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.