The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 60

The single-lane blacktop led half a mile off the county road before arriving at the simple, painted steel-pipe gate that barred passage.

If the pearly fog grew thicker, even in daylight the white gate might be hard to see in spite of the red reflectors affixed to it. In the headlights, a line of those ovals glittered as if the gate were a trophy rack mounted with the heads of giant rattlesnakes.

Billy Pilgrim put down the driver’s window and pressed the button on the call post.

After only a short delay, Harrow replied. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Billy.”

Harrow knew him by a few other names, as well, though not by the name Tyrone Slothrop.

“You’re cutting it tight,” Harrow admonished.

“I saw this beautiful young girl in a car with a bumper sticker that said ABSTINENCE ALWAYS WORKS, and I didn’t kill her.”

After a silence, Harrow said, “You always make me laugh, Billy. But not now, okay?”

“Juliette Junke says I’m working too hard. Maybe that’s it.”

“We’re gonna talk workloads now?”

“No. I’m just saying.”

“You have the bag of stuff from Amy’s house?”

“Yeah, but I’ll bring it to you later.”

“Later when?”

“Like you said, I’m cutting it tight. I’ve got to get set up. I’ll bring the bag when I bring you the bitch and McCarthy.”

“Are you all right?” Harrow asked.

“After this, I’m taking some time off. Do some reading, see if I can find that young mother with the two kids in the tandem stroller.”

“Young mother who?”

“Listen, I’ll get set up right away. I’ll bring the bag of stuff from Redwing’s house later.”

The gate swung open, and Billy drove through.

In the event of clear weather, he had the sniper rifle, which would have allowed him to conceal himself at a distance and shoot out a couple of tires on Redwing’s Expedition at the designated point in the road, taking them by surprise. They wouldn’t have had a chance to see him with a gun and throw the SUV in reverse, backing out of sight at high speed.

In this fog, however, Billy didn’t need the rifle. He could wait closer to the road. He would use the Glock machine pistol to blow the tires, to persuade Redwing and McCarthy to get out of the Expedition, and to shoot the dog through the side window.

Past the gate, the road rose and fell and curved for nearly a mile before it topped a final rise and descended the last two hundred yards to the lighthouse.

Harrow wanted Redwing to cross this crest, see the lighthouse, and realize that she had been lured to her death, and to worse than death. At that moment, Billy would disable the Expedition.

Right now, fog shrouded much of the lighthouse, but the tower was huge, and it loomed even in this murk.

Billy pulled off the pavement, drove among a cluster of hillside pines, parked, switched off the headlights, and killed the engine.

When he marched Redwing and McCarthy to the caretaker’s house, quite a program would unfold. The boss had showman-ship.

After the pair were chained in the kitchen, Harrow would no doubt tell Billy to wait for him in the lighthouse. That was where they discussed business, not in front of Vanessa.

Because Billy was the last man left who could link Redwing and McCarthy to the boss, Harrow would kill him in the lighthouse.

Billy wanted his midlife crisis to be in the middle of his life, not at the end. He wouldn’t wait in the lighthouse to be killed.

Instead, he would go to the garage and remove the spark plugs from both of Harrow ’s vehicles. Then he would return to his rented SUV and drive out of there, around the gate in the road, away.

No more Billy Pilgrim. Done, over, finito. He would be Tyrone Slothrop for a week, a month, perhaps for the rest of his life.

He would not be able to continue criminal activity in California, Arizona, or Nevada, or in select South American countries, because he was well known there in too many circles as an associate of Harrow.

Everybody liked pudgy balding Billy and wanted to hug him, but they feared Harrow and wanted to kiss his butt. Fear always trumped affection, and it was Billy’s experience that most human beings also preferred butt-kissing to hugging.

Once it was known that Billy had fallen from Harrow’s grace, every old friend he met would want to kill him right away, to please Harrow. Friendship wasn’t worth the heart it was written on, as Billy himself had proved many times, as when he had shot Georgie Jobbs. A heart was just meat, people were meat, meat didn’t care. Did a filet mignon care about a pork chop? No.

As Tyrone Slothrop, he would have to go somewhere Harrow and his crowd would never travel. Like Oklahoma or Utah or South Dakota. This would be a hardship, but he would find lots of crime to commit in his new turf; and there were people to kill no matter where you went.

He would have to lose weight, grow a mustache, cut off an ear. If a friend of Harrow’s did cross Tyrone’s path in Pierre, South Dakota, he would maybe do a double take, but then say Nah, it can’t be Billy. Billy had two ears. As a disguise, cutting off an ear is better than a Tyrolean hat and fake gold teeth combined and cubed.

Maybe he was getting his groove back. His life was beginning to seem meaningless and brutal and comic again, just like the fiction he admired.

He got out of the rented SUV with the plastic bag of crap from Redwing’s house and the Glock 18. He had taken the silencer off the Glock. The boss wanted to hear the bang.

He walked up the slope and chose a position just below the crest, at the edge of the small copse of trees.

The fog imparted a pleasant chill to his exposed face and his bare head, and it suppressed most noises. He could barely hear the surf breaking, which sounded like ten thousand people whispering in the distance.

Thinking in similes and metaphors was a not always welcome consequence of being formed by literature.

Like ten thousand people whispering in the distance.

It wasn’t a very good simile, because why would ten thousand people be gathered anywhere to whisper?

Once the simile was in his head, he couldn’t cast it out, and it began to annoy him. Annoyance phased into uneasiness, and soon uneasiness became a deep disquiet.

As improbable as the image was, the thought of ten thousand people whispering together began to creep him out.

All right. Enough. It was just a damn simile. It didn’t mean anything. Nothing meant anything, ever. He was doing fine. He was back in his groove. He was just swell. Hi-ho.