Pursuit

by Thomas Perry

  It was disconcerting to be wrong about so much, but Prescott was still certain that the killer would be on the ninth floor trying to get into his office.

  Prescott moved to the stairwell door on the eighth floor, opened it a crack, and listened. He heard nothing, so he slowly, carefully pushed it open another six inches. There was still no sound. He slipped out and eased the door shut behind him. The best way to do this was to let the complete emptiness and silence of the building magnify and sharpen his senses. He needed to know precisely where the three men in the building were. He moved close to the elevator door, put his ear to it, and listened. There was no hum. He moved to the front stairwell, the one he had seen the older guard, Cal, enter. He put his ear to the door and listened, then opened it a crack and saw the shoes.

  The body was lying face-down on the landing above him, and the feet protruded over the highest step. Prescott climbed higher, and knelt to reach for the carotid artery to feel for a pulse, but withdrew his hand without touching it. The head had been wrenched to the side and the neck broken. The gun was still in its holster.

  Prescott stepped over the body and out of the stairwell onto the ninth floor. He moved to the first turn of the hall, then kept going past the corner into the center, staring at the hallway along the barrel of his gun. There was nobody in sight. He waited, listening for footsteps, then carefully made his way toward his office. Each of the possibilities suggested itself to him: the killer had planned to wait inside the office until Prescott showed up in the morning, but the security guards had made it impractical; the killer wanted to booby-trap the office, so when Prescott opened the door he would be either perforated or fricasseed. Prescott hoped that was what it would be, because that took time, and the killer would be fully engaged for a few more minutes.

  What worried Prescott most was the younger guard. Could this guy have killed them both already? No, the older guard had been killed silently. At that point the younger guard had still been alive: there was no reason for silence if there was nobody alive to hear. The second one, he would simply have shot. Prescott moved into the corridor where his office was. As he silently approached, he kept his eyes on the doorknob, watching to see it turn. He had never let the photographs of the bodies in the Louisville restaurant fade from his mind: all rapid, clean shots done without moving anything but the gun arm. If Prescott saw this character, he probably wasn’t going to get more than one shot unless the first one cut flesh.

  He stepped to the door, moved to the side, set his left hand on the knob, and held the pistol in his right. He formed a clear, sharp image of the office in his mind, tracing the way every shape would look from here. Whatever did not perfectly conform to that picture had to be shot, a round placed in the middle of it instantly.

  Prescott heard the elevator bell ring and he spun, then froze. He heard the elevator doors open. If the killer was in Prescott’s office, he must have heard it too. Prescott couldn’t let the young security guard stumble into the middle of this. Prescott held his gun in front of him and began to back away from his office. He heard the elevator doors slide shut. He backed to the turn in the hallway and looked. The indicator lights lit up as the elevator descended.

  Prescott dashed to the stairwell and slipped inside. He bent over the body again, checking for the keys. The elevator would not work unless it was operated with a key. The older guard’s keys were still clipped to his belt. Prescott shoved his gun into his jacket pocket, grabbed both railings, and began to vault down the steps four and five at a time.

  On the fifth floor, he paused and opened the door to look at the elevator. Above it, he could see the number two, just lighting up. He kept going, trying desperately to reach the lobby in time. When he arrived at the ground floor, he was winded, but he flung open the door, his gun ready. The elevator was open, the lobby deserted.

  He ran to the telephone at the security console and dialed 911. As soon as he heard the click of the connection, he said, “My name is Roy Prescott, and I’m at 98503 Wilshire Boulevard. An armed killer has just murdered a man and left the building. He’s extremely dangerous, and he’s dressed as a security guard.” Prescott paused and then added, “Might as well send the bomb squad too. He’s the sort of person who may have left a little something.”

  7

  Prescott sat in his office and piled objects into cardboard boxes that had once held reams of paper, and put others into big trash bags. He didn’t mind being evicted. The trip wire had been easy to find if you knew what you were looking for, and the gun it had been connected to had not even gone off when Prescott had disconnected it. There had been no reason after all to call the bomb squad.

