Prescott could hear him on the telephone between the rounds fired on the range. Durbin held his hand over his free ear and spoke loudly. “He’s not just the average customer, he’s a real shooter . . . and he’s a friend of mine, so I’d like to find something good for him. Nine. He wants something like a Beretta or a SIG. Got anything?” In a moment he hung up and beamed as he came to the window. “He’s just down the road, so he’ll bring a couple of things in here for you to look at.”
Prescott smiled. “Well, that’s great. Thank you very much.”
Durbin seemed to notice the revolver on the counter. “Hell, this thing’s got to be cleaned anyway. Why don’t you go back and shoot until he gets here? I’ll call you.”
Prescott bought another box of bullets and went back to the range. Fifteen minutes later, as he was unclipping a target from the pulley, he turned and saw Durbin with another man, knocking on the Plexiglas to get his attention. He lifted his ear protector and shouted, “I’ll be right out.”
He carefully unloaded his pistol and took it out into the open space behind the range. The man with Durbin was a tall fat man in his sixties with white hair in a crew cut. He was holding a hard-sided suitcase.
“This is Billy,” Durbin said. “And this is Mike. Why don’t you come on into the office?”
The area behind the glass was more like a booth than an office, but it had a desk. Prescott and Billy went in, and it was slightly quieter there, with an extra layer of Plexiglas separating them from the range. Prescott began to understand Billy after a few minutes with him. He was a retired machinist who worked on guns as a hobby. The reason he had driven here was that he wasn’t interested in making a deal for a gun with a total stranger unless he was in the presence of third and fourth parties who were also armed. He opened his suitcase on the desk, and Prescott could see pistols arranged neatly on a stenciled cutout foam rubber pad in rows of three.
Prescott looked respectfully at the guns. He spotted a Beretta Cougar in a space that didn’t quite fit it. He said to Billy, “May I?”
Billy nodded, and Prescott lifted it and looked closely at it. The slide was worn, the barrel burned out from too many rounds. He set it back without comment, but Billy said, “Dave told me you wanted a Beretta, and that’s the only one I have now. I can work it over for you, get a new barrel, maybe reblue the slide. But that Walther over here is good, and you can have that right away. It’s a P99, a year old. Been fired maybe once, and the woman who owned it didn’t like it. Little bitty thing—she liked the name because of James Bond, but when she fired it, she found it a little hot for her. I traded her a nice .38 Special and a hundred bucks.”
“What are you asking?”
Billy acted as though he had never considered the question before. He thought, calculated, estimated. “Four hundred would probably do it.”
Prescott examined the weapon, and saw that Billy was only exaggerating the gun’s condition slightly. He transferred it to his left hand and held out his right to shake with Billy. Billy started to take it, then held back. “I’m not actually a licensed dealer, so I don’t have no papers for you. I’ve got to trust you not to get in trouble with it.”
“I’ll try not to,” said Prescott, smiling. He opened his wallet, took out four hundred-dollar bills, and handed them to Billy, who stared at them for a moment, folded them, and put them under the foam rubber in his carrying case. Prescott chatted for a few more minutes, then said, “Well, it’s time for me to get back to Philadelphia. Thanks again.” As he left, Durbin escorted him to the parking lot. Prescott handed him a hundred-dollar bill. “This is for your trouble, Dave.” In another minute he was on the road again. He drove northwest as far as Binghamton, New York, then turned in his rental car and rented another with New York plates.
He continued west, assessing his progress. He had his gun, a high-end nine-millimeter that had been gone over carefully by a gunsmith, cleaned, oiled, and in perfect working order. It was probably still registered to its first owner. Billy might very well have been lying about the woman who had only fired it once, but it didn’t matter. No attempt to trace it would lead to Roy Prescott. If an investigator ever traced it far enough to force Billy to admit he had sold it illegally, he could only say he had sold it to a man named Mike Kennison who had told a story about a construction project in Philadelphia.
Prescott had a clean, fast rental car with 250 miles on its odometer. He had his pictures, so good that they were probably better than photographs. He supposed that he should be feeling amazed at how easily this was going. But there was something about the hunt this time that was a bit different, and it disturbed him.
At each of these stops, he had devoted himself to studying the people around him, and found that his old ability to figure out what he needed to know had sharpened and expanded. He knew more about them than he had ever known about the people he had used and left before. He could tell things about them from the way they held their heads or walked or moved their hands. He looked into their faces and read things: stupid misconceptions that they stubbornly clung to in the face of all evidence, bad decisions they had made years ago and still thought about sometimes and regretted. He sensed the things they worried about late at night, and he saw the courage and will it took when they woke up each morning to take up the weight of their lives again.
No, he decided, knowing wasn’t the odd thing about this trip. He had always been good at analyzing people instantly because his life sometimes depended on it. He had been like a dog sniffing for danger and always smelling more subtle things in the process, noting them and pushing them aside to think of things that would help him survive. What was different now was that he was interested. The isolated qualities he had noticed had grown into parts of stories. People were poor, lonely creatures who had come into the world unready and helpless, and by adulthood had only partly managed to change that, and by the time they’d made much progress, they had already started to die. That was what was odd, that feeling.
He supposed that the change had come from spending too much time visiting the mind of Cara Lee Satterfield. He had stared so hard at her paintings for so many hours that he had begun to see what she was actually doing when she made a portrait of a person. What she did was an abbreviated version of what old portrait painters had done. In old paintings, a man would be standing in the foreground, staring at the painter, and at his feet and behind him and beside him in artistic arrangement would be the symbols of his trade—orb and scepter, guns and swords, maybe astrolabes and maps, as though those were the contents of his mind. A woman might have children, lapdogs, flowers, fans, pens and paper. Somehow Cara Lee Satterfield had managed to show what her model had in his mind without the objects. It was as though she had painted the whole portrait—the props, the face, the expression in the eyes, the subtle curl of the lip—and then painted over the objects that had inspired and stimulated the face to assume that habitual pose.
What worried Prescott was the eerie feeling that the sudden expansion of his receptivity was beginning to give him. It could be a sign that he was now reaching a new level of perception that was going to make him harder to beat. But it could be what people felt after they’d had a premonition. They took a long, quiet look around them, appearing to an observer as though they were counting the leaves on the trees, memorizing the exact blue of the sky, saying good-bye to the world.
13
Varney had very carefully, cautiously made the trip to Buffalo in stages. His first step had been to buy a set of clothes that didn’t smell like seawater and gasoline. He didn’t try to get on a big transcontinental airliner like the one he had taken west, because he was intensely aware of what Prescott must be thinking. As soon as Prescott had gotten his message about the people at the hotel in Marina del Rey, he would have gotten into his car again and driven to Los Angeles International Airport. He might think that Varney had gotten out right away, gotten onto a plane and left town, but Prescott had undoubtedly been around long enough to know that things were hardly ever that simple. Chasing a man down often just involved following as well as you could and waiting for something to go wrong for him.
Varney had driven his rental car to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, gotten on a plane belonging to an airline he had never heard of that seated about twenty-five passengers, and flown to Las Vegas. From there, he had flown to Toronto, taken a bus to Niagara Falls, walked across the Rainbow Bridge into the United States, and then taken a cab south to Buffalo.
He had arrived late at night. The house was east of Delaware Avenue, off Hertel Avenue in a neighborhood that was full of big nineteenth-century two-story houses with wooden porches and little squares of front lawn that a person could just about cover with a blanket. Someone had told him once that it had been part of the era when they’d been built: people were just moving off farms and into towns, and the epitome of being modern and
