Velocity

THEIR FRENZIED EYES

These dismaying utterances were not delivered in a tone of distress. They came in the same uninflected murmur with which she spoke less troubling words.

Nevertheless, they concerned Billy. He worried that at the bottom of her coma, she occupied a dark and fearsome place, that she felt trapped and threatened, and alone.

Now her brow furrowed and she spoke again, “The sea…”

When he wrote this down, she gave him more: “What it is…”

The stillness in the room grew more profound, as if countless fathoms of thickening atmosphere pressed all currents from the air, so that her soft voice carried to Billy.

To her lips, her right hand rose as though to feel the texture of her words.

“What it is that it keeps on saying.”

This was the most coherent she had been, in coma, and seldom had she said as much in a single visit.

“Barbara?”

“I want to know what it says… the sea.”

23

She lowered her hand to her breast. The furrows faded from her brow. Her eyes, which as she spoke had roved beneath their lids, grew fixed once more. Pen poised over paper, Billy waited, but Barbara matched the silence of the room. And the silence deepened, and the stillness, until he felt that he must go or meet a fate similar to that of a prehistoric fly preserved in amber. She would lie in this hush for hours or for days, or forever. He kissed her but not on the mouth. That would feel like a violation. Her cheek was soft and cool against his lips.

Three years, ten months, four days, she had been in this coma, into which she had fallen only a month after accepting an engagement ring from Billy.

24

Chapter 4

Billy did not have the isolation that Lanny enjoyed, but he lived on an acre shrouded by alders and deodar cedars, along a lane with few residences. He didn’t know his neighbors. He might not have known them even if they had lived closer. He was grateful for their disinterest.

The original owner of the house and the architect had evidently negotiated each other into a hybrid structure, half bungalow, half upscale cabin. The lines were those of a bungalow. The cedar siding, silvered by the weather, belonged on a cabin, as did the front porch with rough-hewn posts supporting the roof. Unlike most bipolar houses, this one appeared cozy. Diamond-pane, beveled-glass windows—pure bungalow—looked bejeweled when the lights were on. In daylight the leaping-deer weather vane on the roof turned with lazy grace even in turbulent scrambles of wind.

The detached garage, which also contained his woodworking shop, stood behind the house.

After Billy parked the Explorer and closed the big door behind it, as he walked across the backyard toward the house, an owl hooted from its perch on the ridge line of the garage roof.

No other owls answered. But Billy thought he heard mice squeak, and he could almost feel them shivering in the shrubbery, yearning for the tall grass beyond the yard.

His mind felt swampy, his thoughts muddy. He paused and took a deep breath, savoring air redolent of the fragrant bark and needles of the deodars. The astringent scent cleared his head.

Clarity proved undesirable. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but now he wanted a beer and a shot.

25

The stars looked hard. They were bright, too, in the cloudless sky, but the feeling he got from them was hardness.

Neither the back steps nor the floorboards of the porch creaked. He had plenty of time to keep the place in good, tight condition. After gutting the kitchen, he himself had built the cabinets. They were cherry wood with a dark stain.

He had laid the tile floor: black-granite squares. The granite countertops matched the floor.

Clean and simple. He had intended to do the whole house in that style, but then he had lost his way.

He poured a cold bottle of Guinness stout into a mug, spiked it with bourbon. When he did drink, he wanted punch in both the texture and the taste. He was making a pastrami sandwich when the phone rang. “Hello?”

The caller did not respond even when Billy said hello again. Ordinarily, he would have thought the line was dead. Not this evening. Listening, he fished the typewritten message from his pocket. He unfolded it and smoothed it flat on the black-granite counter.

Hollow as a bell, but a bell without a clapper, the open line carried no fizz of static. Billy couldn’t hear the caller inhale or exhale, as if the guy were dead, and done with breathing.

Whether prankster or killer, the man’s purpose was to taunt, intimidate. Billy didn’t give him the satisfaction of a third hello.

They listened to each other’s silence, as if something could be learned from nothing.

After perhaps a minute, Billy began to wonder if he might be imagining a presence on the far end of the line.

If he was in fact ear-to-ear with the author of the note, hanging up first would be a mistake. His disconnection would be taken as a sign of fear or at least of weakness.

Life had taught him patience. Besides, his self-image included the possibility that he could be fatuous, so he didn’t worry about looking foolish. He waited.

When the caller hung up, the distinct sound of the disconnect proved that he had been there, and then the dial tone.

26

Before continuing to make his sandwich, Billy walked the four rooms and bath. He lowered the pleated shades over all the windows.

At the dinette table in the kitchen, he ate the sandwich and two dill pickles. He drank a second stout, this time without the added bourbon. He had no TV. The entertainment shows bored him, and he didn’t need the news.

His thoughts were his only company at dinner. He did not linger over the pastrami sandwich.

Books lined one wall of the living room from floor to ceiling. For most of his life, Billy had been a voracious reader.

He had lost interest in reading three years, ten months, and four days previously. A mutual love of books, of fiction in all genres, had brought him and Barbara together.

On one shelf stood a set of Dickens in matched bindings, which Barbara had given him for Christmas. She’d had a passion for Dickens. These days, he needed to keep busy. Just sitting in a chair with a book made him restless. He felt vulnerable somehow.

Besides, some books contained disturbing ideas. They started you thinking about things you wanted to forget, and though your thoughts became intolerable, you could not put them to rest.

The coffered ceiling of the living room was a consequence of his need to remain busy. Every coffer was trimmed with dentil molding. The center of each featured a cluster of acanthus leaves hand-carved from white oak, stained to match the surrounding mahogany.

The style of this ceiling suited neither a cabin nor a bungalow. He didn’t care. The project had kept him occupied for months.

In his study, the coffered ceiling was even more ornate than the ceiling in the living room.

He did not go to the desk, where the unused computer mocked him. Instead, he sat at a worktable arrayed with his carving tools. Here also were stacks of white-oak blocks. They had a sweet wood smell. The blocks were raw material for the ornamentation’s that would decorate the bedroom ceiling, which was currently bare plaster.

On the table stood a CD player and two small speakers. The disc deck was loaded with zydeco music. He switched it on.

27

He carved until his hands ached and his vision blurred. Then he turned off the music and went to bed.

Lying on his back in the dark, staring at a ceiling that he could not see, he waited for his eyes to fall shut. He waited. He heard something on the roof. Something scratching at the cedar-shake shingles. The owl, no doubt. The owl did not hoot. Perhaps it was a raccoon. Or something. He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Twenty minutes past midnight. You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours. Everything would be all right in the morning. Everything always was. Well, not all right, but good enough to encourage perseverance. I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying. A few times, he closed his eyes, but that was no good. They had to fall shut on their own for sleep to follow. He looked at the clock as it changed from 12:59 to 1:00. The note had been under the windshield wiper when he had come out of the tavern at seven o’clock. Six hours had passed. Someone had been murdered. Or not. Surely not. Below the scratching talons of the owl, if it was an owl, he slept.

28

Chapter 5

The tavern had no name. Or, rather, its function was its name. The sign at the top of the pole, as you turned from the state highway into the elm-encircled parking lot, said only TAVERN.

Jackie O’Hara owned the place. Fat, freckled, kind, he was to everyone a friend or honorary uncle.

He had no desire to see his name on the sign.

As a boy, Jackie had wanted to be a priest. He wanted to help people. He wanted to lead them to God.

Time had taught him that he might not be able to master his appetites. While still young, he had arrived at the conclusion that he would be a bad priest, which hadn’t been the nature of his dream.

He found self-respect in running a clean and friendly taproom, but it seemed to him that simple satisfaction in his accomplishments would sour into vanity if he named the tavern after himself.

In Billy Wiles’s opinion, Jackie would have made a fine priest. Every human being has appetites difficult to control, but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses.

Vineyard Hills Tavern. Shady Elm Tavern. Candlelight Tavern. Wayside Tavern.

Patrons regularly offered names for the place. Jackie found their suggestions to be either awkward or inappropriate, or twee. When Billy arrived at 10:45 Tuesday morning, fifteen minutes before the tavern opened, the only cars in the lot were Jackie’s and Ben Vernon’s. Ben was the day cook.

29

Standing beside his Explorer, he studied the low serried hills in the distance, on the far side of the highway. They were dark brown where scalped by earthmovers, pale brown where the wild grass had been faded from green by the arid summer heat.

Peerless Properties, an international corporation, was building a worldclass resort, to be called Vineland, on nine hundred acres. In addition to a hotel with golf course, three pools, tennis club, and other amenities, the project included 190 multimillion-dollar getaway homes for sale to those who took their leisure seriously.

Foundations had been poured in early spring. Walls were rising. Much closer than the palatial structures on the higher hills, less than a hundred feet from the highway, a dramatic mural neared completion in a meadow. Seventy feet high, 150 feet long, three-dimensional, it was of wood, painted gray with black shadowing.

In the Art Deco tradition, the mural presented a stylized image of powerful machinery, including the drive wheels and connecting rods of a locomotive. There also were huge gears, strange armatures, and arcane mechanical forms that had nothing to do with a train.

A giant, stylized figure of a man in work clothes was featured in the section that suggested a locomotive. Body angled left to right as if leaning into a stiff wind, he appeared to be pushing one of the enormous drive wheels, as if caught up in the machine and pressing forward with as much panic as determination, as though if he rested for an instant he would slip out of sync and be torn to pieces.

None of the animated mural’s moving parts was yet operational; nevertheless, it fostered a convincing illusion of movement, speed. On commission, a famous artist with a single name—Valis—had designed the thing and had built it with a crew of sixteen.

The mural was meant to symbolize the hectic pace of modern life, the harried individual overwhelmed by the forces of society.

On the day when the resort opened for business, Valis himself would set the thing afire and burn it to the ground to symbolize the freedom from the mad pace of life that the new resort represented.

Most locals in Vineyard Hills and the surrounding territory mocked the mural, and when they called it art, they pronounced the word with quotation marks.

30

Billy rather liked the hulking thing, but burning it down didn’t make sense to him.

The same artist had once fixed twenty thousand helium-filled red balloons to a bridge in Australia, so it appeared to be supported by them. With a remote control, he popped all twenty thousand at once.

In that case, Billy didn’t understand either the “art” or the point of popping it.

Although not a critic, he felt this mural was either low art or high craftsmanship. Burning it made no more sense to him than would a museum tossing Rembrandt’s paintings on a bonfire.

So many things about contemporary society dismayed him that he wouldn’t lose sleep over this small issue. But on the night of burning, he wouldn’t come to watch the fire, either.

He went into the tavern.

The air carried such a rich scent that it almost seemed to have flavor. Ben Vernon was cooking a pot of chili.

Behind the bar, Jackie O’Hara conducted an inventory of the liquor supply. “Billy, did you see that special on Channel Six last night?”

“No.”

“You didn’t see that special about UFO’s, alien abduction?”

“I was carving to zydeco.”

“This guy says he was taken up to a mother ship orbiting the earth.”

“What’s new about that? You hear that stuff all the time.”

“He says he was given a proctological exam by a bunch of space aliens.”

Billy pushed through the bar gate. “That’s what they all say.”

“I know. You’re right. But I don’t get it.” Jackie frowned. “Why would a superior alien race, a thousand times more intelligent than we are, come trillions of miles across the universe just to look up our butts? What are they—

perverts?”

“They never looked up mine,” Billy assured him. “And I doubt they looked up this guy’s, either.”

“He’s got a lot of credibility. He’s a book author. I mean, even before this book, he published a bunch of others.”

31

Taking an apron from a drawer, tying it on, Billy said, “Just publishing a book doesn’t give anyone credibility. Hitler published books.”

“He did?” Jackie asked.

“Yeah.”

“The Hitler?”

“Well, it wasn’t Bob Hitler.”

“You’re jerking my chain.”

“Look it up.”

“What did he write—like spy stories or something?”

“Something,” Billy said.

“This guy wrote science fiction.”

“Surprise.”

“Science fiction,” Jackie emphasized. “The program was really disturbing.” Picking up a small white dish from the work bar, he made a sound of impatience and disgust. “What—am I gonna have to start docking Steve for condiments?”

In the dish were fifteen to twenty maraschino-cherry stems. Each had been tied in a knot.

“The customers find him amusing,” Billy said.

“Because they’re half blitzed. Anyway, he pretends to be a funny type of guy, but he’s not.”

“Everyone has his own idea of what’s funny.”

“No, I mean, he pretends to be lighthearted, happy-go-lucky, but he’s not.”

“That’s the only way I’ve ever seen him,” Billy said.

“Ask Celia Reynolds.”

“Who’s she?”

“Lives next door to Steve.”

“Neighbors can have grudges,” Billy suggested. “Can’t always believe what they say.”

“Celia says he has rages in the backyard.”

“What’s that mean—rages?”

“He goes like nuts, she says. He chops up stuff.”

32

“What stuff?”

“Like a dining-room chair.”

“Whose?”

“His. He chopped it until there wasn’t anything but splinters.”

“Why?”

“He’s cursing and angry when he’s at it. He seems to be working off anger.”

“On a chair.”

“Yeah. And he does watermelons with an ax.”

