Velocity

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Chapter 61

On the bedroom TV, a naked man in a black mask lashed a woman’s breasts with a cluster of leather straps.

Billy switched off the TV. “I’m thinking about you handling the lemons and limes you slice for drinks, and I want to puke.”

Lying disabled in the hall past the open door, Zillis either didn’t hear him or pretended that he didn’t.

The bed did not have a headboard or a footboard. The mattress and box springs sat on a wheeled metal frame.

Because Zillis didn’t bother with such niceties as bedspreads and dust ruffles, the frame of the bed was exposed.

Billy took the handcuffs from the bread bag. He locked one of the bracelets to the bottom rail of the bed frame.

“Get up on your hands and knees,” he said. “Crawl toward my voice.”

Remaining on the hall floor, breathing easier but still noisily, Zillis spat vigorously on the carpet. His flooding tears had carried the Mace to his lips, and the bitter taste had gotten in his mouth.

Billy went to him and pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the nape of his neck. I.

Zillis became very still, wheezing softly.

Billy said, “You know what this is?”

“Man.”

“I want you to crawl into the bedroom.”

“Shit.”

“I mean it.”

“All right.”

“To the bottom of the bed.”

Although the only light in the room issued from a dim bedside lamp, Zillis squinted against a stinging, blinding brightness as he crawled to the bed.

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Billy had to redirect him twice. Then: “Sit on the floor with your back against the foot of the bed. That’s good. With your left hand, feel beside you. A set of handcuffs is hanging from the bed rail. There you go.”

“Don’t do this to me, man.” Zillis’s eyes watered copiously. Fluid bubbled in his nostrils. “Why? What is this?”

“Put your left wrist in the empty bracelet.”

“I don’t like this,” Zillis said.

“You don’t have to.”

“What’re you going to do to me?”

“That depends. Put it on now.”

After Zillis fumbled with the cuff, Billy leaned in to test the double lock, which was secure. Zillis still couldn’t see well enough to strike out or to make a play for the gun.

Steve could drag the bed around the room if he wanted. He could overturn it with effort, dump the mattress and the box springs, and patiently dismantle the bolted frame until he could slide the cuff free. But he couldn’t move fast. The carpet looked filthy. Billy wouldn’t sit or kneel on it. He went to the dinette alcove off the kitchen and returned with the only straight-backed chair in the house. He stood it in front of Zillis, out of his reach, and sat down.

“Billy, I’m dying here.”

“You aren’t dying.”

“I’m scared about my eyes. I still can’t see.”

“I want to ask you some questions.”

“Questions? Are you crazy?”

“I half feel like it,” Billy admitted.

Zillis coughed. The single cough became a fit of coughing, which became a fearsome choking. He wasn’t faking any of it.

Billy waited.

When Zillis could speak, his voice was hoarse, and it shook: “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Billy.”

“Good. Now I want you to tell me where you keep your gun.”

“Gun? What do I need with a gun?”

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“The one you shot him with.”

“Shot him? Shot who? I didn’t shoot anybody. Jesus, Billy.”

“You shot him in the forehead.”

“No. No way. Not me, man.” His eyes swam with tears induced by the Mace, so they could not be read for deception. He blinked and blinked, trying to see. “Man, if this is some half-assed joke—”

“You’re the joker,” Billy said. “Not me. You’re the performer.”

Zillis didn’t react to the word.

Billy went to the nightstand and opened the drawer.

“What’re you doing?” Zillis asked.

“Looking for the gun.”

“There isn’t ‘the a gun.”

“There wasn’t one earlier, when you weren’t here, but there will be now. You’ll keep it close to you.”

“You were here earlier?”

“You wallow in every kind of filth, don’t you, Steve? I wanted to shower in boiling water after I left.”

Billy opened the door on the bottom of the nightstand, rummaged inside.

“What’re you going to do if you don’t find a gun?”

“Maybe I’ll nail your hand to the floor and cut your fingers off one by one.”

Zillis sounded as if he was about to start crying for real. “Oh, man, don’t say crazy shit like that. What did I do to you? I didn’t do anything to you.”

