“So I know where he is. He saw me arrive, he took his shots, and he knows he missed. For a lot of people, that would be enough. There are a few dozen cops around, and he can’t fight all of us. But for him that won’t be enough.”
“Won’t be enough?”
“He knows I must have driven here. He saw the direction I came from when I walked up to the building. He knows that right now you’ll think he’s gone home, because it’s the only sensible thing for him to do. But he hasn’t, he’s just moved down the street a couple hundred yards.”
“What for?”
“To get a clear, unimpeded shot at my car.”
The detective’s eyes passed across the faces of two uniformed cops moving toward Prescott. “What is it that you’re trying to get us to do?”
“Make it look like the emergency is over. Send everybody out of here except a few cops who look like they’re collecting evidence and a couple to secure the scene. Then you hide two cars out of sight up on that end of the street, and two at the other end, and let me walk down to my car alone. He’ll make another try.”
The detective’s eyebrows knitted and his face acquired a fluid expression: genuine surprise that shaded off into a smirk. For a moment, he made his features assume a parody of contemplation. Finally he said, “This is a case that’s beyond my previous personal experience. I do have a certain memory for things I’ve seen and heard. One of them is that most of the time, when you get a small, nondescript building that gets its windows blown out by explosives, it turns out that it isn’t because somebody blew it up. What you find out is that it was an accident. Somebody was using the place to build bombs, and made a mistake or didn’t know how to store them.” He turned a steady gaze on Prescott. “Now, you may be telling me the truth, and your theory may even be correct. But I did notice that we had a certain amount of quiet around here until the officers started to put you into their patrol car to take you downtown. Then somebody started shooting, and what got hit was the car, which has POLICE in foot-high letters down the side of it. Now, what I’m going to do is similar to what you want. You could even call it a compromise.”
“Compromise?” said Prescott.
“Right. I’m going to move out most of these people, just as you requested. I’m going to leave a few officers to secure the scene so the forensics team can do their work. If there is some kind of maniac who is down there waiting to shoot you in your car, he’s got to stay where he can see it. I’ll have units stationed all around it, where they can move in if he shows himself. What I won’t do is let you walk down there by yourself and get into your car.”
“Then he won’t show himself.”
“You seem to be an intelligent man, too intelligent to imagine you can get in and drive off. But you also seem too intelligent to think it’s a good idea to walk in front of a rifle. It’s a contradiction.”
Prescott shook his head. “He’s down there, and this is the chance to get him. All he wants is me. The other officer already took my wallet and keys. You can hold on to them, and I can’t drive away.”
“Thank you.” He turned to the two uniformed cops. “Take him downtown.”
The two policemen began to help him to his feet. “He’s only here because it’s my place.”
The detective’s expression turned stony. “It was your place until a bomb went off in it. Now it’s a crime scene, and that makes it my place.” He said to the cops, “Take him around the back, and up the side street to the east, so you can’t be seen from the front of the building.”
Prescott sighed and shook his head wearily. He let the two cops handcuff him, then push him into the back seat of a car. As they drove off, he didn’t look back at the building again.
About five hours later, when the detective came into the interrogation room, he looked at Prescott with frank irritation. He sat down at the table across from Prescott and set a file in front of him that was already half an inch thick. “I’ve been reading about you. I also read the statement you gave Lieutenant Mussanto. Does your statement contain any inaccuracies that you know of?”
“No.”
“How about your record?”
Prescott asked, “Where did you get it?”
“It was faxed to us by the Los Angeles police.”
“Then it’s probably close enough. It was last time I looked at it.”
“You think this is the same man who killed the two police officers and the security guard in the office building in L.A.?”
“I know it is.”
“I can see why you don’t work at home.”
Prescott nodded, but said nothing.
“What is either one of you doing in Buffalo?”
“I think he’s been living here. I don’t know how long. I came to find him.”
“Looks like he saw you first.”
Prescott sat in silence, neither conceding the point nor contesting it, merely waiting.
After a time, the detective nodded, then took a deep breath and let it out. “There’s a local ordinance against remodeling your own office so a person who goes in can’t get out: a fire regulation. The fine will be a thousand bucks, and they’ll send you a summons you can pay by mail. I’ll try to get you out of that, but when firefighters get called out on something like this, they’re pissed off. It doesn’t seem fair to them to have to get shot at.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you try to get me out of it?”
The detective stared down at the closed file folder for a moment. “What would you have done if I had let you go down to your car by yourself?”
“Tried to draw his fire,” said Prescott. “If I could survive one miss, I figured I could probably get to him. He was up high somewhere—I think closer to the car than he’d been to the office. It’s hard to hold a moving man in the field of a powerful scope. Lowering your aim when a man is running toward you fast is hard to do. The scope is mounted above the barrel, so if you try to look past it, the gun itself is in your line of vision.”
Prescott saw that the detective was listening politely, so he continued. “I picked out his problem when he shot the first time. He had a lot of rounds: at least ten in the magazine. He’s young and angry, and he let the fact that he had a semiautomatic rifle make him squander that first shot. The first recoil kicked the barrel up, and so he had to horse it down for the next one, and that gave me time to duck and roll. He’s better than that, but I think he let his anger overcome his judgment.”
“So you could get him. If you survived one miss,” the detective repeated.
“Yeah. That would let me see the muzzle flash.”
“I see,” said the detective. “If I’d known more last night, I still wouldn’t have let you do it. But I would have been sorry—curious to see what would have happened. It’s why I want to get you out of the fine. You don’t need a fine, you need to be put in a home somewhere so you don’t do this anymore.” He paused. “You can pick up your belongings at the desk.”
Prescott took a cab to his hotel and requested that his locked cash box be removed from the main safe. He brought it upstairs, opened it, and took out the gun he had bought in Pennsylvania. From now on, he would probably be needing it.
17
Varney drove the route he had run just twenty-four hours ago. Now it was a different landscape. He had chosen Buffalo a few years ago because it was a town that had everything he wanted. It was big enough to hide in, but not big enough to require a lot of work to stay alive in it. Houses were cheap and sturdy, traffic was sane. The stories about the winter weather had not been exaggerated, but it had been that way forever, so the people could hardly be taken by surprise when it happened. They had plows out beginning their routes while the snow was still three inches deep on the ground, and all the people knew how to handle their own problems. He liked being at the edge of the state, where he could slip over a border to Canada, or be in Pennsylvania in an hour and a half, even
