14
It was late at night when Varney approached the darkened one-story commercial building on the corner. He could see that it had been divided into three storefronts facing Cumberland Avenue. He walked along the street behind it at first to see if there was a car parked in the small blacktop lot, but there was no vehicle. Next he walked back on Cumberland to the storefronts along the street side.
The back windows of each section of the building were small and high, with permanent iron bars to prevent burglaries. Only one had a rear door, and Varney could tell by the position that it opened into the tiny grocery store. None of the windows along the back was lighted, and one even had boards nailed up across it from the inside.
He moved farther off and then came around the block to see the front of the building from across Cumberland. The only possibility seemed to be the one with the boards over the rear window. Prescott could not have rented the grocery store, and the window of the thrift store was hung with a rack of used women’s dresses, while the back was shelves of shoes and ancient toasters and toys. But the store on the end was in a state of remodeling of some sort. The front window was covered with brown butcher paper. Maybe Varney had made a mistake about the address.
He had used a telephone directory on the Internet. He had typed in the phone number and clicked on SEARCH, and found this address. But maybe the phone number was an old one for the store that had been in this building and had gone out of business, and the number had been reassigned to Prescott. The website claimed all the numbers were automatically updated every day, but how could he know whether that was true?
Varney looked around. There was a pay telephone on the wall in front of the liquor store. He made his way to the store, put in two quarters and dialed the number, then set the receiver on top of the telephone and trotted across the street. He moved around the building, put his ear close to the boarded-up back window, and listened. He heard the faint ringing of the telephone. There was a click, and a recording. “You have reached the offices of Prescott Enterprises. Please leave your telephone number and your name, unless you wish to remain anonymous. Your call will be returned within twenty-four hours.”
Varney walked back to the front of the liquor store and hung up the telephone, then kept walking. Prescott had found his suitcase, opened it, and seen the plane ticket to Buffalo. Then he had gotten the pictures made somehow, and come here. He was in the process of setting up a local field office, like he was the F.B.I. or something. Prescott was not a single frustrating experience that he could put behind him and forget. Prescott was a monster. Varney had somehow, unaccountably, attracted his attention, somehow awakened him. He had come, and he kept coming and coming. He couldn’t be scared off or ignored. He had to be killed.
Varney circled the place warily, looking this time at all of the sights besides the new office. He looked at nearby windows for signs that somebody was watching, scrutinized the eaves of buildings for surveillance cameras. He walked up and down the streets around the neighborhood searching for closed vans that might be listening posts. Then he simply left. If Prescott was watching, how could he let Varney come into sight and disappear again? He couldn’t.
Varney walked, scanned, and listened, his body poised to run, his hand close to the pistol in his jacket, his mind concentrating on the buildings ahead. He evaluated and chose the spaces between buildings ahead where he would duck out of sight, the straight passages where he would sprint, the dark pockets where he could crouch and wait for Prescott to come running after him. He kept walking until he was sure: he had not made a mistake. Prescott had.
He went to his car and drove home. It took Varney an hour to gather his equipment, make a few modifications and adjustments, and drive back to Prescott’s new office. A rule of Varney’s discipline was keeping a small but well-chosen supply of the implements of his trade. Now he went through his inventory, running in his mind each of the possible problems that could occur. In Los Angeles he had tried to succeed by speed and audacity, because he had not known enough about his opponent. This time he prepared.
When he returned to the neighborhood, he parked his car in an unoccupied space in a lot behind a big three- story apartment building two streets from Cumberland. Then he took his small backpack and walked to the store. He looked in where the butcher paper didn’t quite reach the edge of the front window to be sure that nothing had changed in the past hour. There was nothing in the plain white room but a metal desk, a chair, and a few two-by- fours and sheets of plywood left by the carpenters.
He stepped to the door. He had two locks to defeat, a dead bolt and a double-plunger door lock. Probably Prescott had assumed that if he found the place, he would not be up to that, but Prescott had been wrong. Varney had done more than break into a few crummy apartments. When he had worked with Coleman Simms, he had learned.
During those years, when they weren’t traveling, they had stayed on Coleman’s ranch in California. He remembered a day when he had awakened in his room upstairs, and known instantly that there were strangers in the house. He had looked out the window and seen no vehicles, but that had not dissuaded him. He had taken the pistol from under the unused pillow beside his, crept down the stairs, and listened.
Coleman had been sitting in the kitchen talking to two men when Varney had appeared in the doorway. Coleman had looked up.
“This is him,” he had said.
The two men were dressed like workmen, in jeans and identical light blue work shirts with names in embroidered script above the left breast pocket—Dave and Tim. They looked at Varney a bit anxiously, and Varney knew that the two men were all right: Coleman must have told them who he was.
Coleman said to him, “Dave and Tim are locksmiths. They’re going to teach you.” It had been much harder than community college. For five weeks he had studied books and diagrams of shafts and tumblers and springs and cylinders. Each day he had practiced the use of the pick and tension wrench on door locks that Dave and Tim had mounted on boards. Under their supervision he had taken locks apart and studied their mechanisms, then put them together again.
At the end of the five weeks, he and Coleman had gone out of town to do a minister. It had struck Varney as a joke. The man was the pastor of a huge congregation in Kansas who had a foundation devoted to lobbying for laws to outlaw the teaching of evolution, and it brought in millions of dollars a year. Most of the donation money came from a few rich men who were bent on raising the issue once again in a series of trials that would be made into a feature-length documentary film. But the real prize was still in the future. The minister had just signed a contract to put the church’s weekly service on television.
This had been a problem for another preacher who already was on television in that part of Kansas. He didn’t want the competition, so he had visited one of his parishioners in his temporary home in Leavenworth, Kansas. The parishioner was a reformed man doing long time, but the word Varney got from Coleman was that his preacher had convinced him that the other preacher was a heretic and false prophet, and probably a precursor for the Antichrist. The prisoner had gotten the word to the right people, and those people had gotten to Coleman.
Varney had gone to the preacher’s big brick church at night and seen moving shadows on the ceiling of an upstairs office. He had found the outer doors locked, but he had used his new skills to pick the lock on a maintenance door that led into a small room just off the sanctuary that was full of folding chairs and tables. He had pulled his gun and made his way upstairs to the office, quietly placed his hand on the doorknob, and found it locked. He had picked that lock too, swung the door open quietly to reveal a reception area, and had seen the preacher, a tall, heavy man in a pair of suit pants and white shirt but no coat, forty feet away inside an inner office. The preacher had looked at a sheaf of papers he held in his right hand, and then begun to speak and wave his arms with animation. Varney had crouched in alarm, then realized the man was rehearsing a sermon in front of a mirror. He’d watched the preacher raise both hands, his hair in disarray and his eyes wild, and say, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” before he’d fired a shot through both doorways into his right temple.
The day after he and Coleman had returned, Varney had gone back to his locksmith lessons for ten more weeks. He learned about house locks, car locks, commercial locks, and dead bolts. It was only after he had mastered the traditional skills that they had introduced him to electronic pick guns and magnetic bolt-sliders that could do the same things more quickly.
He opened the shiny new locks on Prescott’s office door in seconds. He pulled the door open and slipped inside, then let the door swing gently shut without touching the inner doorknob. He walked directly to the back of the dark room, found the desk by the glow of the answering machine, set his backpack down, and looked around him, waiting for his eyes to reach their maximum adjustment to the near darkness.
Everything about this place was right, as though Prescott had been on Varney’s side. The front window was
