Pursuit

by Thomas Perry

  In St. Louis, there were two stops at jewelry stores, and then a stop at a big bar called Nolan’s Paddock Club, which Prescott judged must live off a small stage with a walkway that was pictured on the sign outside that said LIVE NUDE GIRLS. This was the first building where the two men had led him that had no windows through which he could watch them, so Prescott waited until they had gone inside, then followed to see who would meet them. When he entered, they were just passing through a lounge toward the right side of the stage. A big, bespectacled man behind the bar seemed not to acknowledge or even notice them, but he lifted a hinged section of the bar and stepped off, and didn’t seem to be surprised when the two followed him. The three disappeared through a door near the stage.

  Prescott heard a sudden deep, repetitive sound like the thumping of a big engine, and realized after a moment that it was recorded music with the bass turned up too high. A few men in the poolroom drifted into the lounge, and then a blond woman who could not recently have been described as a girl, but who was arguably live, stepped out onto the stage and began to remove parts of a sequined costume, fulfilling the promise of the sign outside. She seemed monumentally uninterested in the whole empty ceremony, and had the expression of a woman alone in her room removing the clothes she’d worn to do some gardening. Prescott bought a beer and went to the men’s room. When he returned, the woman looked about ready to get into a shower and pick up the kids from soccer practice. He put a tip on the bar for the bartender, tossed a bill to the woman, and went outside again to wait.

  A short time later, the two men emerged, and began to drive north on the interstate highway again. They drove the 246 miles to Indianapolis. Prescott now had a clear sense of the way the two men worked. There was nothing about any of the stops they had made to indicate that they had not made them all fifty times before. In each city, the people they met all had been expecting them and were ready to transact business. No stop ever took longer than a half hour, and some took as little as five minutes.

  They went to jewelry stores, Prescott guessed, primarily to sell jewelry stolen in another town. Most could be safely resold as estate jewelry. If it was too distinctive, a jeweler could break it up and reset it as new. But in each city they also drove to some blighted neighborhood to stop in a different kind of business: a pawnshop, a bail-bond office, a used-appliance store. In Indianapolis it was a barber shop and an agency that specialized in placing domestic help. None of those places sold jewelry, but all of them were places where it was possible that people who came into possession of valuables of suspicious provenance might turn up. Those were the pickup points, where fresh supplies of stolen jewelry came from.

  From Indianapolis, the men drove the 110 miles to Cincinnati and stopped in the evening at a small office building. Prescott saw them go inside and up a staircase, carrying their titanium cases. He waited for the usual half hour, and then saw them come outside again. He had expected them to find a hotel, but they did not. The older man drove the younger to an apartment complex, waited until his partner had gone to an upstairs walkway and opened his door with a key, and then drove on. Prescott followed him another fifteen minutes to a small suburban tract, where he turned into a driveway and put his car in the garage. Cincinnati wasn’t a stop on the route. It was home.

  Prescott drove back to the center of town and spent the evening watching the small office building where the men had made their final stop. He had coffee down the street at a table near the window in a coffee shop, then browsed at the front window of a bookstore, looked at clothes in two different stores, and went for an evening walk that took him up the streets to the sides and back of the building. By ten o’clock the pedestrian traffic had become too thin to hide him, so he returned to his car and drove off.

  By then he had seen everything that interested him. No customers or clients had come to the small office building during that time. The only arrivals had been two more pairs of men, and that told him this had to be a far-flung operation. The two he had followed had traveled to Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, and Indianapolis—five major cities in four states—and returned to their home base in a fifth state in under three days. He checked the odometer of his car and added the figure to the one from his last car: a bit over eleven hundred miles. If the other two-man teams did anything like as much traveling, the network would include cities in twelve states.

  There would be no trouble selling merchandise in cities where it wasn’t hot. The best part was that there was no need for any of the jewelers who were buying stolen merchandise to know which city it had come from, who had owned it, who had stolen it, how long it had been missing. There was no need for them to know much about the people in Cincinnati who ran this business, or even that they were in Cincinnati. All they needed to know was that they were buying goods at prices that meant they couldn’t be anything but stolen, and that two men would show up now and then to sell them some more.

  Prescott was careful not to assume he knew more than he did. It was possible that the office in Cincinnati was not the tip of the pyramid. This might be one of three or twenty-three regional syndicates that all paid into some larger, uglier national confederation. It might be a franchise that paid a percentage to the Mafia. It might be a secondary invention for the convenience of a silent partner who was washing cash by converting it into jewelry and back. Prescott could not be sure of the exact structure of the business, but that did not, for the moment, matter.