Sliding open the closet door, Billy said, “When you were at my place, Stevie, where did you hide the severed hand?”

A groan escaped Zillis, and he began to shake his head: no, no, no, no. The closet shelf over the hanging clothes lay just above eye level. As Billy felt along the shelf for the gun, he said, “And what else did you hide in my place? What did you cut off the redhead? An ear? A breast?”

“This doesn’t compute,” Zillis said shakily.

“Doesn’t it?”

“You’re Billy Wiles, for God’s sake.”

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Returning to the bed, searching for the gun, Billy felt between the mattress and the box springs, which he wouldn’t have had the stomach to do if he hadn’t been wearing the gloves.

“You’re Billy Wiles,” Zillis repeated.

“Which means what—that you didn’t think I’d know how to take care of myself?”

“I didn’t do anything, Billy. I didn’t.”

Going around to the other side of the bed, Billy said, “Well, I know how to take care of myself, all right, even if I don’t exactly ring the bell on the zing meter.”

Recognizing his own words, Zillis said, “I didn’t mean anything by that. You think that was an insult? I didn’t mean it that way.”

Billy searched between mattress and box springs again. Nothing.

“I say things, Billy. You know how I am. I’m always joking. You know me. Hell, Billy, I’m an asshole. You know I’m an asshole, all the time talking, half the time not listening to myself.”

Billy returned to the chair and sat again. “Can you see me better, Stevie?”

“Not much, no. I need some Kleenex.”

“Use the bed sheet.”

With his free hand, Zillis pawed loose the thin blanket tucked into the foot of the bed. He freed a corner of the sheet, mopped his face with it, blew his nose.

Billy said, “Do you have an ax?”

“Oh, God.”

“Do you own an ax, Stevie?”

“No.”

“Be truthful with me, Stevie.”

“Billy, don’t.”

“Do you own an ax?”

“Don’t do this.”

“Do you own an ax, Stevie?”

“Yes,” Zillis admitted, and a sob of dread escaped him.

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“You’re either one hell of an actor or you’re really just poor dumb Steve Zillis,” Billy said, and it was the latter possibility that had begun to worry him.

Chapter 62

“When you’re chopping the mannequins in the backyard,” Billy asked, “do you dream that they’re real women?”

“They’re just mannequins.”

“Do you like to chop watermelons because they’re red inside? Do you like to see the red meat explode, Stevie?”

Zillis seemed astonished. “What? She told you about that? What’d she tell you?”

“Who is ‘she,’ Stevie?”

“The old bitch next door. Celia Reynolds.”

“You’re in no position to call anyone an old bitch,” Billy said. “You’re in no position at all.”

Zillis looked chastened. He nodded in eager agreement. “You’re right. I’m sorry. She’s just lonely. I know. But Billy, she’s a nosy old lady. She just can’t mind her own business. She’s always at her windows, watching from behind the blinds. You can’t go out in the yard, she isn’t watching you.”

“And there’s a lot of things you do that you can’t afford for people to see, aren’t there, Stevie?”

“No. I don’t do anything. I just want some privacy. So a couple times I gave her a show with the ax. Played crazy. Just to spook her off.”

“Spook her off.”

“Just to make her mind her own business. I only did it three times, and the third time I let her know it was a show, let her know I could see her watching.”

“How did you let her know?”

“I’m not proud of this now.”

“I’m sure there’s a lot you’re not proud of, Stevie.”

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“I gave her the finger,” Zillis said. “The third time, I chopped a mannequin and a watermelon—which I don’t dream are anything but what they are—and I walked over to the fence, and I gave her the finger big time.”

“You chopped up a chair once.”

“Yeah. I chopped up a chair. So what?”

“The one I’m sitting on is the only chair you have.”

“I used to have two. I only needed one. It was just a chair.”

“You like to see women being hurt,” Billy said.

“No.”

“Did you just this evening find the porno under the bed? Did some gremlin put it there, Stevie? Should we call Orkin and have them send a gremlin exterminator?”

“Those aren’t real women.”

“They’re not mannequins.”

“I mean, they’re not really being hurt. They’re acting.”

“But you like to watch.”

Zillis said nothing. He hung his head.

