buyer, the credit underwriter, and the original merchant to fight it out. All of these methods involved big numbers, complicated transactions, and the ability to keep institutions from asking any of the right questions.
The wholesalers were not big enough to accomplish schemes of that sort. When they sold Varney’s certificates, they were only acting as middlemen for much larger interests in New York. It was this transaction that brought Varney to the attention of the people Wally had told him he didn’t want to know. The money was, for Varney, a fortune—nearly forty thousand dollars. To them the money was a tip. But there were certain things about the young man that interested them. The securities had come from twenty-two different robberies, done over a period of a year. This meant he had the qualities of patience and caution, which they admired, and secretiveness, which they worshiped. They advised the wholesalers to keep an eye on him and watch his development. It was well known that people who did not take their advice were the very definition of stupid and did not deserve to live.
The wholesalers already knew quite a bit about Varney. Several of their fences had purchased items from him, and each confirmed what the others said. He was quiet, steady, and reliable. He was a relief to them, after the legion of mentally impaired, volatile maniacs who came in with something they’d taken in a smash-and-grab or a purse snatching that they expected would keep them in crystal meth for a month.
But the wholesalers were waiting. They knew every aspect of the stolen-merchandise business in a way that no young sneak thief could know it, and they knew that the odds would catch up with Varney. When the inevitable happened, that would be the test. Either he would cease to be a factor in the local trade, or he would kill somebody.
One night, he went into a rich neighborhood in San Francisco that he had never hit before. He walked for a time, trying to select a house. The night was unusually warm, and he could hear the faint hum of air conditioners coming from some of the houses, which told him the windows were all closed and latched. There were lights on in the windows of others. Now and then, if he lingered near a house too long, a dog would bark, and he had to move on. Finally, he found one that seemed not to present too many obstacles. He stood outside the gate for a few minutes, listening and studying the building. Then he saw something that made him decide.
He was over the fence and up the broad lawn like a shadow. He climbed a trellis, careful to place his hands and feet where they would not tangle with the climbing roses. He reached the second floor, where there was an open window. He was sure that a place like this would have an alarm system, but whatever circuit included an open window had to be turned off. He slit the screen with a knife and slipped inside a bedroom. There was no one in the bed.
He moved to the doorway and cautiously looked up the hall. There were bedrooms, all with their doors closed, and no sign of light under them. At the other end of the hall was a faint glow. He froze and waited. There was no sound. The light was not like an incandescent lamp, so he decided to look more closely. He slowly moved up the hallway. The glow was a computer screen. There was a screen saver, with colorful tropical fish moving from left to right and disappearing. He took two deep breaths. It was all right. The room was an office, and the computer was probably left on all the time. There was nobody awake. He was halfway down the hall toward the office, so he decided to start his search for valuable items there. He heard a creak behind him that might be a person in one of the bedrooms. He retreated to the nearest door, but found the room absolutely empty, with nothing to hide behind. He knew he had time for only one more guess. He stepped to the office, slipped just inside the doorway, and waited.
He had chosen wrong: the room was not empty. He heard the hollow rattle-scrape sound behind him, and knew it: a handgun being grasped and lifted from the wooden bed of a drawer. He gave it a half second, so the man’s arm would be in motion, rising toward the level of his chest. Then Varney abruptly squatted, slapped the floor with the palm of his hand, and dived across the open doorway.
The gun went off and punched a hole in the wall where Varney’s chest had been. Varney caught a glimpse of the man while he was in motion. The man was about forty years old, crouching beside the desk wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and his black hair was tousled. He must have been working at the computer and fallen asleep on the couch. The man popped up, startled by Varney’s low dive, and pointed the gun downward. The man overcompensated in aiming his second round, this time firing into the carpet at his own feet.
Varney rolled, brought his knees up to his chest in a crouch, then quickly did something that was not what anyone else would do, and few could do: he sprang up, took a running step up the wall, pushed off, and hurled his body into the man with the gun. The man was knocked down, his head hit a chair, and the gun bounced on the carpet. Varney picked it up, fired it into the man’s forehead, checked the magazine to be sure it had a few more rounds, then went down the hall to the room where he had heard the creak.
He opened the door and found it empty, then opened all of the others. He returned to the office and considered his situation. Maybe the reason the man had kept a gun in this room was that there really were valuable things here. Varney could see the gun had come from a small, open door on the right side of the desk, with a key sticking out of the lock. He pushed the door open a bit farther with his foot, and saw that it was a small safe, with three shallow drawers, like trays. The gun must have been locked in there in the front of the safe.
Varney wanted to run, but he kept the fear under control. The house was big, a stone structure set back on about two acres of land, but there seemed to be nobody here except the man. The only open window was down the hall where he had come in. If the three shots had not been heard by the neighbors in their big houses, then the danger was over.
He put the gun into the back of his belt and began to empty the contents of the drawers while he listened for sirens and car engines. There were banded stacks of cash, a couple of fancy watches, two gold rings, and a sheaf of documents that looked to Varney like stock certificates. When he had what he could carry, he went down the hall, out the window, and down the trellis.
Two days after he sold the securities, he received a visit at his apartment from two of the traveling men who worked for the wholesaler. They had learned that the name on the securities—Robert Haverly—was a name the San Francisco newspapers had printed as the victim of a burglary and murder. Varney had shown the aptitude the wholesalers had been told to watch for.
All these years he had been stubbornly preparing himself for a life that was different, more intense and exciting than the drab busy-ness that occupied other people. Now he had shown that he was ready to find out precisely what that life was.
6
Varney made his reservations so that his flight to the West Coast left the next afternoon. He would land at night. There was no reason to wait even one extra day and give Prescott time to dream up some kind of trap. Varney could use the flying time to sleep and plan.
This, he had decided, must be a virtuoso performance. Its purpose was not practical but psychological. He had listened to Prescott’s laconic, skeptical tone, and it had given him a strong urge to wake Prescott up. Prescott had been overconfident, absolutely certain that he could assume Varney was no threat, although he knew nothing about him. It was time to teach Prescott something about Varney, to let him know that this time he had made a fatal miscalculation.
Varney rented a car at the airport, then drove north past the center of the city into the San Fernando Valley. He had to assume that Prescott would have called the L.A. police as soon as he had hung up, and that by now they were all on edge and preparing to be attacked. He was still in their jurisdiction but far from Prescott’s office, and he was willing to bet that the police here had taken the warning less seriously. All cops patrolling this late at night were tense, suspicious, on guard. They already seemed to have adrenaline trickling into their veins at a steady pace before anything happened, because they were never at ease. He had decided that the place to do his hunting was in the suburbs, where the people were richer and the cops weren’t treated like an occupying army. They would be calmer, and easier to approach.
He had decided that a good place to find what he wanted was a hospital, so he went to Valley Presbyterian because it was the biggest one he knew of in the area. He parked his car a few blocks away on a quiet residential street and walked back. He walked the circuit of the hospital to study the entrances, exits, and parking lots carefully. Then he extended his walk around once more to stop near the emergency room. He found a concrete bench in a little niche that people seemed to use as a smoking area, sat down, and watched.
He had sat for only a half hour in the dark before he saw what he had been waiting for. The police car came
