“I won’t,” she said, sounding hurt.
He was silent again until after she had made the turn onto the smaller road and was headed toward the farm. She had gotten them here without his having to point out the last few turns, so he felt reassured: she wouldn’t get lost on the way back. She said, “Let me know where to stop.”
He watched the sights going by for a few minutes. When they passed the farm, he looked and his heartbeat strengthened again. The SUV was parked there, and one light was on upstairs. He was here. When Mae had gone a half mile down the road, Varney looked back and saw no headlights. He said, “Right here. Stop.”
He slipped out onto the road and closed the car door, then stepped back onto the shoulder. As he turned to go, her voice cut the silence.
“Wait,” she called.
He stopped, his senses searching the area for danger, his mind racing. He glanced at her to see what she had meant. She looked as though she knew she had made a mistake. She said, “I just wanted to say good luck.”
His eyes flared, but he said, “Thanks,” and stepped into the woods at the edge of the road. He saw the lights fade, heard the engine accelerating, and then submerged himself in the silence and darkness.
34
Varney took his bearings by looking up to find the North Star, gauging the angle of the road, and then looking for a landmark to aim at. The sky was incredibly clear and the stars appeared big and close, but the woods were too thick to allow him to pick out a landmark on the ground. He knew the approximate direction he wanted, so he set off.
There was something about the night woods that created its own propriety. He found himself stalking through the forest quietly, as he had practiced in Ohio. As he walked, occasionally he startled small animals that rustled the brush and scuttled off. He was in only about a quarter mile before he heard something different ahead. A thicket shook, making a hissing and crackling, the leaves on the ground crunching as something heavy exploded out of the thicket.
He dropped and crouched, the pistol out of his belt and in his hand before his mind even attempted to interpret the sounds. The thumping of feet rapidly moved off somewhere ahead and to his right, and the silence flowed in to fill the vacuum again.
Varney stayed coiled and motionless for a long time, his ears straining and his eyes slowly moving back and forth, up and down. A deer: it had to be a deer, he thought. It had been absolutely still, maybe lying down, and he had approached so quietly that he had startled it.
He slowly stood. He switched on the safety of his pistol, but he didn’t put it away. He reached into his jacket pocket, found the four-inch tube of the silencer, and carefully screwed it onto the custom-threaded barrel. He stepped forward again, this time feeling the cadence of his heart, almost hearing it as it raced, then slowed again. He was probably being foolish, he chided himself. There was nothing to be uneasy about as long as he didn’t get startled in the dark and step in a hole.
He had become accustomed to walking in fields and woods at night in Ohio, but this was not Ohio. It had felt the same at first, but it wasn’t. There were deer. What about bears? Up here there could easily be bears. These woods and farms had covered all the land that was high, and the rest was marshes and streams, so this was where they would be.
He plotted his course again by mentally tracing his path back to where he had begun, then extending the line forward through the thicket. He kept going steadily, not letting himself be as quiet now as he had been. If there was something big up ahead, he wanted it to have time to get out of his way.
In a few minutes he was feeling better, concentrating on what he had to do. It was simpler than most of the jobs he’d done since he had moved into the upper level of his profession. People only put out the big money he commanded when the job was risky or complicated. In this case, it was only risky and complicated for the client, and whoever he was, he had taken care of most of that himself. He was going to be the suspect, so he had established an alibi, paid in advance, and gotten out of the way. He had even done the work of finding Kelleher himself, so there could be no mistake.
Varney was not a believer in taking work lightly. If you were good enough to do the job, then usually the way you got destroyed was by chance. The best always assumed that something was going to go wrong, and calmly watched to see what it was going to be this time. Some visitor would show up at the front door just as you were waiting for the target to answer it. You would have your car’s muffler go just as you were driving off, trying not to be noticed. Guns jammed, fires either went out or roared into life so fast that you could hear sirens before you made it out the door.
Over the past few days, he had anticipated as many of the possible problems as he could, and fixed them. Nobody would see his car parked here. Mae was in a casino alone, and when she drove off, she would still seem to be alone. If his gun jammed, he had another in his jacket pocket. If that failed, he had a knife. If Mae didn’t come, he could walk back to the house and take Kelleher’s car, or even sneak into town at that time of night and probably hot-wire one. He reviewed his preparations and contingency plans, and found they were adequate. The real certainty was inside Varney. He had exerted self-discipline over the past couple of months, and stayed strong and ready. He had tirelessly worked on his body, his concentration, his skills, his alertness. Trudging out here to pop some solitary traitor was almost beneath him, but he didn’t mind. The job had come at a time when he needed to get back to work. He needed a kill.
He sensed that there was more light between the trunks of the trees ahead, and quickened his pace. In a few minutes, he was sure. A hundred feet to his left, he caught sight of stubble and bare ground. He had made a near-perfect diagonal from the road across the woods, and at some point had passed over an invisible line onto Kelleher’s property. He stayed well back, where the brush was thick and the trunks of trees made him invisible from outside the woods, and kept going until his eye caught the glow of an electric light just below the canopy of leaves.
He turned toward it and moved forward from tree to tree, until he could see the house. The light was still on in the upstairs window—undoubtedly Kelleher’s bedroom. Downstairs, everything seemed to be dark. Varney moved closer, still gliding ahead only as far as the next tree that he could stand behind, then stopping and watching the house for a time while he planned his next advance.
The SUV he had seen from the road was a dark blue Lincoln Navigator. He could make out the name on the back, the beige leather upholstery of the back seats above the window, and the license-plate holder from a lot in Minneapolis. The vehicle was new, and expensive. He felt a moment of empathy for his client. This weasel had handed the client to the police, and managed to hold on to some serious money. He had bought a big farm and a new vehicle, and if he could live up here, he had no need to work.
For the first time, it occurred to Varney that this job might be worth more than he had been offered. All this money had come from some kind of theft that this Kelleher had pulled with the client, and so there was a fairly strong possibility that some of it was here in cash. Varney checked his watch. It was twenty after twelve already. He needed to set aside twenty minutes to get back to the road, and that left an hour and twenty minutes for him to accomplish everything he was going to do here. The thought made him venture closer, his eyes now scanning the eaves of the house for floodlights that might be connected to motion detectors. The roof of the farmhouse was steep and the eaves were high, so he could see clearly: they were bare. There were no warning signs on the lawn or windows that belonged to an alarm company. He supposed that way out here there might not even be such a thing. But he exerted the self-discipline and made himself do the walk-around he had planned. He unscrewed the silencer and put away the gun.