In some ways, this was easier than Billy had expected it to be. He had thought that asking deeply unpleasant questions and listening to another human being grovel in despondent self-justification would be so distressing that he would not be able to sustain a productive interrogation. Instead, he had a sense of power from which he drew confidence. And satisfaction. The ease of it surprised him. The ease of it scared him.

“They’re very nasty videos, Stevie. They’re very sick.”

“Yes,” Zillis said softly. “They are. I know.”

“Have you ever made any videos of yourself hurting women that way?”

“No. God, no.”

“You’re whispering, Stevie.”

He raised his chin from his chest, but he wouldn’t look toward Billy. “I’ve never hurt a woman that way.”

“Never? You’ve never hurt a woman that way?”

“No. I swear.”

“How have you hurt them, Stevie?”

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“I never have. I couldn’t.”

“You’re such a choirboy, is that it?”

“I like to… watch it.”

“Watch women being hurt?”

“I like to watch, all right? But I’m ashamed.”

“I don’t think you’re ashamed at all.”

“I am. I am ashamed. Not always during, but always after.”

“After what?”

“After… watching. This isn’t… Oh, man. This isn’t what I want to be.”

“Who would want to be what you are, Stevie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Name me one person. One person who would want to be what you are.”

“Maybe nobody,” Zillis said.

“How ashamed are you?” Billy persisted.

“I’ve thrown the videos away. Lots of times. I’ve even destroyed them. But then, you know… after a while, I buy new ones. I need help to stop.”

“Have you ever sought help, Stevie?”

Zillis didn’t respond.

“Have you ever sought help?” Billy pressed.

“No.”

“If you really want to stop, why haven’t you sought help?”

“I thought I could stop on my own. I thought I could.”

Zillis began to cry. His eyes were still glazed from the Mace, but these were real tears.

“Why have you done those things to the mannequins in the other room, Stevie?”

“You can’t understand.”

“Yeah, I’m just stodgy old Billy Wiles, got no zing, but give me a try anyway.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, what I did to them.”

“For something that doesn’t mean anything, you sure put a lot of time and energy into it.”

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“I won’t talk about this. Not this.” He wasn’t refusing as much as pleading.

“I won’t.”

“Does it make you blush? Stevie? Does it offend your tender sensibilities?”

Zillis cried continuously now. Not wrenching sobs. The steady, scalding tears of humiliation, of abashment.

He said, “Doing it isn’t the same as talking about it.”

“You mean what you do to the mannequins,” Billy clarified.

“You can… you can blow my brains out, but I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”

“When you mutilate the mannequins, are you excited, Stevie? Are you huge with excitement?”

Zillis shook his head, hung his head.

“Doing it to them and talking about it are so different?” Billy asked.

“Billy. Billy, please. I don’t want to hear myself, hear myself talking about it.”

“Because when you’re doing it, then it’s just something you do. But if you talk about it, then it’s something you are.”

Zillis’s expression confirmed that Billy had gotten to the quick of it. Not much could be gained by harping on the mannequins. They were what they were. Rubbing Steve Zillis’s face in his perversion could be counterproductive.

Billy had not yet gotten what he needed, what he had come here to prove. He was simultaneously tired and wired, in need of sleep but strung out on caffeine. At times, his pierced hand ached; the Vicodin had begun to wear off. Because of exhaustion staved off with chemicals, he might not be conducting the interrogation cleverly enough.

If Zillis was the freak, he was a genius of emotional fakery. But then that’s what sociopaths were: voracious spiders with an uncanny talent for projecting a convincing image of a complex human being that obscured the insectile reality of icy calculation and ravenous intent. Billy said, “When you do what you do to the mannequins, when you watch those sick videos, do you ever think of Judith Kesselman?”

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In the course of this encounter, Zillis had been surprised more than once, but this question shocked him. Bloodshot from the residual effect of the Mace, his eyes widened. His face paled and went loose, as if he had taken a blow.

Chapter 63

Zillis shackled to the bed. Billy free on the chair but with a growing sense of being trammeled by his prisoner’s evasiveness.

“Stevie? I asked you a question.”

“What is this?” Zillis said with apparent earnestness and even the merest trace of righteous affront.

