He had concentrated all of his mental energy on maintaining a small, private discipline. It was not even a plan, just a way of holding on to who he was. After the first week here, he had been shocked and alarmed at what he was doing to himself. He had been letting himself lose his edge. He had been letting his muscles go slack and his perception dull and his will weaken, and these were the same as dying. That day, he had begun to perform his old workouts. When he had felt the agonizing suspicion that doing them was harder than it had been a month ago, he had increased the number of repetitions, added new exercises, run farther, slowly increasing his workouts until they took half the day. He had walked wherever he went, sharpening his sense of the rhythms of the city, using his ears and practicing his night vision so that his mind would supply what his eyes could not see.
After a time, he had begun to shop for places where he could again practice the skills he used in his work. He had gone to a karate dojo and joined advanced classes that met two evenings a week. He had gone to a second dojo and joined an advanced class in judo that met two more. Advanced classes in martial arts were very small, made up almost entirely of men, all of them wearing black belts. They were much more highly skilled than anyone Varney would be likely to meet in the normal course of his trade. They helped him practice how to detect an opponent’s intentions from tiny physical changes, then block, dodge, roll, and retaliate ever more quickly.
He had not felt comfortable about going to a shooting range. There were few of them in the area, and he knew that at least some of the customers were sure to be off-duty policemen or people who worked with policemen. He didn’t want to be distracted by wondering whether one of them might have seen a copy of the picture Prescott had given the police in Buffalo. He drove around the area and found four pieces of land that were big enough and empty enough and so overgrown with scrub trees and weeds that they could not be used or even visited by the owners much.
He would go at night with his pistol hidden in his coat and walk the woods and fields. He would tread silently, aware of the way the moonlight fell on him and the shapes of trees and bushes behind him. He listened for the sounds of small animals in the brush, testing his patience and alertness by trying to find birds in their nesting places, and to surprise the skunks, raccoons, opossums, and field mice, which moved only at night.
He followed rituals, sometimes walking in the night landscape with his pistol broken down, the pieces secreted in different pockets. When he detected his prey, he assembled the weapon in the dark without looking at it: slide, barrel, recoil spring, trigger and sear, grip. He loaded one bullet into the magazine and slid the magazine into place. Then he screwed the silencer onto the barrel. He practiced until he could do it quickly, all without making a sound that would alert an animal to his presence. He would study the position and attitude of the animal, match it to the features of the landscape. Finally, he would cycle the single bullet into the chamber. That noise would startle the animal. It would panic, skitter toward a hole or a brush pile, or take flight, while Varney took his single shot.
At other times, he would stop in the brush, assemble the pistol with his eyes closed, slip it into his pocket, then move ahead, waiting to startle any animal out of its hiding place. When it happened, he drew and fired.
Now, three months later, Varney’s daily life was still out of control, a bundle he had let slip, that was rolling and bouncing downhill, coming apart and spilling its contents. He still had done nothing about that. Maybe it would all be lost and destroyed, and maybe later he would go back to gather up all the bits and pack them together again. He would not be able to make that decision until it had bounced to the bottom and stopped. For now, he would tolerate the unpleasant sensation. He had made a different choice. Whatever happened to his money, whatever temporary advantage people took of his vulnerability, Varney had preserved what mattered. He had chosen to save himself.
He knew he had wasted three months, given up planning, lost all of the respect he had earned with one of the syndicates that had often provided him with work. But today he had a feeling. He was beginning to feel that things were about to change. It might have been because he had needed to work on himself this hard, and he had been waiting until the self-improvement process had hit a certain high pitch before he could bring on the next change. But the rest had to do with the consequences of letting go of his life. The disaster was nearly complete. In another week he would be out of money.
There was a strange change in the atmosphere of the office when he stepped inside today. He knew that the reason he noticed was that he had trained himself so assiduously to detect tiny, subtle movements and sounds. Something was different. He looked at Tracy, sitting at a desk across the room, and she was holding herself differently. It took him a moment to realize that it was the angle of her back. Usually she leaned forward on her forearms, looking tired and frustrated. Today she was a little straighter, her shoulders held lower. As he stepped in, she fidgeted before she looked up. She was impatient. Her eyes widened. “Sugar!” she said.
“Hello, Tracy,” said Varney.
“I was expecting you earlier. Before lunch.” She glowered at him, but this time, the expression was not the usual counterfeit hurt feelings because his payment was late. This time it was mock anger, which he was supposed to recognize as a pleasantry.
“I walked here,” he said. “It takes time.”
She watched him take out the cash from his coat pocket and set it on the desk in front of her. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up. “I’ll bet you’re running a bit low about now.”
Varney shrugged, but didn’t answer.
“I was right,” she announced. “Now,” she said in a fake-sympathetic tone, like the one people used to give unwelcome advice to drunks and addicts, “don’t you think it’s about time you got over what’s been bothering you and got a job?”
Varney shrugged again. “I guess I’ll have to do that one of these days.” He hated her. It was amazing to him that his bad luck should have been so relentless and extreme that it was forcing him to listen to this woman doling out these doses of criticism as though she had invented them and provided them for his benefit.
She stared at him with an air of superiority. “Would you even be ready to work if a job came up?”
“Of course I would. I’m healthy and rested.”
She looked at him more sharply. “That’s exactly why I ask. You’re rested, all right: maybe a little too rested?”
“I’m as sharp right now as I’ve ever been in my life. Something will come up,” he assured her.
“It has,” she purred slyly.
“What?”
“I said something has come up,” said Tracy, her eyes gleaming with self-satisfaction. Then the malice crept into her voice again. “I hope you were telling me the truth about being ready to work, because this is not like murdering Duane, who wasn’t expecting it and didn’t see it coming.”
“Then what is it like?” he asked.
“It’s a big job, almost at the level you worked before your . . . little setback,” she said.