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.
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.