“Maybe he likes watermelon,” Billy said.

“He doesn’t eat them. He just chops and chops till nothing’s left but mush.”

“Cursing all the time.”

“That’s right. Cursing, grunting, snarling like an animal. Whole watermelons. A couple of times he’s done dummies.”

“What dummies?”

“You know, like those store-window women.”

“Mannequins?”

“Yeah. He goes at them with an ax and a sledgehammer.”

“Where would he get mannequins?”

“Beats me.”

“This doesn’t sound right.”

“Talk to Celia. She’ll tell you.”

“Has she asked Steve why he does it?”

“No. She’s afraid to.”

“You believe her?”

“Celia isn’t a liar.”

“You think Steve’s dangerous?” Billy asked.

“Probably not, but who knows.”

“Maybe you should fire him.”

33

Jackie raised his eyebrows. “And then he turns out to be one of those guys you see on TV news? He comes in here with an ax?”

“Anyway,” Billy said, “it doesn’t sound right. You don’t really believe it yourself.”

“Yeah, I do. Celia goes to Mass three mornings a week.”

“Jackie, you joke around with Steve. You’re relaxed with him.”

“I’m always a little watchful.”

“I never noticed it.”

“Well, I am. But I don’t want to be unfair to him.”

“Unfair?”

“He’s a good bartender, does his job.” A shamefaced expression overcame Jackie O’Hara. His plump cheeks reddened. “I shouldn’t have been talking about him like this. It was just all those cherry stems. That ticked me off a little.”

“Twenty cherries,” Billy said. “What can they cost?”

“It’s not about the money. It’s that trick with his tongue—it’s semiobscene.”

“I never heard anyone complain about it. A lot of the women customers particularly like to watch him do it.”

“And the gays,” Jackie said. “I don’t want this being a singles bar, either gay or straight. I want this to be a family bar.”

“Is there such a thing as a family bar?”

“Absolutely.” Jackie looked hurt. In spite of its generic name, the tavern wasn’t a dive. “We offer kid portions of French fries and onion rings, don’t we?”

Before Billy could reply, the first customer of the day came through the door. It was 11:04. The guy wanted brunch: a Bloody Mary with a celery stick. Jackie and Billy tended bar together through the lunchtime traffic, and Jackie served food to the tables as Ben plated it from the grill. They were busier than usual because Tuesday was chili day, but they still didn’t need a first-shift waitress. A third of the customers had lunch in a glass, and another third were satisfied with peanuts or with sausages from the brine jar on the bar, or with free pretzels.

34

Mixing drinks and pouring beers, Billy Wiles was troubled by a persistent image in his mind’s eye: Steve Zillis chopping a mannequin to pieces, chopping, chopping.

As his shift wore on, and as no one brought word of a gunshot schoolteacher or a bludgeoned elderly philanthropist, Billy’s nerves quieted. In sleepy Vineyard Hills, in peaceful Napa Valley, news of a brutal murder would travel fast. The note must have been a prank.

After a slow afternoon, Ivy Elgin arrived for work at four o’clock, and at her heels thirsty men followed in such a state that they would have wagged their tails if they’d had them.

“Anything dead today?” Billy asked her, and found himself wincing at the question.

“A praying mantis on my back porch, right at my doorstep,” Ivy said.

“What do you think that means?”

“What prays has died.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I’m still trying to figure it.”

Shirley Trueblood arrived at five o’clock, matronly in a pale-yellow uniform with white lapels and cuffs.

After her came Ramon Padillo, who sniffed the aroma of chili and grumbled, “Needs a pinch of cumin.”

When Steve Zillis breezed in at six, smelling of a verbena-scented aftershave and wintermint mouthwash, he said, “How’re they hangin’, Kemosabe?”

“Did you call me last night?” Billy asked.

“Who, me? Why would I?”

“I don’t know. I got a call, a bad connection, but I thought maybe it was you.”

“Did you call me back?”

“No. I could hardly hear the voice. I just had a hunch it might be you.”

Selecting three plump olives from the condiment tray, Steve said,

“Anyway, I was out last night with a friend.”

“You get off work at two o’clock in the morning and then you go out?”

35

Steve grinned and winked. “There was a moon, and I’m a dog.” He pronounced it dawg.

“If I got off at two A.M., I’d be straight to bed.”

“No offense, pilgrim, but you don’t exactly ring the bell on the zing meter.”

“What’s that mean?”

Steve shrugged, then began to juggle the slippery olives with impressive dexterity. “People wonder why a good-lookin’ guy like you lives like an old maid.”

Surveying the customers, Billy said, “What people?”

“Lots of people.” Steve caught the first olive in his mouth, the second, the third, and chewed vigorously to applause from the barstool gallery. During the last hour of his shift, Billy was markedly more observant of Steve Zillis than usual. Yet he saw nothing suspicious.

Either the guy wasn’t the prankster or he was immeasurably more cunning and deceitful than he appeared to be.

Well, it didn’t matter. No one had been murdered. The note had been a joke; and sooner or later the punch line would be delivered. As Billy was leaving the tavern at seven o’clock, Ivy Elgin came to him, restrained excitement in her brandy-colored eyes. “Somebody’s going to die in a church.”

“How do you figure?”

“The mantis. What prays has died.”

“Which church?” he asked.

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Maybe it won’t be in church. Maybe it’s just that a local minister or a priest is going to die.”

Her intoxicating gaze held his. “I didn’t think of that. You might be right. But how does the possum fit in?”

“I don’t have a clue. Ivy. I don’t have a talent for haruspicy, like you do.”

“I know, but you’re nice. You’re always interested, and you never make fun of me.”

Although he worked with Ivy five days a week, the impact of her extraordinary beauty and sexuality could make him forget, at times, that she

36

was in some ways more girl than woman, sweet and guileless, virtuous even if not pure.

Billy said, “I’ll think about the possum. Maybe there’s a little bit of a seer in me that I don’t know about.”

Her smile could knock you off balance. “Thanks, Billy. Sometimes this gift… it’s a burden. I could use a little help with it.”

Outside, the summer-evening air was lemon yellow with oblique sunshine, and the eastward-crawling shadows of the elms were one shade of purple short of black.

As he approached his Ford Explorer, he saw a note under the windshield wiper.

Chapter 6

Although neither a dead blonde nor an elderly cadaver had been reported, Billy halted short of the Explorer, hesitant to proceed, reluctant to read this second message.

He wanted nothing more than to sit with Barbara for a while and then to go home. He didn’t see her seven times a week, but he visited more days than not. His stops at Whispering Pines were one of the blocks with which the foundation of his simple life had been built. He looked forward to them as he looked forward to quitting-time and carving.

He was not a stupid man, however, and not even merely smart. He knew that his life of seclusion might easily deteriorate into one of solitude. A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

Slipping the note from under the wiper, crumpling it in his fist, and tossing it aside unread would surely constitute the crossing of the first of those lines. And perhaps there would be no going back.

He did not have much of what he wanted in life. But by nature he was prudent enough to recognize that if he threw away the note, he would also be

37

throwing away everything that now sustained him. His life would be not merely different but worse.

In his trance of decision, he had not heard the patrol car enter the lot. As he plucked the note off the windshield, he was surprised by Lanny Olsen’s sudden appearance at his side, in uniform.

“Another one,” Lanny declared, as though he had been expecting the second note.

His voice had a broken edge. His face was lined with dread. His eyes were windows to a haunted place.

Billy’s fate was to live in a time that denied the existence of abominations, that gave the lesser name horror to every abomination, that redefined every horror as a crime, every crime as an offense, every offense as a mere annoyance. Nevertheless, abhorrence rose in him before he knew exactly what had brought Lanny Olsen here.

“Billy. Dear sweet Jesus, Billy.”

“What?”

“I’m sweating. Look at me sweating.”

“What—Whatisit?”

“I can’t stop sweating. It’s not that hot.”

Suddenly Billy felt greasy. He wiped one hand across his face and looked at the palm, expecting filth. To the eye, it appeared to be clean.

“I need a beer,” Lanny said. “Two beers. I need to sit down. I need to think.”

“Look at me.”

Lanny wouldn’t meet his eyes. His attention was fixed on the note in Billy’s hand.

That paper remained folded, but something unfolded in Billy’s gut, blossomed like a lubricious flower, oily and many-petaled. Nausea born of intuition.

The right question wasn’t what. The right question was who, and Billy asked it.

Lanny licked his lips. “Giselle Winslow.”

“I don’t know her.”

“Neither do I.”

38

“Where?”

“She taught English down in Napa.”

“Blond?”

“Yeah.”

“And lovely,” Billy guessed.

“She once was. Somebody beat her nearly to death. She was messed up really bad by someone who knew how to draw it out, how to make it last.”

“Nearly to death.”

“He finished by strangling her with a pair of her pantyhose.”

Billy’s legs felt weak. He leaned against the Explorer. He could not speak.

“Her sister found her just two hours ago.”

Lanny’s gaze remained fixed on the folded sheet of paper in Billy’s hand.

“The sheriff’s department doesn’t have jurisdiction down there,” Lanny continued. “So it’s in the lap of the Napa police. That’s something, anyway. That gives me breathing space.”

Billy found his voice, but it was rough and not as he usually sounded to himself. “The note said he’d kill a schoolteacher if I didn’t go to the police, but I went to you.”

“He said he’d kill her if you didn’t go to the police and get them involved.”

“But I went to you, I tried. I mean, for God’s sake, I tried, didn’t I?”

Lanny met his eyes at last. “You came to me informally. You didn’t actually go to the police. You went to a friend who happened to be a cop.”

“But I went to you.” Billy protested, and cringed at the denial in his voice, at the self-justification.

Nausea crawled the walls of his stomach, but he clenched his teeth and strove for control.

“Nothing smelled real about it,” Lanny said.

“About what?”

“The first note. It was a joke. It was a lame joke. There isn’t a cop alive with the instinct to smell anything real in it.”

“Was she married?” Billy asked.

39

A Toyota drove into the lot and parked seventy or eighty feet from the Explorer.

In silence they watched the driver get out of the car and go into the tavern. At such a distance, their conversation couldn’t have been overheard. Nevertheless, they were circumspect.

Country music drifted out of the tavern while the door was open. On the jukebox, Alan Jackson was singing about heartbreak.

“Was she married?” Billy asked again.

“Who?”

“The woman. The schoolteacher. Giselle Winslow.”

“I don’t think so, no. At least there’s no husband in the picture at the moment. Let me see the note.”

Withholding the folded paper, Billy said, “Did she have any children?”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters,” Billy said.

He realized that his empty hand had tightened into a fist. This was a friend standing before him, such as he allowed himself friends. Yet he relaxed his fist only with effort.

“It matters to me, Lanny.”

“Kids? I don’t know. Probably not. From what I heard, she must have lived alone.”

Two bursts of traffic passed on the state highway: paradiddles of engines, the soft percussion of displaced air.

In the ensuing quiet, Lanny said plaintively, “Listen, Billy, potentially, I’m in trouble here.”

“Potentially?” He found humor in that choice of words, but not the kind to make him laugh.

“No one else in the department would have taken that damn note seriously. But they’ll say I should have.”

“Maybe I should have,” Billy said.

Agitated, Lanny disagreed: “That’s hindsight. Bullshit. Don’t talk like that. We need a mutual defense.”

“Defense against what?”

“Whatever. Billy, listen, I don’t have a perfect ten card.”

40

“What’s a ten card?”

“My force record card, my performance file. I’ve gotten a couple negative reports.”

“What’d you do?”

Lanny’s eyes squinted when he took offense. “Damn it, I’m not a crooked cop.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I’m forty-six, never taken a dime of dirty money, and I never will.”

“All right. Okay.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Lanny’s pique might have been pretense; he couldn’t sustain it. Or perhaps some grim mind’s-eye image scared him, for his pinched eyes widened. He chewed on his lower lip as if gnawing on a disturbing thought that he wanted to bite up, spit out, and never again consider. Although he glanced at his wristwatch, Billy waited.

“What’s true enough,” Lanny said, “is I’m sometimes a lazy cop. Out of boredom, you know. And maybe because… I never really wanted this life.”

“You don’t owe me any explanations,” Billy assured him.

“I know. But the thing is… whether I wanted this life or not, it’s what I’ve got now. It’s all I have. I want a chance to keep it. I gotta read that new note, Billy. Please give me the note.”

Sympathetic but unwilling to yield the paper, which was now damp with his own perspiration, Billy unfolded and read it. If you don’t go to the police and get them involved, I will kill an unmarried man who won’t much be missed by the world. If you do go to the police, I will kill a young mother of two. You have five hours to decide. The choice is yours.

On the first reading, Billy comprehended every terrible detail of the note, yet he read it again. Then he relinquished it.

Anxiety, the rust of life, corroded Lanny Olsen’s face as he scanned the lines. “This is one sick son of a bitch.”

“I’ve got to go down to Napa.”

“Why?”

“To give both these notes to the police.”

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“Wait, wait, wait,” Lanny said. “You don’t know that the second victim’s going to be in Napa. Could be in St. Helena or Rutherford—”

“Or in Angwin,” Billy interrupted, “or Calistoga.”

