Pursuit: A Novel

35

Varney’s whole being seemed to him to be toppling into the silence: Prescott was waiting for him to answer. His instinct was that anything Prescott wanted was something that would hurt him somehow. But he could not break the connection, lose touch. “I can hear you breathing,” said Prescott. “I know it’s not Michael J. Kelleher, because I made him up. And it’s not as though I don’t know where you are. I know where I put the phone.”

Varney took a moment to swallow and be sure his voice would sound right when it came out. “I’m listening.” He held the phone away from his ear, so he could detect it if there was a sound of Prescott’s voice coming to him through the air in addition to through the telephone’s earpiece. An echo, a slight time dissonance would tell him where Prescott was. He stepped to the doorway.

“That’s better,” said Prescott. “I apologize for scaring the shit out of you by ringing the phone.”

There was no sound that Varney could hear that had not come from the telephone. He said, “I’m not that easy to scare.” He concentrated on keeping the anger and hatred out of his voice. He peered into the hallway, but there was no visual sign of Prescott, either. The hallway was just a hardwood corridor with the two bedrooms he had entered, and four closed doors—one at either end, one on his right on this side of the house, just before the railing of the staircase, and another across the hall from it. Wherever Prescott was, he couldn’t see Varney, but he knew which room Varney was in. That had to change.

“That’s good,” said Prescott. “Fear and anger cloud a man’s judgment sometimes, and right now I think you need to be clearheaded.”

“Why is that?” Varney quickly slipped across the hall into the other room and paused just to the right of the doorway with his back against the wall. He held the phone away from his ear again and held his breath as he strained his ears.

“Because you’ve got a problem. I wanted to talk to you now, and let you know there are a couple of options, before they get used up.”

Varney’s chest felt as though it would burst with frustration. He still could not get his ears to detect a sound of Prescott’s voice coming to him from somewhere inside the house. He knew it was happening: Prescott had to be in the house, but Varney’s ears were not sensitive enough to pick it up. He blew out the air in his lungs as he stepped silently toward the window. He knew Prescott would hear it as an expression of contempt, but it wasn’t loud enough for Prescott to hear except through the phone. He took another step and looked out the window. He sidestepped, still not sure, getting worried.

“I wouldn’t bother with that,” said Prescott.

“What?”

“Just because I bought you those pipes and let you have the use of one of them doesn’t mean I’ll let you use it forever.”

Varney leaned close enough to the window so his face touched the screen. He had been right. The pipe he had leaned against the wall of the house beside the window had been moved. He could see it on the grass below. He quickly ducked and pivoted, then stopped, protected by the wall. Prescott could be out there with a rifle and night-vision scope—must be, Varney decided. The outer wall was a stupid place for Varney to be. Its solidity was an illusion. Even a common hunting rifle would put a hole through it. He went low again and retreated to the inner wall by the doorway. “What do you want?” he hissed. “Haven’t you had enough of trying and losing?”

“It’s more a question of what you want,” said Prescott. “You’ve got a problem to solve.”

“So what’s my problem?”

“Here’s the way it looks to me,” said Prescott. “You’re alone, on foot, in a pretty remote place where there are not a lot of people. There’s no crowd to fade into, and not much to distract anybody like me. At the moment, you’re in a house that I selected. You know I’m not far away, but you don’t know exactly where I am. I could be outside with a rifle, waiting for you to try to get out a window. You’ll be out there hanging by your fingertips in your dark clothes against those white boards for a good second or two. Tomorrow morning I can go hose off the siding and go up on a ladder to patch the holes. Of course, maybe I’m in the room right next to you with the door closed. Or one of the others. If you open one to go out a different window, it’s entirely possible I might be sitting in a comfortable chair holding a shotgun loaded with double-ought. The cleanup would take longer, but I’m a patient man.”

Varney said, “You think I haven’t thought of all this?”

“I suppose you have. I don’t want you to dwell on the specifics. I want you to think past them. I’ve got you in a predicament. I want you to know that you don’t have to die. There are other ways through this.”

“Like what?”

“You leave anything made out of metal in that room. You come out. I run a metal detector over you, to be sure nothing slipped your mind. You would have to tolerate handcuffs on the ride into Hinckley, and probably again when they transport you down to Minneapolis, but after that you’d be in a private cell.”

