by Thomas Perry
The good part was that the constant squabbling about money had ended. Whatever negotiations she had with the men who stayed or passed through were carried on out of earshot, and seemed to be resolved mostly in her favor. The things she liked—new dresses, makeup, hair and nail work—were in plentiful supply. But he still was alone most of the time. He got up and went to school, came home, ate what was left over from the dinners she had shared with her male guests, washed the dishes, and went out again. If he was home in time to be gone again by the time she woke up, he had nothing to fear from her displeasure.
For years, he made no further forays into the world of adventure he had glimpsed in the death of Aunt Toni. He prepared. He got up in the morning and did his sets with weights, chinned himself, did crunches and push-ups, showered, and went to school. Then he came home, did his homework, ate what he could find around the house, and went out to run a few miles. When he came back he did a second workout, showered, and went out again to walk the night streets.
He detested the weak, so he worked and sweated to be strong and hard and fast. Failure was humiliating and brought unwelcome attention, so he avoided trouble by doing his homework and getting good grades.
In the second month of his senior year of high school, it seemed to occur to his mother, all at once, that he existed. It was as though while he was young and small he was able to be invisible, but by that October, he had grown too big to ignore. He had to endure detailed recitations of her daily life. He had to endure less specific lists of sacrifices she had made for his sake. He had always had to hear her say that having him around was such a terrible burden that she could not stand it any longer. But now he had to experience a strange new set of indictments: the complaints against his father that had been silently refined in her mind during six years of resentment were now delivered to the boy as though the transgressions were his.
Varney waited. He concentrated on his routines, for he was of a curiously disciplined temperament. He worked harder and longer, and maintained his silence. This was a method he had perfected in order to stay invisible when he was small, and he found it worked nearly as well now that he had been rediscovered. He lasted until June. On the afternoon of his graduation he came home with a diploma and began to pack for his life of adventure just as his mother was waking up.
She came out of her bedroom and stared at him, then went back in to get her robe. When she came out this time, she had tied it so tight at the waist that her eyes were bulging. She said in a voice like cracking glass, “What do you think you’re doing?”
He shrugged. “I just graduated. Time to go.”
She shrieked at him, “You bastard!” Then she began to pace. “I raised you all by myself! I gave you everything you ever had! Everything you ever did was because I did it for you! Now you’re just going to leave?”
He looked at her, puzzled. She had always said that he was a burden and she wanted him to leave. “What else?”
“What else? You ask me what else? You can get a job and do the same for me. You can—”
He was already shaking his head. “No.” He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t interested in any more trouble. He went on packing. He had not anticipated this. From the moment when he had been old enough to decipher her words, she had said she couldn’t wait until this day. But the fact that her reaction was the opposite wasn’t enough of a surprise to disturb him. It simply explained a few of her most recent tirades. She had noticed he was grown into a man. She had not been trying to hasten his departure. She had simply identified him as an adult male—someone who could be induced to get money for her.
He had almost finished packing, since he owned very little that he wasn’t wearing. She saw the diploma and it seemed to outrage her, as though the piece of paper was what had caused him to offend her. She snatched it off the couch, tore it in four pieces, and tried to hurl it at his face, but the pieces merely fluttered to the floor at her feet.
She looked around her, and then her eyes settled on the suitcase. She snatched the handle. “These are mine!” she shouted. “I paid for everything! You want to go, you’re not taking anything of mine with you.”
He looked at her for only a second, then picked up the pieces of his diploma and walked to the door.
She screamed, “You’ll be back! You’re going to need me!”
He thought for a moment. “If cannibalism comes back in style, I might come back to cut up your fat ass and sell it. Otherwise . . .” He shrugged, stepped out, and closed the door. His life of adventure began.
That had been ten years ago, and Varney did not often think about those days anymore. He finished his breakfast in the hotel dining room, reread the editorial in the Columbus Dispatch, folded the paper, and returned to his room. For the next half hour, he packed and made leisurely preparations to leave, glancing now and then at the television set and feeling pleased. In the editorial, they had referred once more to the “senseless massacre of thirteen people in a Louisville restaurant.” Senseless meant that they still had not seen the sense of it: the job was a clean one. Senseless was good.
3
Prescott stood at the front door of the restaurant, then stepped to the side and stared in the window past the FOR LEASE sign. He raised his eyes a few degrees, and he could see the folding steel grate extended across the storefront two doors away. This was probably where the killer had been standing when he had noticed the lock.
The new padlock the owners had put on the grate stuck out a little. Prescott walked toward the store, looking at the pattern of cars on the street, listening for engines and counting, gauging speeds. There had probably been more cars parked at the curb on this side that night, because the restaurant had still been in business, but it wasn’t a street that had much foot traffic. He reached the padlock, then gave himself a few seconds to open it in his mind. The killer had probably carried a shim pick in his pocket. No, Prescott decided, it had been a small, all-purpose set, because the killer had been improvising.
