“That’s better,” said Prescott. “I apologize for scaring the shit out of you by ringing the phone.”
There was no sound that Varney could hear that had not come from the telephone. He said, “I’m not that easy to scare.” He concentrated on keeping the anger and hatred out of his voice. He peered into the hallway, but there was no visual sign of Prescott, either. The hallway was just a hardwood corridor with the two bedrooms he had entered, and four closed doors—one at either end, one on his right on this side of the house, just before the railing of the staircase, and another across the hall from it. Wherever Prescott was, he couldn’t see Varney, but he knew which room Varney was in. That had to change.
“That’s good,” said Prescott. “Fear and anger cloud a man’s judgment sometimes, and right now I think you need to be clearheaded.”
“Why is that?” Varney quickly slipped across the hall into the other room and paused just to the right of the doorway with his back against the wall. He held the phone away from his ear again and held his breath as he strained his ears.
“Because you’ve got a problem. I wanted to talk to you now, and let you know there are a couple of options, before they get used up.”
Varney’s chest felt as though it would burst with frustration. He still could not get his ears to detect a sound of Prescott’s voice coming to him from somewhere inside the house. He knew it was happening: Prescott had to be in the house, but Varney’s ears were not sensitive enough to pick it up. He blew out the air in his lungs as he stepped silently toward the window. He knew Prescott would hear it as an expression of contempt, but it wasn’t loud enough for Prescott to hear except through the phone. He took another step and looked out the window. He sidestepped, still not sure, getting worried.
“I wouldn’t bother with that,” said Prescott.
“What?”
“Just because I bought you those pipes and let you have the use of one of them doesn’t mean I’ll let you use it forever.”
Varney leaned close enough to the window so his face touched the screen. He had been right. The pipe he had leaned against the wall of the house beside the window had been moved. He could see it on the grass below. He quickly ducked and pivoted, then stopped, protected by the wall. Prescott could be out there with a rifle and night-vision scope—must be, Varney decided. The outer wall was a stupid place for Varney to be. Its solidity was an illusion. Even a common hunting rifle would put a hole through it. He went low again and retreated to the inner wall by the doorway. “What do you want?” he hissed. “Haven’t you had enough of trying and losing?”
“It’s more a question of what you want,” said Prescott. “You’ve got a problem to solve.”
“So what’s my problem?”
“Here’s the way it looks to me,” said Prescott. “You’re alone, on foot, in a pretty remote place where there are not a lot of people. There’s no crowd to fade into, and not much to distract anybody like me. At the moment, you’re in a house that I selected. You know I’m not far away, but you don’t know exactly where I am. I could be outside with a rifle, waiting for you to try to get out a window. You’ll be out there hanging by your fingertips in your dark clothes against those white boards for a good second or two. Tomorrow morning I can go hose off the siding and go up on a ladder to patch the holes. Of course, maybe I’m in the room right next to you with the door closed. Or one of the others. If you open one to go out a different window, it’s entirely possible I might be sitting in a comfortable chair holding a shotgun loaded with double-ought. The cleanup would take longer, but I’m a patient man.”
Varney said, “You think I haven’t thought of all this?”
“I suppose you have. I don’t want you to dwell on the specifics. I want you to think past them. I’ve got you in a predicament. I want you to know that you don’t have to die. There are other ways through this.”
“Like what?”
“You leave anything made out of metal in that room. You come out. I run a metal detector over you, to be sure nothing slipped your mind. You would have to tolerate handcuffs on the ride into Hinckley, and probably again when they transport you down to Minneapolis, but after that you’d be in a private cell.”
Varney thought he saw a movement at the edge of the woods. If that was where Prescott was, he would have been in position to see Varney arrive, watch the business with the pipe, see him come into this room. Varney stared out the window at the spot. “What difference does it make if I let you shoot me or I let them kill me in some gas chamber?”
