recover from a gunshot wound in just twenty-four hours.
Mae put the new bandages on. She liked the business of touching him like this, ministering to him. She felt as though she was putting good feelings in his mind for later. When he felt better, he was going to know who had gotten him through this. She said, “I’ll bring us something to eat. What do you want?”
“I’ll go in with you.”
They went inside the restaurant, and she was amazed to hear what he ordered, and more amazed to see him eat it. He was healing, all right. Otherwise, he couldn’t have eaten all that steak and the potatoes and vegetables, and then order pie and milk too. She had to cut his steak for him, but after that, if his left arm hadn’t been resting in his lap while he ate, she would not have known.
When they were finished, he paid the bill in cash and they went out to the car again. It made Mae feel a tiny bit sad to leave the place where there were lights and cheerful voices and the smells of food cooking, and come out here where it was dark and the air was beginning to take on the late-night chill, and the smell of gasoline was so strong while Jimmy filled the tank. It was easy to be lonely when she was with Jimmy. He had started talking a little more before things had gone all wrong the other night, but that had died out.
Varney said, “You ready to drive some more?”
She drove while he slept, but she found as she drove that the night didn’t bother her much, because she forgot about it for long periods. She was thinking about Jimmy while he slept. She could tell during dinner that he had become more settled in his mind. It was as though he had been shocked and confused at first, but had finally made some sense of what had happened. To Mae, that was a very good sign. It meant he was going to be all right. He had not lost his health, and he had not lost his nerve. She drove through the night devising ways to make this work. She considered getting him to marry her, but there were too many reasons why that would be unwise. He would have a responsibility to give her money, but he would also have a right to some of hers, including the money Tracy had been paying her to be with him. And that would stop. He wouldn’t pay Tracy for his own wife. Mae would have no income at all. No, marriage was not for her.
In the morning, Jimmy took the wheel and drove into Cleveland while she rested. They turned in the car at the airport, and rented a new one at another lot. Mae was preparing to drive on again, but he stopped at noon and checked into a hotel.
Mae was delighted. It was a nice hotel, with room service and a beautiful lobby with a marble floor. She determined to make this phase of the trip the very best for him. He might have been distracted and inattentive while he was scared and in pain, but he had recovered enough now so she believed he would remember what she did next. She made herself devote every moment to him. Now that they were in good light, she could examine the wound better and see that it had no signs of infection. She bathed him, changed the dressing, brought him food from the restaurant downstairs, massaged him. On the second day, he asked her to dye his hair again. “The guy who shot me saw that it’s light brown,” he said. “Darken it.”
This time, Mae did something more radical, a gesture for him. After she had colored his hair, she waited until he slept again, and colored her own too. She made it the same as his, but with lighter highlights. When he awoke, he looked at her for a long time without speaking. Then he wordlessly took off her clothes and made love to her.
At ten the next morning, they left the hotel and drove toward Cincinnati. At noon, Jimmy stopped at a restaurant and bought a picnic lunch. They drove for a time looking for a place to stop, until he found a secluded grove of trees near a river. It was quiet and empty and beautiful, and she smiled at him as she ate.
Mae was fascinated by the sight of three birds high up in the sky, circling one another. They seemed to be playing. She couldn’t tell what kind they were. She was just about to turn toward Jimmy to ask if he could tell, but she didn’t, because that was when he brought the blade of the knife across her throat.
A bit later, as Varney dragged her body into the ditch he had dug, he felt himself getting angrier. It was outrageous that Tracy and her stupid sons had done this to him, so that he had needed to kill Mae. He felt this betrayal more strongly than the rest of their offenses. Mae was the part that he held against them most bitterly.
Tracy had let herself get suckered. She was so greedy that all she had needed to hear was a high number, and she was in. He supposed that he should not have been surprised. He had even suspected there was something wrong with the way she was thinking about the job at the moment he had heard of it. Varney had not imagined that Prescott was behind the offer, but that was not the point. A man didn’t have to be clairvoyant to survive, if only people would take reasonable precautions. Well, she was going to have to make reparations.
38
When Prescott was still four blocks away from the office building in Cincinnati, he knew that something had already happened.
The sidewalk in front of the building was roped off with yellow POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape. There were three blue-and-white patrol cars parked on the opposite side of the street, three more at the curb just past the tape. There were a number of plain cars, a couple with small insignia on their doors. There were plainclothes cops walking in and out of the building, some of them with tackle boxes that held forensics kits. Prescott turned his car to the right at the next corner so he didn’t have to drive past. He found a gas station where he could see a couple of pay phones, and pulled up to the fence and parked.
He picked up the nearest phone, pumped in some change, and dialed the Los Angeles number. “Millikan,” he said. “I’m in Cincinnati. There’s a crime scene here, and there’s no way the police are going to let me near it. One of us needs to get a look at it.”
It was nearly twelve hours later that Millikan came out of the building, ducked under the tape, and walked down the block to the car where Prescott sat watching.
Prescott walked with him back up the sidewalk, under the police tape, and to the front entrance. A uniformed policeman inside the door nodded to Millikan, then turned his eyes toward Prescott, but Millikan foreclosed the question. “He’s with me.” The two went up the stairs quickly instead of waiting for the elevator, so the cop didn’t have time to stare at Prescott and wonder whether being with a visiting professor from some college was enough to make a man welcome in this particular spot.
The two walked along the upstairs hallway shoulder to shoulder, while Millikan spoke in a low voice. “The family owned the building under the name of the family’s corporation, and charged themselves rent.”
“What about these companies?” He pointed at Crestview Wholesale, and swept his hand toward the row of other doors, all with different names on them.
“All of them—the travel agency, the salon and manicure place, the credit lender—were dba’s: the mother or one of the sons ‘doing business as.’ Half of them connect with the others through doors inside, like hotel suites. You’ll see.”
He opened the door of the wholesale office, stepped around the desk in front, and pointed down at the floor. “It’s a shame you didn’t get to see this before they took the bodies out, but there will be pictures. This is where he did the mother. I think she was sitting in this chair when he came in the door. She swiveled around and took a step to get away, and he was on her. It was sort of like a big cat taking down an antelope—kind of flings his weight onto her back so she just runs into the ground. He grabbed her by the hair with the left hand and sliced the throat with the right, then shoved the face back down into the rug. He’s not hurt as bad as we’d hoped.”
Millikan stepped carefully across the carpet to a door that led off to another room. “Next he goes this way. It’s the travel agency, according to the sign on the door. I don’t know if he made noise doing Mom, or if he knew this one was going to be armed, or what. But as he’s walking, he’s getting out his gun.”
Prescott nodded and waited. Millikan pushed open the door and stood to the side so Prescott could stand where he had been. In the wall at the other side of the room there were three bullet holes with wooden dowels stuck in them. The holes were all spattered with bright spots of blood where they had passed through a body into the wall. Millikan said nothing, only watched Prescott sidestep, bend his knees slightly, and raise his right arm to line up with the three dowels so they pointed up the arm toward his right eye. Prescott held his position for a few seconds, then looked around him to study the room.
The next step came to Prescott immediately, and Millikan could see it happening. He kept his right arm pointed at the three spots on the wall, took three steps diagonally forward, bent over to look at the outline of the