Prescott walked back to the door, stopped for a couple of seconds to simulate putting the chain and padlock on the door and hanging the CLOSED sign on the knob, then went around the small building toward the rear. There was a little parking area in the alley where trucks could unload supplies, and spaces for five cars—the boss, the two cooks, the two waiters. He stopped and looked in one direction, then the other. There was nothing for the length of the alley that would have concerned the shooter: no big light fixtures, no other businesses that were open at night. Instead, there were dumpsters, piles of empty boxes, long dark stretches, and places where he could climb a fence or step between buildings and be on the next street in seconds. Prescott began to feel a faint echo of the killer’s sensation. This looked good to him—safe, almost—but the time was going by, and the opportunity was too good to pass up. He went to the back door and used the key to open it, then put the key away and propped the door open six inches with the doorstop.
Prescott stepped back into the dark alley again to clear his mind. The police had finished here a few days ago, and had returned the building to the possession of its owner. Prescott had presented himself as a potential tenant and gotten the keys for the night. Now he had to forget those details, and see this place as the killer had.
Within a few seconds, he had succeeded. He looked at the light falling from the open door onto the rough, pitted pavement at his feet. In his mind, the door was open because someone in the kitchen had opened it. The cook had done it to disperse the heat and steam and food smells. The last meals of the evening had been served. Soon the dishwasher would arrive to help with the cleanup in the kitchen while he waited for the last customers to leave the dining room. This way he wouldn’t have to bang on the door to get in.
Prescott stepped close to the door, looked inside, and listened. The killer’s ears would have been what told him where the cook was. He took the pistol he carried in his jacket and moved it to his belt at the small of his back, so he could reach it but it would not
get in his way. He leaned into the doorway and waited until the sounds the cook was making moved away, then farther away, toward the sink at the end of the room.
He saw the knives where they used to hang on the rack. He scanned for the one: most were big, flat, and unwieldy. The serrated edge of the bread knife had a small attraction, but the blade was thin and flexible. The boning knife was the one. He took three deep breaths, and drifted in. He did not tiptoe slowly in but floated quickly to the rack, his hand already feeling the handle so it came into his grip smoothly, without pause. There was still a space of about twenty feet to cross, and he moved even more swiftly. Then his left arm came up to hook around under the man’s head and jerk it back, and his right brought the blade across the throat in a single cut. He stepped back quickly to avoid the blood and the falling body, preparing to strike again not because it would be needed but because that was the correct way to complete the motion. He remained poised to thrust for two seconds, then dropped the knife into the hot, soapy water in the sink and took two steps toward the door.
The polished wooden surface abruptly swung inward at him, and a waiter nearly collided with him. There was no time for decisions. The killer’s body did what it had practiced so many times: the legs pushed off to dodge aside and pivot, ending behind the waiter. The hands shot up, one beside the waiter’s jaw and the other to the opposite side of the head, and they pushed hard to turn the head against the body’s momentum and break the neck. The killer let the body drop on its back beside the other one.
Prescott moved to the swinging door. He stopped at the hinged side and reached to the small of his back for the pistol, pulled the slide to cycle it and put a round in the chamber. He felt the need to proceed quickly, but he used one second to visualize the dining room he had seen through the front window: where the nine customers had been seated, where the waiter and the boss had stood, and the places where they might have moved. He stepped through the door smoothly, his gun already aimed at the table where Robert Cushner sat. Bang!—through the forehead. Bring the gun to the right ten degrees, the arm still extended. The boss and the waiter both at the front of the room, the boss at the little podium where there used to be a reservation book and a telephone, and the waiter leaning against the wall near him. Two shots for them, one in the waiter’s chest because he was young and already on his feet, and one through the boss’s neck because he was near the phone—probably a head shot that was a bit low, but maybe a slip of the mind and not the hand, because the killer was aware he might try to use the phone. Then there were the two who dashed to the door—the young guys. They had been sitting in the booth by the window, and getting out the door had looked easy to them. By then the killing had seemed intended to be a clean sweep. He pictured them tugging on the door handle, and sensed a small, amused chuckle. Why was that? They looked funny: pulling on the door, pulling harder, their eyes widening with the bad news. BAM BAM BAM. Their bodies collapsing.
He moved his arm to the left, and found the parents with the two little girls. The husband popped up, probably with a vague intention of protecting the others, but making his chest an easier shot. Then the wife, clinging to him as he went down, a shot through the head. The two ten-year-old girls taking a step to run, two shots placed identically between the shoulder blades.
That left the young couple under the front window. The man had pushed over a table and lay on top of the woman to shield her from the bullets. Prescott saw the table in his mind, felt the impulse to fire through it ten inches from the floor, so the man would die on top of her, then to fire through it again to kill her. But he did not allow himself to be that sloppy. He took four steps around the fallen table, stopped at their feet, and fired through the man’s head, then his back, down into the woman’s chest. Both dead.