Varney thought he saw a movement at the edge of the woods. If that was where Prescott was, he would have been in position to see Varney arrive, watch the business with the pipe, see him come into this room. Varney stared out the window at the spot. “What difference does it make if I let you shoot me or I let them kill me in some gas chamber?”

Prescott’s laugh carried with it everything that Varney hated. It was the laugh of a man who didn’t think he would ever have to worry about the things that were tormenting Varney, but more important than this, it was arrogant, superior. Prescott said, “You ought to know better than that. If they did get through a trial and prove anything, it wouldn’t be good enough to get you executed. The evidence they have isn’t that strong. They can’t say, ‘This guy has been taking money for putting people in the ground for years.’ They have to pick one and prove you did it.”

“If you think I’d get off, what are you doing this for? I thought you had given up, gotten off me.”

“I’ll never do that,” said Prescott. The sound of his voice was quiet, almost gentle, and the effect was horrible. “I have two reasons. If you go in, get booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and all that, I’m not the only one who knows you. If you ever kill somebody later, you’re a manageable police problem. They’ll pick you up. They’ll know all about you, your habits, the way you do your work, so they’ll recognize it.”

“What’s the other reason?” Varney still didn’t see movement out there.

“That’s different,” said Prescott. “That’s for you. Maybe if you got a little time where you would have to stay put and talk to somebody—”

“Psychiatrists?” The anger tightened his throat so his voice came out choked.

“Your own lawyer would call a few in the minute anything about the case looked ominous. It’s your escape hatch if I’m wrong and some real evidence turns up.” He paused. “I really think you’ve had a problem for a long, long time. It must be hard. I’m not interested in killing you, kid. I’ll be satisfied just to make you stop.”

Outrage gripped Varney’s chest, pushing his words out in streams. “You lying bastard. I read about you in the papers. Everybody you ever went after is dead. You’re a fucking snake. Did you tell them all you were going to take them to a nice doctor? Did you get them all to put on handcuffs before you shot them?”

“Neither one,” said Prescott calmly.

“Bullshit!” Varney snapped. “You’re the one who’s afraid. You’re in the same business I am, and you know I’m better than you. I’m going to cut your fucking head off and stick it on a post.”

He heard Prescott sigh. “I guess I’ve said everything I wanted to. If you change your mind, press 1 on your phone. It’s programmed to dial me.” The telephone went dead.

Varney watched the bushes at the edge of the woods more intently, and he saw the movement again. He silently mouthed the words, “I’ve got you.” He was moving before the plan had solidified in his mind. Prescott was out there thinking he had the only advantage that mattered. Varney turned off the cell phone and slipped it into his jacket. As soon as he cleared the doorway he began to run. The upstairs hallway was dark because the doors of bedrooms were closed, but the wooden railing began and he put his gloved hand on it and let the hand slide along it to orient him as he moved forward. The railing made a curve and headed down at an angle into the dark. He took the first stair, lengthened his stride to take three at a time, and his foot stepped onto nothing.

Varney’s body dropped downward, but his right hand tightened in a reflex to stop himself, clutching the railing in a desperate grab. His right arm elongated in a sudden, wrenching tug. His left hand held the pistol, but as his body swung and his chest slammed against the side of the staircase, the hand pawed at the wood to cushion the impact, and his legs swung into the void. He dangled there for a moment, swinging back and forth. He stuck the pistol into his left jacket pocket, and hung by both hands. He looked down.

The staircase had been sawed off just below the first-floor ceiling. The drop to the floor looked to him like fourteen or fifteen feet, but below him the floor was not clear. The stairway lay intact on the floor, as though Prescott had run a chain saw across it where it connected to the upper floor and let it fall. If Varney had not been gripping the railing when he had stepped off, he would be lying across those triangular ridges that used to be steps. He probably wouldn’t be dead, but it would have been impossible not to have broken some bones.

Varney took a second to move through a series of thoughts. Prescott was out in those bushes, but Varney had seen them shake, so he might have been preparing to move on. If he was heading inside, then it was to catch Varney hanging here by both hands. If he wasn’t coming in, then Varney had to get out in time to see where he was going. Varney could pull himself up and go tie bedsheets together to lower himself down, but that would take time. If he dropped from here, the only place he could land was the jagged stairway.

