Pursuit: A Novel

34

Varney took his bearings by looking up to find the North Star, gauging the angle of the road, and then looking for a landmark to aim at. The sky was incredibly clear and the stars appeared big and close, but the woods were too thick to allow him to pick out a landmark on the ground. He knew the approximate direction he wanted, so he set off.

There was something about the night woods that created its own propriety. He found himself stalking through the forest quietly, as he had practiced in Ohio. As he walked, occasionally he startled small animals that rustled the brush and scuttled off. He was in only about a quarter mile before he heard something different ahead. A thicket shook, making a hissing and crackling, the leaves on the ground crunching as something heavy exploded out of the thicket.

He dropped and crouched, the pistol out of his belt and in his hand before his mind even attempted to interpret the sounds. The thumping of feet rapidly moved off somewhere ahead and to his right, and the silence flowed in to fill the vacuum again.

Varney stayed coiled and motionless for a long time, his ears straining and his eyes slowly moving back and forth, up and down. A deer: it had to be a deer, he thought. It had been absolutely still, maybe lying down, and he had approached so quietly that he had startled it.

He slowly stood. He switched on the safety of his pistol, but he didn’t put it away. He reached into his jacket pocket, found the four-inch tube of the silencer, and carefully screwed it onto the custom-threaded barrel. He stepped forward again, this time feeling the cadence of his heart, almost hearing it as it raced, then slowed again. He was probably being foolish, he chided himself. There was nothing to be uneasy about as long as he didn’t get startled in the dark and step in a hole.

He had become accustomed to walking in fields and woods at night in Ohio, but this was not Ohio. It had felt the same at first, but it wasn’t. There were deer. What about bears? Up here there could easily be bears. These woods and farms had covered all the land that was high, and the rest was marshes and streams, so this was where they would be.

He plotted his course again by mentally tracing his path back to where he had begun, then extending the line forward through the thicket. He kept going steadily, not letting himself be as quiet now as he had been. If there was something big up ahead, he wanted it to have time to get out of his way.

In a few minutes he was feeling better, concentrating on what he had to do. It was simpler than most of the jobs he’d done since he had moved into the upper level of his profession. People only put out the big money he commanded when the job was risky or complicated. In this case, it was only risky and complicated for the client, and whoever he was, he had taken care of most of that himself. He was going to be the suspect, so he had established an alibi, paid in advance, and gotten out of the way. He had even done the work of finding Kelleher himself, so there could be no mistake.

Varney was not a believer in taking work lightly. If you were good enough to do the job, then usually the way you got destroyed was by chance. The best always assumed that something was going to go wrong, and calmly watched to see what it was going to be this time. Some visitor would show up at the front door just as you were waiting for the target to answer it. You would have your car’s muffler go just as you were driving off, trying not to be noticed. Guns jammed, fires either went out or roared into life so fast that you could hear sirens before you made it out the door.

Over the past few days, he had anticipated as many of the possible problems as he could, and fixed them. Nobody would see his car parked here. Mae was in a casino alone, and when she drove off, she would still seem to be alone. If his gun jammed, he had another in his jacket pocket. If that failed, he had a knife. If Mae didn’t come, he could walk back to the house and take Kelleher’s car, or even sneak into town at that time of night and probably hot-wire one. He reviewed his preparations and contingency plans, and found they were adequate. The real certainty was inside Varney. He had exerted self-discipline over the past couple of months, and stayed strong and ready. He had tirelessly worked on his body, his concentration, his skills, his alertness. Trudging out here to pop some solitary traitor was almost beneath him, but he didn’t mind. The job had come at a time when he needed to get back to work. He needed a kill.

He sensed that there was more light between the trunks of the trees ahead, and quickened his pace. In a few minutes, he was sure. A hundred feet to his left, he caught sight of stubble and bare ground. He had made a near-perfect diagonal from the road across the woods, and at some point had passed over an invisible line onto Kelleher’s property. He stayed well back, where the brush was thick and the trunks of trees made him invisible from outside the woods, and kept going until his eye caught the glow of an electric light just below the canopy of leaves.

He turned toward it and moved forward from tree to tree, until he could see the house. The light was still on in the upstairs window—undoubtedly Kelleher’s bedroom. Downstairs, everything seemed to be dark. Varney moved closer, still gliding ahead only as far as the next tree that he could stand behind, then stopping and watching the house for a time while he planned his next advance.

