by Thomas Perry
Varney moved to the front door and looked out through the peephole, then stepped to the front window. The place where Prescott had been was not visible from here, so there was no clear shot. If Varney moved quickly, maybe he could slip out to the edge of the porch, go over the railing, and hit the ground before Prescott could aim.
He tried the doorknob, unlocked the door, then pulled his knife. He stood to the side of the door and ran the blade along each side, then above the top, then lay on his belly and slid it underneath. He was startled by the voice from above and behind him: “Front . . . door.” He had rolled to the side and was aiming his pistol at the sound with one hand, the knife still in the other, before he realized the voice had not been human. He was aiming at the alarm keypad on the wall. He stepped closer and saw the slits for a small speaker, then knelt and ran his knife under the door again. “Front . . . door.”
The blade had interrupted the contact between the two magnets set into the door and the floor beneath it. He took a deep breath and regained his composure. The door wasn’t booby-trapped, and that was what mattered. He stood, took two more deep breaths, opened the door, slipped out, and closed it, ignoring the muffled electronic voice. In a few seconds he was at the end of the porch, vaulting over the railing to the ground. He lay still for a moment, listening: no metal sounds, no footsteps. He spider-crawled quickly along the side of the house to the back corner, then lay flat and paused to listen again and stare out into the darkness. He let time pass.
Prescott was devious. He had picked this remote, sparsely populated place just so he could convert it into a field of traps and snares for Varney. He’d had to be in a place like this, where he could run a power saw through a staircase and let it crash to the floor, where he could fire a gun through a helpless man’s head and not have to worry about anybody hearing it, or telling him later he had not done it the way the law said he should. The only way ever to be free was to see Prescott first and kill him.
Varney had to read the trap and use it against Prescott. The brush where Prescott was hiding tempted Varney. He stared across the lawn. The shortest way to the low bushes was across the patio at the back of the house. If he could make it across the open space, he could work his way through the brush and come up behind Prescott. The idea was tantalizing. Prescott would think he was still in the house, probably lying on the ruined stairway with a broken back. He had no way of knowing how good Varney was in a field at night. Varney could move more quietly, more quickly than Prescott could. But moving across an open patio to get to the first cover was a risk.
He crouched, still watching the brush ahead. He slowly moved to the corner of the house to get a view to his left. It seemed that the place where Prescott had been was not quite visible from here, but once he was out a few paces, it would be. He would try the quiet, invisible way. He went to his belly and began to slither across the back lawn, his eyes on the row of bushes, waiting for movement.
There was a loud crack as a bullet broke the sound barrier over his head. He was up and sprinting, gaining speed as he dashed toward cover. There was no reason to stay on the grass now, so he let his feet take him toward the paved patio, where he could make better time.
One foot hit the patio and the ball of his foot pushed off, and he knew it was all wrong. There was a spongy feel to it. The other foot hit and the pavement sank. He saw a section of the stones ahead buckle and fold. The patio wasn’t stone slabs laid in the ground; it was just sheets of artificial masonry, made of drywall with a plastic veneer. He had broken through. He had to control the fall. He did not impede his forward motion, because he had to keep from dropping vertically. He flopped forward, both arms extended, slapping the next section of artificial stones, pushing down with arms and legs, scrambling ahead on the fragile surface to keep the drywall falling below him. He felt himself going through, then heard the first end of a section hit with a hollow echo. With the sound, he knew there was concrete, he knew it was about ten feet down. He hit, letting his feet break a sheet of drywall wedged beside another, and directing his body onto the next section of drywall.
His fall was jarring, but he felt no sharp pain, and he was on his feet. He could tell he was in an empty swimming pool, and he knew he had to get out. He ran up the steep concrete slope toward the shallow end, where the fragile sheets of drywall overhead still formed a roof to shield him from Prescott’s sights.
Varney reached the end, came up without pausing, his head lifting the end of the drywall enough to free him, and he was out and running again. He found himself heading back the way he had come, but for the moment he had no choice. He had to get out of Prescott’s view.
As he approached the side of the house, he was beginning to get past the pure anger at what Prescott had tried to do to him, and had begun to wonder at what Prescott had not done. There had been only one shot, and it had gone high. Prescott had had time to fire again. He could have put ten rounds through the half-inch drywall on top of the empty pool, let them bounce around in the dark concrete basin, and probably clip Varney on a ricochet. He must have known that Varney would come out at the shallow end, and should have leveled his weapon on it. Was he that slow? He couldn’t be. He had fired his one shot only to make Varney run and fall into the pool. He had to be at the wrong angle, too low and far away to fire downward into the pool, and too far to the left to have the shallow end in view. He must still be across the lawn from the pipes, where Varney had seen the bushes move.
Varney had one clear, simple idea and it would work only if he used it before Prescott did. When Varney reached the house, he kept running along the side. He had to take the chance that Prescott would still be aiming at the back corner of the house, waiting for him to show himself there. Varney came around the front, running harder now. He ran past the front porch, keeping his feet on the grass, where his steps would make no noise. He could see the start of the row of bushes now. It was not neat and thin like a hedge, but deep and unruly, planted there as a barrier to the wind in the summer, when the dust blew off the fields, and probably in the winter a snow fence to catch the drifts before they piled up on the side and front of the house.
