drunk. He stood as much as he could, and in a moment of annoyance, decided to end the questions.
“You know that guy over in Fort Wayne who got his throat cut last night?”
“Yes,” she said. It had been on the television news all day.
“Well, that’s what I do,” Varney said. “I make a lot of money because I’m really good at it.”
The next morning when Varney woke up, Terry was gone. He wasn’t entirely sorry, because he had a headache and wasn’t interested in hearing her voice again. He showered and dressed, then found that Coleman wasn’t in his room. Varney waited for a couple of hours, and when Coleman showed up, he was in a jumpy mood. As they walked to the car in the hotel lot, Coleman’s jaw was set, and he threw his suitcase into the trunk and slammed the lid so hard that the car rocked on its springs. When he took the wheel and Varney was sitting beside him, he said, “Don’t ever do that again.”
“Do what?”
Coleman said, “Don’t tell hookers your life story. They’re not in it to meet interesting people. If you want them to respect you, stay away from them. If you want them to like you, give them some money.”
Varney felt a growing sense of dread. “What happened?”
“About four o’clock I saw her sneaking off down the hall like something was chasing her. I decided to see if something was. When I caught up with her, she told me you hadn’t said anything about Fort Wayne, and if you had, she would never tell anyone.”
“I didn’t tell her anything to prove I really did it,” he said uneasily. “I just couldn’t stand the stupid questions. I decided to shut her up.”
Coleman glared at him. “It’s a business. Get that into your head. If they ask you questions, it’s just like when a waiter asks you questions. None of them gives a shit what the answer is. They’re just trying to make you feel important so you’ll give them a decent tip and they can go on to the next customer.”
“Did you have to give her more money to keep her quiet?”
Coleman took his eyes off the road to turn an irate stare on Varney. “It was a little late for that, kid. I had to break her neck.”
After that, Varney had to sit in silence staring at cornfields and now and then a ramshackle house with dusty old cars in the front yard. The midmorning sun heated the endless, straight road until distant pools of imaginary water appeared on the pavement, then dissolved as the car drew nearer. He thought about the girl Terry, the thin white neck, the little wisps of blond hair that grew at the nape, and felt a confusing retroactive arousal that lasted for a few seconds, until memory moved forward and reminded him that it had all turned ugly, and the girl’s body was cold and already dumped someplace. Each time he forgot that he didn’t want to think about her, the girl’s image returned, and he would find himself falling into the cycle again. She should have kept her mouth shut.
After about an hour, Coleman spoke again. “That’s the only free one you’ll ever get out of me. If I ever have to do it again, I’ll deduct my fee from your pay.”
At that moment, Varney forgot the girl and began to concentrate on Coleman. He was treating Varney as though he were some weak, inferior creature that he had the right to criticize or punish any time Varney displeased him. Varney began to see the events of the night differently. Coleman had not had to kill the girl just because Varney had made a small mistake. He had done it to exert control and stifle him. Coleman had sensed that Varney had taken pleasure in her, and Coleman had decided for that reason alone to find an excuse to take her away. Coleman was like a father who punished a child by strangling the kid’s puppy in front of him.
As the car traversed the hot, flat country, Varney watched the telephone poles go past the window. Coleman was not the wise, generous professional who had taken Varney on as an apprentice. It had seemed that way at first, but from the beginning, the one who had done all the hard, dangerous work had been Varney. Coleman made a phone call or two, acted as Varney’s driver and companion, then kept most of the money. Varney sat there quietly for the rest of the morning, staring out the window at the flat country. There was no reason to argue with Coleman about the girl, no reason to say anything at all. It was settled.
Varney came out of his reminiscence and pulled his car up onto the blacktop margin along the side of a gas station in south Buffalo. He got out, stood at the pay telephone, and opened the book to the yellow pages. There were dozens of hotels listed, but he could safely ignore most of them. He wrote down the addresses and phone numbers of the ten biggest and most expensive in town.
It was thinking about Coleman that had given him the idea. Whenever Coleman had come into a town, he had looked in the yellow pages to find the biggest and the best. Prescott was a lot like Coleman—tall and swaggering, with that cowboy accent and that way of insinuating that he knew everything. They were so much alike that sometimes, when Varney was remembering Coleman, he had caught himself letting Prescott’s features merge with Coleman’s to form a single face.
18
Prescott stepped into the hotel room and saw the little red light on the telephone dial flashing. He turned off the switch by the door to make the room go dark before he went to the telephone. He stood with his back to the wall where he could not be seen through the window, and lifted the receiver. If the man he was searching for had found the right hotel and used some trick to get the right room number, he could leave a message, train his rifle through the window on the phone, and win the easy way.
The computer voice said, “You have . . . one! . . . message.” Prescott covered his free ear so he would not miss any vibration of the vocal cords, could judge the tightness of the throat, maybe even hear a background noise. A man who always made calls from pay telephones couldn’t always control what went on around him.
The voice said, “Prescott, this is Millikan. I’ll be in the bar downstairs at ten o’clock. Come see me.” Prescott hung up, looked at his watch, left the room, and took the elevator down to the lobby. It was nearly eleven, but he didn’t hurry to step into the bar. He went into the gift shop and bought a copy of the
It was an old-fashioned, dark room with polished wood along the walls, booths with red leather upholstery, and a few potted plants in unlikely and inconvenient places. He saw Millikan from a distance and had time to look at him as he walked in his direction. Millikan had aged in ten years. The disappointed, liquid blue eyes looked as though they were the same, but the desiccation that happened in middle age had begun, and the skin looked loose and dry. Millikan’s thick, wiry hair had not receded. It still began too low on the forehead and covered his head like a bristly cap, but now it was mostly gray, and thin on top. He had a big, thick manila envelope on the table under his forearm.
Prescott walked to the table and sat. Neither man smiled or offered to shake hands. People at other tables in the dim, windowless room would have assumed that they had last seen each other ten minutes ago. Millikan said, “The police knew where you were staying.”
Prescott nodded. “This wasn’t a good time to come. He’s out there looking for me now.”
Millikan rubbed his forehead in a gesture of frustration that Prescott recognized as a habit that had only gotten stronger over the years. “What are you doing?”
“You know,” said Prescott. “You have news?”
Millikan rubbed his forehead again, then left his elbow on the table and leaned his cheekbone against his fist. “The police in Louisville have been looking more closely at the victims. The first theory seems to have been wrong.”
Prescott kept his eyes on Millikan without showing much eagerness or interest. “Which one?”
“The intended victim. I mean the first one to be shot—Robert Cushner Junior. It wasn’t what everybody thought. He did have a new computer-hardware breakthrough, and one of the big companies that might have felt threatened by it did know about it. The Louisville police started at the top, with the intention of pressing executives to scare them into cooperating. But all they had to do was ask, and the first one produced a signed, witnessed, and notarized agreement. They had bought his company. He was due to get a wire transfer of twenty million dollars in cash and fourteen in stock. The transaction went through without a hitch even though he was dead.”
Prescott shrugged. “So the company’s out. What else are they looking at?”
“Nothing.”