Incredibly quiet. Listen for noises from the street: cars stopping? People rattling the door? Nothing. He looked around him. There was nothing more to do but pick up the spent brass casings. First the two that had ejected to his right while he was shooting the couple. Then the bunch to the right of the kitchen door: three for the men at the locked door, two for the waiter and the boss, one for Robert Cushner. Eight. Then four for the parents and two children. Twelve.
He looked around again. Good. Brilliant. Only one shot into the target’s head, so Cushner looks no more like the target than any one of several others. The young couple share two holes, and that looks like random craziness. Shooting two little girls in the back makes it conclusive. All the brass casings are up. The cops use those to figure the order of shots, and now they won’t have them, or the distinctive marks a firing pin and extractor make on them that can reveal the model of the gun. There was a moment of elation, and Prescott savored it, tested it, and felt the delayed beating of the heart, the slug of fresh, oxygen-laden blood to the brain. Pride: I’m so fucking smart. A look at the bodies—a still life, juicy, cut fruit with a few dead fish laid beside it on the wooden floor, their eyes already clouding over. A work of art.
He turned and stepped to the kitchen door, switched off the light in the dining room, then backed through to the kitchen. He stopped to look down toward the spot where he had sliced the cook, to be sure he saw where the blood had run. Five quarts in a grown man, and a good bit of it pumped out on the floor while the heart was still beating: step carefully. But it’s okay: the tile floor in the kitchen has a little slope to it so water will go down to the drain when they wash it. The knife—take it? No, what the hell. Leave it in the sink.
First a new clip in the gun, then the back door. Stop, listen, then out quick and shut the door so the light won’t shine out into the alley and the door will lock. Walk at this pace—not in a big hurry, but not loitering in a dark alley, either. Don’t cut between buildings. This isn’t an emergency, so there’s no need to take the chance. Come out at the end on the side street. Now to the car and go. I’m gone now. There is no more connection to that restaurant than there is to any other place I see driving down this road. It’s done.
The elation is taking over. The pay. Yeah, that’s good too, but it’s almost beside the point. Reliving the sense that everyone else in the room is slow, as though they’re moving with weights tied to them. He had always been ahead of them, a superior being. He was still ahead, only this time he was ahead of the cops: they would never figure out what he had just done. Prescott pulled the car to the side of the road and turned the engine off. It was power. This killer had to be stronger and faster and braver, but mostly he had to be smarter, because that made the difference. If he was smarter, they were all in his power. If they were smarter, then he was in theirs. He could not allow them this giddy pleasure; he could not allow them to make him that afraid.
Millikan was grading final examinations when the telephone rang. The voice was the one he had been dreading for days. “Danny Millikan,” it said. “It’s me.”
Millikan sighed. “I’m not in this. I gave him your number, and that’s all. I’m not involved.”
“I wanted to thank you for the referral. It pays pretty well.”
“No, you didn’t,” Millikan said irritably. “You don’t do this for the money any more than the other killer does. You need the kick to keep your heart beating.”
“Actually, what I wanted to thank you for was giving the old man the stuff from the cops—the crime-scene photographs, and the reports. You knew he would give them to me. What good would they be to him?”
“You’re welcome,” said Millikan. “Now—”
Prescott interrupted. “You were there, weren’t you—at the restaurant? That’s why you gave him my number.”
“Yes.”
“You think it was Cushner first, then the rest?”
“That’s what I think.”
“I didn’t see any misses—none in the walls or the furniture.”
“There weren’t any.”
“Did he scoop up the shell casings too? I don’t see any pictures with brass, and no circles on the floor.”
“R
ight. No brass, no prints, no footprints in the blood, no identifiable fibers or hairs.”
“You have to wish somebody noticed him before he got this good at it, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Millikan. “I told the cops to find his client and make a deal for his name.”
“How promising is that?”
“The suspects are three big companies that wanted to take over Cushner’s business. The directors are retired senators, the chairmen of other companies, college presidents. There’s nobody to squeeze.” He was silent for a moment. “He’s yours now.”
“Don’t worry,” said Prescott. “If your luck holds, you may never hear from me again. I don’t need to check in with cops very often.”
“I’m not a cop anymore,” said Millikan. “I teach.”
“You teach people to be cops.”
“What is it? What do you want?”
“I spent the night at the restaurant. I can feel him. There’s something there at each step.”
“It’s different,” admitted Millikan. “I could feel that much.”
“He’s told us a lot. The padlock shows me he’s learned to open locks: probably took a locksmith course somewhere. He was in a hurry, but he spotted the lock and went right to it. That was because he knew he could open it, how long it would take. And he didn’t know the back door was open, either, but he knew that there would be a door, and that he would be able to open it. Then there’s the cook.”
Millikan couldn’t help himself. “That was the thing that struck me, too. He’s got a gun, he knows the front door is locked because he just locked it. Nobody can leave if he fires. Why sneak thirty feet across a lighted kitchen, find a knife, and risk a fight with a good-sized guy?”
“To show us he can. He can cross that distance in about three seconds without making a sound, grab the right knife and strike—once, with certainty—and step back before the first drop of blood hits the floor.”
“What are we talking about—martial arts?”