Eager to press the point, Lanny said, “Or Yountville or Circle Oaks, or Oakville. You don’t know where. You don’t know anything.”

“I know some things,” Billy said. “I know what’s right.”

Blinking at the note, flicking sweat off his eyelashes, Lanny said, “Real killers don’t play these games.”

“This one does.”

Folding the note and tucking it in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt, Lanny pleaded, “Let me think a minute.”

Immediately retrieving the paper from Lanny’s pocket, Billy said, “Think all you want. I’m driving down to Napa.”

“Oh, man, this is bad. This is wrong. Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s the end of his game if I won’t play it.”

“So you’re just going to kill a young mother of two. Just like that, are you?”

“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”

“Then I’ll say it again. You’re going to kill a young mother of two.”

Billy shook his head. “I’m not killing anyone.”

“ ‘The choice is yours,’” Lanny quoted. “Are you going to choose to make two orphans?”

What Billy saw now in his friend’s face, in his eyes, was not anything that he had seen before across a poker table or anywhere else. He seemed to be confronted by a stranger.

“The choice is yours,” Lanny repeated.

Billy didn’t want a falling-out between them. He lived on the more companionable side of the line between recluse and hermit, and he did not want to find himself straddling that divide.

Perhaps sensing his friend’s concern, Lanny took a softer tack: “All I’m asking is throw me a line. I’m in quicksand here.”

“For God’s sake, Lanny.”

“I know. It sucks. There’s no way it doesn’t.”

42

“Don’t try to manipulate me like that again. Don’t hammer me.”

“I won’t. I’m sorry. It’s just, the sheriff’s a hardass. You know he is. With my ten card, this is all he needs to take my badge, and I’m still six years short of a full pension.”

As long as he met Lanny’s eyes and saw the desperation in them, and saw something worse than desperation that he didn’t want to name, he couldn’t compromise with him. He had to look away and pretend to be speaking to the Lanny he’d known before this encounter.

“What are you asking me to do?”

Reading capitulation in the question, Lanny spoke in a still more conciliatory voice. “You won’t regret this, Billy. It’s going to be all right.”

“I didn’t say I’d do whatever you want. I just need to know what it is.”

“I understand. I appreciate it. You’re a true friend. All I’m asking is an hour, one hour to think.”

Shifting his gaze from the tavern to the cracked blacktop at his feet, Billy said, “There’s not much time. With the first message, it was six hours. Now it’s five.”

“I’m only asking for one. One hour.”

“He must know I get off work at seven, so that’s probably when the clock starts ticking. Midnight. Then before dawn he kills one or the other, and by action or inaction, I’ve made a choice. He’ll do what he’ll do, but I don’t want to think I decided it for him.”

“One hour,” Lanny promised, “and then I’ll go to Sheriff Palmer. I just have to figure the approach, the angle that’ll save my ass.”

A familiar shriek, but seldom heard in this territory, raised Billy’s attention from the blacktop to the sky.

White on sapphire, three sea gulls kited against the eastern heavens. They rarely ventured this far north from San Pablo Bay.

“Billy, I need those notes for Sheriff Palmer.”

Watching the sea gulls, Billy said, “I’d rather keep them.”

“The notes are evidence,” Lanny said plaintively. “That bastard Palmer will rip me a new one if I don’t take custody of the evidence and protect it.”

As the summer evening waned toward the darkness that always drove gulls to seaside roosts, these birds were so out of place that they seemed to be an

43

omen. Their piercing, cold cries brought a creeping chill to the nape of Billy’s neck.

He said, “I only have the note I just found.”

“Where’s the first one?” Lanny asked.

“I left it in my kitchen, by the phone.”

Billy considered going into the tavern to ask Ivy Elgin the meaning of the birds.

“All right. Okay,” Lanny said. “Just give me the one you’ve got. Palmer’s gonna want to come talk to you. We can get the first note then.”

The problem was, Ivy claimed to be able to read portents only in the details of dead things.

When Billy hesitated, Lanny grew insistent: “For God’s sake, look at me. What is it with the birds?”

“I don’t know,” Billy replied.

“You don’t know what?”

“I don’t know what it is with the birds.” Reluctantly, Billy fished the note from his pocket and gave it to Lanny. “One hour.”

“That’s all I need. I’ll call you.”

As Lanny turned away, Billy put a hand on his shoulder, halting him.

“What do you mean you’ll call? You said you’d bring Palmer.”

“I’ll call you first, as soon as I’ve figured out how to tweak the story to give myself cover.”

“ ‘Tweak,’” Billy said, loathing the word.

Falling silent, the circling sea gulls wheeled away toward the westering sun.

“When I call,” Lanny said, “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna tell Palmer, so we’ll be on the same page. Then I’ll go to him.”

Billy wished that he had never surrendered the note. But it was evidence, and logic dictated that Lanny should have it.

“Where are you going to be in an hour—at Whispering Pines?”

Billy shook his head. “I’m stopping there, but only for fifteen minutes. Then I’m going home. Call me at my place. But there’s one more thing.”

Impatiently, Lanny said, “Midnight, Billy. Remember?”

44

“How does this psycho know what choice I make? How did he know I went to you and not to the police? How will he know what I do in the next four and a half hours?”

No answer but a frown occurred to Lanny.

“Unless,” Billy said, “he’s watching me.”

Surveying the vehicles in the parking lot, the tavern, and the arc of embracing elms, Lanny said, “Everything was going so smooth.”

“Was it?”

“Like a river. Now this rock.”

“Always a rock.”

“That’s true enough,” Lanny said, and walked away toward his patrol car. Mother Olsen’s only child appeared defeated, slump-shouldered and baggyassed.

Billy wanted to ask if everything was all right between them, but that was too direct. He couldn’t think of another way to phrase the question. Then he heard himself say, “Something I’ve never told you and should have.”

Lanny stopped, looked back, regarding him warily.

“All those years your mom was sick and you looked after her, gave up what you wanted… that took more of the right stuff than cop work does.”

As though embarrassed, Lanny looked at the trees again and said almost as if discomfited, “Thanks, Billy.” He seemed genuinely touched to hear his sacrifice acknowledged.

Then as if a perverse sense of shame compelled him to discount, if not mock, his virtue, Lanny added, “But all of that doesn’t leave me with a pension.”

Billy watched him get in the car and drive away.

In a silence of vanished sea gulls, the breathless day waned, while the hills and the meadows and the trees gradually drew more shadows over themselves. On the farther side of the highway, the forty-foot wooden man strove to save himself from the great grinding wheels of industry or brutal ideology, or modern art.

45

Chapter 7

Barbara’s face against the dimpled background of the pillow was Billy’s despair and his hope, his loss and his expectation.

She was an anchor in two senses, the first beneficial. The sight of her held Billy fast and stable whatever the currents of a day.

Less mercifully, every memory of her from the time when she had been not just in the quick of life, but also vivacious, was a link of chain enwrapping him. If she sank from coma into full oblivion, the chain would pull taut, and he would sink with her into the darkest waters.

He came here not only to keep her company in the hope that she would recognize his presence even in her internal prison, but also to be taught how to care and not to care, how to sit still, and perhaps to find elusive peace. This evening, peace was more elusive than usual.

His attention shifted often from her face to his watch, and to the window beyond which the acid-yellow day soured slowly toward a bitter twilight.

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He held his little notebook. He paged through it, reading the mysterious words that she had spoken.

When he found a sequence that particularly intrigued him, he read it aloud:

“—soft black drizzle—”

“—death of the sun—”

“—the scarecrow of a suit—”

“—livers of fat geese—”

“—narrow street, high houses—”

“—a cistern to hold the fog—”

“—strange forms… ghostly motion—”

“—clear-sounding bells—”

His hope was that, hearing her enigmatic coma-talk read back to her, she would be spurred to speak, perhaps to expand upon those utterances and make more sense of them…

On other nights his performance had sometimes drawn a reply from her. But never did she clarify what previously she had said. Instead she delivered a new and different sequence of equally inscrutable words.

This evening she responded with silence, and occasionally with a sigh uncolored by emotion, as if she were a machine that breathed in a shallow rhythm with louder exhalations caused by random power surges. After reading aloud two sequences, Billy returned the notebook to his pocket.

Agitated, he had read her words with too much force, too much haste. At one point he’d heard himself and thought he sounded angry, which would do Barbara no good.

He paced the room. The window drew him.

Whispering Pines stood adjacent to a gently sloping vineyard. Beyond the window lay regimented vines with emerald-green leaves that would be crimson come autumn, with small hard grapes still many weeks from maturity.

The work lanes between the vine rows were mottled black with the shadows of the day’s last hour, purple with grape pomace that had been spread as fertilizer.

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Seventy or eighty feet from the window, a man alone stood in one of those lanes. He had no tools with him and did not appear to be at work. If he was a grower or a vintner out for a walk, he must not be in a hurry. He stood in one place, feet planted wide apart, hands in his trouser pockets. He seemed to be studying the convalescent home.

From this distance and in this light, no details of the man’s appearance could be discerned. He stood in the lane between vines with his back to the declining sun, which revealed him only as a silhouette.

Listening to running feet on hollow stairs, which was in fact the thunder of his heart, Billy warned himself against paranoia. Whatever trouble might come, he would need calm nerves and a clear mind to cope.

He turned away from the window. He went to the bed.

Barbara’s eyes moved under her lids. The specialists said this indicated a dream state.

Considering that any coma was a far deeper sleep than mere sleep itself, Billy wondered if hers were more intense than ordinary dreams—full of fevered action, crashing with a thunderstorm of sound, drenched in color. He worried that her dreams were nightmares, vivid and perpetual. When he kissed her forehead, she murmured, “The wind is in the east”

He waited, but she said no more, though her eyes darted and rolled from phantom to phantom under her closed lids.

Because those words contained no menace and because no sense of peril darkened her voice, he chose to believe that her current dream, at least, must be benign.

Although he didn’t want it, he took from the nightstand a square creamcolored envelope on which his name had been written in flowing script. He tucked it in a pocket, unread, for he knew that it had been left by Barbara’s doctor, Jordan Ferrier.

When medical issues of substance needed to be discussed, the physician always used the telephone. He resorted to written messages only when he had turned from medicine to the devil’s work.

At the window again, Billy discovered that the watcher in the vineyard had gone.

Moments later, when he left Whispering Pines, he half expected to find a third note on his windshield. He was spared that discovery.

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Most likely the man among the vines had been an ordinary man engaged in honest business. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Billy drove directly home, parked in the detached garage, climbed the back-porch steps, and found his kitchen door unlocked, ajar.

Chapter 8

Billy had not been threatened in either of the notes. The danger confronting him was not to life and limb. He would have preferred physical peril to the moral jeopardy that he faced.

Nevertheless, when he found the back door of the house ajar, he considered waiting in the yard until Lanny arrived with Sheriff Palmer. That option occupied his consideration only for a moment. He didn’t care if Lanny and Palmer thought he was gutless, but he didn’t want to think it of himself.

He went inside. No one waited in the kitchen.

The draining daylight drizzled down the windows more than it penetrated them. Warily, he turned on lights as he went through the house. He found no intruder in any room or closet. Curiously, he saw no signs of intrusion, either.

49

By the time that he returned to the kitchen, he had begun to wonder if he might have failed to close and lock the door when he had left the house earlier in the day.

That possibility had to be discounted when he found the spare key on a kitchen counter, near the phone. It should have been taped to the bottom of one of twenty cans of wood stain and varnish stored on a shelf in the garage. Billy had last used the spare key five or six months previously. He could not possibly have been under surveillance that long.

Suspecting the existence of a key, the killer must have intuited that the garage was the most likely place in which it would have been hidden. Billy’s professionally equipped woodworking shop occupied two-thirds of that space, presenting numerous drawers and cabinets and shelves where such a small item could have been hidden. The search for it might have taken hours. If the killer, after visiting the house, intended to announce his intrusion by leaving the spare key in the kitchen, logic argued that he would have saved himself the time and trouble of the search. Instead, why wouldn’t he have broken one of the four panes of glass in the back door?

As Billy puzzled over this conundrum, he suddenly realized that the key lay at the very spot on the black-granite counter where he had left the first typewritten message from the killer. It was gone.

Turning in a full circle, he saw the note neither on the floor nor on another counter. He pulled open the nearest drawers, but it was not in this one or in this one, or in this one…

Abruptly he realized that Giselle Winslow’s killer had not been here, after all. The intruder had been Lanny Olsen.

Lanny knew where the spare key was kept. When he had asked for the first note, as evidence, Billy had told him that it was here, in the kitchen. Lanny had also asked where to find him in an hour, whether he would be going directly home or to Whispering Pines.

A sense of deep misgiving overcame Billy, a general uneasiness and doubt that began to curdle his trust.

If Lanny had all along intended to come here and collect the note as essential evidence, not later with Sheriff Palmer but right away, he should have said so. His deception suggested that he was not in a mood to serve and protect the public, or even to back up a friend, but was focused first on saving his own skin.

50

Billy didn’t want to believe such a thing. He sought excuses for Lanny. Maybe after driving away from the tavern in his patrol car, he had decided that, after all, he must have both of the notes before he approached Sheriff Palmer. And maybe he didn’t want to make a call to Whispering Pines because he knew how important those visits were to Billy.

