed the parking lot again.

Prescott moved his right hand to his back, opened the door with his left, and stepped inside. The concrete hallway was unoccupied. The music was louder, the thumping bass beat that some of the girls liked to dance to because it kept them on rhythm when the lounge was full and the crowd was noisy. He took his first steps along the hallway. To his right was the door to the dancers’ dressing room. His face was familiar at Nolan’s. If he stepped in and the killer was not there, he could apologize drunkenly that he had been looking for Jeanie while he backed out. If the killer was there, Prescott’s sudden appearance might be enough of an edge. He put his left hand on the knob, held the gun under his coat, and pushed.

The door opened a couple of inches and he heard a woman’s voice. “So he moves out, and what does he take with him?”

Another woman’s voice said, “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. The dog. The very same dog that he’s been whining and complaining about for three months. Supposedly the reason he was leaving in the first place.”

Prescott closed the door quietly and went on. He had no idea who the woman was, but he recognized that the voice had no tension in it. She was talking to one of the other dancers. There was no chance that if the killer had chosen to hide in there, one of them would not have noticed him.

He stopped at the entrance to the stage. He would have liked to try to check the crowd from behind the black curtain, but he knew it was too risky. The dancers sometimes did it, but that was the reason he knew it was difficult to do without being seen. The girls knew that it didn’t matter if the customers saw the quick sparkle of a feminine eye appear at the edge of the curtain and vanish. It probably helped build the suspense that was part of the appeal of the show. But Prescott could not afford to be seen.

He moved up the corridor to the door of Dick Hobart’s office, stepped to the side, and knocked. He listened, but the music from the main room grew louder, so he heard nothing. He knocked again, this time rapping his knuckles hard on the wood so he could hear it clearly over the music. He waited, but Hobart did not appear.

Prescott moved on, opened the door to the storeroom, and switched on the light. The tall shelves shone white with stacked rolls of paper towels and toilet paper for the rest rooms. On the lower shelves there were bottles of floor wax, cans of metal polish, mop heads, sponges. The empty spaces on the floor held buckets, mop wringers, brooms propped against the wall. There was no way for Prescott to know whether anyone had been here who didn’t work here, but he could see there was nobody here now. He turned off the light and went out.

Prescott moved toward the door near the side of the stage that led out into the public part of the building, then stopped. There was still a room back here that he could not be sure about: Hobart’s office. He could not leave a room at his back that had not been searched.

Millikan had settled into his spot near the bar, where he could keep his back against the wall and not be jostled too often by the men who made their way past him to buy more drinks. The light in the margins of the cavernous room was red and dim: the stage lights were a bit brighter, a compromise between not paying enough attention to the lady who was working up there, and having a stage awash in white light that would make her skin look pink and raw, like flesh in an operating room.

Millikan was in a dim place that was not too visible, but he was not able to see the other customers well either. He concentrated on looking at every face that presented itself. Prescott had warned him that the crowd at night was young, and now he saw that it was making what he had to do more difficult and dangerous. Everyone he saw seemed to be twenty-five and in good physical shape, with shortish hair and an unlined, undistinctive face. It was their height that was bothering him the most at the moment. He had been aware that each generation grew a bit taller than the last. No forensics specialist could possibly not know that, and anyone who spent time on a college campus could see it. But there were few times when Millikan had found himself in such cramped quarters with an audience made up exclusively of young males. He craned his neck, he stood on his toes, he glanced between passing customers, but he never could see far enough to be sure he was seeing even a significant proportion of the men in the big room.

Prescott had told him that in Minnesota the killer’s hair had been dyed light brown—or maybe the first time, it had been dyed dark brown. It didn’t matter which was the natural shade, or if either was. Once it had been established that the man had ever changed the color, it was simply not something Millikan could use. He had to look directly into the man’s face to see if he matched his portrait, and how could Millikan possibly stare into the eyes without having the eyes stare back?

Prescott managed to push the fifth pin into line with the others on the cylinder of the lock on Dick Hobart’s office, then turn the cylinder. He gently pushed the knob to let the door swing inward, and in the first fraction of a second he received the first bit of disturbing news: the light was on. In the next fraction of a second, the door stopped. Prescott pushed the door again, and the sound was the one he had already begun to dread. What had stopped the door’s arc was the sole of a shoe. He pushed on the door harder, and the side of the shoe scraped against the concrete floor as he moved the heavy weight far enough to put his head in and look down.

Dick Hobart’s foot was against the door because his head had a hole in it. It was a neat hole, on the left side. That was the entry wound. The side that was down against the floor was the exit wound, and it would not be so neat. Since the killer’s left forearm was the one that Prescott had clipped in the dark in Minnesota, he had certainly shot Dick Hobart with his right. That meant that Hobart had been facing him.

