Before Varney was aware of it, he had already walked a mile from Tracy’s office. He was alive again, in control. He was in the best shape of his life, he was thinking, making decisions, preparing to set off on a hunt. The interruption of his life was over, and he was an adventurer again.
32
Varney was standing by the bed, folding clothes and putting them into his suitcase, when he heard Mae’s light footsteps on the stairs. She had never said anything about Duane, but he suspected she knew about him, because since Varney had killed him, she had never raised the issue of painting the kitchen again. She must have noticed that the tarp that had been in the closet with the paint was missing, and figured out where it had gone. She had also changed the way she entered the apartment. He stood in the doorway and looked across the kitchen at the door. The key in the lock was quiet. The door swung inward an inch or two and stopped, as though she was looking for signs of trouble. She saw Varney, came in the rest of the way, and set the bag of groceries on the kitchen table. “Hi,” she said, watching him.
“Hi.” He returned to his packing, folding shirts expertly and setting them aside. He always took special care with his shirts. They would be the final layer, so when he opened the suitcase he could pull them out quickly and hang them up. When he traveled, he liked to have his clothes professionally washed, ironed, and packaged, because wrinkles made him nervous. Anything that made him the one in a crowd that somebody remembered was dangerous. But this time he was not going to take the clothes to a laundry: he was too impatient to get on the road.
Mae padded around silently, putting away the food she had bought, waiting for Varney to speak, to tell her what was happening. He watched her for a moment. She was pretty, especially when she was alone with him and preoccupied like this. She was alien, like a different species of animal, with thin, birdlike bones and graceful movements. He kept looking at her while he folded the last shirt he had chosen. She wasn’t too pretty, he decided. She had probably gone all the way to the store and back without having a man stare at her.
“I’m going on a trip,” he said.
“Oh?” She was being careful to sound casual about it, and knew enough not to ask any questions.
He tried to find words like the ones that other people might use, then pitched his voice to sound the way theirs sounded. “Would you like to go with me?”
She seemed to struggle, as though she had never considered that he might say such a thing, and she had to convince herself that it was true. Then she had to select the safest response.
“I think I would,” she said. “If I wouldn’t be too much trouble.” She stood with her shoulders drawn up to her neck in a frozen shrug. “Where do you want to go?”
He let the part about wanting pass, even though it irritated him: wanting to go meant it was just some self-indulgent whim, when it deserved to be dignified with “have to” because it was a job. “Minnesota,” he said. “Up north of Minneapolis.” He hurried to spare himself the annoyance she would cause with her next couple of questions. “We’d be gone for a while, probably at least two weeks, and maybe a month. I’m driving up.”
She stared at him and tiny worry lines appeared on her forehead and beside her eyes. He realized it had occurred to her that maybe he was planning to take her somewhere and kill her. The replacement tarp she had been fearing to see on the kitchen floor wouldn’t be necessary if he took her out in some woods.
He said, “It’s a job that I got through Tracy. We drive up, I do it, and we drive home. It’s a long trip, pretty dull. If you don’t want to come, don’t do it for me.”
The lines disappeared, and her color seemed to return. “I want to,” she said. “I do. I like to go places, and I’ve never been up there.” She was suddenly animated. “I’m so excited.” She hurried to the closet and started picking hangers off the rod and putting them back. “I don’t know what to bring.”
“You don’t want a lot of luggage,” he said. “A couple of pairs of jeans, a couple of sweatshirts, sneakers . . .” He relented. “Maybe one nice outfit. Minneapolis and St. Paul are kind of big, so we may be able to go out a little to good restaurants.”
Mae was a person who could actually be seen in the act of thinking. She got through it like a person feeling a pain passing: a slight knitting of the brows, then it was over. Now it was different. She snatched a couple of hangers, threw them on the bed, went to the dresser, pulled a few items from different drawers as she was talking. “I’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes, if we need to leave right away. If we don’t, I’d like to trim your hair and touch up the highlights a little first.” She paused. “Of course, I can do that when we get there, but if you’re working, you probably want to look as good as you can, right? I mean, as different from the way you used to look.” She didn’t wait for an answer, but jumped to the next thought. “I should tell Tracy that I’m going. We should leave a light on in the apartment, and pull the shades down. Maybe the bathroom light, so it’s dim, like a night-light, and you can’t see it from outside in the day. I’ll just take this dress. If you like this dress?” She held it up on the hanger in front of her body.
Varney decided to defend his concentration from her scattered musings by dispatching all of the questions at once. “The dress will be fine. I’ll leave the bathroom light on. Tracy knows. Bring the hair stuff, and you can do me in a hotel on the way. I’d like to get going.”
He waited until she was in the bathroom before he closed and latched his suitcase, then lifted a second one to the bed and opened it. This one contained his equipment. There were a few pairs of gloves, some hats and shoes, some locksmith’s skeleton keys, a couple of sets of picks, a slim-jim for pulling car-door locks, some Mag-lites in different sizes, three nine-millimeter pistols with spare ammunition magazines, a commando knife with a guttered blade and a nearly flat handle. He added his big envelope to the suitcase, and closed it.
He changed into a comfortable pair of khaki pants, some good, casual shoes, and a blue oxford shirt, pulled down the window shade, and waited. A few minutes later, Mae had filled her small bag and looked at him anxiously.
“Do I look all right?”
“You know you do,” he said. “Hair, makeup, clothes, all that. It’s what you do for a living.” Then he frowned. “That reminds me. Where I’m going now, that’s what I do for a living. If you’re going, you’ll want to listen hard to what I say.”
“I will,” said Mae. “I promise.”
“Start now. Once we leave here, you don’t call anybody on the phone, or anything like that. You don’t strike up conversations with people in restaurants or hotels. What you want more than anything is not to be noticed or remembered. A man or woman traveling alone might get noticed—for different reasons, maybe—but if they’re traveling together, they’re just a couple. The man isn’t dangerous and the woman isn’t available, so people won’t look hard to figure those things out. So you stick close to me.”
She nodded, maybe a little too energetically. He wasn’t sure she really had taken it in and understood. “I know that,” she said. “I’m ready.” He picked up their suitcases and let her open and close the doors for him.
Varney drove out of town with a feeling that was close to joy. He was on the road, with a pretty woman at his side. She was not flashy enough to make him feel visible, but she was pleasant to look at. He knew she probably would have gotten to chattering again if she had been smart enough to realize that she was important to him, that she was the best part of his disguise. He had told her, in case it occurred to her later, but she didn’t seem to have absorbed the full meaning of it.