In that case, however, he would have written a brief explanation to leave in place of the killer’s note when he took it.

Unless… If his intention was to destroy both notes instead of going to Palmer, and later to claim that Billy had never come to him prior to the Winslow murder, such a replacement note would have been evidence to refute him.

Always, Lanny Olsen had seemed to be a good man, not free of faults, but basically good and fair and decent. He’d sacrificed his dreams to stand by his ailing mother for so many years.

Billy dropped the spare key in his pants pocket. He did not intend to tape it again to the bottom of the can in the workshop.

He wondered just how many bad reports were on Lanny’s ten card, exactly how lazy he had been.

In retrospect, Billy heard markedly greater desperation in his friend’s voice than he had heard at the time: I never really wanted this life… but the thing is… whether I wanted it or not, it’s what I’ve got now. It’s all I have. I want a chance to keep it.

Even most good men had a breaking point. Lanny might have been closer to his than Billy could have known.

The wall clock showed 8:09.

In less than four hours, regardless of the choice that Billy made, someone would die. He wanted this responsibility off his shoulders. Lanny was supposed to call him by 8:30.

Billy had no intention of waiting. He snatched the handset from the wall phone and keyed in Lanny’s personal cell-phone number.

After five rings, he was switched to voice mail. He said, “This is Billy. I’m at home. What the hell? What’ve you done? Call me now.”

Instinct told him not to attempt to reach Lanny through the sheriffsdepartment dispatcher. He would be leaving a trail that might have consequences he could not foresee.

51

His friend’s betrayal, if that’s what it was, had reduced Billy to the cautious calculations of a guilty man, although he had done nothing wrong. A transient sting of mingled pain and anger would have been understandable. Instead, resentment swelled in him so thick, so quick, that his chest grew tight and he had difficulty swallowing.

Destroying the notes and lying about them might spare Lanny dismissal from the force, but Billy’s situation would be made worse. Lacking evidence, he would find it more difficult to convince the authorities that his story was true and that it might shed light on the killer’s psychology. If he approached them now, he risked looking like a publicity seeker or like a bartender who sampled too much of his wares. Or like a suspect. Riveted by that thought, he stood very still for a minute, exploring it. Suspect.

His mouth had gone dry. His tongue cleaved to his palate.

He went to the kitchen sink and drew a glass of cold water from the tap. At first he could barely choke down a mouthful, but then he drained the glass in three long swallows.

Too cold, drunk too fast, the water wrung a brief sharp pain from his chest, and washed nausea through his gut. He put the glass on the drainboard. He leaned over the sink until the queasiness passed.

He splashed his greasy face with cold water, washed his hands in hot. He paced the kitchen. He sat briefly at the table, then paced some more. At 8:30, he stood by the telephone, staring at it, although he had every reason to believe that it would not ring.

At 8:40, he used his cell phone to call Lanny’s cellular number, leaving the house phone open. He got voice mail again.

The kitchen was too warm. He felt stifled.

At 8:45, Billy stepped outside, onto the back porch. He needed fresh air. With the door wide open behind him, he could hear the telephone if it rang.

Indigo in the east, the sky overhead and to the west trembled faintly with the iridescent vibrations of an orange-and-green sunset.

The encircling woods bristled dark, growing darker. If a hostile observer had taken up position in that timber, crouching in ferns and philodendrons, none but a sharp-nosed dog could have known that he was out there.

52

A hundred toads, all unseen, had begun to sing in the descending gloom, but in the kitchen, past the open door, all was silent.

Perhaps Lanny just needed a little more time to find a way to tweak the truth.

Surely he cared about more than himself. He could not have been reduced so totally, so quickly, to the most base self-interest.

He was still a cop, lazy or not, desperate or not. Sooner than later he would realize that he couldn’t live with himself if, by obstructing the investigation, he contributed to more deaths.

The ink-spill in the east soon saturated the sky overhead, while in the west, all was fire and blood.

Chapter 9

At 9:00, Billy left the back porch and went inside. He closed the door and locked it.

In just three hours, a fate would be decided, a death ordained, and if the killer followed a pattern, someone would be murdered before dawn. The key to the SUV lay on the dinette table. Billy picked it up. He considered setting out in search of Lanny Olsen. What he had thought was resentment, earlier, had been mere exasperation. Now he knew real resentment, a dark and bitter brooding. He badly wanted confrontation. Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain, and from the friend who has something to lose.

Lanny had been on day shift. He was off duty now.

Most likely he would be holed up at home. If he was not at home, there were only a handful of restaurants, bars, and friends’ houses where he might be found.

A sense of responsibility and a strange despairing kind of hope held Billy prisoner in his kitchen, by his telephone. He no longer expected Lanny to call; but the killer might.

53

The mute listener on the line the previous night had been Giselle Winslow’s murderer. Billy had no proof, but no doubt, either. Maybe he would call this evening, too. If Billy could speak to him, something might be accomplished, something learned.

Billy was under no illusion that such a monster could be charmed into chattiness. Neither could a homicidal sociopath be debated, nor persuaded by reason to spare a life.

Hearing the man speak a few words, however, might prove valuable. Ethnicity, region of origin, education, approximate age, and more could be inferred from a voice.

With luck, the killer might also unwittingly reveal some salient fact about himself. One clue, one small bud of information that blossomed under determined analysis, could provide Billy with something credible to take to the police.

Confronting Lanny Olsen might be emotionally satisfying, but it would not get Billy out of the box in which the killer had put him.

He hung the key to the SUV on a pegboard.

The previous evening, in a nervous moment, he had lowered the shades at all the windows. This morning, before breakfast, he had raised those in the kitchen. Now he lowered them again.

He stood in the center of the kitchen.

He glanced at the phone.

Intending to sit at the table, he put his right hand on the back of a chair, but he didn’t move it.

He just stood there, studying the polished black-granite floor at his feet. He kept an immaculate house. The granite was glossy, spotless. The blackness under his feet appeared to have no substance, as if he were standing on air, high in the night itself, with five miles of atmosphere yawning below, wingless.

He pulled the chair out from the table. He sat. Less than a minute passed before he got to his feet.

Under these circumstances, Billy Wiles had no idea how to act, what to do. The simple task of passing time defeated him, although he had not been doing much else for years.

54

Because he hadn’t eaten dinner, he went to the refrigerator. He had no appetite. Nothing on those cold shelves appealed to him.

He glanced at the SUV key dangling on the pegboard.

He went to the phone and stood staring at it.

He sat at the table. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. After a while, he went to the study, where he spent so many evenings carving architectural ornaments at a corner worktable.

He collected several tools and a chunk of white oak from which he had only half finished carving a cluster of acanthus leaves. He returned with them to the kitchen.

The study had a telephone, but Billy preferred the kitchen this evening. The study also had a comfortable couch, and he worried that he would be tempted to lie down, that he would fall asleep and not be awakened by the killer’s call, or by anything, ever.

Whether or not this concern was realistic, he settled at the dinette table with the wood and the tools.

Without a carver’s vise, he could work only on the finer details of the leaves, which was engraving work akin to scrimshaw. The blade scraped a hollow sound from the oak, as if this were bone, not wood. At ten minutes past ten o’clock, less than two hours before the deadline, he abruptly decided that he would go to the sheriff.

His house was not in any township; the sheriff had jurisdiction here. The tavern lay in Vineyard Hills, but the town was too small to have its own police force; Sheriff Palmer was the law there, too.

Billy snared the key from the pegboard, opened the door, stepped onto the back porch—and halted. If you do go to the police, I will kill a young mother of two.

He didn’t want to choose. He didn’t want anyone to die.

In all of Napa County, there might be dozens of young mothers with two children. Maybe a hundred, two hundred, maybe more.

Even with five hours, they couldn’t have identified and alerted all the possible targets. They would have to use the media to warn the public. That might take days.

Now, with less than two hours, nothing substantive would be done. They might spend longer than that just questioning Billy.

55

The young mother, obviously preselected by the killer, would be murdered.

What if the children awakened? As witnesses, they might be eliminated. The madman had not promised to kill only the mother.

On damp night air, a musky smell wafted from the rich layers of mast on the woodland floor and drifted from the trees to the porch. Billy returned to the kitchen and closed the door.

Later, whittling leaf details, he pricked a thumb. He didn’t get a Band-Aid. The puncture was small; it should close quickly.

When he nicked a knuckle, he remained too intensely involved with the carving to bother attending to it. He worked faster, and didn’t notice when he sustained a third tiny cut.

To an observer, had there been one, it might have seemed as though Billy wanted to bleed.

Because his hands remained busy, the wounds kept weeping. The wood soaked up the blood.

In time, he realized that the oak had completely discolored. He dropped the carving and put aside the blade.

He sat for a while, staring at his hands, breathing hard for no reason. In time, the bleeding stopped, and it didn’t start up again when he washed his hands at the sink.

At 11:45, after patting his hands dry on a dishtowel, he got a cold Guinness and drank it from the bottle. He finished it too fast. Five minutes after the first beer, he opened a second. He poured it in a glass to encourage himself to sip it and make it last.

He stood with the Guinness in front of the wall clock.

Eleven-fifty. Countdown.

As much as Billy wanted to lie to himself, he couldn’t be fooled. He had made a choice, all right. The choice is yours. Even inaction is a choice. The mother who had two children—she wouldn’t die tonight. If the homicidal freak kept his end of the bargain, the mother would sleep the night and see the dawn.

Billy was part of it now. He could deny, he could run, he could leave his window shades down for the rest of his life and cross the line from recluse to hermit, but he could not escape the fundamental fact that he was part of it.

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The killer had offered him a partnership. He had wanted no part of it. But now it turned out to be like one of those business deals, one of those aggressive stock offers, that writers in the financial pages called a hostile takeover. He finished the second Guinness as midnight arrived. He wanted a third. And a fourth.

He told himself he needed to keep a clear head. He asked himself why, and he had no credible answer.

His part of the business was done for the night. He had made the choice. The freak would do the deed.

Nothing more would happen tonight, except that without the beer, Billy wouldn’t be able to sleep. He might find himself carving again. His hands ached. Not from his three insignificant wounds. From having clutched the tools too tightly. From having held the chunk of oak in a death grip.

Without sleep, he wouldn’t be ready for the day ahead. With morning would come news of another corpse. He would learn whom he had chosen for death.

Billy put his glass in the sink. He didn’t need a glass anymore because he didn’t care about making the beer last. Each bottle was a punch, and he wanted nothing more than to knock himself out.

He took a third beer to the living room and sat in his recliner. He drank in the dark.

Emotional fatigue can be as debilitating as physical exhaustion. All strength had fled him.

At 1:44, the telephone woke him. He flew up from the chair as if from a catapult. The empty beer bottle rolled across the floor.

Hoping to hear Lanny, he snared the handset from the kitchen phone on the fourth ring. “Hello” earned no reply.

The listener. The freak.

Billy knew from experience that a strategy of silence would get him nowhere. “What do you want from me? Why me?”

The caller did not respond.

“I’m not going to play your game,” Billy said, but that was lame because they both knew that he had already been co-opted.

57

He would have been pleased if the killer had replied with even a soft laugh of derision, but he got nothing.

“You’re sick, you’re twisted.” When that didn’t inspire a response, Billy added, “You’re human debris.”

He thought he sounded weak and ineffective, and for the times in which he lived, the insults were far from inflammatory. Some heavy-metal rock band probably called itself Sick and Twisted, and surely another was named Human Debris.

The freak would not be baited. He disconnected.

Billy hung up and realized that his hands were trembling. His palms were damp, too, and he blotted them on his shirt.

He was struck by a thought that should have but hadn’t occurred to him when the killer had called the previous night. He returned to the phone, picked up the handset, listened to the dial tone for a moment, and then keyed in * 69, instigating an automatic callback.

At the farther end of the line, the phone rang, rang, rang, but nobody answered it.

The number in the digital display on Billy’s phone, however, was familiar to him. It was Lanny’s.

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Chapter 10

Graceful in starlight with oaks, the church stood along the main highway, a quarter of a mile from the turnoff to Lanny Olsen’s house. Billy drove to the southwest corner of the parking lot. Under the cloaking gloom of a massive California live oak, he doused the headlights and switched off the engine.

Picturesque chalk-white stucco walls with decorative buttresses rose to burnt-orange tile roofs. In a belfry niche stood a statue of the Holy Mother with her arms open to welcome suffering humanity.

Here, every baptized baby would seem to be a potential saint. Here, every marriage would appear to have the promise of lifelong happiness regardless of the natures of the bride and groom.

Billy had a gun, of course.

Although it was an old weapon, not one of recent purchase, it remained in working order. He had cleaned and stored it properly.

Packed away with the revolver had been a box of .38 cartridges. They showed no signs of corrosion.

When he had taken the weapon from its storage case, it felt heavier than he remembered. Now as he picked it off the passenger’s seat, it still felt heavy.

59

This particular Smith and Wesson tipped the scale at only thirty-six ounces, but maybe the extra weight that he felt was its history. He got out of the Explorer and locked the doors.