“What is what?”

“Why did you come here? Billy, I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

“Do you think of Judith Kesselman?” Billy persisted.

“How do you know about her?”

“How do you think I know?”

“You answer questions with questions, but I’m supposed to have real answers to everything.”

“Poor Stevie. What about Judi Kesselman?”

“Something happened to her.”

“What happened to her, Stevie?”

“It was in college. Five, five and a half years ago.”

“Do you know what happened to her, Stevie?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Somebody does,” Billy said.

“She disappeared.”

“Like in a magic show?”

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“She was just gone.”

“She was such a lovely girl, wasn’t she?”

“Everybody liked her,” Zillis said.

“Such a lovely girl, so innocent. The innocent are the most delicious, aren’t they, Stevie?”

Frowning, Zillis said, “Delicious?”

“The innocent—they’re the most succulent, the most satisfying. I know what happened to her,” Billy said, meaning to imply that he knew Zillis had kidnapped and killed her.

Such a full-body shudder passed through Steve Zillis that the handcuffs rattled protractedly against the metal bed frame.

Pleased with that reaction, Billy said, “I know, Stevie.”

“What? What do you know?”

“Everything.”

“What happened to her?”

“Yes. Everything.”

Zillis had been sitting with his back against the bed, his legs splayed on the floor in front of him. Now he suddenly drew his knees up to his chest. “Oh, God.” A groan of abject misery escaped him.

“Precisely everything,” Billy said.

Zillis’s mouth softened and his voice grew tremulous. “Don’t hurt me.”

“What do you think I might do to you, Stevie?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think.”

“You’re so imaginative, so talented when it comes to dreaming up ways to hurt women, but suddenly you don’t want to think?”

Shivering continuously now, Zillis said, “What do you want from me, what can I do?”

“I want to talk about what happened to Judith Kesselman.”

When Zillis began to sob like a young boy, Billy got up from the chair. He sensed that a breakthrough was coming.

“Stevie?”

“Go away.”

“You know I’m not going to. Let’s talk about Judi Kesselman.”

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“I don’t want to.”

“I think you do.” Billy didn’t go closer to Zillis, but he squatted in front of him, coming down almost to his level. “I think you want very much to talk about it.”

Zillis shook his head violently. “I don’t. I don’t. If we talk about it, you’ll kill me for sure.”

“Why do you say that, Stevie?”

“You know.”

“Why do you say I’ll kill you?”

“Because then I’ll know too much, won’t I?”

Billy stared at his prisoner, trying to read him.

“You did her,” Zillis said with a groan.

“Did what?”

“You killed her, and I don’t know why, I don’t understand, but now you’re going to kill me.”

Billy took a deep breath and grimaced. “What’ve you done?”

For an answer, Zillis only sobbed.

“Stevie, what’ve you done to yourself?”

Zillis had drawn his knees to his chest. Now he stretched out his legs again.

“Stevie?”

The crotch of the man’s pajamas was dark with urine. He had wet himself.

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Chapter 64

Some monsters are pathetic rather than murderous. Their lairs are not lairs in the fullest sense because they do not lie in wait. They take to ill-kept burrows, with minimal furniture and the objects of their misshapen sense of beauty. They hope only to indulge their mutant fantasies and live their monstrous lives in as much peace as they can find, which is precious little, for they torment themselves even when the rest of the world leaves them unmolested.

Billy resisted the conclusion that Steve Zillis was one of this pathetic breed.

To admit that Zillis was not a homicidal sociopath, Billy must accept that much precious time had been wasted in the pursuit of a wolf, presumed fierce, that was in fact a meek dog.

Worse, if Zillis was not the freak, Billy had no idea where to go from here. All the evidence had seemed to funnel him to a single conclusion. The circumstantial evidence.

Worst of all, if the killer was not before him now, then he had stooped to this brutality without profit.

Consequently, for a while he continued to question and harass his captive, but by the minute, the contest between them seemed to be less a contest than an act of oppression. A matador can find no glory when the bull, bristling with banderillas and lanced by the picador, loses all spirit and will pass not even listlessly at the red muleta.

