There, in the middle of the board, among the flyers advertising rock-climbing trips, hang-gliding lessons, and concerts, was a picture of Varney—an eight-by-ten glossy color photograph. He glanced at the young man on duty at the desk and felt heat grow in his temples and wash down the sides of his neck to his shoulders. The young man wasn’t looking up, but Varney didn’t recognize him. He must have been hired recently, or transferred from an evening shift.
Varney walked past the board, bent to adjust the weight on the nearest machine, saw the young man turn to gaze at the women in the exercise class, snatched the picture down, and shoved it into the back of his shirt. He went into the men’s room, stepped inside a stall, and took the picture out.
It had looked at first like a photograph of him, but his mind rebelled at the proposition. He had never posed to have a professional picture taken. He looked more closely, and formed a different theory. It was a fake of some sort, maybe a computer-enhancement of some tape in a security camera that had caught him during the past few days. His heart was still pounding from his run, and the sweat was still coming, but his body’s reaction seemed to intensify. He read the print at the bottom of the picture.
“Do you know this man? Age 25–30, five feet ten to six feet, 175 lbs., and in good physical condition. Substantial cash reward offered for reliable information.” Varney studied the telephone number. Area code 716. It was a local number. Prescott was here.
14
It was late at night when Varney approached the darkened one-story commercial building on the corner. He could see that it had been divided into three storefronts facing Cumberland Avenue. He walked along the street behind it at first to see if there was a car parked in the small blacktop lot, but there was no vehicle. Next he walked back on Cumberland to the storefronts along the street side.
The back windows of each section of the building were small and high, with permanent iron bars to prevent burglaries. Only one had a rear door, and Varney could tell by the position that it opened into the tiny grocery store. None of the windows along the back was lighted, and one even had boards nailed up across it from the inside.
He moved farther off and then came around the block to see the front of the building from across Cumberland. The only possibility seemed to be the one with the boards over the rear window. Prescott could not have rented the grocery store, and the window of the thrift store was hung with a rack of used women’s dresses, while the back was shelves of shoes and ancient toasters and toys. But the store on the end was in a state of remodeling of some sort. The front window was covered with brown butcher paper. Maybe Varney had made a mistake about the address.
He had used a telephone directory on the Internet. He had typed in the phone number and clicked on SEARCH, and found this address. But maybe the phone number was an old one for the store that had been in this building and had gone out of business, and the number had been reassigned to Prescott. The website claimed all the numbers were automatically updated every day, but how could he know whether that was true?
Varney looked around. There was a pay telephone on the wall in front of the liquor store. He made his way to the store, put in two quarters and dialed the number, then set the receiver on top of the telephone and trotted across the street. He moved around the building, put his ear close to the boarded-up back window, and listened. He heard the faint ringing of the telephone. There was a click, and a recording. “You have reached the offices of Prescott Enterprises. Please leave your telephone number and your name, unless you wish to remain anonymous. Your call will be returned within twenty-four hours.”
Varney walked back to the front of the liquor store and hung up the telephone, then kept walking. Prescott had found his suitcase, opened it, and seen the plane ticket to Buffalo. Then he had gotten the pictures made somehow, and come here. He was in the process of setting up a local field office, like he was the F.B.I. or something. Prescott was not a single frustrating experience that he could put behind him and forget. Prescott was a monster. Varney had somehow, unaccountably, attracted his attention, somehow awakened him. He had come, and he kept coming and coming. He couldn’t be scared off or ignored. He had to be killed.
Varney circled the place warily, looking this time at all of the sights besides the new office. He looked at nearby windows for signs that somebody was watching, scrutinized the eaves of buildings for surveillance cameras. He walked up and down the streets around the neighborhood searching for closed vans that might be listening posts. Then he simply left. If Prescott was watching, how could he let Varney come into sight and disappear again? He couldn’t.
Varney walked, scanned, and listened, his body poised to run, his hand close to the pistol in his jacket, his mind concentrating on the buildings ahead. He evaluated and chose the spaces between buildings ahead where he would duck out of sight, the straight passages where he would sprint, the dark pockets where he could crouch and wait for Prescott to come running after him. He kept walking until he was sure: he had not made a mistake. Prescott had.
He went to his car and drove home. It took Varney an hour to gather his equipment, make a few modifications and adjustments, and drive back to Prescott’s new office. A rule of Varney’s discipline was keeping a small but well-chosen supply of the implements of his trade. Now he went through his inventory, running in his mind each of the possible problems that could occur. In Los Angeles he had tried to succeed by speed and audacity, because he had not known enough about his opponent. This time he prepared.
When he returned to the neighborhood, he parked his car in an unoccupied space in a lot behind a big three-story apartment building two streets from Cumberland. Then he took his small backpack and walked to the store. He looked in where the butcher paper didn’t quite reach the edge of the front window to be sure that nothing had changed in the past hour. There was nothing in the plain white room but a metal desk, a chair, and a few two-by-fours and sheets of plywood left by the carpenters.
He stepped to the door. He had two locks to defeat, a dead bolt and a double-plunger door lock. Probably Prescott had assumed that if he found the place, he would not be up to that, but Prescott had been wrong. Varney had done more than break into a few crummy apartments. When he had worked with Coleman Simms, he had learned.
During those years, when they weren’t traveling, they had stayed on Coleman’s ranch in California. He remembered a day when he had awakened in his room upstairs, and known instantly that there were strangers in the house. He had looked out the window and seen no vehicles, but that had not dissuaded him. He had taken the pistol from under the unused pillow beside his, crept down the stairs, and listened.
Coleman had been sitting in the kitchen talking to two men when Varney had appeared in the doorway. Coleman had looked up.
“This is him,” he had said.
The two men were dressed like workmen, in jeans and identical light blue work shirts with names in embroidered script above the left breast pocket—Dave and Tim. They looked at Varney a bit anxiously, and Varney knew that the two men were all right: Coleman must have told them who he was.
Coleman said to him, “Dave and Tim are locksmiths. They’re going to teach you.” It had been much harder than community college. For five weeks he had studied books and diagrams of shafts and tumblers and springs and cylinders. Each day he had practiced the use of the pick and tension wrench on door locks that Dave and Tim had mounted on boards. Under their supervision he had taken locks apart and studied their mechanisms, then put them together again.