against his body as though he had fallen. He was aware that the big, heavy metal desk hopped above him and came down askew. The hand that he had extended to insert the plug had been punched aside so hard it tingled.
Varney lay still. He felt as though he had been injured in some way, jolted like a person in a high-speed crash, shaken by an impact so that his joints were strained and everything inside him had been shaken. It was silent. He tested his muscles and found he was able to stir, and when he did, his presence of mind gathered itself out of fragments and returned. He remembered he was in a hurry. Time was passing. He slowly crawled out from inside the desk and pulled the jacket off his face.
The room was dark, the air so thick he could barely breathe. He held the jacket over his nose and mouth and found his flashlight with his knee. He turned it on. The air was a cloud of plaster dust, but he could see that up and to the side, the plywood had been blown inward off the window. About half of the acoustic tiles in the ceiling had been knocked out of their metal frame, and the others were tilted, the frame still swinging on its wires.
He moved to the window, and his heart stopped. The bars were still there. He moved closer. They weren’t at the right angle. He reached out and gave the nearest bar a push, but it burned his hand. “Shit!” he hissed, drawing his hand back and sticking it in his mouth. But he had seen the bars move. He pushed the desk the couple of feet to the side so that it was under the window. He lay on its surface and kicked at the bars with his feet. They moved, then jerked out farther. He kicked again and again, until the lower bolts were out of the brick. He rolled, stood on the desk, used his backpack to brush the broken glass off the sill, then used it to hold the bars away from the wall. He eased himself onto the small window.
He stopped for a moment to shine his flashlight around the inside of the office to be sure he had left nothing. Then he lowered himself to the ground, trotted up the dark street for a half block, cut into the backyard of a house to reach the next street. He heard the faint, faraway sound of sirens. Lights were going on in houses, the glows of lamps falling in squares on the spaces of darkness where he had wanted to walk, so he dodged them, ducking low and stepping quickly along the walls. He broke into a run. He was out of the box. He could breathe the soft, cool air of night.
15
Buffalo was not a huge town. Whenever Prescott had asked somebody how to get to his next stop, the person would say, “It’s about fifteen minutes away.” In Los Angeles they would usually say, “It’s about an hour from here,” and they would mean on the freeway, if traffic was moving. Earlier today, he had sometimes found himself in sluggish spots, but not like the ones at home. By evening the lines of cars had thinned out, and the fifteen-minute drives could be done in ten.
He had made twenty-two stops before it got to be too late in the evening to go on. He had made a list of the places where this particular killer probably spent time. There were only seven gyms in the area that would have appealed to this man. Those were the ones that were fairly new and spacious, had huge numbers of people coming in each day, and catered to the twenty-to-thirty crowd. The small, hard-core places that were in tiny, dark buildings and smelled of ancient sweat would not have seemed safe to this man: his best defense was protective coloration. The old iron works where men turned themselves into something like small steers would have been too intimate for him. But Prescott was sure that this killer was in the habit of going somewhere to work out, so he had put pictures in every gym where nobody stopped him.
Prescott believed that this man also spent some time shooting. He was too accurate not to be getting regular practice. Prescott had found only four ranges in the area where people were allowed to shoot handguns, and all were private clubs. None of them seemed to Prescott to fit his image of the man. Two of the clubs were meeting places for men cradling Purdy shotguns over their forearms and wearing sport coats with suede padding patches at the right shoulders. The other two were a bit more plebeian, but both seemed to consist of older men biding their time until hunting season—not practicing, exactly, but rehearsing.
Prescott was not hopeful about the gun clubs. They didn’t feel like places that would attract this killer. But men engaged in a pastime sometimes saw others engaged in the same pastime without socializing, so he knew the clubs were not a waste of time. He had left his pictures and moved on. He had tried a few gun shops, but he had not felt hopeful about those, either. Nobody who engaged in shooting sports wanted to be reminded that guns were used to kill people. The topic was depressing, and the shopkeepers were not enthusiastic, because it might put a damper on sales. But Prescott had kept at it until he had hit all the larger stores.
All that had to happen was that the killer come along and see his own picture, so any place might work. He put a few pictures up near big shopping malls. Then he drove back toward his new office. It would be one more day before the place was exactly as he wanted it, but he had begun posting the pictures as soon as the trap was strong enough to hold a man.
It was late when he returned to the spot where he had planned to park while he watched his office, but when he reached Cumberland Avenue, he could tell that he had arrived too late. There was a crowd of people in sweatshirts and T-shirts, and even pajamas and bathrobes, all gathered in the street and staring toward his building.
He could see four police cars, two of them with flashing light bars above their roofs, alternately turning his building red and blue; two that were dark; a fire truck; and an ambulance. He pulled his car to the curb and stared through the windshield. He forced himself to breathe normally. He hoped there wasn’t another body, some innocent bystander who happened to be in this man’s way at the wrong time. He hoped it was . . . He didn’t finish the thought. The ambulance doors weren’t open, and it wasn’t in a hurry to get moving, so either there was nobody in it, or the occupant was dead.
He got out of his car and walked up the street toward the low building. As he came closer he could see the police officers milling around in front, on the sidewalk and the street, but there seemed to be more of them in the back. He came to the corner, and started down toward the rear of the building. He could see the yellow POLICE LINE tape blocking the entrance to the little parking lot, and now he could see a big panel truck. He slowly, patiently made his way through the crowd to the police tape, saying over and over, “Excuse me, that’s my building. Excuse me, that’s my office.” People parted, not so much to make room as to spin their bodies to the side so their heads could turn enough to see him. When he reached the tape, he took out his wallet, opened it, and waved it at the nearest cop.
The cop was a tall black detective who had been giving orders to a couple of uniformed officers at the edge of the parking lot. The detective’s eyebrows went up as he looked at Prescott, and Prescott watched him decide that whatever this man meant by waving his wallet around, it had better be pertinent.
“Did you want something, sir?” The controlled tone was a warning to Prescott.
“Yes, officer. My name is Prescott. I’m the one who is renting that space on the end, there.”
The detective’s eyes followed Prescott’s gesture to the building. He reached down and pulled up the yellow tape so Prescott could step under it. “We’ve been looking for you.” He led Prescott into the lot, and Prescott saw the rear window. The bars had been torn out of the wall, but not as though they had been pulled. Bricks around the window were chipped and cracked apart. Above and below the window, there were big, fan-shaped marks that were part black carbon, and part gouges and nicks.
“What kind of bomb was it?” he asked.
The detective glared at him sharply. “What kind were you expecting?” He led Prescott around the building to the front. “This is Mr. Prescott,” he said to the two uniformed cops loitering beside a patrol car. “Let them know we’ve got him.”
The two cops quickly and expertly whirled Prescott around and began to frisk him.
He said evenly, “I’m not carrying anything dangerous.”
The cops finished patting him down, then one of them conferred in a whisper with the detective, and returned. He didn’t handcuff Prescott, just opened the door to the back and said, “Have a seat.”
Prescott ducked down to sit, and the side window just ahead of him shattered, showering the inside of the car with bits of flying glass. The report of the rifle reached Prescott a half breath later. He was already curled into a crouch. He ducked to the pavement and rolled as the next three shots punched through the door of the police car. The two cops scattered, one to the rear of the car and the other to the front, where they knelt, drew sidearms, and aimed uselessly into the darkness, their heads swiveling to find the target.
Prescott’s mind carried several thoughts at once: The bullets had not exited through the opposite window, so