Prescott pulled back and closed the door, then turned the cylinder to lock it again. He was sorry. Dick Hobart had been eager to get involved in arranging a murder. He supposed that this was not entirely an event that Hobart had a right to expect would never happen, but it was something Prescott had tried to prevent. He moved back up the corridor the way he had come.

The beer bottle Varney carried in his left hand was an empty one he had picked up from a table. He had it so that the way he held his injured left forearm resting across his stomach looked natural. He moved with slow, intermittent progress across the big, crowded room. Nearly everyone but Varney had his eyes focused on the woman up on the stage. Varney turned his face in that direction for a few seconds each time he waited. When he saw another gap in the crowd, he stepped into it, then paused again and pretended to watch.

He did not want to be aggressive in making his way out. It would be easy in a place like this to get into a fight if he pushed one of these big bastards too hard. There was no question he could put any one of them down, even tonight, when his left arm was throbbing, but it would require him to do serious damage.

Throwing a punch in this kind of crowd was foolish. They were all big and stupid. Half of them were already feeling the effect of the alcohol, and that was the half that had been most aggressive about elbowing their way to the head of the line at the bar while they were sober.

As he moved, he looked past each of them, not wanting to make eye contact, his gaze on his destination instead. Each time he was forced by the crush of bodies to pause again, he had to look up at the stage, and he hated it. The woman up there was very blond and very tall, but that did not help. The fact that she was not remotely like Mae forced him to think of Mae and compare. When he did, even the dissimilarity was not exactly real: there was a similarity between the shapes of all attractive women, their movements and expressions. The differences were like the differences between two zebras, probably enormous to a zebra, but practically invisible to any other animal.

He turned away again to watch the fluid movements of the crowd, waiting for a path to appear. His eyes passed across two big men who had just come in a few minutes ago, after he had begun to make his way toward the door. At that moment, one of them turned his body to the side to look over his shoulder—maybe in response to something that was said, but was only audible at that end of the room—and his companion took one step toward the bar. In the half second the space between them widened by a foot, and Varney saw something that made him gasp.

It seemed to be the guy he had seen on television months ago, right after the job in Louisville. Varney instinctively turned and drifted to the side along with the pressure of the crowd, toward the bar, so he would be harder to see while he looked. He never took his eyes from the space near the door, barely blinking, trying to be sure.

Another man stopped and looked at the stage just as the one ahead of him took a step toward the bar, and another space opened. Varney got a clear look beyond them, and this time the name came back to him: Millikan. He wasn’t even sure why he had remembered it, but the old guy’s name was Millikan.

Varney’s eyes moved from side to side, looking for a new path through the crowd. He would have to make his way to the front door on the left side, so that he wouldn’t pass on Millikan’s side. He was sure Millikan must have seen the picture Prescott had posted in Buffalo. He could not have come here by sheer coincidence. Varney decided that as soon as he could make it to the left side of the door, just before he slipped out of the light into the night, he would have to be sure that Millikan got a good look.

Millikan had been wondering what had become of Prescott. He had agreed with the strategy, and had, in fact, considered it inevitable. One man had to gain control of the doorway while the other moved systematically through the crowd from the far wall toward the door, looking at faces. But Millikan had taken his station near the door at least a half hour ago, and he still had not seen Prescott. He caught himself. It probably had not been a half hour. It had been proven experimentally that it took no more than two minutes before the average person began to overestimate duration, and as time went on, the exaggeration grew. Millikan had not looked at his watch when he came in, so there was no point in looking now. He corrected his time sense by looking at the only objective measure he could see. The woman on the stage was the only one in the building who was making visible progress of any kind. He supposed that merely taking off her clothes to music couldn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and she had not finished yet. He returned his eyes to the faces in the crowd.

He quickly scanned the faces from the door inward into the big room. There was still no sign of Prescott, but he had just convinced himself that his wait had not been so long. He moved his eyes from face to face, moving back toward the door. He stopped. His eyes were caught by a face. He saw that the young man was standing absolutely still, staring at him too. He took a breath and it seemed to keep coming, his lungs expanding as though he were preparing to shout. The hair was not light anymore, as Prescott had said it had been, but he could not change his eyes.

Millikan moved toward the door, but the crowd seemed to tighten and solidify in front of him. As he struggled, he shouted above the pounding music, “Excuse me! Pardon! Sorry! Coming through!” He gained a few steps, but then there were four men ahead who had all just come in the door. They were staring stupidly into the big room, trying to get their bearings, just as the music told Millikan the dancer on the stage was reaching some kind of climactic moment in her performance. Millikan tapped the nearest man and shouted, “Excuse me,” and that made him a few more feet before he was stopped again. Millikan craned his neck to see past the next group of customers. The doorway was empty. The killer had slipped out.

