Varney jogged back to his apartment building on a street parallel to the one he had used before, short of breath and feeling a tightness in his calves and thighs that he had not felt in years. That made him more angry. He had been living in a stream, swimming against the current. The moment he had rested, he had begun to drift backward, losing what he had accomplished in the past two months.
When he had dressed and eaten, he walked downtown to the office building. As he walked, he began to feel better. The idiotic interlude with Prescott had not killed him, and the disappointment he had felt since could not be allowed to destroy him.
He climbed the stairs, walked along the hallway, and opened the door to Crestview Wholesale to find Tracy at her desk again. As she looked up at him, her eyelids half-closed wearily.
“Hello, sugar. Nice of you to grace us with your presence this afternoon.”
He knew that look, that tired, quiet look as though she had tried to help him and failed a hundred times. He had grown up with it. He had spent his early childhood trying to fight it, to remove it from his mother’s face by trying to do things that would please her. After that had failed, he had tried to avoid the look, to keep from attracting her attention, or simply to evade her and be somewhere else. “I was working out.”
“You mean lifting weights and all that?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t bring any weights when I came. But that’s the sort of thing.”
She raised her eyes and made a cradle for her chin out of the backs of her hands. She blinked once and smiled sweetly. “I always wondered about that. Why would a person do such heavy work for nothing? Why not just get a job running around and lifting heavy things?”
Varney said, “It’s part of the life. You have to be stronger and faster, or the other guy will kill you.” He was pleased that she had given him the chance to remind her that he was not just some sap who was paid to listen to her. She seemed to feel it too. She wrinkled her forehead further and shook her dyed red hair in a manner that suggested that the ways of men were far too mysterious for a young girl to understand, and returned her eyes to her bookkeeping.
He stood and waited until she looked up again. “Is there something you needed, sugar?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want you to help me change some things.”
“Like what?”
“I want to look different—change my hair, get some new clothes, that sort of thing. You probably know the best places in Cincinnati.”
She compressed her face into a worried, vexed expression. “I could do better than give you a list of stores and stylists,” she said. “I have some experience with this kind of thing, but you know, to do it right, it runs into a bit of money.”
“I can pay.”
“Really?” She pretended to be uneasy. “I didn’t like to embarrass you or anything, because I thought you must be broke. I didn’t mention it, but that apartment usually rents for a hundred dollars a day.”
Varney watched her face. It had changed from a disapproving irony that was cautious, because she was delicately testing how far she could go without being in danger, to a still-cautious hopefulness, the greed she was feeling rapidly beginning to overwhelm her. He said, “Oh,” in a toneless voice. “Here.” He watched her eyes when she saw the thick sheaf of folded hundreds emerge from his pocket. “Here’s for the time I’ve been in it.” He tossed the three bills on the desk and watched her eyes follow the rest of the bills back to his pocket, then linger there.
Pointed red fingernails that grew into little curves like claws scraped on the wood as her fingertips touched the money lightly and drew it back into her lap. It was not until the money was out of sight that she said disingenuously, “I didn’t mean to sound inhospitable, sugar. I could have waited. Now, about the changes you’re making. We can get started this afternoon, if you like. You come back here around three, will you?”
“Sure.” He turned and left the office. As he walked down the hallway two of the brothers were coming in the other way, but they weren’t walking together. The older one, Marty, was almost to the door. Varney smiled and said hello to him, but Marty seemed to pass through the greeting, not slowing, just making a barely perceptible nod as he continued on his course. The second brother, Nick, seemed to have noticed the exchange and decided that if his older brother had been cool, it must be the wrong decision.
He was warm. “Hey, buddy,” he said with a grin that seemed to be an unfortunate inheritance from some ancestor who had lived in the hills and eaten raccoons. “How you getting by? Everything comfortable over there?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Varney. “I appreciate everything you folks have done.” He had used the word “folks” with no time lost in calculation. He had always had an ear for other people’s diction and a tendency to fall easily into it that was almost a weakness. He kept walking because it was not the time, and certainly not the place, for the conversation he was considering. Tracy and Marty were too close, just beyond the door.
Nick said, “Glad to do it. Is she in there?”
Varney nodded. “I just left her.”
Nick disappeared inside the door and Varney went on. He wondered if he should have come to Cincinnati. It had seemed to be the best way to counter Prescott’s latest stratagem. Prescott had made Buffalo an impossible place for him, then abruptly disengaged. Varney could wear himself out looking for Prescott and hiding from a horde of cops while Prescott rested up and concocted some grand plan to take him by surprise after he had defeated himself. It had seemed to Varney that he had been brilliant in sidestepping before any of that happened. He had selected Cincinnati because it was far enough away to keep the Buffalo police from being a problem but close enough to reach in a day. There were other people in other cities who had served as front men to bring him jobs from time to time, but there were none he would have come to like this; each of them had some quality he didn’t like. They were too unpredictable, or too closely connected with the powerful, or too involved in some business that brought with it worse risks than his did—schemes like bringing drugs into the country or shipping stolen cars out of it.
But now he wondered if the wholesalers might create problems he had not expected. He amended the thought: Tracy was going to be a problem. He had been here a week, and she had already begun looking at him with that bored, detached expression that showed she was wondering when he was going to leave. And now Marty, the oldest son, had begun to look at him with a debased, cruder version of it. He wasn’t sure whether Nick had simply not yet had the conversation with his mother that would make him do the same, or if he had, and had decided that a separate relationship with a man like Varney might be a good idea.
For Varney, being in a place that Prescott didn’t know about, and where he could not find him, was not a mistake. Every minute that Varney stayed out of sight, Prescott would be forced to consider the possibility that Varney was nearby, preparing to kill him. Maybe Prescott would be curious enough to begin searching, and not doing whatever he had intended to do. But Cincinnati had not been what Varney had expected. He was going to need to be watchful.
He went to a big discount store off Beechmont Avenue near the mall, bought some supplies, and brought them back to the apartment. He spent the next three hours making small improvements. He installed dead bolts on the doors. He fitted sawed-off sections of broom handles to the windows so they could not easily be opened from outside. He installed shades. Then he wrapped the handles of the set of steak knives he had bought with electrical tape to improve the grip and hid them in convenient places: in the bathroom cabinet, in the refrigerator, taped to the wall of the closet. If an intruder got very lucky sometime and managed to get between Varney and the gun he’d hidden under the bed, the luck would not necessarily bring a lasting advantage.