Sooner than later, concealing his growing despair, Billy sat on the chair once more and raised his final issue, hoping that a trap might spring when he least expected.

“Where were you earlier tonight, Steve?”

“You know. Don’t you know? I was at the bar, working your shift.”

“Only until nine o’clock. Jackie says you worked between three and nine because you had stuff to do before and after.”

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“I did. I had stuff.”

“Where were you between nine o’clock and midnight?”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters,” Billy assured him. “Where were you?”

“You’re gonna hurt… you’re gonna kill me anyway.”

“I’m not going to kill you, and I didn’t kill Judith Kesselman. I’m pretty sure you killed her.”

“Me?” His amazement rang as true as any reaction he’d had since this had started.

“You’re really good at this,” Billy told him.

“Good at what? Killing people? You’re bugshit crazy! I never killed anyone.”

“Steve, if you can convince me you have a solid alibi for nine to midnight, then this is over. I’m out of here, and you’re free.”

Zillis looked dubious. “That easy?”

“Yes.”

“After all this—it’s over that easy?”

“It could be. Depending on the alibi.”

Zillis worried over his answer.

Billy began to think he was concocting it from scratch.

Then Zillis said, “What if I tell you where I was, and it turns out that’s why you’re here, because you already know where I was, and you want to hear me say it so you can beat the shit out of me.”

“I’m not following you,” Billy told him.

“All right. Okay. I was with someone. I never heard her mention you, but if you have a thing for her, what’re you going to do to me?”

Billy regarded him with disbelief. “You were with a woman?”

“I wasn’t with her, not like in bed. It was just a date. A late dinner, which had to be later ‘cause I covered for you. This was our second date.”

“Who?”

Steeling himself against Billy’s jealous outrage, Zillis said, “Amanda Pollard.”

“Mandy Pollard? I know her. She’s a nice girl.”

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Warily, Zillis said, “That’s it—‘She’s a nice girl’?”

The Pollards owned a successful vineyard. They grew grapes on contract for one of the valley’s finest vintners. Mandy was about twenty, pretty, friendly. She worked in the family business. Judging by all evidence, she was wholesome enough to have come from an era better than this one. Billy let his gaze travel the sleazy bedroom, from the porno-tape package lying on the floor beside the TV to the pile of dirty laundry in one corner.

“She’s never been here,” Zillis said. “We’ve only had two dates. I’m looking for a better place, a nice apartment. I want to get rid of all this stuff. Make a clean start.”

“She’s a decent girl.”

“She is,” Zillis eagerly agreed. “I think with her in my corner, I could clean up my act, start over, do the right thing for once.”

“She ought to see this place.”

“No, no. Billy, no, for God’s sake. This isn’t the me I want to be. I want to be better for her.”

“Where did you go to dinner?”

Zillis named a restaurant. Then: “We got there about twenty past nine. We left at about a quarter past eleven because we were the only people in the place by then.”

“After that?”

“We went for a drive. A nice drive. I don’t mean we parked. She isn’t like that. We just drove around, talking, listening to music.”

“Until when?”

“I took her home a little after one o’clock.”

“And came back here.”

“Yeah.”

“And put on a porno flick of a guy whipping a woman.”

“All right. I know what I am, but I also know what I can be.”

Billy went to the nightstand and picked up the phone. It had a long cord. He brought it to Zillis. “Call her.”

“What, now? Billy, it’s after three in the morning.”

“Call her. Tell her how much you enjoyed the evening, how very special she is. She won’t mind if you wake her up for that.”

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“We don’t have that kind of relationship yet,” Zillis worried. “She’s gonna think this is weird.”

“You call her and let me listen in,” Billy said, “or I jam this pistol in your ear and blow your brains out. What do you think?”

Zillis’s hands shook so badly that he misdialed twice. He got it right the third time.

Hunkering beside his captive, the muzzle of the pistol pressed against Zillis’s side so he wouldn’t get a half-wise idea, Billy listened to Mandy Pollard answer the phone and express surprise at hearing from her new beau at that hour.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mandy told Zillis. “You didn’t wake me. I was just lying here staring at the ceiling.”

