Pursuit: A Novel

10

Varney understood what had happened as though he had seen it. Prescott had gone into the room looking for Varney. He had found it empty, then spent a moment teasing himself with the idea of doing this job the sensible way. He had undoubtedly been tempted to sit there with his gun in his lap, watch Varney walk in the door, and then drop the hammer on him: maybe one through the head, or maybe be safe and conservative and put two or three into his chest while he was standing there, caught in the doorway.

But if Prescott had done it the sensible way, the police would have come in, looked things over, and known that they had Varney and Prescott too. He had to sit around outside, observing the letter of the law until Varney showed up in the open air of the parking lot. Then Prescott could have arranged an execution that at least appeared legal.

Well, fuck him. He was the one who wanted to be famous, so he’d had to give up the advantages that notoriety cost. Varney sat on the edge of the tub and the shivers returned. The salt residue on his clothes and skin seemed to draw water out of the air and renew the bone-chill he felt from his hours in the water. He could not get himself to forget the image he had constructed. There is Varney strolling back from the library unarmed, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Inside the room, sitting in the only chair, which he has moved to the side of the door, is Prescott. He hears Varney’s key in the lock, flips the safety off his pistol, raises it to chest height. Varney steps inside, catches something in his peripheral vision, spins toward it, and crouches. His quick compression of his body brings him low and ready to spring, but all it really accomplishes is that he takes the intended chest shot full in the face.

Varney could not delude himself into believing that any action of his had prevented his death from happening. All that had saved him was that Prescott could not have explained things afterward. Varney’s hands were numb and tingling. He stripped off his clothes and ran the shower, then stepped into it, letting the hot water slowly restore his body heat.

As he closed the curtain, he caught sight of himself in the mirror over the sink. His hair was stiff and dirty from the surface slime in the boat harbor, his face pinched and white. Even the muscular torso he had worked so untiringly to build looked white and slack, like the flesh of a fish’s belly. This trip had been a disaster. He had talked to Prescott on a whim, and gotten so outraged at everything about him that he had decided to take a quick trip out here to put him away. That had been two days ago. Only two days.

He had not needed to do this. Prescott had made it clear that he wasn’t even planning to come after Varney yet. Varney had thought that this made now a good time. He had gotten the cops within a few hours after his plane had landed. Then he had gone after Prescott. He had done everything right. Getting into that office building as a security guard had seemed clever, but what had it accomplished? It had forced him to kill two security guards without any hope of ever getting a dime for it.

Now he was worse off than he’d been at the start. Prescott had heard his voice and seen his face. Prescott had found out one of his identities. Prescott probably hadn’t seen the plane ticket hidden in his suitcase, but if he hadn’t, it wasn’t because Varney had outsmarted him. The ticket would have told him the airport Varney had left to fly to Los Angeles. Varney had given all of that to Prescott. All he could do now was get out of town. But first, he had to leave a message.

After he had showered and dried his clothes, he took a nap. When he awoke it was four A.M. He walked to the airport and rented a car using the credit card that Prescott had compromised already. There was no question that Prescott and the cops would find out about it later. That would give Prescott the impression that Varney had not figured out that Prescott knew about it. Later this morning, Varney would give Prescott something else to wonder about.

Varney drove past the motel in Marina del Rey. He parked a half mile away, on a street that ran inland from the ocean, took the tire iron from the trunk of the car, and walked back. The parking lot was about as full as it had been when Varney had gone out eagerly to get Prescott. His mood was terribly different now.

Varney knew he would not have long to wait. It was nearly six. The maid who had cleaned his room in the afternoon was the one he had seen arriving yesterday a bit before seven in the morning, and the desk clerks seemed to change shifts at about the same time.

He came around the side of the motel to the entrance to the courtyard where the pool was. When he had checked into the motel, he had studied it with his usual attention to detail. Whenever the maids cleaned a room, they always threw open the curtains on the big glass doors to the courtyard to give themselves some light. Sometimes they opened a window to air out the room while they worked. When they finished, they closed and locked the window, but they left the curtains open.

He walked along the row of glass doors, searching. The fifth set had its curtains open. He could see the smooth surface of the bedspread pulled tight across the mattress, the pillow still plumped and covered. Varney had already found that the quickest, easiest way to open the sliding doors was to use a telephone calling card, so he used the one he had again, stepped inside, and slid the door shut.

Varney waited and watched through his small front window until he saw the door to the office open and the night clerk walk across the parking lot to a car along the fence, toss a lunch box and a thermos onto the back seat, get in, and drive off. Varney stepped out of the room, made his way to the office, and entered.

The day clerk was just putting his jacket on a hanger in the back room. Varney heard him put something on the rack in the small refrigerator, then heard him close the door, the insulating rubber gasket making a little smack as it sealed. The clerk came out to see Varney leaning forward with his left forearm on the counter. Varney could detect surprise, but no fear. Prescott must not have told him anything about the man he had been there to look for.