A lone car passed on the highway. The sidewash of the headlights reached no closer than thirty yards from Billy.

The rectory lay on the farther side of the church. Even if the priest was an insomniac, he would not have heard the SUV.

Billy walked farther under the oak, out from its canopy, into a meadow. Wild grass rose to his knees.

In the spring, cascades of poppies had spilled down this sloped field, as orange-red as a lava flow. They were dead now, and gone.

He halted to let his eyes grow accustomed to the moonless dark. Motionless, he listened. The air was still. No traffic moved on the distant highway. His presence had silenced the cicadas and the toads. He could almost hear the stars.

Confident of his dark-adapted vision though of nothing else, he set out across the gently rising meadow, angling toward the fissured and potholed blacktop lane that led to Lanny Olsen’s place.

He worried about rattlesnakes. On summer nights as warm as this, they hunted field mice and younger rabbits. Unbitten, he reached the lane and turned uphill, passing two houses, both dark and silent.

At the second house, a dog ran loose in the fenced yard. It did not bark, but raced back and forth along the high pickets, whimpering for Billy’s attention. Lanny’s place lay a third of a mile past the house with the dog. At every window, light of one quality or another fired the glass or gilded the curtains. In the yard, Billy crouched beside a plum tree. He could see the west face of the house, which was the front, and the north flank.

The possibility existed that this entire thing had in fact been a hoax and that Lanny was the hoaxer.

Billy did not know for a fact that a blond schoolteacher had been murdered in the city of Napa. He had taken Lanny’s word for it.

He had not seen a report of the homicide in the newspaper. The killing supposedly had been discovered too late in the day to make the most recent edition. Besides, he rarely read a newspaper.

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Likewise, he never watched TV. Occasionally he listened for weather reports on the radio, while driving, but mostly he relied on a CD player loaded with zydeco or Western swing.

A cartoonist might be expected also to be a prankster. The funny streak in Lanny had been repressed for so long, however, that it was less of a streak than a thread. He made reasonably good company, but he wasn’t a load of laughs. Billy didn’t intend to wager his life—or a nickel—that Lanny Olsen had hoaxed him.

He remembered how sweaty and anxious and distressed his friend had been in the tavern parking lot, the previous evening. In Lanny, what you saw was what he was. If he’d wanted to be an actor instead of a cartoonist, and if his mother had never gotten cancer, he would still have wound up as a cop with a problematic ten card.

After studying the place, certain that no one was watching from a window, Billy crossed the lawn, passed the front porch, and had a look at the south flank of the house. There, too, every window glowed softly.

He circled to the rear, staying at a distance, and saw that the back door stood open. A wedge of light lay like a carpet on the dark porch floor, welcoming visitors across the kitchen threshold.

An invitation this bold seemed to suggest a trap.

Billy expected to find Lanny Olsen dead inside. If you don’t go to the police and get them involved, I will kill an unmarried man who won’t much be missed by the world.

Lanny’s funeral would not be attended by thousands of mourners, perhaps not even by as many as a hundred, though some would miss him. Not the world, but some.

When Billy had made his choice to spare the mother of two, he had not realized that he had doomed Lanny.

If he had known, perhaps he would have made a different choice. Choosing the death of a friend would be harder than dropping the dime on a nameless stranger. Even if the stranger was a mother of two. He didn’t want to think about that.

Toward the end of the backyard stood the stump of a diseased oak that had been cut down long ago. Four feet across, two feet high.

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On the east side of the stump was a hole worn by weather and rot. In the hole had been tucked a One Zip plastic bag. The bag contained a spare house key.

After retrieving the key, Billy circled cautiously to the front of the house. He returned to the concealment of the plum tree.

No one had turned off any lights. No face could be seen at any window; and none of the curtains moved suspiciously.

A part of him wanted to phone 911, get help here fast, and spill the story. He suspected that would be a reckless move.

He didn’t understand the rules of this bizarre game and could not know how the killer denned winning. Perhaps the freak would find it amusing to frame an innocent bartender for both murders.

Billy had survived being a suspect once. The experience reshaped him. Profoundly.

He would resist being reshaped again. He had lost too much of himself the first time.

He left the cover of the plum tree. He quietly climbed the front-porch steps and went directly to the door.

The key worked. The hardware didn’t rattle, the hinges didn’t squeak, and the door opened silently.

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Chapter 11

This Victorian house had a Victorian foyer with a dark wood floor. A wood-paneled hall led toward the back of the house, and a staircase offered the upstairs.

On one wall had been taped an eight-by-ten sheet of paper on which had been drawn a hand. It looked like Mickey Mouse’s hand: a plump thumb, three fingers, and a wrist roll suggestive of a glove.

Two fingers were folded back against the palm. The thumb and forefinger formed a cocked gun that pointed to the stairs.

Billy got the message, all right, but he chose to ignore it for the time being. He left the front door open in case he needed to make a quick exit. Holding the revolver with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling, he stepped through an archway to the left of the foyer. The living room looked as it had when Mrs. Olsen had been alive, ten years ago. Lanny didn’t use it much. The same was true of the dining room. Lanny ate most of his meals in the kitchen or in the den while watching TV.

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In the hallway, taped to the wall, another cartoon hand pointed toward the foyer and the stairs, opposite from the direction in which he was proceeding. Although the TV was dark in the den, flames fluttered in the gas-log fireplace, and in a bed of faux ashes, false embers glowed as if real. On the kitchen table stood a bottle of Bacardi, a double-liter plastic jug of Coca-Cola, and an ice bucket. On a plate beside the Coke gleamed a small knife with a serrated blade and a lime from which a few slices had been carved. Beside the plate stood a tall, sweating glass half full of a dark concoction. In the glass floated a slice of lime and a few thin slivers of melting ice. After stealing the killer’s first note from Billy’s kitchen and destroying it with the second to save his job and his hope of a pension, Lanny had tried to drown his guilt with a series of rum and Cokes.

If the jug of Coca-Cola and the bottle of Bacardi had been full when he sat down to the task, he had made considerable progress toward a state of drunkenness sufficient to shroud memory and numb the conscience until morning.

The pantry door was closed. Although Billy doubted that the freak lurked in there among the canned goods, he wouldn’t feel comfortable turning his back on it until he investigated.

With his right arm tucked close to his side and the revolver aimed in front of him, he turned the knob fast and pulled the door with his left hand. No one waited in the pantry.

From a kitchen drawer, Billy removed a clean dishtowel. After wiping the metal drawer-pull and the knob on the pantry door, he tucked one end of the cloth under his belt and let it hang from his side in the manner of a bar rag. On a counter near the cooktop lay Lanny’s wallet, car keys, pocket change, and cell phone. Here, too, was his 9-mm service pistol with the Wilson Combat holster in which he carried it.

Billy picked up the cell phone, switched it on, and summoned voice mail. The only message in storage was the one that he himself had left for Lanny earlier in the evening. This is Billy. I’m at home. What the hell? What’ve you done? Call me now.

After listening to his own voice, he deleted the message.

Maybe that was a mistake, but he didn’t see any way that it could prove his innocence. On the contrary, it would establish that he had expected to see Lanny during the evening just past and that he had been angry with him.

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Which would make him a suspect.

He had brooded about the voice mail during the drive to the church parking lot and during the walk through the meadow. Deleting it seemed the wisest course if he found what he expected to find on the second floor. He switched off the cell phone and used the dishtowel to wipe it clean of prints. He returned it to the counter where he had found it. If someone had been watching right then, he would have figured Billy for a calm, cool piece of work. In truth, he was half sick with dread and anxiety. An observer might also have thought that Billy, judging by his meticulous attention to detail, had covered up crimes before. That wasn’t the case, but brutal experience had sharpened his imagination and had taught him the dangers of circumstantial evidence.

An hour previously, at 1:44, the killer had rung Billy from this house. The phone company would have a record of that brief call.

Perhaps the police would think it proved Billy couldn’t have been here at the time of the murder.

More likely, they would suspect that Billy himself had placed the call to an accomplice at his house for the misguided purpose of trying to establish his presence elsewhere at the time of the murder.

Cops always suspected the worst of everyone. Their experience had taught them to do so.

At the moment, he couldn’t think of anything to be done about the phonecompany records. He put it out of his mind. More urgent matters required his attention. Like finding the corpse, if one existed.

He didn’t think he should waste time searching for the killer’s two notes. If they were still intact, he would most likely have found them on the table at which Lanny had been drinking or on the counter with his wallet, pocket change, and cell phone.

The flames in the den fireplace, on this warm summer night, led to a logical conclusion about the notes.

Taped to the side of a kitchen cabinet was a cartoon hand that pointed to the swinging door and the downstairs hallway.

At last Billy was willing to take direction, but a shrinking, anxious fear immobilized him.

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Possession of a firearm and the will to use it did not give him sufficient courage to proceed at once. He did not expect to encounter the freak. In some ways the killer would have been less intimidating than what he did expect to find.

The bottle of rum tempted him. He had felt no effect from the three bottles of Guinness. His heart had been thundering for most of an hour, his metabolism racing.

For a man who was not much of a drinker, he’d recently had to remind himself of that fact often enough to suggest that a potential rummy lived inside him, yearning to be free.

The courage to proceed came from a fear of failing to proceed and from an acute awareness of the consequences of surrendering this hand of cards to the freak.

He left the kitchen and followed the hall to the foyer. At least the stairs were not dark; there was light here below, at the landing, and at the top. Ascending, he did not bother calling Lanny’s name. He knew that he would receive no answer, and he doubted that he could have found his voice anyway.

Chapter 12

Opening off the upper hallway were three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a closet. Four of those five doors were closed.

On both sides of the entrance to the master bedroom were cartoon hands pointing to that open door.

Reluctant to be herded, thinking of animals driven up a ramp at a slaughterhouse, Billy left the master bedroom for last. He first checked the hall bath. Then the closet and the two other bedrooms, in one of which Lanny kept a drawing table.

Using the dishtowel, he wiped all the doorknobs after he touched them. With only the one space remaining to be searched, he stood in the hall, listening. No pin dropped.

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Something had stuck in his throat, and he couldn’t swallow it. He couldn’t swallow it because it was no more real than the sliver of ice sliding down the small of his back.

He entered the master bedroom, where two lamps glowed.

The rose-patterned wallpaper chosen by Lanny’s mother had not been removed after she died and not even, a few years later, after Lanny moved out of his old room into this one. Age had darkened the background to a pleasing shade reminiscent of a light tea stain. The bedspread had been one of Pearl Olsen’s favorites: rose in color overall, with embroidered flowers along the borders. Often during Mrs. Olsen’s illness, following chemotherapy sessions, and after her debilitating radiation treatments, Billy had sat with her in this room. Sometimes he just talked to her or watched her sleep. Often he read to her. She had liked swashbuckling adventure stories. Stories set during the Raj in India. Stories with geishas and samurai and Chinese warlords and Caribbean pirates. Pearl was gone, and now so was Lanny. Dressed in his uniform, he sat in an armchair, legs propped on a footstool, but he was gone just the same. He had been shot in the forehead. Billy didn’t want to see this. He dreaded having this image in his memory. He wanted to leave. Running, however, was not an option. It never had been, neither twenty years ago nor now, nor any time between. If he ran, he would be chased down and destroyed. The hunt was on, and for reasons he didn’t understand, he was the ultimate game. Speed of flight would not save him. Speed never saved the fox. To escape the hounds and the hunters, the fox needed cunning and a taste for risk. Billy didn’t feel like a fox. He felt like a rabbit, but he would not run like one. The lack of blood on Lanny’s face, the lack of leakage from the wound suggested two things: that death had been instantaneous and that the back of his skull had been blown out. No bloodstains or brain matter soiled the wallpaper behind the chair. Lanny had not been drilled as he sat there, had not been shot anywhere in this room.

As Billy had not found blood elsewhere in the house, he assumed that the killing occurred outside.

Perhaps Lanny had gotten up from the kitchen table, from his rum and Coke, half drunk or drunk, needing fresh air, and had stepped outside. Maybe he realized that his aim wouldn’t be neat enough for the bathroom and therefore went into the backyard to relieve himself.

The freak must have used a plastic tarp or something to move the corpse through the house without making a mess.

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Even if the killer was strong, getting the dead man from the backyard to the master bedroom, considering the stairs, would have been a hard job. Hard and seemingly unnecessary.

To have done it, however, he must have had a reason that was important to him.

Lanny’s eyes were open. Both bulged slightly in their sockets. The left one was askew, as if he’d had a cast eye in life.

Pressure. For the instant during which the bullet had transited the brain, pressure inside the skull soared before being relieved.

A book-club novel lay in Lanny’s lap, a smaller and more cheaply produced volume than the handsome edition of the same title that had been available in bookstores. At least two hundred similar books were shelved at one end of the bedroom.

Billy could see the title, the author’s name, and the jacket illustration. The story was about a search for treasure and true love in the South Pacific. A long time ago, he had read this novel to Pearl Olsen. She had liked it, but then she had liked them all.

Lanny’s slack right hand rested on the book. He appeared to have marked his place with a photograph, a small portion of which protruded from the pages.