  The building manager had arrived to see the guys in padded suits coming out of his building a couple of hours later, and he’d seen the bomb-sniffing dogs and the trucks. He’d heard all the crap about pipe bombs and booby traps, and had wondered just how much inconvenience and aggravation the rent on one office was worth. That had been before he had even heard about the murder. No, Prescott recalled: murders. The other guard who had been killed for his uniform and gun was part of it, too.

  He had given Prescott twenty-four hours, but Prescott had let him off easy. As soon as the evidence guys had sprinkled half the building with black fingerprint dust and stiff-armed all the other tenants to keep them from coming into their offices, he had come in and gotten to work packing. The office was not much use to him now. This was not the kind of killer who would keep trying the same thing in the same place until he got it right. He had already proven that he was a man who could, and would, do anything. The next try would be something entirely different.

  Prescott had just about finished his packing. The furniture-rental people would be coming in a few hours to pick up the desk and chairs, the table and filing cabinets. He checked his watch, then looked at the telephone and answering machine. It was possible that he had figured this guy wrong. He had assumed that as soon as this killer knew that Prescott had not gotten his head blown off, he would make his way to another pay phone and call. The ring was like the answer to a question. He picked up the receiver and said casually, “Yeah?”

  “How do you feel, Roy?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Slick.”

  “You scared yet?”

  “Me?” said Prescott. “Not possible. Every day brings its own little benefits.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, you know, I guess I spoke prematurely about having you on videotape. It seems I was misinformed and you didn’t get picked up too well. But last night you showed up right in the lobby of my building. I got to watch you for a couple of hours while you were pretending to be a guard. I got to know your face, the way you move. And there was that perverted business with the two cops. I’m starting to feel like I know you.”

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “When I get around to coming for you, I’ll pick you out right away.”

  “I’ll look forward to that.”

  “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “If you’re looking forward to it, you must want it to happen. Of course, life is tricky. A lot of the time you get all eager about something, and then when you finally get it, it’s not anywhere near as pleasant as you thought. But that’s your problem. Tell me where you want to meet, and I’ll be there.”

  “You must be crazy. You think I’m going to tell you where I am? You’d have a thousand cops surround the place and set fire to it. You could sit home on your ass and watch it on TV.”

  Prescott’s voice was slightly different, and Varney detected the change. It was quieter, curious, penetrating. “You haven’t done any research on me yet?”

  “Yeah. I found your telephone number and address in the phone book.”

  Prescott’s voice resumed its usual jovial, mocking tone. “Address. That reminds me. After your antics last night, my landlord bought out my lease. I’m evicted.”

  “Oh,” moaned Varney. “So sorry.”

  �
��It’s okay,” said Prescott. “He had to pay me double what I paid for the year’s lease, so you took care of my last two years’ rent. Since I already wrote it off as a business expense, it’s about half pure profit. The only reason I mention it is that I’m moving to a new address. Got a pencil?”

  “You want to give me your new address?”

  “Sure. It’s 87875 Sunset. The phone number will be the same, but it might take a couple of days to get it transferred.”

  “Why are you giving me this?”

  “Why not?” said Prescott. His voice was quiet and penetrating again. It gave Varney a cold, eerie feeling that made him want to shake it off. It sounded as though Prescott were inserting the words directly into his brain, without any physical mediation from the telephones, or even his ear. “You aren’t going to do anything to me.”

  “Wait and see.”

  Prescott’s voice was amused. “Now that I’ve seen you, I understand why you’re afraid to tell me anything. You’ve been scared all your life. Before I knew who you were, I saw you sitting in the lobby and I felt sorry. I thought, A young guy who’s spent all that time working out in the gym, building up his biceps and shoulders, must have had a miserable time as a kid. Probably got kicked around a lot by normal kids. You overdid the lats a bit, and the abs too, by the way. It’s nice to have a thin waist, but you look a little like a girl.”

