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.
Varney heard two men come through the door into the men’s room. He stood up and flushed the toilet, then went to the sink to wash his hands. He would go to the public library to see if he could use one of the computers. He would look up what he could find about Roy Prescott.
8
An hour later, Prescott moved his boxes into his new office and left them in a corner unopened. The place was much like the last one, only on Sunset the lawyers down the hall were more likely to be entertainment lawyers than corporate or criminal, and most of the other offices were occupied by talent agencies or small film-development companies that lived off the excess money and vanity of some actor or director.
The telephone jack was about all he was interested in for the moment, and he was in a hurry, so he plugged in his phone and answering machine and left. He took the elevator down to the street level, so he could get back in his car and drive to his rented storage space near the airport on his way down to the marina.
A number of years ago, Prescott’s wife had announced to him that he was not temperamentally suited for marriage—something he had begun to suspect on his own—and asked him to move out of their house. Prescott had learned a couple of years later that a man in his business should not live in a house at all. After the divorce, he had bought a small house wedged in on a short, unremarkable street in Van Nuys. It was shaded by old magnolia trees that dropped thick, brown, leathery leaves on the pavement and lawns year-round, but added white, rubbery flower petals in the spring and summer, and grenadelike woody cones in the fall. His name had not been known to people he had not met face-to-face. Since his hunting had been conducted in cities far from Van Nuys, all that was required for safety was that he never give up on a hunt until it was finished, leaving some killer free to follow him home.
The house had appreciated in value through the eighties, as every piece of land in California did even if it was situated on a toxic-waste dump astride the San Andreas Fault. He had done what all the world seemed to consider inevitable—sold it and bought a better one. The second house was two miles away in Encino, south of Ventura Boulevard. He selected it for its appropriateness to his high income, paid five times as much for it as for the last one, and then remodeled it with an awareness that things sometimes happened to people like him if they momentarily forgot who they were.