The psychopath had arranged all of this. The tableau satisfied him and had emotional meaning to him, or it was a message—a riddle, a taunt. Before disturbing the scene, Billy studied it. Nothing about it seemed compelling or clever, nothing that might have excited the murderer enough to motivate him to put forth such effort in its creation.

Billy mourned Lanny; but with a greater passion, he hated that Lanny had been afforded no dignity even in death. The freak dragged him around and staged him as if he were a mannequin, a doll, as if he had existed only for the creep’s amusement and manipulation.

Lanny had betrayed Billy; but that didn’t matter anymore. On the edge of the Dark, on the brink of the Void, few offenses were worth remembering. The only things worth recalling were the moments of friendship and laughter. If they had been at odds on Lanny’s last day, they were on the same team now, with the same and singular adversary.

Billy thought he heard a noise in the hall.

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Without hesitation, holding the revolver in both hands, he left the master bedroom, clearing the doorway fast, sweeping the .38 left to right, seeking a target. No one.

The bathroom, closet, and other bedroom doors were closed, as he had left them.

He didn’t feel a pressing need to search those rooms again. He might have heard nothing but an ordinary settling noise as the old house protested the weight of time, but it almost certainly had not been the sound of a door opening or closing.

He blotted the damp palm of his left hand on his shirt, switched the gun to it, blotted his right hand, returned the gun to it, and went to the head of the stairs.

From the lower floor, from the porch beyond the open front door, came nothing but a summer-night silence, a dead-of-night hush.

Chapter 13

As he stood at the head of the stairs, listening, pain had begun to throb in Billy’s temples. He realized that his teeth were clenched tighter than the jaws of a vise. He tried to relax and breathe through his mouth. He rolled his head from side to side, working the stiffening muscles of his neck. Stress could be beneficial if you used it to stay focused and alert. Fear could paralyze, but also sharpen the survival instinct. He returned to the master bedroom. Approaching the door, he suddenly thought body and book would be gone. But Lanny still sat in the armchair. From a tissue box on one of the nightstands, Billy plucked two Kleenex. Using them as an impromptu glove, he moved the dead man’s hand off the book. Leaving the book on the cadaver’s lap, he opened it to the place that had been marked by the photograph. He expected sentences or paragraphs to have been highlighted in some fashion: a further message. But

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the text was pristine. Still using the Kleenex, he picked up the photo, a snapshot.

She was young and blond and pretty. Nothing in the picture gave a clue to her profession, but Billy knew that she had been a teacher. Her killer must have found this snapshot in her house, down in Napa. Before or after finding it, he brutally beat the beauty out of her. No doubt the freak had left the photograph in the book to confirm for the authorities that the two murders had been the work of the same man. He was bragging. He wanted the credit that he had earned. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility…

The freak hadn’t learned that lesson. Perhaps his failure to learn it would lead to his fall.

If it was possible to feel genuinely heartbroken over the fate of a stranger, the photo of this young woman would have done the job had Billy stared at it too long. He returned it to the book and closed it in the yellowing pages. After putting the dead man’s hand atop the book, as it had been, he wadded the two Kleenex in his fist. He went into the bathroom that was part of the master suite, pushed the plunger with the Kleenex, and then dropped them into the whirling water in the toilet bowl.

In the bedroom, he stood beside the armchair, not sure what he should do. Lanny did not deserve to be left here alone without benefit of prayer or justice. If not a close friend, he had nevertheless been a friend. Besides, he was Pearl Olsen’s son, and that ought to count for a lot.

Yet to phone the sheriff’s department, even anonymously, and report the crime might be a mistake. They would want an explanation for the call that had been placed from this house to Billy’s place soon after the murder; and he still had not decided what to tell them.

Other issues, things he didn’t know about, might point the finger of suspicion at him. Circumstantial evidence.

Perhaps the ultimate intention of the killer was to frame Billy for these murders and for others.

Undeniably, the freak saw this as a game. The rules, if any, were known only to him.

Likewise, the definition of victory was known only to him. Ginning the pot, capturing the king, scoring the final touchdown might mean, in this case,

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sending Billy to prison for life not for any rational reason, not so the freak himself could escape justice, but for the sheer fun of it. Considering that he could not even discern the shape of the playing field, Billy didn’t relish being interrogated by Sheriff John palmer. He needed time to think. A few hours at least. Until dawn. “I’m sorry,” he told Lanny.

He switched off one of the bedside lamps and then the other. If the house glowed like a centenarian’s birthday cake through the night, someone might notice. And wonder. Everyone knew Lanny Olsen was an early-to-bed guy. The house stood at the highest and loneliest point of the deadend lane. Virtually no one drove up here unless they were coming to see Lanny, and no one was likely to visit during the next eight or ten hours. Midnight had turned Tuesday to Wednesday. Wednesday and Thursday were Lanny’s days off. No one would miss him at work until Friday. Nevertheless, one by one, Billy returned to the other upstairs rooms and switched off those lights as well.

He doused the hall lights and went down the stairs, uneasy about all the darkness at his back.

In the kitchen, he closed the door to the porch and locked it. He intended to take Lanny’s spare key with him.

As he went forward once more through the first floor, he turned off all the lights, including the ceramic gas-fueled logs in the den fireplace, using the barrel of the handgun to flip the switches.

Standing on the front porch, he locked that door as well, and wiped the knob.

He felt watched as he descended the steps. He surveyed the lawn, the trees, glanced back at the house.

All the windows were black, and the night was black, and Billy walked away from that closed darkness into an open darkness under an India-ink sky in which stars seemed to float, seemed to tremble.

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Chapter 14

He walked briskly downhill along the shoulder of the lane, ready to take cover in the roadside brush if headlights appeared.

Frequently, he glanced back. As far as he could tell, no one followed him. Moonless, the night favored a stalker. It should have favored Billy, too, but he felt exposed by the stars.

At the house with the chest-high fence, the half-seen dog once more raced back and forth along the pickets, beseeching Billy with a whimper. It sounded desperate.

He sympathized with the animal and understood its condition. His plight, however, and his need to plan left him no time to stop and console the beast.

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Besides, every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.

So he continued down the lane, and glanced behind, and held tight to the revolver, and then turned left into the meadow where he waded through the grass in a fear of snakes.

One question pressed upon him more urgently than others: Was the killer someone he knew or a stranger?

If the freak had been in Billy’s life well prior to the first note, a secret sociopath who could no longer keep his homicidal urges bottled up, identifying him might be difficult but possible. Analysis of relationships and a search of memory with an eye for anomaly might unearth clues. Deductive reasoning and imagination would likely paint a face, spell out a twisted motive. In the event that the freak was a stranger who selected Billy at random for torment and eventual destruction, detective work would be more difficult. Imagining a face never seen and sounding for a motive in a vacuum would not prove easy.

Not long ago in the history of the world, routine daily violence—excluding the ravages of nations at war—had been largely personal in nature. Grudges, slights to honor, adultery, disputes over money triggered the murderous impulse.

In the modern world, more in the postmodern, most of all in the postpostmodern, much violence had become impersonal. Terrorists, street gangs, lone sociopaths, sociopaths in groups and pledged to a Utopian vision killed people they did not know, against whom they had no realistic complaint, for the purpose of attracting attention, making a statement, intimidation, or even just for the thrill of it.

The freak, whether known or unknown to Billy, was a daunting adversary. Judging by all evidence, he was bold but not reckless, psychopathic but selfcontrolled, clever, ingenious, cunning, with a baroque and Machiavellian mind. By contrast, Billy Wiles made his way in the world as plainly and directly as he could. His mind was not baroque. His desires were not complex. He only hoped to live, and lived on guarded hope.

Hurrying through tall pale grass that lashed against his legs and seemed to pass conspiratorial whispers blade to blade, he felt that he had more in common with a field mouse than with a sharp-beaked owl.

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The great spreading oak tree loomed. As Billy passed under it, unseen presences stirred in the boughs overhead, testing pinions, but no wings took flight.

Beyond the Ford Explorer, the church looked like an ice carving made of water with a trace of phosphorus.

Approaching, he unlocked the SUV with the remote key, and was acknowledged by two electronic chirps and a double flash of the parking lights. He got in, closed the door, and locked up again. He dropped the revolver on the passenger’s seat.

When he attempted to insert the key in the ignition, something foiled him. A folded piece of paper had been fixed to the steering column with a short length of tape.

A note.

The third note.

The killer must have been stationed along the highway, observing the turnoff to Lanny Olsen’s place, to see if Billy would take the bait. He must have noticed the Explorer pull into this parking lot.

The vehicle had been locked. The freak could have gotten into it only by breaking a window; but none was broken. The car alarm had not been triggered.

Thus far, every moment of this waking nightmare had felt keenly real, as veritable as fire to a testing hand. But the discovery of this third note seemed to thrust Billy through a membrane from the true world into one of fantasy. With a dreamlike dread, Billy peeled the note off the steering column. He unfolded it.

The interior lights, activated automatically when he boarded the SUV, were still on, for he had so recently shut and locked the door. The message—a question—was clearly visible and succinct. A re you prepared for your first wound?

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Chapter 15

Are you prepared for your first wound?

As though an Einsteinian switch had thrown time into slomo, the note slipped out of his fingers and seemed to float, float like a feather into his lap. The light went out.

In a trance of terror, reaching with his right hand for the revolver on the passenger’s seat, Billy turned slowly to the right as well, intending to look over his shoulder and into the dark backseat.

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There would seem to be too little room back there for a man to have hidden; however, Billy had gotten into the Explorer hastily, heedlessly. He groped for the elusive gun, his fingertips brushed the checked grip of the weapon—and the window in the driver’s door imploded.

As safety glass collapsed in a prickly mass across his chest and thighs, the revolver slipped out of his grasping fingers and tumbled onto the floor. Even as the glass was falling, before Billy could turn to face the assault, the freak reached into the SUV and seized a handful of his hair, at the crown of his head, twisted it and palled hard.

Trapped by the steering wheel and the console, pulled ruthlessly by the hair, unable to scramble into the passenger’s seat and search for the gun, he clawed at the hand that held him, but ineffectively because a leather glove protected it.

The freak was strong, vicious, relentless.

Billy’s hair should already have come out by the roots. The pain was excruciating. His vision blurred.

The killer wanted to pull him headfirst and backward through the brokenout window. The back of Billy’s skull rapped hard against the window sill. Another solid rap snapped his teeth together and knocked a hoarse cry from him. He clutched at the steering wheel with his left hand, at the headrest on the driver’s seat with his right, resisting. The hair would come out in a great handful. The hair would come out, and he would be free.

But the hair didn’t, and he wasn’t, and he thought of the horn. If he blew the horn, pounded the horn, help would come, and the freak would run. At once he realized that only the priest in the rectory would hear, and if the priest came, the killer wouldn’t flee. No, he would shoot the priest in the face just as he had shot Lanny.

Maybe ten seconds had elapsed since the window had shattered, and the back of Billy’s head was being drawn inexorably across the window sill. The pain had quickly grown so intense that the roots of his hair seemed to extend through the flesh of his face—for his face hurt as well, stung as if flame had seared it—and seemed to extend also into his shoulders and arms, for as the tenacious roots came free, so did the strength in those muscles. The nape of his neck chilled on contact with the window sill. Crumbles of gummy safety glass jagged his skin.

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His head was being bent backward now. How quickly his exposed throat could be slit, how easily his spine might be snapped.

He let go of the steering wheel. He reached behind his back, fumbling for the door handle.

If he could open the door and thrust with sufficient force, he might unbalance his assailant, knock him down, and either break his grip or lose the hair at last.

To reach the handle—slippery in his sweaty fingers—he had to twist his arm behind himself so torturously and bend his hand at such a severe angle that he didn’t have the range of movement to work the lever action. As if sensing Billy’s intent, the freak leaned all his weight against the door.

Billy’s head was largely out of the car now, and a face suddenly appeared above him, upside-down to his face. A countenance without features. A hooded phantom.

He blinked to clear his vision.

Not a hood. A dark ski mask.

Even in this poor light, Billy could see the fevered gaze that glistered from the eyeholes.

Something sprayed the lower half of his face, from the nose down. Wet, cold, pungent yet sweet, a medicinal reek.

He gasped in shock, then tried to hold his breath, but the single gasp had undone him. Astringent fumes burned in his nostrils. His mouth flooded with saliva.

The masked face seemed to lower toward his, like a dark moon coming down, the cratered eyes.

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Chapter 16

The sedative wore off. Like a winch line turning on a drum, pain gradually hoisted Billy from unconsciousness.

His mouth tasted as if he’d drunk waffle syrup and chased it with bleach. Sweet and bitter. Life itself.

For a while he didn’t know where he was. Initially he did not care. Raised from a sea of torpor, he felt saturated with unnatural sleep and yearned to return to it.

Eventually the unrelenting pain forced him to care, to keep his eyes open, to analyze sensation and to orient himself. He was lying on his back on a hard surface—the church parking lot.

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He could smell the faint scents of tar, oil, gasoline. The vague nutty, musty fragrance of the oak tree spreading overhead in the darkness. His own sour perspiration.

Licking his lips, he tasted blood.

When he wiped his face, Billy found it slick with a viscous substance that was most likely a mixture of sweat and blood. In the dark, he could not see what had been transferred to his hand.