Millikan felt a wave of panicky heat grip his chest and spine. He yanked out his wallet and opened it, waving it in front of him. All it had in its plastic window was his California driver’s license, but he shouted, “Police officer! One side! Police! One side.” His voice was stentorian, the authority in it only a remnant left for years in storage, like the old uniforms he would never throw away, but the tone of urgency and need was real. The men in front of him might not have been convinced he was a police officer, but they seemed to know that he was not joking, and they made way. In a few more seconds he was through the doorway, patting his coat to put his hand on the gun as he trotted out into the parking lot.

Varney stared at Millikan with intense interest. Millikan carried himself as though he were armed. That didn’t seem to Varney to make much sense. On television they had said he was a professor. But Varney did not waste time questioning what he could see. Millikan was here, and he was moving farther from the bright lights around the building and into the rows of parked cars.

From here, looking through the tinted window in the back of the sport utility vehicle where Varney sat, cut off from the sounds of Millikan’s feet and shielded from the breeze that ruffled Millikan’s wiry gray hair, Varney felt as though he were watching him on television again. Millikan was turning his whole body round and round now, looking in every direction, then walking a few steps and doing it again. That was a look of despair. Even if Varney had not been able to make out the wrinkled brow and the frantic eyes, he could have told from Millikan’s body what he was feeling. When a man stopped and began spinning like that, he was out of ideas.

Varney waited until Millikan had turned away from him and stepped off toward the other side of the parking lot before he got out of the SUV and began to follow him. He would get Millikan now, and then go into cover again somewhere near the body to wait for Prescott to show himself.

Varney had a sudden, unexpected feeling of joy. He had just been through the worst period of his life. All this time, he had been upset about it, but had been quietly determined to wait it out and endure until it was over. He had suffered the humiliation of repeated failure, and the shame of having to be dependent on Tracy and her sons, and the pain of the bullet piercing his forearm. He’d had to maintain his discipline, burn out of himself all weakness and hold to his clarity of purpose while it had all happened. Finally, he’d had to make Mae into a human sacrifice, so there would be no barrier, no human connection to put a limit to his rage.

He had gone from place to place, finding the people who must have had a part in his betrayal, and obliterating them. It had taken him a few days, but now he knew. His rage had made him harder and cleaner, and now the rage was beginning to change into exultation. His period of trial was over: he had won. He wasn’t fighting now; he was just collecting the last of the enemies, bagging them like game. His period of misery and agony had been a test. If he had been weak and undisciplined, he would have drifted lower and lower until he died. But he had used every day of those hard, horrible months working to make himself better and stronger. He felt he was approaching a kind of perfection tonight, not a mere adventurer anymore, but a perfect warrior, tempered and purified.

He stepped around the building after Millikan. This side was even darker, but he noticed the steel rungs of a ladder built into the side of the brick wall for maintenance men to reach the roof—probably to fix the air-conditioning and clean the vents. That was where he would wait for Prescott after he got Millikan. Once again, he marveled at the change in the current of the universe. For months, nothing had gone right. Now, he reached out a hand, and the things he needed simply came to him, like gifts.

He studied Millikan’s form, walking up the aisle of parked cars, the right arm bent, the hand near the lapel of his open coat so he could reach in and pull out the gun. Varney could not allow that gun to come out and make noise. He screwed the silencer on the barrel of his own pistol, stopped walking, and aimed. The bullet would pass through Millikan’s temple, he decided. That would keep some half-conscious nerve impulse from reaching the hand and discharging the gun.

“Last chance, Slick.”

Varney held the gun at arm’s length, but he knew he could not fire. Prescott had to be first. Where had he come from? The roof, of course. Prescott had simply gotten there first. Varney lowered the pistol a few degrees slowly, listening for the sound of Prescott’s feet on the gravel, stepping up behind him to take it. “Last chance?”

“Live or die,” said Prescott. “You pick.”

Varney knew then that Prescott was not going to step forward to take the gun. He ducked, slapped the ground, dove toward the nearest car, and rolled behind it. As he came up beyond the car, his arm already extended over the hood to fire, Prescott’s bullet passed through his forehead.

Hours later, there was a moment when the police had finished with Prescott for a time. He took a breath and looked at the crowd of onlookers beyond the barriers. A familiar shape turned and began walking away, but he had already begun to move, and in twenty steps he had caught her. “Jeanie.”

She turned and looked at him, but she kept walking. “I’m glad you got that man, and he didn’t get you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Will you stop and talk to me?”

She stopped, her arms folded across her chest.

He said, “My name is Roy Prescott.”

She shook her head. “Whoever that is, it’s not somebody I want to know. My time with Bob Greene is over, and that’s okay. I was right that I wouldn’t be sorry it happened. Good luck.”

She turned away and began to walk, but he stayed close to her. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“What are you going to do?”

She sighed. “What I had always planned to do. If Hobart is dead, then Nolan’s is finished a year or so earlier than I thought. I’m just skipping ahead, that’s all.”

Prescott said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you or mess up your plans. Look, this place is closing because of me. I would like—”

“Don’t give me anything else,” she said. “I don’t need it. Just go away now, so it can be over.”