He did not pause but moved immediately among the thick bushes, making his way toward the spot where he judged Prescott must be. His ears were sharp. He could hear insects take flight as he came close, hear a leaf fall from the tree above him, but he could not hear his own movements. He had practiced the skill of motion through foliage at night all summer long, and he knew he had gotten better at it. He began to feel the old excitement return, anticipating the sudden, brief, sweet moment when he would emerge from the bushes. He would take Prescott through the head. Prescott would have just enough time for the meaning of it to reach his brain before the bullet punched through it.
He stepped steadily, placing each foot tentatively, to feel the texture under the sole before he eased his weight onto it. He kept going, watchful and eager at the same time. When he reached the spot where he had expected to find Prescott, he was disappointed. He told himself that Prescott had simply moved onward toward the back of the lot, where he would have a better view of the corner of the house. He had no choice but to keep going. He quickened his pace. Then he was near the end of the bushes. Could Prescott have gotten this far?
He crouched, planted his feet, checked his gun to be sure he had not pushed the safety on while he was handling it. Finally, he took the cell phone out of his pocket.
The telephone was his advantage. Prescott had put it in his hands so he could rattle him, make him feel weak and hesitant and afraid. But Varney had immediately seen the potential. Varney’s reflexes had been too quick to let him fall across the sabotaged staircase, his body too agile to be trapped in the empty pool, too fast to be picked off on a run across the open. He had fooled Prescott each time, made the house he had booby-trapped into a joke. Now he was going to finish him. Varney held the phone at his side, pressed the power button, pressed 1, set the phone on the ground, and crawled quickly into th
e brush. Varney heard the ring, and began to hurry toward it. He had been right. Probably Prescott had planned to do this very thing to Varney, maybe even provided the phone in the belief that Varney would wait too long, and let Prescott use it to find him in the dark. Prescott might have planned, but Varney had done it.
The telephone rang a second time, and Varney held his head slightly to the side, so the wind blowing across his ears would not distort its sound. He was getting closer. He was sure, and then his mind settled on precisely the spot. He popped up to his feet and fired three times, his silenced weapon making a harsh spitting sound, then dropped down again.
He carried with him into the darkness a sight imprinted on his memory like a snapshot. It was Prescott’s cell phone, the tiny lights behind the keys flickering as it rang, then going out again to wait for the next ring, as it lay abandoned on the ground.
36
Prescott gave a disappointed, sad shake of his head. “So much for that.” As he stood up, he began the quiet process of clearing his mind. He had always seen the telephone as the last, surest sign. If this guy had carried it and never pressed the key, Prescott would not have been sure. Only if he used it as a way to surprise Prescott and kill him would Prescott be certain.
Prescott could have ended this an hour ago, when his night scope had detected the bright glow of another human being’s heat moving through the woods. He had predicted, in a general way, each move that this man would make. Prescott had placed in his path some signs to suggest that Prescott might be too much for him, and pointed him toward the way to survive.
He supposed it had always been this way. He had wasted his advantages and held back each time since he was a kid. An unexpected memory that was more physical than mental gripped him. There was Anthony Meara in the street with his friends already moving to block Prescott’s way on the sidewalk. Meara had been a senior, and Prescott was two years younger. It was not the sort of fighting that had gone on in earlier years, two boys engaging in the series of elimination matches that established each grade’s male hierarchy. This had been something else.
Meara had stood in the center of the walk: maybe all he wanted was to force Prescott to step off the sidewalk to get around him. Prescott had no desire to fight over a sidewalk he could never own, so he veered a bit to the right. But Prescott had moved from city to city with his mother twice by then, and he had been in fights, so he was ready. He heard the faint whisper of the cloth of Meara’s shirt, a scrape of a shoe moving across concrete, and reacted. He raised the books clutched in his left hand to the side of his head in time to make Meara’s first strike a glancing blow that knocked them flying, the pages flapping somewhere out of Prescott’s vision as he spun and delivered the jab with his right.
Meara had not been expecting a counterpunch. The jab caught the bridge of his nose, and made him stagger back as both hands shot up to cover the hurt. Prescott instantly turned on the other two and charged three steps, knowing that they would scramble a distance off, then stop and drift, uncertain. He turned again to make the same charge toward Meara. He knew that if Meara retreated now, it was over.
But Meara was already in motion, hurling his body toward Prescott, trying to take advantage of his momentary inattention to push him into the brick wall of the building and hammer him there. Prescott made a quick half dodge, tripped him up, and gave him a push to speed up his motion. Meara bounced off the wall, fell to the sidewalk, and lay there. He was clutching his shoulder, moaning a little. It didn’t seem to Prescott that he could be that badly injured. “My shoulder.” It was a half-whispered croak. “It’s busted.”
Prescott glanced at the two others, who were now at least fifty feet away, moving sideways like runners taking a lead and keeping their eyes on the pitcher’s mound. When he met their eyes, they began to back away. Prescott’s wrath began to cool. There was no reason to be afraid, and he couldn’t leave Meara here with a broken shoulder.
