Prescott broke from his hiding place. He had been expecting the man to go after Stella on foot, but since he had not, Prescott would need his car. He dashed between the next two buildings out to the street where he had left it, got in, and drove up the alley. He pulled in behind the man’s vehicle and blocked his exit. When he got out of his car, the man was already pushing Stella away so he could face Prescott.
The man was big and muscular, and Prescott could see in the man’s eyes that he was not reacting welclass="underline" he looked almost glad to see Prescott. In a single, quick motion, he reached into the cab of his truck, came back with a two-foot crowbar, and swung it hard and fast at Prescott’s head. Prescott stepped back only long enough to let the claw of the bar get past his face, then lunged forward while the man’s arm was across his body trying to stop the bar’s momentum to begin the backhand swing. The heel of Prescott’s right hand pounded into the middle of the man’s face to drive the bones of his nose up into his brain.
Then Prescott called the police and waited patiently. They arrested him, as usual, but Stella had already begun her narrative of his heroism, and her version got better with repetition. She seemed to have judged that a little exaggeration was warranted by the edgy, slit-eyed look both of the cops gave Prescott, and she had determined not to tolerate having equivocal judgments issued by the authorities. Prescott and Stella were allowed to leave the station at the same time the next morning.
Prescott flew home to Los Angeles and received a big check from Mellgrim’s client. But when he arrived he discovered that Stella’s wild tale of his uncanny brilliance and his deadly combat skills had made it, undiluted and not tempered by skepticism or even common sense, into the wire-service reports, and then onto national television news.
Prescott had still lived happily enough in his house in Encino until one night a month later. He awoke to the flashing of the light on the silent alarm and the low buzz it made in his room when the perimeter of the house had been breached. He began to move silently down the back stairs, his gun in his hand, gliding through the darkness. He slipped out the back door onto the lawn, and quietly made his way around the house to the window where the intruder had entered. As he approached, he noticed that a dim illumination from inside the house was throwing a square of light on the lawn.
The silence was shattered by a piercing electronic shriek, and the square of light seemed to brighten. Prescott stepped forward and looked in the window just as the fire alarm reached 120 decibels. The flames rose from the center of the living room floor and blossomed outward at the ceiling, with thick black smoke pouring ahead of the brightness toward the dining room and the staircase. The color of the flames—bright yellow with blue fringes—told him it was gasoline. The front door swung open and he got a glimpse of a man wearing a blue windbreaker and jeans slipping outside.
Prescott sprinted around the corner of the house in time to see the man running hard toward the front gate. Prescott strained to gain on him, the balls of his feet digging hard into the grass and his strides lengthening. The man pushed on the gate, then realized it would not open, and reached up to pull himself to the top.
Prescott stopped twenty feet from him and aimed the gun. “Don’t leave just yet.”
When the man dropped to the driveway and turned to face him, the explanation settled on Prescott all at once. In the brightness of the fire, Prescott could see that the man’s face and hands were deeply scratched and skinned from going over the fence through the hedge of climbing roses. Trickles of blood ran down his cheeks to his chin, making streaks in the black carbon that had come from the mistake of lighting a big pool of gasoline in an enclosed space. His eyebrows and the hair above his forehead had been singed off by the first flash of ignition, but the eyes glowed with excitement, and the mouth was set in a delighted grin. On the heart of the windbreaker were the words MINNESOTA TWINS.
There followed a fraction of a second that Prescott used by cursing himself for letting this happen. He had been too willing to accept it when the police had insisted that the man who had gone after Stella Kaspersen was a solitary, introverted type who could not have had an accomplice. Prescott had not been sure. The murdered girls had merely been dumped in the woods after they were dead. The way they had first been overpowered and killed somewhere else argued for the idea that there was a somewhere else, and the police had not turned up a suitable spot that was owned or controlled by the man with the crowbar. The police had assured him it didn’t mean anything, because that part of Minnesota was full of sparsely populated places where a man could do virtually anything and not be heard or seen. Prescott had assumed they must know more about their territory than he did. Now, a month later, here the nonexistent accomplice was, burning Prescott’s house down around his ears.
When the fraction of a second had elapsed, the man’s right hand was slipping into the windbreaker’s pocket. Prescott had seen from the white-toothed grin in the middle of the black-singed face that this was going to happen, so while the man maneuvered the hidden pistol so he could fire it though the windbreaker’s pocket, Prescott took the time to place a shot through the bend of the M in Minnesota.
While he was bent over the body to check for any unwelcome signs of life, he happened to glance toward his house and see the center beam burn through to dump much of the tile roof into his living room and create a suitable flue for the forty-foot flames to billow upward into the night sky.
As he watched his beautiful, carefully planned house burn down, Prescott admitted to himself that he had become too notorious to live this way. It also occurred to him that in a large city, almost any good hotel had a bed as comfortable as he’d had, a chef who could cook better than he could, and a bathroom that was cleaned more often than he was willing to clean it. He rented a storage space for the possessions he felt he needed to own but didn’t want to carry from one hotel to another in a suitcase.
Without the burden of the big house, or the temptation to buy things to put in it, he spent a smaller portion of his income. He put his money into stocks and bonds that were in the physical custody of major brokerage firms, and they automatically fed his checking account every month. If anybody wanted him, they could dial his business telephone number or send a letter to his post office box.
Within a month after the fire, Prescott had effectively disappeared as a physical presence that could be limited at any given moment to a single set of coordinates on the earth.
9
Varney chose the North Hollywood branch library because it was miles from the big central one downtown. It was small enough so that he could see the entrances and most of the employees at a glance. Even if Prescott’s suggestion that he do some research was a trap—if Prescott had some insider’s way of getting the library’s computer-system controller to call the cops as soon as someone started running searches on his name—Varney was fairly confident that he would notice odd behavior in the librarians or patrons in time to get out.