  Prescott was sure he had found a route that Rowland the jeweler might have used to hire a killer. During the time when he had watched and studied Rowland, he had found no other way in which Rowland could have met or spoken with serious criminals. Rowland had probably had a difficult time getting himself to make the request out loud. He was a rich, established businessman. Even if there were people who knew he wasn’t quite respectable, they didn’t know anything specific enough to harm him. It was a risk. He had probably started to speak on a couple of occasions, and changed his mind, or maybe made a joke out of it. Then he had said something like, “I’ve got a problem, and I wondered if you knew anybody I could hire who might be able to help me.” They would have made him say it more plainly, because it wasn’t the sort of request that could be acted on without clear understandings. Then the word had traveled upward from the two jewelry couriers, and eventually made it to the killer.

  Prescott decided to spend the night in a good hotel, then turn in his rental car in the morning at the airport and get a midday flight. After some consideration, he altered his plan and headed straight toward the airport. It would be better to get out of here now. He already knew the place where he would have to get his request into the system, and it would take time.

  24

  Varney awoke and his arm moved quickly but silently, his hand sliding into the space between the mattress and springs where his gun was hidden. As his fingers touched the grip, he already knew it had been another mistake. The soft, rustling sound he had heard was only Mae’s small bare feet padding across the floor to the bathroom. He turned his eyes in that direction just as the door closed softly.

  In a moment he heard the shower running. He rolled over and stared up at the old light fixture on the ceiling, slowly reversing the perspective of his thought so that he was up with the half globe looking down on the bed at himself. Was Varney happy? This seemed to be what other people referred to as being happy. He tried to feel it, to feel anything, but he caught himself calculating again, enumerating the things he now had, and insisting to himself, “That is good. And that is at least okay. And that is something I sort of like . . .”

  He had never lived with a person who was female since he had left his mother’s house, eleven years ago. At the moment it was not as bad as he knew it would have been if the woman had been confident enough to let her true nature show. Since she had come here, Mae had been on tiptoe, just like this morning, slipping lightly and quietly from one place to another, always on the periphery, where she wouldn’t be too
obtrusive and get on his nerves.

  She almost lived out of the black overnight bag, taking a few of her belongings out of it, putting them back when she was finished, and pushing the bag under the bed. She kept the apartment neat and clean without ever appearing to touch anything that belonged to Varney, and she had quickly gotten used to his preferences.

  Varney didn’t mind listening to her talk, because she had a pleasant, musical voice, but he didn’t like having to give her long answers. He had spent so much of his life alone that he had never developed the habit of talking just to fill up silences, and he didn’t feel any need to deliver a running inventory of every thought that entered his mind. But he understood that women needed to do that, so he let her. The surprise was that she had learned to accept the little he said as sufficient. He knew she was on her best behavior. He could tell that in bed, if no other way, because she even talked there. Everything he did was wonderful, every time was the best ever, and nothing was ever too much or not enough. She was always ready, always watching him closely without seeming to. Varney waited: she couldn’t possibly be as perfect as she seemed to be.

  Varney had always been good at observing people, so that he would know how to behave the way they expected him to. Mae, it seemed, was good at the same thing. Probably he was not as good at it as Mae. But he had watched other women closely at all stages of relationships, and he knew what was probably coming. He remembered talking to Coleman Simms about women once when their two female companions had gone to the ladies’ room.

  “You offer them a drink, but they say no,” he had said. “So a minute later, they reach over and drink yours. You offer again, and they say no, and look at you as if you must be deaf.”

  Coleman nodded. “She don’t want a drink, kid.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because they’re like that. What she wants is not a drink. She wants an easement.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The right, like a legal right, to drink yours when she feels like it. It tells her something she wants to know, maybe tells other women she claims you or something.” He shrugged. “If you don’t like them, stay away from them and get a dog.”

  Varney knew that if he let things go on very long, Mae would get comfortable and begin to do things like that. She would begin bringing possessions in here, moving things around and cluttering everything up. She would have to revert to her nature at some point. He guessed that the past three weeks must have been what a honeymoon was like. Both people were still being very careful, scared to death they were going to make a mistake and fart.

  Mae slipped out of the bathroom, holding her hair dryer in her hand. He could see the alert, questioning look in her eyes. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said. “I wanted to get an early shower so I’d be out of your way when you finish your exercises.”

  He was almost angry at the falseness of it, but he reminded himself that she was trying to please him. “Relax,” he said. “I wanted to get up anyway.” He put on his shorts and a sweatshirt and began his routines. Before he had worked up much of a sweat, she had pulled her bag out from under the bed and had the strap over her shoulder. She walked to the door and said, “I’ll be back at six.” She paused. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  Between crunches, he said, “I heard you.”

  “If you don’t want me to—”

  “No,” he said, as he dropped to the ground for his first set of push-ups. “No problem.” He heard the door close and went back to counting. When he reached fifty, he went to the closet and moved aside the hangers so he could do his pull-ups.

  He couldn’t blame her for being so careful. All these clothes he had to push aside, he had bought so she would be in a good mood. That was another thing about women that he had learned from careful observation. They had all these strange things about them that made little sense. They liked clothes so much that they sometimes bought new ones they never even wore, just kept them in a closet to make them feel good, as though it made a difference. They all thought they were fat, and even if they knew they were thin, they harbored some suspicion that they were fat inside, and were just managing to hide the truth by being thin. Even then, they had to hear people tell them they weren’t fat, so they’d know they hadn’t been caught yet.