The SUV he had seen from the road was a dark blue Lincoln Navigator. He could make out the name on the back, the beige leather upholstery of the back seats above the window, and the license-plate holder from a lot in Minneapolis. The vehicle was new, and expensive. He felt a moment of empathy for his client. This weasel had handed the client to the police, and managed to hold on to some serious money. He had bought a big farm and a new vehicle, and if he could live up here, he had no need to work.

For the first time, it occurred to Varney that this job might be worth more than he had been offered. All this money had come from some kind of theft that this Kelleher had pulled with the client, and so there was a fairly strong possibility that some of it was here in cash. Varney checked his watch. It was twenty after twelve already. He needed to set aside twenty minutes to get back to the road, and that left an hour and twenty minutes for him to accomplish everything he was going to do here. The thought made him venture closer, his eyes now scanning the eaves of the house for floodlights that might be connected to motion detectors. The roof of the farmhouse was steep and the eaves were high, so he could see clearly: they were bare. There were no warning signs on the lawn or windows that belonged to an alarm company. He supposed that way out here there might not even be such a thing. But he exerted the self-discipline and made himself do the walk-around he had planned. He unscrewed the silencer and put away the gun.

He stayed far from the house as he walked around it, but moved closer when there was cover. He looked at the eaves and gutters all around, studied windows, doors, the foundation. When he had made a full circuit, he had confirmed that there was no sign of an armed security service that answered alarms, but there seemed to be a system of some kind installed. Visible through a window was a keypad near the front door with glowing red and green lights.

At the rear of the house was an open stone patio that looked as though it had been laid recently enough to be the work of the current owner. There was an irregular pattern of sandstone slabs with sand between them, and just one lawn chair in the center not far from a small portable barbecue. Just as Varney was moving in that direction, the light in the upper window went out. He looked at his watch. It was nearly twelve-thirty.

The barn was a small one, not the kind that had been built to house forty cows, but the kind where machinery was parked on the lower floor and bales of hay were stored in the loft. The door had a padlock on it, but it was unlocked and the hasp open at the moment, so he supposed there was nothing of interest inside.

He found the septic tank, and in the dark it looked to him as though it had probably just been replaced, because it had been covered with turf strips that still had lines between them, and there was a hatch that seemed nearly new. There were a couple of long, four-inch pipes on the ground, and he supposed they had something to do with it.

Then Varney made a lucky find. The upstairs window that had been lit was open about two inches, and so was the one on the other side of the house directly across from it, probably to set up a cross-breeze. If the alarm system was on but the upstairs windows were open, then the alarm was only protecting the ground floor. He could go in the window across the hall from Kelleher’s room without setting off any bells and whistles.

It was not going to be without risk. He had to make his way to that window, open it farther, and slip inside without letting Kelleher hear him. Nobody who thought there were people who wanted to kill him went to bed without having a gun where he could reach for it in the dark. Varney moved to the corner of the house and judged the possibilities. There was a low roof over the front porch that he could easily climb onto, but he would still be twenty feet from the open window. No tree was near enough to let him climb and jump for the sill. Even if he could have done such a thing and held on, it would have made a lot of noise.

He looked down and saw the pipes on the ground. He raised his eyes to the window, then judged the length of the nearest pipe. He stepped closer to it. The material was hard and heavy and smooth like iron, but it seemed to be made of some kind of ceramic material. He knelt and looked at the open end. It was rougher inside, and narrower. The rim seemed to be three quarters of an inch thick.

He stepped to the center, squatted, and lifted the heavy pipe, then adjusted his grip to find the balance point, and walked toward the house with it. He set it down. Then, below the open window and about ten feet from the house, he used his knife to dig a hole in the lawn. He set the end of the heavy pipe over the hole. He went to the other end and lifted the pipe, hand-walking up its length until the pipe was vertical and the butt end of it was in the hole. Then he stepped between the pipe and the house and slowly, carefully, stepped backward, letting the pipe tip toward the house until its upper end rested against a clapboard beside the open window.