Prescott’s laugh carried with it everything that Varney hated. It was the laugh of a man who didn’t think he would ever have to worry about the things that were tormenting Varney, but more important than this, it was arrogant, superior. Prescott said, “You ought to know better than that. If they did get through a trial and prove anything, it wouldn’t be good enough to get you executed. The evidence they have isn’t that strong. They can’t say, ‘This guy has been taking money for putting people in the ground for years.’ They have to pick one and prove you did it.”
“If you think I’d get off, what are you doing this for? I thought you had given up, gotten off me.”
“I’ll never do that,” said Prescott. The sound of his voice was quiet, almost gentle, and the effect was horrible. “I have two reasons. If you go in, get booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and all that, I’m not the only one who knows you. If you ever kill somebody later, you’re a manageable police problem. They’ll pick you up. They’ll know all about you, your habits, the way you do your work, so they’ll recognize it.”
“What’s the other reason?” Varney still didn’t see movement out there.
“That’s different,” said Prescott. “That’s for you. Maybe if you got a little time where you would have to stay put and talk to somebody—”
“Psychiatrists?” The anger tightened his throat so his voice came out choked.
“Your own lawyer would call a few in the minute anything about the case looked ominous. It’s your escape hatch if I’m wrong and some real evidence turns up.” He paused. “I really think you’ve had a problem for a long, long time. It must be hard. I’m not interested in killing you, kid. I’ll be satisfied just to make you stop.”
Outrage gripped Varney’s chest, pushing his words out in streams. “You lying bastard. I read about you in the papers. Everybody you ever went after is dead. You’re a fucking snake. Did you tell them all you were going to take them to a nice doctor? Did you get them all to put on handcuffs before you shot them?”
“Neither one,” said Prescott calmly.
“Bullshit!” Varney snapped. “You’re the one who’s afraid. You’re in the same business I am, and you know I’m better than you. I’m going to cut your fucking head off and stick it on a post.”
He heard Prescott sigh. “I guess I’ve said everything I wanted to. If you change your mind, press 1 on your phone. It’s programmed to dial me.” The telephone went dead.
Varney watched the bushes at the edge of the woods more intently, and he saw the movement again. He silently mouthed the words, “I’ve got you.” He was moving before the plan had solidified in his mind. Prescott was out there thinking he had the only advantage that mattered. Varney turned off the cell phone and slipped it into his jacket. As soon as he cleared the doorway he began to run. The upstairs hallway was dark because the doors of bedrooms were closed, but the wooden railing began and he put his gloved hand on it and let the hand slide along it to orient him as he moved forward. The railing made a curve and headed down at an angle into the dark. He took the first stair, lengthened his stride to take three at a time, and his foot stepped onto nothing.
Varney’s body dropped downward, but his right hand tightened in a reflex to stop himself, clutching the railing in a desperate grab. His right arm elongated in a sudden, wrenching tug. His left hand held the pistol, but as his body swung and his chest slammed against the side of the staircase, the hand pawed at the wood to cushion the impact, and his legs swung into the void. He dangled there for a moment, swinging back and forth. He stuck the pistol into his left jacket pocket, and hung by both hands. He looked down.
The staircase had been sawed off just below the first-floor ceiling. The drop to the floor looked to him like fourteen or fifteen feet, but below him the floor was not clear. The stairway lay intact on the floor, as though Prescott had run a chain saw across it where it connected to the upper floor and let it fall. If Varney had not been gripping the railing when he had stepped off, he would be lying across those triangular ridges that used to be steps. He probably wouldn’t be dead, but it would have been impossible not to have broken some bones.
Varney took a second to move through a series of thoughts. Prescott was out in those bushes, but Varney had seen them shake, so he might have been preparing to move on. If he was heading inside, then it was to catch Varney hanging here by both hands. If he wasn’t coming in, then Varney had to get out in time to see where he was going. Varney could pull himself up and go tie bedsheets together to lower himself down, but that would take time.