Zillis’s voice had a tremor, but Mandy might easily have assumed he was nervous about calling at this late hour and about expressing his affection more directly than perhaps he had done previously.

For a few minutes, Billy listened to them recap the night—their dinner, the drive—and then he gestured at Zillis to wrap it up.

Mandy Pollard had spent the evening with this man, and she was not some half-cracked thrill seeker who knowingly hung out with bad boys. Having dinner with Mandy, Steve Zillis could not have been the freak who propped Ralph Cottle’s corpse on Lanny’s living room sofa and nailed Billy’s hand to the hallway floor.

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Chapter 65

Slipping the pistol into the holster at his hip, Billy said, “I’m going to leave you handcuffed to the bed.”

Steve Zillis looked relieved at the holstering of the weapon, but remained wary.

Billy tore the phone cord out of the wall and out of the phone, knotted it, and put it in his bread bag. “I don’t want you calling anyone until you’ve had plenty of time to cool down and to think about what I’m going to say.”

“You’re really not gonna kill me?”

“I’m really not. I’ll leave the handcuff key on a counter in the kitchen.”

“All right. The kitchen. But how’s that gonna help me?”

“After I’m gone, you can work the mattress and the box springs off the frame. It’s held together by nuts and bolts, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But—”

“You can work the nuts with your fingers.”

“Maybe they’re rusted—”

“You only moved in six months ago. They haven’t rusted in six months. If they’re tight, torque the sections of the frame, try to wrench a little play into the connections. You’ll figure it out.”

“I can figure that out, sure, but I still can’t figure why the hell you did this. You can’t believe I killed Judith Kesselman, like you said. I know you can’t believe that. What was this?”

Putting the can of Mace in the bread bag, Billy said, “I’m not going to explain, and you don’t want to know. Believe me, you don’t.”

“Look at me here,” Zillis whined. “My eyes still sting. I’m sitting in a puddle, for God’s sake. This is humiliating. You hit me with that gun, you cut my scalp, you hurt me, Billy.”

“It could have been worse,” Billy assured him. “It could have been a whole lot worse.”

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Choosing to interpret those words as a threat, Zillis became placating. “All right. Okay. I hear you. I’m cool.”

“Depending on how tight the bolts are, you’ll need at least an hour, probably two, to get loose of the bed. The cuff key will be in the kitchen. After you use it, start packing.”

Zillis blinked. “What?”

“Call Jackie, tell him you’re quitting.”

“I don’t want to quit.”

“Get real, Steve. We aren’t going to see each other every day. Not with what I know about you and not with what you know about me. You’re going to move on.”

“Where?”

“I don’t care where. Just not in Napa County.”

“I like it here. Besides, I can’t afford to move right now.”

“Go to the tavern Friday night to get your last paycheck,” Billy said. “I’ll leave an envelope for you with Jackie. It’ll contain ten thousand in cash. That’ll get you started somewhere.”

“I did nothing, but my whole life gets turned upside down? This isn’t fair.”

“You’re right. It isn’t fair. But it’s the way it is. Your furniture isn’t worth crap. You can junk it. Pack the personal stuff and be out of town by Friday night.”

“I could call the cops, I could press charges.”

“Really? You’d want the cops to see the scene of the crime, have them tramping through here, with the bondage pornos, those mannequins in the next room?”

Although still scared, Zillis found sufficient self-pity to pout. “Who died and made you God?”

Billy shook his head. “Steve, you’re pathetic. You’ll take the ten thousand, be glad you’re alive, and get out. Plus one more thing—don’t ever call Mandy Pollard again.”

“Wait a minute. You can’t—”

“Don’t call her, don’t see her. Not ever.”

“Billy, she could make all the difference for me.”

“She’s a nice girl. She’s a decent girl.”

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“That’s what I mean. I know I could clean up my act if she—”

“A good woman can turn a man around,” Billy said. “But not a man who’s as far down the rathole as you are. If you call her or see her, even just once, I’ll know. And I’ll find you. You believe that?”

Zillis said nothing.

“And if you touch her,” Billy said, “so help me God, I’ll kill you, Steve.”

“This is 50 not right,” Zillis said.

