The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 36

The man known as Eliot Rosewater to Vernon Lesley was known as Billy Pilgrim to the associate who had flown the two-engine aircraft to the abandoned military facility in the Mojave.

The pilot, who had worked with Billy on many occasions, called himself Gunther Schloss, and was Gunny to his friends. Billy thought Gunther Schloss sounded like a true name, a born name, but he would not have bet a penny on it.

Gunny looked like a Gunther Schloss ought to look: tall, thick-necked, muscular, with white-blond hair and blue eyes and a face made for the cover of White Supremacist Monthly.

In fact he was married to a lovely black woman in Costa Rica and to a charming Chinese woman in San Francisco. He wasn’t a fascist but an anarchist, and during one bizarre week in Havana, he had smoked a lot of ganja with Fidel Castro. You could hire Gunny Schloss to kill just about anyone, if it was someone you for some reason didn’t want to kill yourself, but he cried every time he watched Steel Magnolias, which he did once a year.

After Gunny killed Bobby Onions and Vernon Lesley, he and Billy stripped the bodies of ID and dragged them to the intersection of the two cracked blacktop roads that served the surrounding cluster of abandoned Quonset huts. They pried a manhole out of the weed-choked pavement and dumped the dead men into the long-unused septic tank.

Even the desert got some rain, and the service-road gutters fed this tank, so the darkness below still stank, if not as bad as it had when the facility had been open twenty years ago, and both bodies splashed into something best not contemplated.

Billy heard movement below, before and after the dropping of the cadavers: maybe rats, maybe lizards, maybe desert beetles as big as bread plates.

When he had been a young man, he would have lowered a flashlight or torch down there, to satisfy his curiosity. He was old enough now to know that curiosity usually got you a bullet in the face.

They worked fast, and after they wrestled the cover onto the manhole, Gunny said, “See you in Santa Barbara.”

“Pretty place. I like Santa Barbara,” Billy said. “I hope nobody ever blows it up.”

“Somebody will,” Gunny said, not because he had any proprietary knowledge of a forthcoming event, but because he was an anarchist and always hopeful.

Gunny flew out in the twin-engine Cessna, and Billy walked the scene, kicking sand over the drag marks from the dead men’s heels, picking up what shell casings he spotted in the late sun, and making sure they had gathered up all of the major pieces of Bobby Onions’s skull.

When the woman disappeared, no one would care as long as she was a nobody named Redwing, living in a modest bungalow, doing nothing with her life except rescuing dogs.

Every week, so many people disappeared or turned up dead in a grotesque fashion that even the cable-news crime shows, with their insatiable hunger for shock and gore, could not cover every case. Some deaths were more important than others. You didn’t get killer ratings and book all your ad time at the highest price if your show’s philosophy was that the death of any sparrow mattered as much as the death of any other.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for the pretty twenty-something pregnant woman who is clubbed to death by her husband, cut into twelve pieces, packed in a footlocker with concrete blocks, and submerged in a pond. It tolls and tolls and tolls, ²⁴/₇, until the only way you can escape hearing it is by switching to Animal Planet.

Amy Redwing’s disappearance would merit zero TV time as long as no one knew she had once been someone other than Amy Redwing. Because Vernon Lesley had done a good job of finding the mementos of her past that she had saved, he knew too much about her, and he had to die.

Maybe Lesley had not shared his knowledge with Bobby Onions, but Billy Pilgrim had not been willing to take a chance that Onions was as clueless as he looked. Besides, the moment Onions got out of the Land Rover, with his James Dean sneer and his swagger, Billy wanted to kill him on general principles.

After policing the area for evidence of the shootings, Billy dropped the dead men’s ID into the white trash bag that contained what Vernon Lesley had confiscated from the woman’s bungalow. With the bag on the passenger seat beside him, he drove out of the desert in the Land Rover and headed west.

Twilight came on like a big Hollywood production, saturated with color-gold, peach, orange, then red, with purple pending-ornamented with clouds in fantastic shapes afire against an electric-blue sky shimmering toward sapphire: the kind of twilight that could almost make you think the day had been important and had meant something.

Billy had a busy night ahead of him. They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor for the wicked, nor for guys like Billy Pilgrim, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.