  Prescott heard the click, and knew the killer had hung up. He put the receiver back in the cradle, unplugged the telephone and answering machine, and put them in the box. He supposed he had gone a bit too far this time, but the murder of the two cops and those two poor security guards had made him impatient.

  He had believed from the beginning that he would need to call this one’s manhood into question, but it had to be done with some subtlety, not by flat-out saying he looked like a girl. That had been just plain stupid. Prescott had been patiently, relentlessly fitting himself into a role. Prescott needed to be a perfect fit, and he needed never to appear to be trying to be perfect. He simply had to embody all of the qualities that this man had been searching for, as though it were a miracle: he had to be all the people this man had ever hated.

  Varney walked from the pay telephone into the men’s room. He felt reassured in shopping malls, because no matter where in the country he was, they were exactly the same. This one was in Redondo Beach, but it could just as easily have been in Buffalo. The entrances and exits were the same, and even the stores. They were heavy with unobtrusive security, but that did as much to keep Varney from having to watch for problems as it did for anybody else. He went into one of the stalls and sat on the toilet to calm down. These calls always left him feeling agitated and unsatisfied, as though he had been trying to scratch an itch but couldn’t reach the spot.

  He could not ignore what Prescott had said: “You haven’t done any research on me yet?” The sound of it had been chilling. To Varney it had been like a hostile teacher, one who had contempt for him, saying, “You haven’t done the assignment?” There had been an eagerness in the sound, amusement. The unspoken part was, “Then you’re going to fail.” Why hadn’t he done some research? He had not been taking Prescott seriously enough. Varney had decided almost immediately that he could defeat Prescott’s defenses. Varney had seen the keypads and locks and security guards, and known that the way to get in was to be one of them. He had said that he had seen something on the camera in the ninth-floor hallway, so that the old guard would go up. Then he had unplugged the cable that went to the recorders and monitors. Simple. Prescott should have walked to his office next morning, pushed open the door, and gotten a hole in his chest. He should be dead. Instead, he was telling Varney that he didn’t know enough.

  Prescott reminded him of Coleman Simms, and that made talking to him worse. Varney calculated. It had been nearly eight years ago, when Coleman Simms would have been about the age Prescott seemed to be now. They both had that kind of accent that was partly West and partly South, and they used some of the same words. Coleman had called everybody “boy” or “Slick” too, with that air of superiority that made him sound like a combination of an old-time gunslinger and a marine sergeant. It was as though he had such a backlog of experience behind his voice that most of it wasn’t even available anymore: he had beaten better men than you without bothering to put out his cigarette, and the ones that had been a challenge, that had made him rock-hard and leathery, were all dead, because he had killed them.

  Varney remembered their first meeting. The two messengers from the wholesalers had taken an entire day to drive him out to a ranch in the high desert east of Los Angeles, pulled off the road, and walked with him to a house about three hundred yards in, where there was a man standing alone, waiting. That had been Coleman Simms. Coleman had been about six feet three, thin in the way that basketball players were—with shoulder and muscle, but elongated, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. He had big, red hands with long fingers and knotty knuckles, and pale, empty blue eyes that always squinted because he had an unfiltered cigarette hanging from his lip. Once in a while he would take it out and make a whispery “Teh” sound to spit a small flake of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. He wore jeans that always looked unfaded and brand-new, as though that were his version of dress-up, hard leather shoes, and a business shirt in a plain color with no stripes or patterns.