The clerk stepped closer. “Good morning, sir,” he said, smiling. “Are you coming back to stay with us again?”

Varney smiled back, and nodded. The man looked down and bent slightly at the waist to reach the blank registration cards on the shelf under the counter. Varney’s right arm brought the tire iron up from beside his leg, over the counter, and down on the man’s skull in a single, smooth stroke. He followed the blow by vaulting over the counter. He landed with both feet on the man’s back, but there seemed to be no huff of air, not even a tightening of muscles. Varney straddled him and swung the tire iron twice more. The man’s skull was now partly visible through clumps of hair, like shards of a broken bowl of red pudding.

Varney left him, went to the back room, and looked around. There were filing cabinets and a card file to keep track of the current guests. There was a table where people probably sat to take their breaks, and a door on the other side. He could see a couple of cardboard cartons, and the top of one was open. He looked inside, and saw that it had a blanket inside wrapped in plastic. He unwrapped it and tossed it over the clerk’s body to cover it so he wouldn’t get blood on his shoes. He noticed that his face felt strange, and realized that he had smiled at the clerk, and forgotten to stop smiling. He let the muscles go slack.

A couple of minutes later, he heard the maid’s cart rolling along the sidewalk beside the building. He waited until the sound stopped, then cautiously moved to the front window.

He could see the maid had opened one of the room doors and propped it open with her cart. He stepped along the row of doors to the room and listened for a moment, staring into the cart. When he heard her move into the bathroom and begin running water, he pushed the cart the rest of the way in, and quietly closed the door. Then he took a pillow case from the cart and stepped in behind her. She was bent over, cleaning the tub. He wrapped the ends of the pillow case around his fists, waited patiently until she began to rise to her feet, then quickly looped it over her head and around her neck.

She was a small woman, but she bucked and kicked furiously, even after he tightened the pillow case enough to cut off her air and lift her off the ground. He kept tightening it patiently until he was sure she was dead. He lifted her body and dropped it into the bin in her cart that was for dirty linens. Then he tossed over her the pile of sheets she had torn off the bed.

He took a last look around him, closed the door, and walked back to his car. He drove a couple of miles before he stopped at a pay telephone and dialed Prescott’s number. He waited until the answering machine beeped. Then he said, “I’m leaving. I left you a couple of good-bye presents at the motel in Marina del Rey. They’re to remind you never to come after me again.”

As the plane took off, Prescott reached into the pocket of his jacket for some chewing gum and found the crumpled piece of paper. He took it out and glanced at it. The hurried way he had scribbled the name and address of the hotel in Marina del Rey re-created the sick feeling of soured opportunities. This had been a big one, because the killer had believed he’d taken all the right precautions. The killer had been smart enough to disconnect the surveillance cameras in Prescott’s building and erase the tapes. But he had not known that the parking garage did not belong to Prescott’s landlord. The parking company operated its own surveillance system. Prescott had looked at the tape and seen the license number of the rented car. He had used it to get the credit card number, then gotten a list of other places the card had been used. He had gone to the hotel, and missed the killer. The only advantage he had now was that he knew the city where the plane ticket had been bought.

Prescott closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He had been awake for the past two nights, and the long plane ride to New York City would give him a chance to get back his strength and alertness. He would need them soon: New York was just the first stop on the way to Buffalo.

He had always thought of Buffalo as a luckless town. The people were crazy for sports, and the teams always came from behind, made a superhuman effort, and reached second place. The big buildings downtown were graceful and even ornate, built sometime just before or after the place had reached its peak, around 1900. They were built by people who had been optimists—a reflection of an aesthetic that was a little bit out of date even then.

The forces of history had choked off the supply of money and left the office buildings half empty and the factories completely empty. Every time he had been there, he had found another civic advertising blitz announcing another local renaissance that he couldn’t quite locate. The last time he had been through, they had remodeled the airport. But it had the feel of public works in third-world countries that had been built out of civic ambition, and that he could imagine someday soon abandoned to the jungle.

If this killer lived in Buffalo, then the luck of the place must have gotten worse lately. Prescott knew the man had not been born there. His speech had no trace of the accent. Prescott supposed it wasn’t a bad place for a killer to live. Real estate was cheap. It was on the Canadian border, and not far from Ohio and Pennsylvania.

He took the telephone from the back of the seat in front of him and dialed the answering machine in his new office. He heard it rewind. There were two messages. He sat up straight, put his hand over his left ear to cut the noise, and listened, but this time it was not the voice of the killer.