The pain was mostly in his scalp. He first assumed that it was a lingering effect of having had his hair nearly pulled out.

A slow pulsing ache, punctuated by a series of sharper pangs, radiated across his head, not from the crown, however, where his hair had been severely tested, but from his brow.

When he raised one hand and hesitantly explored the source, he found something stiff and wiry bristling from his forehead, an inch below the hairline. Although his touch was gentle, it triggered a spasm of sharper pain that made him cry out. Are you prepared for your first wound?

He left the exploration of the injury for later, until he could see the damage.

The wound would not be mortal. The freak had not intended to kill him, only to hurt him, perhaps to scar him.

Billy’s grudging respect for his adversary had grown to the point that he did not expect the man to make mistakes, at least not major ones. Billy sat up. Pain swelled across his brow, and again when he got to his feet.

He stood swaying, surveying the parking lot. His assailant was gone. High in the night, a cluster of moving stars, the running lights of a jet, growled westward. On this route, it was probably a military transport headed for a war zone. Another war zone different from the one down here. He opened the driver’s door of the Explorer.

Crumbled safety glass littered the seat. He plucked a Kleenex box from the console and used it to scrape the prickly debris off the upholstery. He searched for the note that had been taped over the ignition. Evidently the killer had taken it.

He found the dropped key under the brake pedal. From the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, he retrieved the revolver.

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He had been allowed to keep the gun for the game ahead. The freak didn’t fear it.

The substance with which Billy had been sprayed—chloroform or some other anesthetic—had a lingering effect. When he bent over, he grew dizzy. Behind the wheel, with the door closed, with the engine running, he worried that he might not be fit to drive.

He turned on the air conditioner, angled two vents at his face. As he assessed his transient dizziness, the interior lights went off automatically. Billy turned them on once more.

He tilted the rearview mirror to inspect his face. He looked like a painted devil: dark red, but the teeth bright; dark red, and the whites of the eyes unnaturally white.

When he adjusted the mirror again, he saw at once the source of his pain. Seeing did not immediately mean believing. He preferred to think that the residual dizziness from the anesthetic might be accompanied by hallucination. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He strove to clear the image in the mirror from his mind, and hoped that when he looked again he would not see the same.

Nothing had changed. Across his forehead, an inch below the hairline, three large fishhooks pierced his flesh.

The point and the barb of each hook protruded from the skin. The shank also protruded. The bend of each hook lay under the thin meat of his brow. He shuddered and looked away from the mirror.

There are days of doubt, more often lonely nights, when even the devout wonder if they are heirs to a greater kingdom than this earth and if they will know mercy—or if instead they are only animals like any other, with no inheritance except the wind and the dark.

This was such a night for Billy. He had known others like it. Always the doubt had receded. He told himself that it would recede again, though this time it was colder and seemed certain to leave a higher water mark. The freak had at first seemed to be a player to whom murder was a sport. The fishhooks in the forehead, however, had not been intended as merely a game move; and this was no game.

To the freak, these killings were something more than murder, but the something more was not a form of chess or the equivalent of poker. Homicide

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had symbolic meaning for him, and he pursued it with a purpose more serious than amusement. He had some mysterious goal beyond the killing itself, an aim for which he sought completion. Game was the wrong word, Billy needed to find the right one. Until he knew the correct word, he would never understand the killer, and would not find him.

With Kleenex, he gently swabbed the clotted blood from his eyebrows, wiped most of it off his lids and lashes.

The sight of the fishhooks had clarified his mind. He wasn’t dizzy anymore.

His wounds needed attention. He switched on the headlights and drove out of the church parking lot.

Whatever ultimate goal the freak might have, whatever symbolism he intended with the fishhooks, he must also have hoped to send Billy to a doctor. The physician would require an explanation of the hooks, and any response Billy made would complicate his predicament.

If he told the truth, he would tie himself to the murders of Giselle Winslow and Lanny Olsen. He would be the primary suspect.

Without the three notes, he could offer no evidence that the freak existed. The authorities would not regard the hooks as credible evidence, for they would wonder if this was a case of self-mutilation. A self-inflicted wound was a ploy that murderers sometimes used to cast themselves as victims and thereby to deflect suspicion.

He knew the cynicism with which some cops would look upon his dramatic, bizarre, but superficial wounds. He knew it precisely. Furthermore, Billy was a fresh-water angler. He fished for trout and bass. These substantial hooks were the size needed to land large bass if you were using live bait instead of lures. In his tackle box at home were hooks identical to those that now drew his blood.

He dared not go to a doctor. He’d have to be his own physician. At 3:30 in the morning, he had the rural roadways to himself. The night was still, but the SUV made its own wind, which blustered at the broken-out window. In the halogen headlights, flat vineyards, hillside vineyards, and wooded heights remained familiar to his eye but, mile by mile, became as alien to his heart as any foreign barrens.

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PART 2

ARE YOU PREPARED FOR YOUR SECOND WOUND?

Chapter 17

In February, after the extraction of a molar with roots fused to his jawbone, Billy had been given a prescription for a painkiller, Vicodin, by his periodontist. He had used only two of ten tablets.

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The pharmacy label specified that the medication should be taken with food. He had not eaten dinner, and he still had no appetite. He needed the medication to be effective. From the refrigerator, he got a baking dish of leftover homemade lasagna.

Although the punctures in his brow were plugged with clots and the bleeding had stopped, the pain continued unrelenting and made coherent thought increasingly difficult. He chose not to delay the few minutes necessary to zap the dish in the microwave. He put it cold on the kitchen table. A pink sticker on the pill bottle counseled against consuming alcoholic beverages while taking the painkiller. Screw that. He had no intention of driving a car or operating heavy machinery in the next several hours. He popped the tablet and forked lasagna into his mouth, washing everything down with Elephant beer, a Danish brew boasting a higher alcohol content than other beers.

As he ate, he thought about the dead schoolteacher, about Lanny sitting in the bedroom armchair, about what the killer might do next. Those lines of thought were not conducive to appetite or to digestion. The teacher and Lanny were beyond rescue, and there was no way to foretell the freak’s next move.

Instead, he thought about Barbara Mandel, mostly about Barbara as she had been, not as she was now in Whispering Pines. Inevitably, these reminiscences led forward to the moment, and he began to worry about what would happen to her if he died.

He remembered the small square envelope from her physician. He fished it out of his pocket and tore it open.

The name Dr. Jordan Ferrier was blind embossed on the face of the creamcolored note card. He had precise handwriting: Dear Billy, When you start timing your visits to Barbara in order to avoid me during my regular rounds, I know the time has come for our semiannual review of her condition. Please call my office to schedule an appointment.

Sweat beaded the bottle of Elephant beer. He used Dr. Ferrier’s note card as a coaster to protect the table.

“Why don’t you call my office for an appointment,” Billy said. The baking dish was half full of lasagna. Although he had no appetite, he ate everything, shoving food into his mouth and chewing vigorously, ate as if eating could satiate anger as easily as it could hunger.

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Eventually the pain in his forehead substantially subsided. He went to his fishing gear in the garage. From his angler’s kit, he retrieved needle-nose pliers with a wire-cutting edge.

In the house again, after locking the back door, he went to the bathroom, where he examined his face in the mirror. The mask of blood had dried. He looked like an aboriginal resident of Hell.

The freak had inserted the three hooks with care. Apparently, he had tried to do as little damage as possible.

To suspicious police, that tenderness would have supported the theory that these wounds were self-inflicted.

One end of the hook featured the bend and the barb. At the other end was an eye to which a snap and leader could be attached. Pulling either the barb or the eye through the puncture would further rip the flesh.

He used the pliers to snip off the eye from one hook. Between thumb and forefinger, he pinched the barbed end and extracted the cut shank. When he had removed all three hooks, he took a shower as hot as he could tolerate.

After the shower, he sterilized the punctures as best he could with rubbing alcohol and then hydrogen peroxide. He applied Neosporin and covered the wounds with gauze pads fixed with adhesive tape.

At 4:27 A.M., according to the nightstand clock, Billy went to bed. A double bed, two sets of pillows. His head on one soft pillow, the hard revolver under the other. May the judgment not be too heavy upon us…

As his eyelids fell shut of their own weight, he saw Barbara in his mind’s eye, her pale lips forming inscrutable statements.

I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying. He was asleep before the clock counted the half hour.

In his dream, he lay in a coma, unable to move or to speak, but nonetheless aware of the world around him. Doctors in white lab coats and black ski masks loomed, working on his flesh with steel scalpels, carving clusters of bloody acanthus leaves.

Resurgent pain, dull but persistent, woke him at 8:40 Wednesday morning. At first, he could not remember which of his recent nightmarish experiences had been dreamed, which real. Then he could.

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He wanted another Vicodin. Instead, in the bathroom, he shook two aspirin from a bottle.

Intending to take the aspirins with orange juice, he went into the kitchen. He had neglected to put the baking pan, crusted with the residue of lasagna, in the dishwasher. The empty bottle of Elephant beer stood on Dr. Ferrier’s stationery.

Morning light flooded the room. The blinds had been raised. The windows had been covered when he’d gone to bed.

Taped to the refrigerator was a folded sheet of paper, the fourth message from the killer.

Chapter 18

He knew beyond doubt that he had engaged the deadbolt in the back door when he had returned from the garage with the needle-nose pliers. Now it was unlocked. Stepping onto the porch, he surveyed the western woods. A few elms in the foreground, pines beyond. The morning sun bent all tree shadows in upon the grove and probed those dusky reaches without much illuminating them. As his gaze traveled the Greenwood, seeking the telltale flare of sunlight off the lenses of binoculars, he saw movement. Mysterious forms whidded among the trees, as fluid as the shadows of birds in flight, flickering palely when sunlight dappled them. A sense of the uncanny overcame Billy. Then the forms broke from the trees, and they were only deer: a buck, two does, a fawn. He thought that something must have spooked them in the woods, but they

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gamboled only a few yards onto the lawn before coming to a halt. As serene as deer in Eden, they grazed upon the tender grass. Returning to the house, leaving the deer to their breakfast, Billy locked the back door even though he gained no safety from the deadbolt. If the killer didn’t possess a key, then he owned lock picks and was experienced in their use.

Leaving the note undisturbed, Billy opened the fridge. He took out a quart of orange juice.

As he drank juice from the carton, washing down the aspirins, he stared at the note taped to the refrigerator. He did not touch it.

He put two English muffins in the toaster. When they were crisp, he spread peanut butter on them and ate at the kitchen table.

If he never read the note, if he burned it in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain, he would be removing himself from the game. The first problem with that idea was the same that had pricked his conscience before: Inaction counted as a choice.

The second problem was that he himself had become a victim of assault. And he had been promised more. Are you prepared for your first wound?

The freak had not underlined or italicized first, but Billy understood where the emphasis belonged. Although he had his faults, self-delusion wasn’t one of them.

If he didn’t read the note, if he tried to opt out, he would be even less able to imagine what might be coming than he was now. When the ax fell on him, he would not even hear the blade cutting the air above his head. Besides, this was in no way a game to the killer, which Billy had realized the previous night. Denied a playmate, the freak would not simply pick up his ball and go home. He would see this through to whatever end he had in mind. Billy would have liked to carve acanthus leaves.

He wanted to work a crossword puzzle. He was good at them. Laundry, yard work, cleaning out the rain gutters, painting the mailbox: He could lose himself in the mundane chores of daily life, and take solace in them. He wanted to work at the tavern and let the hours pass in a blur of repetitive tasks and inane conversations.

All the mystery he needed—and all the drama—was to be found in his visits to Whispering Pines, in the puzzling words that Barbara sometimes spoke and in his persistent belief that there was hope for her. He needed nothing more. He had nothing more.

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He had nothing more until this, which he didn’t need and didn’t want—but could not escape.

Finished with the muffins, he took the plate and knife to the sink. He washed them, dried them, and put them away.

In the bathroom, he peeled the bandage off his forehead. Each hook had torn him twice. The six punctures looked red and raw.

Gently he washed the wounds, then reapplied alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and Neosporin. He fashioned a fresh bandage.

His brow was cool to the touch. If the hook had been dirty, an infection might not be prevented by his precautions, especially if the points and barbs had scored the bone.

He was safe from tetanus. Four years previously, renovating the garage to accommodate a woodworking shop, he’d sustained a deep cut in his left hand, from a hinge that corrosion had made brittle and sharp. He’d gotten a booster shot of DPT vaccine. Tetanus didn’t worry him. He would not die of tetanus. Neither would he die of infected hook wounds. This was a false worry to give his mind a rest from real and greater threats.

In the kitchen, he peeled the note off the refrigerator. He wadded it in his fist and took it to the waste can.

Instead of throwing the note away, he smoothed it on the table and read it. Stay home this morning. An associate of mine will come to see you at 11:00. Wait for him on the front porch. If you don’t stay home, I will kill a child. If you inform the police, I will kill a child. You seem so angry. Have I not extended to you the hand of friendship? Yes, I have. Associate. The word troubled Billy. He did not like that word at all.