He hung by his left arm, pulled his belt off with his right, slipped it around the base of the corner post of the railing, and threaded it through the buckle. He lowered himself to the end of the belt, where he was clear of the ceiling and the upper steps of the staircase, held it with both hands, and bent his legs to start himself swinging. He swung a couple of times, until he judged that his momentum would carry him out over the part of the foyer he could see was clear of obstacles, then let go. The floor seemed to tilt and rush up at him, but he managed to break his fall by hitting on the balls of his feet with his knees bent and translating his forward motion into a roll. He came to rest near a fireplace at the end of the room, rose to his feet, and realized his pistol must have slipped out of his jacket pocket.

He crawled quickly back toward the ruined stairway, felt the familiar shape of the pistol under his hand, and grasped it, already planning. In order to take down the pipe that Varney had left at the window, Prescott had to have been on that side of the house, hiding in the low bushes that separated the house from the stubble fields. Varney moved to the opposite side, and unlatched a window that faced the woods. He tried to lift it, but it was closed too tightly. He looked more closely and let out a breath through his clenched teeth. Prescott had used six-penny nails to secure the windows. He would have to use one of the two doors, and Prescott would probably have booby-trapped one and be making his way through the brush toward the other with a rifle.

Varney moved to the front door and looked out through the peephole, then stepped to the front window. The place where Prescott had been was not visible from here, so there was no clear shot. If Varney moved quickly, maybe he could slip out to the edge of the porch, go over the railing, and hit the ground before Prescott could aim.

He tried the doorknob, unlocked the door, then pulled his knife. He stood to the side of the door and ran the blade along each side, then above the top, then lay on his belly and slid it underneath. He was startled by the voice from above and behind him: “Front . . . door.” He had rolled to the side and was aiming his pistol at the sound with one hand, the knife still in the other, before he realized the voice had not been human. He was aiming at the alarm keypad on the wall. He stepped closer and saw the slits for a small speaker, then knelt and ran his knife under the door again. “Front . . . door.”

The blade had interrupted the contact between the two magnets set into the door and the floor beneath it. He took a deep breath and regained his composure. The door wasn’t booby-trapped, and that was what mattered. He stood, took two more deep breaths, opened the door, slipped out, and closed it, ignoring the muffled electronic voice. In a few seconds he was at the end of the porch, vaulting over the railing to the ground. He lay still for a moment, listening: no metal sounds, no footsteps. He spider-crawled quickly along the side of the house to the back corner, then lay flat and paused to listen again and stare out into the darkness. He let time pass.

Prescott was devious. He had picked this remote, sparsely populated place just so he could convert it into a field of traps and snares for Varney. He’d had to be in a place like this, where he could run a power saw through a staircase and let it crash to the floor, where he could fire a gun through a helpless man’s head and not have to worry about anybody hearing it, or telling him later he had not done it the way the law said he should. The only way ever to be free was to see Prescott first and kill him.

Varney had to read the trap and use it against Prescott. The brush where Prescott was hiding tempted Varney. He stared across the lawn. The shortest way to the low bushes was across the patio at the back of the house. If he could make it across the open space, he could work his way through the brush and come up behind Prescott. The idea was tantalizing. Prescott would think he was still in the house, probably lying on the ruined stairway with a broken back. He had no way of knowing how good Varney was in a field at night. Varney could move more quietly, more quickly than Prescott could. But moving across an open patio to get to the first cover was a risk.

He crouched, still watching the brush ahead. He slowly moved to the corner of the house to get a view to his left. It seemed that the place where Prescott had been was not quite visible from here, but once he was out a few paces, it would be. He would try the quiet, invisible way. He went to his belly and began to slither across the back lawn, his eyes on the row of bushes, waiting for movement.

There was a loud crack as a bullet broke the sound barrier over his head. He was up and sprinting, gaining speed as he dashed toward cover. There was no reason to stay on the grass now, so he let his feet take him toward the paved patio, where he could make better time.

One foot hit the patio and the ball of his foot pushed off, and he knew it was all wrong. There was a spongy feel to it. The other foot hit and the pavement sank. He saw a section of the stones ahead buckle and fold. The patio wasn’t stone slabs laid in the ground; it was just sheets of artificial masonry, made of drywall with a plastic veneer. He had broken through. He had to control the fall. He did not impede his forward motion, because he had to keep from dropping vertically. He flopped forward, both arms extended, slapping the next section of artificial stones, pushing down with arms and legs, scrambling ahead on the fragile surface to keep the drywall falling below him. He felt himself going through, then heard the first end of a section hit with a hollow echo. With the sound, he knew there was concrete, he knew it was about ten feet down. He hit, letting his feet break a sheet of drywall wedged beside another, and directing his body onto the next section of drywall.

