He did one last check and closed the door, holding the knob with the rag in his hand. He got into his car and drove onto the street, eager to get out of Buffalo. Varney knew that the police would already have given his picture to the agencies they habitually dealt with: the Canadian officials across the bridges over the Niagara, the New York State Police, and the local cops all over this area. He stayed away from the border and avoided the Thruway, with its entrance and exit booths. He drove the secondary roads. He followed Main Street until it was just Route 5, and then it merged into Route 20. This part of the state was the bed of an ancient, larger great lake, scraped smooth and flat by glaciers. The roads were straight and broad and fast.
As soon as he was outside Buffalo, passing through old towns that had become suburbs, he began to feel slightly better. If he could just stay awake and keep driving for a few hours, the trouble would fall behind. He had spent years studying the habits of pursuers. He knew that the only nationwide manhunts were a creation of television networks. Policemen were municipal employees who answered to city councils selected by local taxpayers. The only time they paid much attention to what was going on in some other city was when they had strong reasons to believe that an identifiable man was about to arrive in their town to kill somebody in particular. The circulars and wanted lists came in by the thousands from distant places, and piled up until they were filed away. Pretty soon, all the faces looked alike.
In a half hour he was nearly thirty miles from the house approaching Silver Creek, and while he thought about that, he had traveled two more and gone past it. He was cruising along at fifty-five miles an hour without a traffic signal to delay him, and the nearest cars a quarter mile ahead or a quarter mile behind. The drivers couldn’t actually see him: he was just an assumption they made because a car couldn’t be moving along a public highway without a driver.
After an hour, he knew that he was out. The open roads were beginning to be more open, with long stretches of farmland that didn’t seem to have anybody in evidence to work it. There were small clusters of buildings at crossroads that did not deserve to be called villages: they seemed to exist only as excuses to have a lower speed limit for a hundred yards so people driving past could read homemade signs that said FRESH STRAWBERRIES or CORN, or have time to notice that there was a gas station on the corner.
Varney kept going. He wanted to give himself enough breathing space, and he knew he wouldn’t have it until he had gone far enough to be out of the range of Buffalo’s television stations and in the zone of some other city’s stations, where somebody else’s picture would be on the news.
Varney tried to make himself feel better. He had been the one who had gone after Prescott, and he was still healthy, still free, still anonymous. He had gone right into Prescott’s trap and come out of it unharmed. Reminding himself of those things did not help. Prescott had hounded him out of Buffalo: Prescott had made him run away.
He let the car slow down a bit, toying with the idea of going back. Prescott wasn’t some petty irritant. When he thought of Prescott, his stomach tightened, his heart began to pound, and after a minute, his jaw began to hurt from clenching his teeth. It wasn’t only what Prescott had done, it was what Prescott was, and what he thought. When Varney had listened to him talk he had felt it instantly. Prescott was so sure of himself, so full of confidence that he was better than Varney—the tone of his voice said, “Well, look at us, the two of us. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”—that Varney had found himself tense, coiled to spring at him, even though he was miles away and the only connection was an electrical impulse over a telephone wire.
Varney sensed something else about Prescott, and he wasn’t quite able to grasp it. Prescott was an impostor. He was a fake; the personality was something assumed in order to fool Varney. It was as though he had constructed an identity, a false one, just to use against Varney. Maybe it was only that he wasn’t as fearless or as invulnerable as he pretended to be: like a bully who sensed some weakness in a smaller kid and set about systematically probing to find out what it was, tormenting him by building himself up and making the victim feel smaller. But Varney had been getting a strange feeling that maybe Prescott was something else: that the face he had constructed was there to make him look more ordinary than he was—that he was actually worse than he seemed, and that if he showed his real face, Varney would dismiss the idea of fighting and escape him.
Sometimes it felt to Varney that Prescott was a man that he hated not just because he was an enemy, but because he was familiar. It was as though Prescott were the vague, dark presence that he had sensed just out of sight, that he knew was coming for him, or sometimes was just forming, coalescing, when he awoke, sweating, from a bad dream.
Varney drove across the line into Pennsylvania, and a couple of miles beyond, before he realized that he had done it. Being in a new state made him much safer, but he refused to let himself be reassured. He was going to be smart this time. He would keep going into Ohio, and try to get as close to Cincinnati as he could before he slept.
He crossed the border before noon, and made Cleveland an hour later. He stopped there for a hamburger and some coffee, then got on Route 71 and drove south toward Columbus. It was over 140 miles away, but when he arrived, he stopped at a gas station, filled the tank, and bought some more coffee. Cincinnati was now just a bit over a hundred miles away.
It was evening before Varney reached the edge of Cincinnati. He was so tired he had begun to feel dizzy. He knew he needed to stop somewhere and sleep, but he had to take a look at the office building first, just to convince himself that it was still there. He drove through the streets, heading vaguely toward the river until he reached Colerain Avenue and let it take him to the center of the city.
He drove past the building slowly. The old two-story structure had been built in an era when it probably hadn’t seemed odd for a commercial building to have a peaked roof like a house, and there had been no compelling reason to build higher, at least in this part of town. But the place was better than it looked: the rooms inside had hardwood floors and big, solid doors, and the red-brick facade was dirty but intact. Varney could see nothing about the place or the streets around it that had changed since he’d last seen it.
He had been here only twice before, with Coleman. The first time, Coleman had warned him. “They’re going to be friendly, and easy to get along with, but don’t let yourself get too comfortable, and don’t mouth off to Mama.”
“Mama?”
“Yeah, and don’t call her that.” Coleman blew out a breath impatiently, in that way he had of signifying that everything he said was something any sensible person should already know but somehow Varney didn’t. “Her name is Tracy. She’s the one you have to pay attention to. She has three sons, Roger, Nick, and Marty, and they’re the ones who run the business. All she runs is them.”
“You mean they’re a bunch of Mama’s—”
“No, that ain’t what I mean,” Coleman interrupted. “Any one of them would cut you just for the fun of seeing you bleed and dance around, and that’s the problem. They can’t trust each other, don’t even seem to like each other much. They’re about a year or two apart in age, so I don’t even know which is older. They all had different fathers, and even God doesn’t know where they are or what became of any of them. The boys each know that the others won’t listen to them, but that they will listen to her. She’s what keeps them from turning on each other. Maybe they like her, or think she’s smart or something. Or maybe she’s just a convenience, so they can work together. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”