  They also liked to say that other women who weren’t very attractive were beautiful. He was not sure why they did that, since they never let on that they knew they were lying. He had tried out theories. One was that if they established an unappealing woman as the standard, then they would be, by comparison, breathtaking. Another was that they all knew perfectly well what all men looked at and how they felt about it, but were trying to be subversive, insisting that the system wasn’t fair, and therefore that they could obliterate it by mere denial. None of his hypotheses had been quite satisfactory when applied to even one woman on all occasions. There were a great many oddities. But Coleman’s words came back to him: “If you don’t like them, stay away from them.” It was still astounding to Varney that a man who seemed to know so much about people had been stupid enough to get himself killed.

  Varney looked up at the closet ceiling as he did his pull-ups, and once again focused on the square up there. It was an access hatch to the attic—not an attic, really, just a crawl space with bare two-by-fours and insulation. At the top of a pull, he held himself with one hand and pushed up with the other to see how quickly he could open it. Then he did another pull-up and closed it again. He had hidden his extra guns up there, where no casual visitor would find them. When he had finished his second set of push-ups and his crunches and sit-ups, he went out for his run. He completed his usual course to the high school and around the track, then came back and showered.

  He tried to keep himself from feeling annoyed that Mae had gone out alone. He would have liked to walk somewhere with her and buy her lunch and listen to her talk. That thought brought back a dull worry. He had only brought with him the cash hidden in his house in Buffalo when he had left, and that had amounted to twenty thousand. The used car he had picked up had cost him eleven, and paying for Mae for two weeks had cost him most of the rest. He owed Tracy about four thousand for various expenses, and he didn’t exactly have it where he could easily reach it.

  He should just get into the car right now and drive away. These people were taking advantage of him. Tracy was charging him outrageous rent for living in this ratty apartment that had been vacant so long it had smelled musty, and outrageous fees for getting Mae to dye and cut his hair and get him a pair of clear glasses and help him pick out different clothes. She had implied she wasn’t taking any of the money he was giving her for Mae, but he didn’t believe her. He had asked Mae about it, and she had just avoided his eyes uneasily and said, “Tracy takes care of me okay.” He should walk away from this place.

  He tried to decide why he wasn’t leaving, and it came down to the fact that he wasn’t ready to give up Mae yet. He couldn’t detect any particular attachment to her when he tried to detect one. He knew that someday he was going to get into his car and drive away, and when he imagined it, he could not imagine wanting her to go with him. He just wasn’t ready to leave yet. He liked having sex with her: the shape of her body, the sound of her voice, the shine of her hair, even the smell of her perfume all seemed pleasant to him. He wasn’t ready to quit yet.

  Even with his new hair and clothes, he couldn’t go back to Buffalo and hope to walk into his bank and come out with enough cash to last more than another month. He was going to have to wait longer before he went back there. He had a lot of cash in a safe-deposit box in Chicago. It was over a hundred thousand. Chicago would not be as dangerous as Buffalo, but he wanted to stay invisible for as long as possible.

  He decided that on his way to lunch he would stop by the office and try to come to some agreement with Tracy. He walked, and noticed that he was going by a long, indirect route that he hardly ever took. For a few blocks he told himself he was doing it because the extra exercise was
good for him, but after he had gone too far to go back to his usual route, he admitted that he had just been putting off talking to Tracy.

  Varney remembered there was a good restaurant three blocks ahead. He had been there with Mae about two weeks ago. What was it called? Antoine, or Auguste, or something like that. He stepped inside and ate lunch by himself. The food was still the same, and he noticed that the prices were lower on the lunch menu. He seldom ate much during the day, but he’d made an exception and ordered a steak. By the time he was outside again it was two o’clock, but he felt better, more ready for Tracy.

  When he reached the office he climbed the steps and went into the Crestview Wholesale office without knocking. Tracy was sitting behind the desk with her head down, staring from six inches away at a necklace made of silver and turquoise. She raised her eyes at him, sighed, and looked down again. “Damned things,” she muttered. “We don’t get much turquoise. What do you suppose this is worth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “More than we can get for it. The fake stuff they make now is so good you need a chemist to catch it. And Indian silver work is so distinctive any insurance company can tell you who made it, where, and when, so you have to ship it practically to the moon to sell it.” She looked at Varney as though she had just noticed him. “But that’s not your problem, is it?”

  He shook his head.

  “What is? Mae?”

  He stared at her. He wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to need her again tomorrow, too. I’ve got a couple more men coming back from the road, and I promised them a party if they’d behave themselves while they were out there.” She chattered on, as he stood there, not quite believing what he was hearing. “I’ve got two girls out sick. They’re roommates, so it’s probably some damned thing they ate. But there’s nothing else I can do.”