He stopped at the side of the doorway and listened. He could see the window, a bit of a bathroom floor through an open door, a chair, a dresser with a mirror. He leaned outward until he could see a bit of the reflection of the bed. There was a quilt in a dark shade that he couldn’t quite decide in the dark was blue, but no lump. Kelleher must be sleeping on the near side, the part of the bed that he couldn’t see in the reflection. Varney raised his right arm in a crook, so the pistol was pointed up, pivoted around the door frame to move inside the room, brought the pistol down to aim at the head of the bed on the near side. The bed was empty.
Varney let his pivot continue so he spun to face the bathroom. Nobody was in there.
A high-pitched electronic ring twittered to his right. It was so loud to Varney’s ears that he dropped to a crouch and aimed at it, his muscles rigid. But the only object in that direction was the dresser. The sound came again—a telephone. The small lozenge-shaped shadow on the surface was a cell phone. This time he saw the rows of keys light up as it rang. He had to stop it.
He snatched it up, pressed the button, and clamped it to his ear as he crouched beside the dresser, listening with the other ear for footsteps.
“Hello, Slick,” said the voice. Varney’s stomach sucked inward. There seemed to be no air in the room, and he had to force himself to take a breath. It was Prescott.
35
Varney’s whole being seemed to him to be toppling into the silence: Prescott was waiting for him to answer. His instinct was that anything Prescott wanted was something that would hurt him somehow. But he could not break the connection, lose touch. “I can hear you breathing,” said Prescott. “I know it’s not Michael J. Kelleher, because I made him up. And it’s not as though I don’t know where you are. I know where I put the phone.”
Varney took a moment to swallow and be sure his voice would sound right when it came out. “I’m listening.” He held the phone away from his ear, so he could detect it if there was a sound of Prescott’s voice coming to him through the air in addition to through the telephone’s earpiece. An echo, a slight time dissonance would tell him where Prescott was. He stepped to the doorway.
“That’s better,” said Prescott. “I apologize for scaring the shit out of you by ringing the phone.”
There was no sound that Varney could hear that had not come from the telephone. He said, “I’m not that easy to scare.” He concentrated on keeping the anger and hatred out of his voice. He peered into the hallway, but there was no visual sign of Prescott, either. The hallway was just a hardwood corridor with the two bedrooms he had entered, and four closed doors—one at either end, one on his right on this side of the house, just before the railing of the staircase, and another across the hall from it. Wherever Prescott was, he couldn’t see Varney, but he knew which room Varney was in. That had to change.
“That’s good,” said Prescott. “Fear and anger cloud a man’s judgment sometimes, and right now I think you need to be clearheaded.”
“Why is that?” Varney quickly slipped across the hall into the other room and paused just to the right of the doorway with his back against the wall. He held the phone away from his ear again and held his breath as he strained his ears.
“Because you’ve got a problem. I wanted to talk to you now, and let you know there are a couple of options, before they get used up.”
Varney’s chest felt as though it would burst with frustration. He still could not get his ears to detect a sound of Prescott’s voice coming to him from somewhere inside the house. He knew it was happening: Prescott had to be in the house, but Varney’s ears were not sensitive enough to pick it up. He blew out the air in his lungs as he stepped silently toward the window. He knew Prescott would hear it as an expression of contempt, but it wasn’t loud enough for Prescott to hear except through the phone. He took another step and looked out the window. He sidestepped, still not sure, getting worried.
“I wouldn’t bother with that,” said Prescott.
“What?”
“Just because I bought you those pipes and let you have the use of one of them doesn’t mean I’ll let you use it forever.”
Varney leaned close enough to the window so his face touched the screen. He had been right. The pipe he had leaned against the wall of the house beside the window had been moved. He could see it on the grass below. He quickly ducked and pivoted, then stopped, protected by the wall. Prescott could be out there with a rifle and night-vision scope—must be, Varney decided. The outer wall was a stupid place for Varney to be. Its solidity was an illusion. Even a common hunting rifle would put a hole through it. He went low again and retreated to the inner wall by the doorway. “What do you want?” he hissed. “Haven’t you had enough of trying and losing?”
“It’s more a question of what you want,” said Prescott. “You’ve got a problem to solve.”
“So what’s my problem?”
“Here’s the way it looks to me,” said Prescott. “You’re alone, on foot, in a pretty remote place where there are not a lot of people. There’s no crowd to fade into, and not much to distract anybody like me. At the moment, you’re in a house that I selected. You know I’m not far away, but you don’t know exactly where I am. I could be outside with a rifle, waiting for you to try to get out a window. You’ll be out there hanging by your fingertips in your dark clothes against those white boards for a good second or two. Tomorrow morning I can go hose off the siding and go up on a ladder to patch the holes. Of course, maybe I’m in the room right next to you with the door closed. Or one of the others. If you open one to go out a different window, it’s entirely possible I might be sitting in a comfortable chair holding a shotgun loaded with double-ought. The cleanup would take longer, but I’m a patient man.”
Varney said, “You think I haven’t thought of all this?”
“I suppose you have. I don’t want you to dwell on the specifics. I want you to think past them. I’ve got you in a predicament. I want you to know that you don’t have to die. There are other ways through this.”
“Like what?”
“You leave anything made out of metal in that room. You come out. I run a metal detector over you, to be sure nothing slipped your mind. You would have to tolerate handcuffs on the ride into Hinckley, and probably again when they transport you down to Minneapolis, but after that you’d be in a private cell.”
Varney thought he saw a movement at the edge of the woods. If that was where Prescott was, he would have been in position to see Varney arrive, watch the business with the pipe, see him come into this room. Varney stared out the window at the spot. “What difference does it make if I let you shoot me or I let them kill me in some gas chamber?”
Prescott’s laugh carried with it everything that Varney hated. It was the laugh of a man who didn’t think he would ever have to worry about the things that were tormenting Varney, but more important than this, it was arrogant, superior. Prescott said, “You ought to know better than that. If they did get through a trial and prove anything, it wouldn’t be good enough to get you executed. The evidence they have isn’t that strong. They can’t say, ‘This guy has been taking money for putting people in the ground for years.’ They have to pick one and prove you did it.”
“If you think I’d get off, what are you doing this for? I thought you had given up, gotten off me.”
“I’ll never do that,” said Prescott. The sound of his voice was quiet, almost gentle, and the effect was horrible. “I have two reasons. If you go in, get booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and all that, I’m not the only one who knows you. If you ever kill somebody later, you’re a manageable police problem. They’ll pick you up. They’ll know all about you, your habits, the way you do your work, so they’ll recognize it.”