Millikan moved toward the door, but the crowd seemed to tighten and solidify in front of him. As he struggled, he shouted above the pounding music, “Excuse me! Pardon! Sorry! Coming through!” He gained a few steps, but then there were four men ahead who had all just come in the door. They were staring stupidly into the big room, trying to get their bearings, just as the music told Millikan the dancer on the stage was reaching some kind of climactic moment in her performance. Millikan tapped the nearest man and shouted, “Excuse me,” and that made him a few more feet before he was stopped again. Millikan craned his neck to see past the next group of customers. The doorway was empty. The killer had slipped out.
Millikan felt a wave of panicky heat grip his chest and spine. He yanked out his wallet and opened it, waving it in front of him. All it had in its plastic window was his California driver’s license, but he shouted, “Police officer! One side! Police! One side.” His voice was stentorian, the authority in it only a remnant left for years in storage, like the old uniforms he would never throw away, but the tone of urgency and need was real. The men in front of him might not have been convinced he was a police officer, but they seemed to know that he was not joking, and they made way. In a few more seconds he was through the doorway, patting his coat to put his hand on the gun as he trotted out into the parking lot.
Varney stared at Millikan with intense interest. Millikan carried himself as though he were armed. That didn’t seem to Varney to make much sense. On television they had said he was a professor. But Varney did not waste time questioning what he could see. Millikan was here, and he was moving farther from the bright lights around the building and into the rows of parked cars.
From here, looking through the tinted window in the back of the sport utility vehicle where Varney sat, cut off from the sounds of Millikan’s feet and shielded from the breeze that ruffled Millikan’s wiry gray hair, Varney felt as though he were watching him on television again. Millikan was turning his whole body round and round now, looking in every direction, then walking a few steps and doing it again. That was a look of despair. Even if Varney had not been able to make out the wrinkled brow and the frantic eyes, he could have told from Millikan’s body what he was feeling. When a man stopped and began spinning like that, he was out of ideas.
Varney waited until Millikan had turned away from him and stepped off toward the other side of the parking lot before he got out of the SUV and began to follow him. He would get Millikan now, and then go into cover again somewhere near the body to wait for Prescott to show himself.
Varney had a sudden, unexpected feeling of joy. He had just been through the worst period of his life. All this time, he had been upset about it, but had been quietly determined to wait it out and endure until it was over. He had suffered the humiliation of repeated failure, and the shame of having to be dependent on Tracy and her sons, and the pain of the bullet piercing his forearm. He’d had to maintain his discipline, burn out of himself all weakness and hold to his clarity of purpose while it had all happened. Finally, he’d had to make Mae into a human sacrifice, so there would be no barrier, no human connection to put a limit to his rage.
He had gone from place to place, finding the people who must have had a part in his betrayal, and obliterating them. It had taken him a few days, but now he knew. His rage had made him harder and cleaner, and now the rage was beginning to change into exultation. His period of trial was over: he had won. He wasn’t fighting now; he was just collecting the last of the enemies, bagging them like game. His period of misery and agony had been a test. If he had been weak and undisciplined, he would have drifted lower and lower until he died. But he had used every day of those hard, horrible months working to make himself better and stronger. He felt he was approaching a kind of perfection tonight, not a mere adventurer anymore, but a perfect warrior, tempered and purified.
He stepped around the building after Millikan. This side was even darker, but he noticed the steel rungs of a ladder built into the side of the brick wall for maintenance men to reach the roof—probably to fix the air-conditioning and clean the vents. That was where he would wait for Prescott after he got Millikan. Once again, he marveled at the change in the current of the universe. For months, nothing had gone right. Now, he reached out a hand, and the things he needed simply came to him, like gifts.
He studied Millikan’s form, walking up the aisle of parked cars, the right arm bent, the hand near the lapel of his open coat so he could reach in and pull out the gun. Varney could not allow that gun to come out and make noise. He screwed the silencer on the barrel of his own pistol, stopped walking, and aimed. The bullet would pass through Millikan’s temple, he decided. That would keep some half-conscious nerve impulse from reaching the hand and discharging the gun.
“Last chance, Slick.”
Varney held the gun at arm’s length, but he knew he could not fire. Prescott had to be first. Where had he come from? The roof, of course. Prescott had simply gotten there first. Varney lowered the pistol a few degrees slowly, listening for the sound of Prescott’s feet on the gravel, stepping up behind him to take it. “Last chance?”
“Live or die,” said Prescott. “You pick.”
Varney knew then that Prescott was not going to step forward to take the gun. He ducked, slapped the ground, dove toward the nearest car, and rolled behind it. As he came up beyond the car, his arm already extended over the hood to fire, Prescott’s bullet passed through his forehead.
Hours later, there was a moment when the police had finished with Prescott for a time. He took a breath and looked at the crowd of onlookers beyond the barriers. A familiar shape turned and began walking away, but he had already begun to move, and in twenty steps he had caught her. “Jeanie.”
She turned and looked at him, but she kept walking. “I’m glad you got that man, and he didn’t get you.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Will you stop and talk to me?”
She stopped, her arms folded across her chest.
He said, “My name is Roy Prescott.”
She shook her head. “Whoever that is, it’s not somebody I want to know. My time with Bob Greene is over, and that’s okay. I was right that I wouldn’t be sorry it happened. Good luck.”
She turned away and began to walk, but he stayed close to her. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“What are you going to do?”
She sighed. “What I had always planned to do. If Hobart is dead, then Nolan’s is finished a year or so earlier than I thought. I’m just skipping ahead, that’s all.”
Prescott said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you or mess up your plans. Look, this place is closing because of me. I would like—”
“Don’t give me anything else,” she said. “I don’t need it. Just go away now, so it can be over.”
EPILOGUE
Only about half the seats on the late-night flight to Los Angeles had been sold. Prescott was resting, lying across the seats in row 16 with his eyes closed, so Daniel Millikan had moved to sit alone in row 28. He had turned off the overhead lights as the plane climbed, so he was in the dark beside the plane’s small window, staring down at the rows of tiny yellow lights that formed the traces of streets of one of the towns just west of St. Louis.
He had known that this time would come. It would be over, and he would be alone at night. There was not silence, but the unchanging drone of the airplane’s engines enforced his solitude, keeping him from hearing any sound that was human. It had been months since he had answered the telephone and been surprised by the voice of Robert Cushner. He had been startled, but that could not now, or ever, serve as an excuse. He had decided to give the old man the name and telephone number of Roy Prescott.
How many since then? How many dead? Two police officers and two security guards in L.A., the maid and the clerk at the motel, the ex-husband of Donna Halsey, that woman in Cincinnati and her three sons, the owner of the strip club back there in St. Louis. What was that? Twelve? And possibly more. Prescott had said there was a woman hostage in Minnesota, and this killer would not have let her go. Who else? Of course: the killer himself. He came to Millikan as an afterthought. It was because the decision to call Prescott had included in it the death of the killer. To someone else, Millikan could have protested that it had not been the only possible outcome. But he did not now. He had known it was the best one he could hope for, the ending he had embraced in his imagination at the beginning. That was what you were asking for when you called Roy Prescott. He felt an urge to pray, to seek forgiveness for