“Help me,” Meara whispered. Prescott stepped closer. The plea was so unseemly that he felt pity. He had started to kneel when the shoe kicked up from below his vision. It moved with incredible speed, missed his groin, brushed the front of Prescott’s shirt, and barely nicked his chin, so that his teeth clicked together. Prescott changed. The kick, the surprise of it and the sudden jump to save himself from it, made the adrenaline surge. There was an instant when he saw with clarity the sequence of events, the simple fact of what Meara had done, and quickly passed beyond knowing into judgment.
Meara was up and charging toward him again to take advantage of the ruse. Prescott’s body devoted its strength to getting both of his hands on Meara’s left shoulder. He gripped the shirt, some of the flesh, and swung him back into the brick wall. Meara caromed off it, and this time Prescott met him. He aimed his blows at the head, delivering them with the heels of his hands, not to punch him but to drive his head into the wall.
In a few seconds Meara was on the pavement again and Prescott went about picking his books up from the ground, stacking them, and then lifting the stack into his left hand. He looked up suddenly.
Forty feet off, one of Meara’s friends exclaimed indignantly, “You killed him!”
Prescott put a faint smile on his face. “If you come near me again, I might kill all three of you.”
Afterward, the three had tried to use those words to get him into trouble with the police and the school administrators, but the version of the story they provided had not been convincing. There had been some kind of quiet investigation, and it had turned up stories of the three attacking lone students on their way home from school and stealing lunch money, watches, and rings.
Prescott supposed that he had been making the same intentional mistake all his life, maybe because he had required clarity—not for any authority, but for himself—before he could do what he had been aware at the beginning he would probably have to do. This time, he had actually thought a couple of times that the obstacles he had put in the killer’s way might have served as more than psychological barriers. The guy had actually taken a step off the stairway into empty air before he had saved himself. He had fallen into the deep end of the empty pool. It would have been nice if Prescott could have found him lying there with a broken leg, unable to go anywhere. But Prescott had watched, and he had been awed by what he had seen. This guy was good: so good that maybe Prescott had been lucky to notice him now, before he got any better.
Prescott sighed. He supposed he had just gotten his kick in the face, so it was time to go out and take this man off the census. Prescott took another look out the cellar window, raised the bolt of his rifle, pushed the detent to release it, pulled it all the way back, and lifted it out. He slipped it into the space beneath the old couch he had been sleeping on for the past few nights, up under the torn cloth into the zigzag springs, then left the useless rifle in plain sight, leaning against the wall. He moved toward the cellar stairs, feeling the weight of his weapons on his body without needing to touch them with his hands. He climbed the steps silently, stopped at the landing, and listened. Then he moved to the back door and slipped outside into the darkness.
Prescott stayed low and moved quickly. He was aware at each moment that the reason he had to be out here was the same as the reason why it was the worst idea in the world. Millikan had seen it instantly, months ago. This was a young, alert, agile man who had, for some reason that Prescott would never really know, begun at a very early age to train himself to kill people, and then somehow gotten himself into the underground market so that he’d had plenty of practice. This man could not be allowed to go on, get stronger, get smarter.
Prescott moved with measured, even paces across the open in the part of the yard that he was sure the killer could not see. Right now his opponent was near the telephone Prescott had left in the brush, wondering why he had been allowed to go there and fire his weapon without drawing Prescott’s fire. Probably there was nothing in his collected knowledge of human behavior—surely of combat—that could explain
it to his satisfaction. He did not know that Prescott, before he could foreclose all the offers and options, had to see the kick swinging toward his face. After the killer had thought about it for a few minutes, he would conclude that the telephone had been placed there to attract him. He would think Prescott wanted his exact location so he could zero it in his sights, take one calm, leisurely aim with the rifle propped to steady it, and cap him.
Prescott held his pistol muzzle-downward in his hand, and floated smoothly and silently into the woods. He knew exactly where he wanted this man to go next, and he was fairly certain he knew how to get him to go there. It was mostly a question of making all of the other places seem impossible.
He made his way along the edge of the woods. He had walked every yard of the woods alone at night while he prepared. He had wanted a piece of forested land, because it made the place seem easy and appealing. It would seem to be a simple matter for this killer to move nearly to the house without being seen. But it also deprived the killer of a car. He would need to leave it before he entered the woods. Once he was here, he was not getting out easily. Getting out meant running through the woods and coming out tired and scratched and maybe injured on an empty rural road on foot.
Prescott was ready. First he would go about denying the woods to the killer. He set the trip wires of his booby traps along the margin of the woods, then made his way to the tree on the edge of the forest that he had chosen in advance. From here he could see the spot where he had left the telephone. He rested his arm in the crook of the tree, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger. He fought down the recoil, fired four more times so he was sure the muzzle flash had been visible, then ducked and ran back the way he’d come. He heard the thuds of bullets pounding into the trees behind him, knocking chips of bark into the air. He was impressed by how quickly the killer had returned fire, and how accurately. But the shooting reassured Prescott: if the killer was lying on his belly in the brush on this side of the house, he was not up and running.