In rare cases, homicidal sociopaths worked in pairs. The cops called them kill buddies. The Hillside Strangler in Los Angeles had proved to be a pair of cousins. The D.C. Sniper had been two men.

The Manson Family numbered more than two.

A simple bartender might rationally hope to get the best of one ruthless psychopath. Not two.

Billy did not consider going to the police. The freak had twice proved his sincerity; if disobeyed, he would kill a child.

In this instance, at least, a choice was open to him that did not entail selecting anyone for death.

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Although the first four lines of the note were straightforward, the meaning of the last two lines could not be easily interpreted. Have I not extended to you the hand of friendship?

The mockery was evident. Billy also detected a taunting quality suggesting that information had been offered here that would prove helpful to him if only he could understand it.

Rereading the message six times—eight, even ten—did not bring clarity. Only frustration.

With this note, Billy had evidence again. Although it did not amount to much and would not itself impress the police, he intended to keep it safe. In the living room, he surveyed the book collection. In recent years, it had been nothing to him except something to be dusted.

He selected In Our Time. He tucked the killer’s note between the copyright page and the dedication page, and he returned the volume to the shelf.

He thought of Lanny Olsen sitting dead in an armchair with an adventure novel in his lap.

In the bedroom, he fetched the .38 Smith and Wesson from under the pillow.

As he handled the revolver, he remembered how it felt when it discharged. The barrel wanted to rake up. The backstrap hardened against the meat of the palm, and the recoil traveled the bones of the hand and arm, seeming to churn the marrow as a school of fish churned water.

In a dresser drawer was an open box of ammunition. He put three spare cartridges in each of the front pockets of his chinos.

That seemed to be enough insurance. Whatever might be coming, it would not be a war. It would be violent and vicious, but brief.

He smoothed the night out of the bedclothes. Although he didn’t use a spread, he plumped the pillows and tucked in the sheets so they were as taut as a drum skin.

When he picked up the gun from the nightstand, he remembered not only the recoil but also what it felt like to kill a man.

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Chapter 19

Jackie O’Hara answered his cell phone with a line he sometimes used when he worked behind the bar. “What can I do ya for?”

“Boss, it’s Billy.”

“Hey, Billy, you know what they were talking about in the tavern last night?”

“Sports?”

“The hell they were. We’re not a damn sports bar.”

Looking out a kitchen window toward the lawn from which the deer had vanished, Billy said, “Sorry.”

“The guys in sports bars—the drinking doesn’t mean anything to them.”

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“It’s just a way to get high.”

“That’s right. They’d as soon smoke a little pot or even get a Starbucks buzz. We’re not a damn sports bar.”

Having heard this before, Billy tried to move the discussion along: “To our customers, the drinking is a kind of ceremony.”

“Beyond ceremony. It’s an observance, a solemnity, almost a kind of sacrament. Not to all of them, but to most. It’s communion.”

“All right. So were they talking about Big Foot?”

“I wish. The best, the really intense barroom talk used to be about Big Foot, flying saucers, the lost continent of Atlantis, what happened to the dinosaurs—”

“—what’s on the dark side of the moon,” Billy interjected, “the Loch Ness monster, the Shroud of Turin—”

“—ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle, all that classic stuff,” Jackie continued.

“But it’s not like that so much anymore.”

“I know,” Billy acknowledged.

“They were talking about these professors at Harvard and Yale and Princeton, these scientists who say they’re going to use cloning and stem cells and genetic engineering to create a superior race.”

“Smarter and faster and better than we are,” Billy said.

“So much better than we are,” Jackie said, “they won’t be human at all. It’s in Time or maybe Newsweek, these scientists smiling and proud of themselves right in a magazine.”

“They call it the posthuman future,” Billy said.

“What happens to us when we’re post?” Jackie wondered. “Post is toast. A master race? Haven’t these guys heard of Hitler?”

“They think they’re different,” Billy said.

“Don’t they have mirrors? Some idiots are crossing human and animal genes to create new… new things. One of them wants to create a pig that’s got a human brain.”

“How about that.”

“The magazine doesn’t say why a pig, like it should be obvious why a pig instead of a cat or a cow or a chipmunk. For God’s sake, Billy, isn’t it hard enough being a human brain in a human body? What kind of hell would it be a human brain in a pig body?”

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“Maybe we won’t live to see it,” Billy said. “Unless you’re planning to die tomorrow, you will. I liked Big Foot better. I liked the Bermuda Triangle and ghosts a lot better. Now all the crazy shit is real.”

“Why I called,” Billy said, “is to let you know I can’t make it to work today.”

With genuine concern, Jackie said, “Hey, what, are you sick?”

“I’m kind of queasy.”

“You don’t sound like you have a cold.”

“I don’t think it’s a cold. It’s like a stomach thing.”

“Sometimes a summer cold starts that way. Better take zinc. They’ve got this zinc gel you squeeze up your nose. It really works. It stops a cold dead.”

“I’ll get some.”

“Too late for vitamin C. You gotta be taking that all along.”

“I’ll get some zinc. Did I call too early, did you close up the tavern last night?”

“No. I went home at ten o’clock. All that talk about pigs with human brains, I just wanted to go home.”

“So Steve Zillis closed up?”

“Yeah. He’s a reliable boy. That stuff I told you, I wish now I hadn’t. If he wants to chop up mannequins and watermelons in his backyard, that’s his business, as long as he does his job.”

Tuesday night was often slow in the bar business. If the traffic grew light, Jackie preferred to lock the tavern before the usual 2:00 A.M. closing time. An open bar with few or no customers in the wee hours is a temptation to a stickup artist, putting employees at risk.

“Busy night?” Billy asked. “Steve said after eleven it was like the world ended. He had to open the front door and look outside to be sure the tavern hadn’t been teleported to the moon or somewhere. He turned off the lights before midnight. Thank God there aren’t two Tuesdays in a week.”

Billy said, “People like to spend some time with their families. That’s the curse of a family bar.”

“You’re a funny guy, aren’t you?”

“Not usually.”

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“If you put that zinc gel up your nose and you don’t feel any better,”

Jackie said, “call me back, and I’ll tell you somewhere else you can stuff it.”

“I think you’d have made a fine priest. I really do.”

“Get well, okay? The customers miss you when you’re off.”

“Do they?”

“Not really. But at least they don’t say they’re glad you’re gone.”

Under the circumstances, perhaps only Jackie O’Hara could have made Billy Wiles crack a smile.

He hung up. He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty-one.

The “associate” would be here in less than half an hour.

If Steve Zillis had left the tavern shortly before midnight, he would have had plenty of time to go to Lanny’s place, kill him, and move the body to the armchair in the master bedroom.

If Billy had been handicapping suspects, he would have given long odds on Steve. But once in a while, a long shot won the race.

Chapter 20

On the front porch were two teak rocking chairs with dark-green cushions, Billy seldom needed the second chair.

This morning, wearing a white T-shirt and chinos, he occupied the one farthest from the porch steps. He didn’t rock. He sat quite still. Beside him stood a teak cocktail table. On the table, on a cork coaster, was a glass of cola.

He hadn’t drunk any of the cola. He had prepared it as a prop, to distract the eye from consideration of the box of Ritz crackers.

The box contained nothing but the snub-nosed revolver. The only crackers were a stack of three on the table, beside the box.

Bright and clear and hot, the day was too dry to please the grape growers, but it was all right with Billy.

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From the porch, between deodar cedars, he could see a long way down the rural road that sloped up toward his house and far beyond. Not much traffic passed. He recognized some of the vehicles, but he didn’t know to whom they belonged.

Rising off the sun-scorched blacktop, shimmering heat ghosts haunted the morning.

At 10:53, a figure appeared in the distance, on foot. Billy did not expect the associate to hike in for the meeting. He assumed this was not the man. At first the figure might have been a mirage. The furnace heat distorted him, made him ripple as if he were a reflection on water. Once he seemed to evaporate, then reappeared.

In the hard light, he looked tall and thin, unnaturally thin, as if he had recently hung on a cross in a cornfield, glaring the birds away with his button eyes.

He turned off the county road and followed the driveway. He left the driveway for the grass and, at 10:58, arrived at the bottom of the porch steps.

“Mr. Wiles?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I believe you’re expecting me.”

He had the raw, rough voice of one who had marinated his larynx in whiskey and slow-cooked it in years of cigarette smoke.

“What’s your name?” Billy asked.

“I’m Ralph Cottle, sir.”

Billy had thought the question would be ignored. If the man were hiding behind a false name, John Smith would have been good enough. Ralph Cottle sounded real.

Cottle was as thin as the distorting heat had made him appear to be from a distance, but not as tall. His scrawny neck looked as if it might snap with the weight of his head.

He wore white tennis shoes dark with age and filth. Shiny in spots and frayed at the cuffs, the cocoa-brown, summer-weight suit hung on him with no more grace than it would have hung from a coat rack. His polyester shirt was limp, stained, and missing a button.

These were thrift-shop clothes from the cheapest bin; and he had gotten long wear out of them.

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“Mr. Wiles, may I come in the shade?”

Standing at the bottom of the steps, Cottle looked as if the weight of the sunlight might collapse him. He seemed too frail to be a threat, but you never could tell.

“There’s a chair for you,” Billy said.

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate the kindness.”

Billy tensed as Cottle ascended the stairs but relaxed a little when the man had settled into the other rocker.

Cottle didn’t rock, either, as if getting the chair moving was a more strenuous task than he cared to contemplate.

“Sir, do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Yes. I do mind.”

“I understand. It’s a filthy habit.”

From an inner coat pocket, Cottle produced a pint of Seagram’s and unscrewed the cap. His bony hands trembled. He didn’t ask if it was all right to drink. He just took a swig.

Apparently, he had sufficient control of his nicotine jones to be polite about it. The hooch, on the other hand, told him when he needed it, and he could not disobey its liquid voice.

Billy suspected that other pints were tucked in other pockets, plus cigarettes and matches, and possibly a couple of hand-rolled joints. This explained why a suit in summer heat: It was not only clothing but also a portmanteau for his various vices.

The booze didn’t heighten the color of his face. His skin was already dark from much sun and red from an intricate web of burst capillaries.

“How far did you walk?” Billy asked.

“Only from the junction. I hitched a ride that far.” Billy must have looked skeptical, for Cottle added, “A lot of people know me around these parts. They know I’m harmless, unkempt but not dirty.”

Indeed, his blond hair looked clean, though uncombed. He had shaved, too, his leathery face tough enough to resist nicking even with the razor wielded by such an unsteady hand.

His age was difficult to determine. He might have been forty or sixty, but not thirty or seventy.

“He’s a very bad man, Mr. Wiles.”

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“Who?”

“The one who sent me.”

“You’re his associate.”

“No more than I’m a monkey.”

“Associate—that’s what he called you.”

“Do I look like a monkey, either?”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“What’s he look like?”

“I haven’t seen his face. I hope I never do.”

“A ski mask?” Billy guessed.

“Yes, sir. And eyes looking out of it cold as snake eyes.” His voice quavered in sympathy with his hands, and he tipped the bottle to his mouth again.

“What color were his eyes?” Billy asked.

“They looked yellow as egg yolks to me, but that was just the lamplight in them.”

Remembering the encounter in the church parking lot, Billy said, “There was too little light for me to see color… just a hot shine.”

“I’m not such a bad man, Mr. Wiles. Not like him. What I am is weak.”

“Why’ve you come here?”

“Money, for one thing. He paid me one hundred forty dollars, all in tendollar bills.”

“One-forty? What—did you bargain him up from a hundred?”

“No, sir. That’s the precise sum he offered. He said it’s ten dollars for each year of your innocence, Mr. Wiles.”

In silence, Billy stared at him.

Ralph Cottle’s eyes might once have been a vibrant blue. Maybe all the alcohol had faded them, for they were the palest blue eyes that Billy had ever seen, the faint blue of the sky at high altitude where there is too little atmosphere to provide rich color and where the void beyond is barely concealed.

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After a moment, Cottle broke eye contact, looked out at the yard, the trees, the road.

“Do you know what that means?” Billy asked. “My fourteen years of innocence?”

“No, sir. And it’s none of my business. He just wanted me to make a point of telling you that.”

“You said money was one thing. What was the other?”

“He’d kill me if I didn’t come see you.”

“That’s what he threatened to do?”

“He doesn’t make threats, Mr. Wiles.”

“Sounds like one.”

“He just says what is, and you know it’s true. I come see you or I’m dead. And not dead easy, either, but very hard.”

“Do you know what he’s done?” Billy asked.

“No, sir. And don’t you tell me.”

“There’s two of us now who know he’s real. We can corroborate each other’s story.”

“Don’t even talk that way.”

“Don’t you see, he’s made a mistake.”

“I wish I could be his mistake,” Cottle said, “but I’m not. You think too much of me, and shouldn’t.”

“But he’s got to be stopped,” Billy said.

“Not by me. I’m nobody’s hero. Don’t you tell me what he’s done. Don’t you dare.”

“Why shouldn’t I tell you?”

“That’s your world. It isn’t mine.”

“There’s just one world.”

“No, sir. There’s a billion of them. Mine’s different from yours, and that’s the way it’s gonna stay.”

“We’re sitting here on the same porch.”