  That first day, he had said to the two messengers, “Thank you.” He waited long enough to see them walk all the way back to their car parked just off the main highway, get inside, and drive away before he turned his attention to Varney. “Before we get to know each other, I want to be fair. You’re young, and probably smart as a spare tire, so I’ll spell it out. Right now, you have a choice. You can walk out to that road, stick your thumb out, and get a ride back to L.A. in a few minutes. No questions asked. What I want to talk to you about is a job. If you get it done, there will be a lot of money. If you like it, there will be plenty of others—all you want. But it’s the kind of job that, once we talk about it, you’re going to be on a very short list of people who know. If you turn it down, and the others think you talked about it, you have a problem. Am I being clear to you?”

  Varney nodded. “I’ll never tell anybody. You can talk.”

  Coleman Simms took the cigarette out of his mouth, flicked it into the dirt, and stepped on it. The blue eyes looked into Varney’s with frank curiosity. “You ever kill anybody besides that guy you robbed in his house?”

  Varney looked away from him toward the road, then around him at the low, dry weeds of the pasture, then quickly back at the blue eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Slick,” said Simms. “I’m not a cop trying to get you to confess. I’m not wearing a wire. You don’t have to tell me who it was, or where. Nod your head or shake it.”

  Varney nodded.

  “Good enough,” said Coleman Simms. “I’ll tell you how this works. There is a guy. You won’t have to meet him or know his name. He won’t know mine or yours. He is going to give a fence like the ones you do business with a pile of money. Our two friends who drove you out here will pick it up and bring it here, minus their cut. A couple of days later, I’ll take you to a place where a different man lives. You’ll kill him. I’ll bring you back here. You will get twenty-five thousand in cash.”

  “How much do you get?”

  “Twenty-five,” said Simms. “If you live through this one, you’ll get thirty next time, and I’ll get twenty. You start doing them alone, you’ll get forty.” He stuck another cigarette on his lip, lit it from a Zippo with a big flame, and the squint returned. “If there’s somebody big—somebody with some real risk to him—the pay goes up.”

  “What about this one?” Varney asked. “Who is he?”

  “He’s just some unsuspecting citizen who’s pissed off the man who’s paying.”

  “If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it and keep the whole fifty?”

  That was the first time he saw Coleman Simms smile. “Oh, I’ve done a few
that way. Quite a few. That’s what paid for this ranch, and for what I got put away. I’m getting to the point where I can afford some luxuries.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Well, this guy lives in a big house. You’ve been making a living as a second-story man, so I think it’ll be easier for somebody like you to get inside. I also think splitting some jobs will be a better way of managing the business. If somebody hires me to kill his worst enemy, probably other people know they were enemies, so his name is going to come up. The police will squeeze him and squeeze him. If he’s weak, he might give up and tell them some names. I’ve always tried to put a middleman or two between the customer and me, but now I can afford something better—protection from the middleman. If anybody along the line ever gives me up, he’s still got to worry about you.”

  “What makes you think I’d kill anybody for that?”

  This time when Coleman Simms smiled, his eyes crinkled and his teeth showed. “It’s just a little feeling I have. Once we get good enough at deer hunting, we find it hard to put up with much from the deer.” He spat out an invisible flake of tobacco. “Besides. It don’t much matter whether you do it or not after I’m dead. What does me good is that while I’m alive, they’ll think you will.”

  For four years Varney had worked with Coleman Simms—no, he admitted to himself now, surrounded by the quiet bare tiles of the men’s room—for Coleman Simms. Coleman had always been the boss. He had always treated Varney like an apprentice. When Varney made a mistake, he was “dumb as a pile of cow shit.” When he questioned Coleman’s decisions, he was an “uppity little shitweasel.”

  In the end, it was Coleman who had made the mistake that mattered. The day came when Varney knew everything that Coleman knew, and Coleman had been too arrogant to see it coming. All that had been necessary from then on was for Varney to learn where the jobs were coming from. Maybe Coleman had seen it coming. After Varney had shot Coleman in the back of the head, he had needed to drag the body into the field to bury it. He had put his hands under the armpits to lift it a little, and found that under his shirt, Coleman had taken to wearing a bulletproof vest.