“This is Daniel Millikan, and it’s four o’clock. I’ll be home in an hour, and I’ll be in all evening. If you don’t get me then, call me in the morning at the office.” Prescott listened to Millikan reciting the telephone numbers while he let the surprise wear off. He had not expected this. He hung up and dialed.

“Hello?”

“I got your message,” said Prescott. “What’s up?”

“The L.A. Times had an article about what happened at your office. You’re out of your mind.”

“Yeah, but I know it. Most of the others don’t.”

“Why do you do this?”

“Answer unpromising phone messages?”

“No,” said Millikan. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“I know how to do seven or eight things,” said Prescott. “All the other ones cost money.”

“I want to call this whole thing off. It was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have told Cushner how to get to you.”

“It’s okay,” Prescott said. “You don’t have to do anything else. Your part is over.”

“He’s killed two people just to scare you, and two more to get to you. Putting yourself out as the next victim isn’t a good idea this time. You know what he is.”

“Yeah, I know what he is. He’s not going to get hungry—he’s done enough of these so he may not need money for years. He isn’t going to make a mistake out of desperation. The only ways are to wait for him to get hit by a truck, or get him to come after me.” Prescott paused. “And he could be active for a long time. He’s young. Late twenties.”

“How do you know that? Voices can be deceptive.”

“When he came to my office I saw him in the flesh. Thanks for your concern, but I’ve got to go now, Danny. I’m on my way to New York.” Prescott disconnected and returned the telephone to the back of the seat, then lay back and closed his eyes. His mind ranged nervously in one direction, then another, keeping him from sleep.

He found himself remembering his first lesson about killers. He had seen someone while she was alive, and then seen her again after she wasn’t. Prescott had been twenty-four years old. He had just gotten out of the service, and had known little more than that he was glad it was over. When he could find no job that paid well or seemed likely to lead anywhere, he had answered an ad in the paper placed by the Emil Vargas Detective Agency. Vargas was lazy, and he was cunning. In his later years, he would hire two or three young men like Prescott, who were strong and tireless and naive, and allow them to put in the two thousand hours of work required for a detective’s license in California. He would pay them minimum wage, and accept every case that was offered, without quibbling about the difficulty or danger. When one of the apprentices quit or put in his two thousand hours, another would take his place.

When Pauline Davis had called, Vargas had answered the telephone, written down the name and address, and handed the paper to Prescott because he happened to be in Vargas’s line of sight, and giving it to anyone else would have required him to turn his head.

Prescott met Pauline Davis at a small apartment building on Victory Boulevard. She was in her thirties but looked like an ugly teenager, almost skeletally thin, with bad skin and bad teeth that made Prescott suspect she was an addict. Her clothes were the short shorts and loose, translucent blouses that had not been in style during his lifetime except among street hookers. She said she owned the apartment building and needed a skip trace done. A man named Steven Waltek had rented an apartment. Through bluff and evasion, he had managed to avoid paying her for six months, then disappeared. He owed her six thousand dollars, and she wanted papers served on him. Prescott could still hear her voice, see her talking—always a little too fast, with nervous, birdlike movements. When she turned her head to look for the rental agreement, it was like a twitch.

Prescott had listened politely, written everything down, then gone directly to the county clerk’s office to see who really owned the apartment building. To his surprise, the tax rolls said Pauline Davis did.

He began to search for Waltek. He visited the landscaping company Waltek had listed on his rental application as his employer. The owner told Prescott that Waltek worked as a trimmer, climbing the big, old trees with a set of spikes on his work shoes and a leather strap, then using a light chain saw to lop off unwanted limbs. He said Waltek had collected his last check a month ago and expressed some vague intention to move inland.

It took Prescott a week of telephone calls to pick up a trace of Waltek. Prescott always made the calls as Vargas had taught him, claiming to be a former employer who owed Waltek some money, or a friend of a friend who had been told to give him a letter. He found a tree service in Riverside where Waltek had applied for a job. There had been no openings, but they had kept his application because he was experienced at a kind of work that not everyone could—or would—do. When Prescott arrived in Riverside, he found that Waltek’s address was not in Riverside. It was on a rural road somewhere in the San Bernardino Mountains. He drove for over an hour up narrow, winding roads, through tiny towns that seemed to exist for the benefit of people who came in other seasons—skiers in the winter, or campers in the summer—but never in the spring. The tall pine trees were shrouded in mist nearly to their tops, and on some of the low, shadowy rock slopes there were still half-melted streaks of dirty snow.

His car was an old Chevy he always had to feed with oil after a couple of hours of driving. As it climbed the steep inclines, it began to grind out a high, whining noise that made him hope that when it broke down he would still be able to disengage the transmission, push it around, and coast back down to the last of the little towns.

