He turned on the flashlight, shone it into the hole in the wall, and saw the rough, reddish surface. It was brick. The little office was not just a walled-off section of the grocery store; it was an addition. The brick had once been the outer wall of the building, and it was still there.
Varney stood still. He was surrounded by brick on four sides. He looked up at the suspended layer of acoustic tiles. Whatever was up there, it couldn’t be brick. He glanced at his watch. He had been in here for twenty-five minutes already. Prescott could be here at any moment—might already be out there waiting in the dark for him—and he was wasting time. He reached gingerly under the desk behind the center drawer and disconnected the wires, then pulled the pipe bomb out.
He felt as though Prescott had his arm clenched around his throat, choking off the air, making him flail around desperately, tiring himself with futile struggling. He could picture Prescott, not as just the tall, thin, middle-aged man he had seen slouching in the car in the California parking lot, but as he really was: the cold eyes watching him with sadistic amusement, the thin lips curled just a little at the corners in a mocking smile.
Varney pushed the desk toward the corner of the room. He bent at the knees, tipped it up on its end, and prepared to climb up on it to reach the ceiling, then stopped. Prescott had selected this place. He had chosen everything in it, and modified whatever wasn’t suited to his purpose. Prescott was cunning, calculating in a way that nobody Varney had ever met had been. He was perfectly capable of seeing that the desk could be tipped up on its end and used to climb to the ceiling.
Varney looked around him. Prescott had made sure the room had four brick walls. Varney could tell by the feel of the floor under his feet that the addition had been built on a concrete slab. Could Prescott have neglected the roof? He had probably had a layer of corrugated steel laid in, covered with tar paper and asphalt. He had thought of everything else. What had Prescott not known?
Varney looked down at the floor. The only thing that Prescott had not known was what Varney would do, what Varney would bring with him. Varney tipped the desk again and brought it back down.
He stood on it to reach the back window, then used his knife to loosen the screws in the plywood that covered the glass. He removed the square, opened the window, and examined the steel bars. He could tell by feel that the bars were in a frame anchored in the brick by four bolts at the corners.
He lifted his two pipe bombs from the floor and set one in the frame at each of the two lower corners outside under the windowsill. He opened his backpack and took out the third pipe charge he had brought but not installed, and used duct tape to secure it to the frame at the third bolt. Then he set himself to rewiring the three bombs in three parallel circuits, so the electrical current would reach all three at the same instant. He spliced the three entry wires and the three exit wires into two little twists. He took the insulated cord from the answering machine, cut it, stripped an inch of it, separated the two wires, and spliced one to each of his two twists.
Varney brought the window down, leaving only enough space for his cord. He used the rest of his duct tape to cover the glass, then screwed the plywood back over the window. He pushed the desk into the rear corner of the room near the electrical outlet, and crawled under it with his backpack. He used his knife to cut two small squares of cloth from the bottom of his shirt, rolled them into balls, and stuck them into his ears, took off his jacket and wound it around his head so it covered his face, ears, and neck. He curled into a ball under the desk and felt for the plastic plate of the electrical outlet. He opened his mouth to keep his eardrums from blowing out, took three deep breaths to calm himself, then inserted the plug.
The noise was so loud the air seemed to turn solid. The concrete foundation under him jumped to slap against his body as though he had fallen. He was aware that the big, heavy metal desk hopped above him and came down askew. The hand that he had extended to insert the plug had been punched aside so hard it tingled.
Varney lay still. He felt as though he had been injured in some way, jolted like a person in a high-speed crash, shaken by an impact so that his joints were strained and everything inside him had been shaken. It was silent. He tested his muscles and found he was able to stir, and when he did, his presence of mind gathered itself out of fragments and returned. He remembered he was in a hurry. Time was passing. He slowly crawled out from inside the desk and pulled the jacket off his face.
The room was dark, the air so thick he could barely breathe. He held the jacket over his nose and mouth and found his flashlight with his knee. He turned it on. The air was a cloud of plaster dust, but he could see that up and to the side, the plywood had been blown inward off the window. About half of the acoustic tiles in the ceiling had been knocked out of their metal frame, and the others were tilted, the frame still swinging on its wires.
He moved to the window, and his heart stopped. The bars were still there. He moved closer. They weren’t at the right angle. He reached out and gave the nearest bar a push, but it burned his hand. “Shit!” he hissed, drawing his hand back and sticking it in his mouth. But he had seen the bars move. He pushed the desk the couple of feet to the side so that it was under the window. He lay on its surface and kicked at the bars with his feet. They moved, then jerked out farther. He kicked again and again, until the lower bolts were out of the brick. He rolled, stood on the desk, used his backpack to brush the broken glass off the sill, then used it to hold the bars away from the wall. He eased himself onto the small window.
He stopped for a moment to shine his flashlight around the inside of the office to be sure he had left nothing. Then he lowered himself to the ground, trotted up the dark street for a half block, cut into the backyard of a house to reach the next street. He heard the faint, faraway sound of sirens. Lights were going on in houses, the glows of lamps falling in squares on the spaces of darkness where he had wanted to walk, so he dodged them, ducking low and stepping quickly along the walls. He broke into a run. He was out of the box. He could breathe the soft, cool air of night.
15
Buffalo was not a huge town. Whenever Prescott had asked somebody how to get to his next stop, the person would say, “It’s about fifteen minutes away.” In Los Angeles they would usually say, “It’s about an hour from here,” and they would mean on the freeway, if traffic was moving. Earlier today, he had sometimes found himself in sluggish spots, but not like the ones at home. By evening the lines of cars had thinned out, and the fifteen-minute drives could be done in ten.
He had made twenty-two stops before it got to be too late in the evening to go on. He had made a list of the places where this particular killer probably spent time. There were only seven gyms in the area that would have appealed to this man. Those were the ones that were fairly new and spacious, had huge numbers of people coming in each day, and catered to the twenty-to-thirty crowd. The small, hard-core places that were in tiny, dark buildings and smelled of ancient sweat would not have seemed safe to this man: his best defense was protective coloration. The old iron works where men turned themselves into something like small steers would have been too intimate for him. But Prescott was sure that this killer was in the habit of going somewhere to work out, so he had put pictures in every gym where nobody stopped him.