Donna Halsey and Robert Cushner had been together for dinner at a table for two. It was late, and there was only one waiter on duty. He had served everybody, and now he was against the wall chatting with the manager while they waited to close up. In the kitchen, the cook had stopped making food some time ago, and had begun the cleanup. The other waiter had nearly finished clearing the tables.
At Robert Cushner and Donna Halsey’s table, things were slower than at some of the others, but the party of two were nearly finished. It was easy to see what had happened. Donna Halsey took great care of her most crucial attribute, her looks. She had ordered something small and low calorie. Robert Cushner had a big slab of meat and a cloud-shaped pile of mashed potatoes. To make the inequity more pronounced, this was a guy who was full of himself. He had struck it rich a few days before. He was out with a very attractive young woman. He did most of the talking, while she gave him admiring glances and nodded her head a lot. Soon she was sitting before an empty plate.
The waiter had cleared her plate and silverware, and probably a wine glass, leaving her sitting with a napkin in her lap and a place mat, talking with Robert Cushner, the former computer guy, while he finished his entree.
The killer stepped through the swinging door from the kitchen. He saw Cushner with a fork on the way to his mouth:
The woman he had hit in the side had managed to take a couple of steps away from him. As she collapsed, Gary the mechanic tried to reach for her, then dropped to one knee to bend over her. He saw the killer take his first step toward her, and in a horrified, involuntary act, tried to hide and protect her by putting his own body over hers.
The killer took one, two, three steps, and aimed downward. Shot one went through the man’s head. Shot two went to his back. Both of them had gone through into the woman. The killer could see she was dead.
He looked to his right, gathered up the two spent casings on the floor, and put them into his pocket. Then he walked back toward the kitchen door. The rounds he had fired before were all in the same area: one for Cushner, the male target at the first table, one for Donna Halsey. One for the maitre d’, one for the waiter, three for the pair of diners at the door. Four for the family. He picked up the shells, turned off the lights, stepped through the kitchen, carefully staying out of the stream of blood running across the tiles into the drain. He replaced the empty clip in his gun, stepped out, closed the steel door behind him, and walked off, feeling a growing elation as each step took him farther away and deeper into the darkness. He had gotten it done with incredible efficiency and speed, and left nothing to indicate who had done it.
He had fulfilled the contract—gotten both of them. The client would be pleased. Prescott considered who that might be. Maybe it was the wife, whose husband had just made twenty million but hadn’t yet gotten around to telling her because he was too busy celebrating with another woman. Prescott would have to look into that. The man had been first, but the one shot three times was the woman. Sometimes it was worth stopping just to count.
Prescott stacked the pictures and reports neatly, reinserted them into the envelope, and put the envelope into his suitcase. He began to fold his clothes and put them on top. He thought about his decision to begin the long drive tonight, and decided he still liked the idea. At night there would not be much traffic, and by sunup he could be half-way to Louisville. He had given the picture to Millikan, so there was no reason to stay in Buffalo. By morning Millikan would have given the picture to the police with a big lecture on how important it was, and sometime tomorrow the killer would be gone.
19
Varney saw the black of night beginning to fade into a dim blue, the big old trees and the shrubs and lawns of Delaware Avenue lightening to green again. In about forty-five minutes the sun would be up, and the people who had vacated the streets of the city for him would be climbing into their cars to infest the world again. He had not found Prescott.
The way Prescott had stayed invisible was not mysterious: all he had needed to do was use a false name to register in a hotel and stay there. But Varney had not expected him to do that. All night long, he had expected Prescott to be around the next corner, or waiting inside one of Varney’s haunts, or sitting in his car outside one of the downtown hotels, waiting for Varney to try to find him.
Varney wasn’t even sure why he had expected Prescott to appear during the night. He decided it was that he had gotten used to a rhythm, like the rhythm of two men in a fistfight. At first they had danced around a bit, made a few feints and jabs. Then Varney had tried to win the quick way—not an exploratory tap, but committing himself to a sudden, hard attack that would take Prescott before he was ready for anything serious. Prescott had been ready to brush it aside, and the counterpunch had been immediate. Varney had gotten used to a pace that was fast and intense, based on heart rate and the adrenaline that had already infused both of them. But Prescott had unexpectedly dodged, and now he was dancing again, out of reach and gathering his strength.
That bothered Varney. He had been awake for two nights, struggling and maneuvering to move in on Prescott, wasting his anger and determination. He had spent the night exhausting himself, and Prescott had been in some hotel sleeping on crisp, clean sheets and getting stronger and sharper for their next encounter.
Varney stopped at a gas station to fill his tank, drove back to his house, and went upstairs. He showered and lay on his bed. The sounds of cars began to reach him from the street outside, a low, steady hum that was usually soothing. This morning it irritated him, because it reminded him that he was used up, and the rest of the world was in motion. Prescott would be getting up fresh and rested, probably putting some new scheme into operation. Prescott and the police, and all the forces of pursuit and punishment, would be talking and planning and putting themselves into position, while Varney was here alone, unconscious in a room with the shades drawn. He rolled over, couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t get his mind to stop foraging for things to worry it.
Varney sat up and looked at the clock. It was six o’clock already. He reached for the remote control and turned on the television set. The head and shoulders that came on belonged to a woman about his age who had perfected that dumb, teasing, “I know something you wish you knew” look. She was saying, “You’ll hear if this morning’s humid weather might surprise us with a change later in the day. We’ll have footage of a melee outside last night’s school board meeting, a three-alarm fire in Cheektowaga, and a picture of a man the police would like your help in finding. We’ll be right back!”
Varney moved to the foot of his bed and put his feet on the floor. The first commercial was for cars. He had seen it at least a hundred times, and it had annoyed him the first time. There was a commercial for a financial- services company that couldn’t quite reveal what it was selling but featured close-up shots of people who looked sick with worry. Then there were a few shorter ones that seemed to have been recorded with a home video camera to advertise a florist, a Lebanese restaurant, and a company that sold appliances but seemed to think that today air conditioners were the only ones people wanted to hear about.
At last, the woman reappeared, sitting behind a desk with a pile of papers in front of her and a pen in her hand. As the camera moved in on her, she said, “Buffalo police have released a picture this morning of a man they want to question in connection with a bombing at a Cumberland Avenue building. He is between twenty-five and thirty years old, six feet tall, and weighs about one hundred and seventy-five pounds.”
There was the picture: Varney, staring out of his television set at him. The extreme definition of the color image that Prescott had somehow gotten made Varney’s face as clear as the woman’s on the television screen.
His stomach tightened in a spasm. He was up, stalking the room as the woman continued. “If you know this man or have seen him, call the special hot-line number at the bottom of your screen. Police have emphasized that he is armed and very dangerous. If you should see him, they ask that you do not approach or attempt to detain him.