His fall was jarring, but he felt no sharp pain, and he was on his feet. He could tell he was in an empty swimming pool, and he knew he had to get out. He ran up the steep concrete slope toward the shallow end, where the fragile sheets of drywall overhead still formed a roof to shield him from Prescott’s sights.

Varney reached the end, came up without pausing, his head lifting the end of the drywall enough to free him, and he was out and running again. He found himself heading back the way he had come, but for the moment he had no choice. He had to get out of Prescott’s view.

As he approached the side of the house, he was beginning to get past the pure anger at what Prescott had tried to do to him, and had begun to wonder at what Prescott had not done. There had been only one shot, and it had gone high. Prescott had had time to fire again. He could have put ten rounds through the half-inch drywall on top of the empty pool, let them bounce around in the dark concrete basin, and probably clip Varney on a ricochet. He must have known that Varney would come out at the shallow end, and should have leveled his weapon on it. Was he that slow? He couldn’t be. He had fired his one shot only to make Varney run and fall into the pool. He had to be at the wrong angle, too low and far away to fire downward into the pool, and too far to the left to have the shallow end in view. He must still be across the lawn from the pipes, where Varney had seen the bushes move.

Varney had one clear, simple idea and it would work only if he used it before Prescott did. When Varney reached the house, he kept running along the side. He had to take the chance that Prescott would still be aiming at the back corner of the house, waiting for him to show himself there. Varney came around the front, running harder now. He ran past the front porch, keeping his feet on the grass, where his steps would make no noise. He could see the start of the row of bushes now. It was not neat and thin like a hedge, but deep and unruly, planted there as a barrier to the wind in the summer, when the dust blew off the fields, and probably in the winter a snow fence to catch the drifts before they piled up on the side and front of the house.

He did not pause but moved immediately among the thick bushes, making his way toward the spot where he judged Prescott must be. His ears were sharp. He could hear insects take flight as he came close, hear a leaf fall from the tree above him, but he could not hear his own movements. He had practiced the skill of motion through foliage at night all summer long, and he knew he had gotten better at it. He began to feel the old excitement return, anticipating the sudden, brief, sweet moment when he would emerge from the bushes. He would take Prescott through the head. Prescott would have just enough time for the meaning of it to reach his brain before the bullet punched through it.

He stepped steadily, placing each foot tentatively, to feel the texture under the sole before he eased his weight onto it. He kept going, watchful and eager at the same time. When he reached the spot where he had expected to find Prescott, he was disappointed. He told himself that Prescott had simply moved onward toward the back of the lot, where he would have a better view of the corner of the house. He had no choice but to keep going. He quickened his pace. Then he was near the end of the bushes. Could Prescott have gotten this far?

He crouched, planted his feet, checked his gun to be sure he had not pushed the safety on while he was handling it. Finally, he took the cell phone out of his pocket.

The telephone was his advantage. Prescott had put it in his hands so he could rattle him, make him feel weak and hesitant and afraid. But Varney had immediately seen the potential. Varney’s reflexes had been too quick to let him fall across the sabotaged staircase, his body too agile to be trapped in the empty pool, too fast to be picked off on a run across the open. He had fooled Prescott each time, made the house he had booby-trapped into a joke. Now he was going to finish him. Varney held the phone at his side, pressed the power button, pressed 1, set the phone on the ground, and crawled quickly into the brush. Varney heard the ring, and began to hurry toward it. He had been right. Probably Prescott had planned to do this very thing to Varney, maybe even provided the phone in the belief that Varney would wait too long, and let Prescott use it to find him in the dark. Prescott might have planned, but Varney had done it.

The telephone rang a second time, and Varney held his head slightly to the side, so the wind blowing across his ears would not distort its sound. He was getting closer. He was sure, and then his mind settled on precisely the spot. He popped up to his feet and fired three times, his silenced weapon making a harsh spitting sound, then dropped down again.

He carried with him into the darkness a sight imprinted on his memory like a snapshot. It was Prescott’s cell phone, the tiny lights behind the keys flickering as it rang, then going out again to wait for the next ring, as it lay abandoned on the ground.