Waltek’s house was not even on the main road. It was up a side road so small that it turned into a mud track a quarter mile into the woods, and Prescott had to pull off into a level space in the forest and walk the rest of the way up. As he walked, the cold and damp and solitude began to affect his enthusiasm. He was arriving, unexpected, to dun some guy for six thousand bucks—some guy who worked in a job that probably didn’t pay a lot, and that required him to inhabit the border between courage and recklessness. It also occurred to Prescott that, while a lot of people way out here had guns where they could reach them, Prescott didn’t own one. As Prescott walked higher up the slowly vanishing path, he began to listen for any sound to reach him in the silence. He heard nothing, and that made him more uneasy. He came around a curve and saw the house. It was in a flat, rocky clearing, sheltered by tall trees on all sides. It was small, with siding composed of half logs nailed to boards so that it looked like a cabin. There was no car, and he could see no way for a car to get here, so he guessed that Waltek must park in a spot near where Prescott had left his car and walk the rest of the way. He knocked, but there was no answer. He supposed Waltek must have found a job, and maybe that meant he could pay. He decided that all he could do was wait.

He sat on the low front steps for a time, then gave in to his curios-ity and looked in the side window. The inside of the house consisted of one room at ground level and a loft. The part that he could see was cluttered. There were dishes overflowing from the sink onto the counter, clothes lying on the floor . . . he stopped. What he had thought was a pile of clothes now seemed to be something else.

Prescott moved to another window to look more closely. Then he kicked in the back door and entered. Lying on the floor was the body of Pauline Davis. He could see she had been beaten and probably, in the end, strangled. What had she been doing out here with Waltek? Then he saw the footlocker lying open near the door. There was nothing inside it, and when he bent to look, he saw stains that had to be blood. She had probably been killed in Los Angeles and brought here, so Waltek could bury her where he could keep people away from her grave.

Prescott backed out the door and headed down the path. He made it nearly to the car before he heard the footsteps. He could see Waltek now, just as he had seen Waltek when he’d emerged from the woods—as tall as Prescott, but very wide, with broad shoulders that made his neck seem short, and heavily muscled forearms developed by years of climbing and cutting. The eyes were the part that bothered Prescott all these years later. They were bright and intense, as the eyes of intelligent people often are, but they had a strange opaque quality, as though they were looking inward, the mind always contemplating its own concerns and needs.

Prescott smiled, held out his hand, and said, “Mr. Waltek? My name is Roy Prescott. Our agency—the Vargas Agency—has been retained by a woman named Pauline Davis. She claims that you owe her some money, and she would like to collect it.” It was a gamble, an attempt to convince Waltek, not of the fantastically unlikely story that he had other business here, or was a person who had just happened by, only that he had not looked in the window and seen the body of Pauline Davis. Waltek said, “I do owe her some money. I don’t have all of it right now, but I can give you some. Come up to the house with me.”

Prescott said, “Okay.” He felt something like amazement mixing in with his alarm: this man he had never seen before had decided to kill him, and it would happen in a moment. Prescott judged that Waltek was stronger, and he had no plan for saving himself, but there was no time to wait for things to get better. Prescott walked with Waltek for a few steps, until Waltek’s eyes drifted away from him for an instant. Prescott pushed off with both legs to give force to his jab, and struck with all his strength. The blow went wide and smacked into the side of Waltek’s head below the temple, making the head turn away with its force. Prescott was afraid to take the time to wind up again, so he instantly brought his right elbow back into Waltek’s face. Waltek staggered into it, and his knees wobbled. Then Prescott was on him, delivering punches as hard and quickly as he could until Waltek was down. Waltek rolled to the side and reached for something inside his coat, but Prescott pinned the arm there, picked up a rock with his free hand, and brought it down on Waltek’s head.

Waltek was unconscious. Prescott dragged him to the foot of a nearby tree, brought his arms around the trunk, took out the pair of cheap handcuffs that were the only implement of the trade that Vargas would allow his employees, and snapped them shut on Waltek’s wrists. He went to get his car, but found that Waltek had left a pickup on the road below his, so he could not get out. He had walked about a mile back to a store where there was a telephone.

Now and then Prescott thought about Pauline Davis. Waltek had killed her for practical reasons. He had wanted the six thousand dollars to add to the down payment for his house in the mountains. There had been something about her that made people know instantly that nobody cared about her. Prescott had seen it, and so, he knew, had Waltek. It made her weak, somebody he could kill.

Prescott detected a distracting something in the back of his mind, then remembered what it was. When he had dialed his office number, the machine had said two messages. Millikan had been the first, but he had not heard the second. He lifted the phone off the back of the seat in front of him, took out his credit card again, and dialed. He pressed the code to hear his messages.

“I’m leaving. I left you a couple of good-bye presents at the motel in Marina del Rey.” Prescott sat up, the sound of the voice making him wince. “They’re to remind you never to come after me again.”

That was it, Prescott thought. That was the price of failing.