Varney went to the end in the hole and tested its immobility, then gripped it as high up as he could reach and pulled himself upward until he was straddling it. The pipe was at a steep angle to the house, but it was not difficult for him to shinny up to the top. He was beside the window. He lifted his pant leg, pulled the knife out, punched a small slice through the screen, and used a finger to slip the hook out of the eye. He pulled the screen out a bit, and slowly pushed the window open wider. Then he eased himself carefully off the pipe into the window. When he was inside, he pulled the screen back and slid the hook through the eye so it wouldn’t make a flapping noise.

He moved to the side of the window before he stood, so he would present no silhouette. He waited and listened. His heart was beginning to speed up again. He had done this a hundred times, and each time still felt like the first. The moment after he had crossed into the enclosed space where the target was, his eyes always grew sharper, his muscles stronger. His ears heard every sound. Sometimes he was sure that he had other, forgotten senses that most human beings had thrown away with soft living. Everything they did worked to insulate them and pad them and put them to sleep. He often felt that he could detect objects in the dark by the changes their weight made in the elasticity of a man-made floor under his feet. He used differences in the motion of the air on his face to help him find a doorway.

He slowly, carefully screwed the silencer onto the barrel of his pistol and disengaged the safety with his thumb. He became still again and listened. Moving silently was not just a question of care, but of time. He had certainly made sounds when he had come in. If they had reached Kelleher’s ears, maybe he had explained them to himself. But his subconscious mind would not be so easily reassured, and it was incapable of forgetting anything. Down there below the level of thinking, Kelleher’s mind would be waiting to hear them again, its instincts aware that noises at night were never good news. Varney had to be sure the next sounds he made did not come too soon.

Varney was a being that moved through the night with heightened alertness, as though his skin had been peeled off and his nerves exposed. He could feel the rhythms of the enemy. He knew he did not have to wait for any particular number of minutes. He had to wait until the mind in the other room had listened long enough. When it had, it would stop. Any sounds he made would not be grouped with the first sounds as a pattern that had grown consistent with danger. They would be random sounds, maybe the noises that wooden houses made as they settled or stood up to a breeze.

The time elapsed and Varney advanced, placing each small step gently so his foot set flat and distributed his weight evenly. When he was satisfied the floor would not creak, he cautiously let more of his weight onto that foot as he moved the other foot forward. He kept his knees flexed and his body low, in an attitude that would let him leap ahead, back, or to either side, or drop and roll more quickly than an opponent’s mind would be likely to expect. If Kelleher saw him, what he would see was not the shape of a human being—something six feet high with a discernible head and shoulders. He would hesitate while he tried to distinguish it from the shadows and resolve it into something he knew.

As Varney moved into the hallway, he felt an urge to put away the gun. The metal, the weight were jarring to his mood. This felt like a time to slip in like a shadow and use only his hands, the strike chosen by the position in which he found Kelleher’s sleeping body. But Varney knew he was being foolish. He was letting his eagerness overwhelm his judgment, just because he was so excited to be working again. He would step into the room, see the head against the whiteness of the pillow, and sensibly fire a shot into it. Then he would spend some time searching for the money.

He stopped at the side of the doorway and listened. He could see the window, a bit of a bathroom floor through an open door, a chair, a dresser with a mirror. He leaned outward until he could see a bit of the reflection of the bed. There was a quilt in a dark shade that he couldn’t quite decide in the dark was blue, but no lump. Kelleher must be sleeping on the near side, the part of the bed that he couldn’t see in the reflection. Varney raised his right arm in a crook, so the pistol was pointed up, pivoted around the door frame to move inside the room, brought the pistol down to aim at the head of the bed on the near side. The bed was empty.

Varney let his pivot continue so he spun to face the bathroom. Nobody was in there.

A high-pitched electronic ring twittered to his right. It was so loud to Varney’s ears that he dropped to a crouch and aimed at it, his muscles rigid. But the only object in that direction was the dresser. The sound came again—a telephone. The small lozenge-shaped shadow on the surface was a cell phone. This time he saw the rows of keys light up as it rang. He had to stop it.

He snatched it up, pressed the button, and clamped it to his ear as he crouched beside the dresser, listening with the other ear for footsteps.

“Hello, Slick,” said the voice. Varney’s stomach sucked inward. There seemed to be no air in the room, and he had to force himself to take a breath. It was Prescott.