The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 54

The previous evening, when he had shot Gunny Schloss, Billy had killed his third person since dawn, having also assisted in two other homicides. When he should have been full of merriment, all the fun had gone out of the day and all the frolic out of him.

As he drove away from the restaurant in Monterey, feeling the dog’s stare on the back of his head even after he turned the corner, he decided the problem might be that he had killed those people solely for business reasons. He hadn’t wasted any of them just for a lark, simply as an expression of his conviction that life was a parade of fools marching to no purpose.

Shumpeter had not been a business associate, but he had not been killed as an act of meaningless violence, either. Billy blew him away for his Cadillac and to use his house as a furnace in which to obliterate multiple life-sentences worth of incriminating evidence.

To his chagrin, Billy realized that he had lost his way. He had gotten so consumed by business that he’d strayed from the philosophy that had given him such a happy and successful life. He had become so serious about the illegal drug dealing, arms dealing, organ dealing, and other enterprises that he had succumbed to the idea that what he did mattered. Other than the fact that everything he did to earn money was illegal, he could not see one lick of difference between himself and Bill Gates: He had committed himself to building something, to a legacy!

He was embarrassed for himself. He had become a counter-culture bourgeois, seduced by the illusion of purpose and accomplishment.

The previous night, driving away from Brian McCarthy’s place after the inexplicable crying jag, he had told himself that the tonic most certain to improve his mood would be the ruthless murder of a total stranger selected on a whim, thus confirming the meaningless and dark-comic nature of life.

He had been correct. Amoment of clear seeing. But he had not yet acted on his own good advice more than half a day later.

With the Learjet, he could leapfrog over McCarthy and Redwing, and be waiting at the interception point long before they arrived. He had time to put his life back on track.

In a Best Buy parking lot, Billy opened the weapons case. He snapped the thirty-three-round magazine into the 9-mm Glock 18 and screwed on the sound suppressor.

Then he cruised.

During the next half hour, he encountered numerous excellent targets. A sweet-looking elderly woman walking a Maltese. A girl in a wheelchair. A beautiful young woman, demurely dressed, getting into a Honda bearing bumper stickers that urged JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS and ABSTINENCE ALWAYS WORKS.

When he failed to work up the energy to pull the trigger on a young mother pushing two infants in a tandem stroller, Billy knew he was having a midlife crisis.

In a Target parking lot, he unscrewed the silencer from the Glock, ejected the extended magazine, and returned everything to the molded-foam niches in the suitcase.

He had never been so scared in his life.

When he completed the current job, he would take off longer than a few days, perhaps a month. He would live the entire time as Tyrone Slothrop, and would reread all the classics that had liberated him in his youth.

The problem might be that the current generation of alienated, bitter, ironic, angry, nihilistic writers with a comic bent were not as talented as the giants who had come before them. If he had been sustaining himself on weak tea, mistaking it for white lightning, he could have unwittingly been starving his mind.

He returned to the airport, where the Lear waited.

At Billy’s request, the steward with the British accent prepared Chivas Regal over cracked ice.

Lunch, served high above the earth, was a chopped salad with breast of capon and quail’s eggs.

Billy sipped Scotch, ate, and brooded. He did not pick up any magazines. He went to the bathroom once, but he didn’t glance at the mirror. He did not worry about the dog getting his scent through the open SUV window. He did not weep. Not a single tear. His malaise was just a bump in the road. Nothing to worry about. A bump. In the road. Hi-ho.