“Do you believe me? You better believe me, Steve.”

When Billy put his hand on the grip of the holstered pistol, Zillis said,

“Hey. All right. I hear you.”

“Good. I’m leaving now.”

“This place sucks anyway,” Zillis said. “Wine country is just another word for farm. I’m not a farm boy.”

“No, you’re not,” Billy said from the doorway.

“There’s no action around here.”

“There’s no zing,” Billy agreed.

“Screw you.”

Billy said, “Happy trails, Kemosabe.”

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Chapter 66

By the time that he’d driven only half a mile from Zillis’s place, Billy had the shakes so bad that he had to pull to the curb, put the Explorer in park, and get control of himself.

Under pressure, he had become the thing he most despised. For a while, he had become John Palmer.

Paying Zillis ten thousand bucks didn’t make Billy any less like Palmer, either.

When the shakes subsided, he didn’t put the SUV in gear because he didn’t know where to go from here. He felt that he was at a brink. You don’t drive over a brink.

He wanted to go home, but nothing there would help him work out a solution to this puzzle.

He wanted to go home just to be home. He recognized the familiar reclusive urge. Once home, he could sit at his carving bench with the blocks of oak, and the world could go to Hell.

Except this time, he would go to Hell with it. He could not take Barbara home with him, and if he left her alone and in jeopardy, he would have trashed his only excuse for living.

Events had thrust him into action, into the rush of life, yet he felt isolated and beyond desperation.

For too long he’d done no proper sowing and now had no harvest. His friends were all acquaintances. Though life is community, he had no community.

In fact, his situation was worse than isolation. The friends who were no more than acquaintances were now not even acquaintances as much as they were suspects. He had carpentered for himself a loneliness of exquisite paranoia.

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Pulling away from the curb, Billy drove with no destination in mind, as far as he was aware. Like a bird, he rode the currents of the night, intent only upon staying aloft and not falling into absolute despair before some gleam of hope appeared.

He had learned more about Ivy Elgin in one brief visit to her house than he had troubled himself to know about her during the years they had worked together. And though he liked Ivy, he found her more mysterious now than when he had known so much less about her.

He did not think that she could have any connection to the freak committing these murders. But his experience with his own mother and father reminded him that he could not be sure of anyone.

Harry Avarkian was a kind man and a fine attorney—but also one of three trustees overseeing seven million dollars, a temptation that could not be discounted. Before Barbara, Billy had been to Harry’s house only once. Barbara socialized him. They had gone to Harry’s for dinner half a dozen times in a year—but since the coma, Billy had not visited Harry anywhere but at his office.

He knew Harry Avarkian. But he didn’t know him.

Billy’s mind circled to Dr. Ferrier. Which was crazy. Prominent physicians in the community didn’t go around killing people.

Except Dr. Ferrier wanted Billy to cooperate with him in the killing of Barbara Mandel. Remove the feeding tube in her stomach. Let her die. Let her starve to death in her coma.

If you were willing to decide for another—for someone in no obvious pain—that her quality of life was insufficient to warrant the expenditure of resources on her behalf, how easy was it to make a step from pulling a plug to pulling a trigger?

Ridiculous. Yet he didn’t know Ferrier a fraction as well as he had known his father; and in violation of all Billy thought he had known, his father had swung that polished-steel lug wrench with something like vicious glee. John Palmer. He was a man whose love of power was clear for all to see, but whose internal landscape remained as enigmatic as an alien planet. The more Billy considered the people he knew, the more he brooded on the possibility that the killer might be a perfect stranger, the more he became agitated to no purpose.

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He told himself to care and not to care, to be still. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by way of dispossession. And what you do not know is the only thing you know.

Driving and yet giving himself to that inner stillness, he came in a short while, without conscious intention, to the truck stop. He parked where he had parked before, in front of the diner.

His left hand ached. When he fisted and opened it, he could feel that it had begun to swell. The Vicodin had worn off. He didn’t know whether or not he should take another, but he should get some Motrin.

He was hungry, but the thought of another candy bar curdled his appetite. He needed a caffeine jolt, but he wanted more than pills.

After stowing the pistol and the revolver under the front seat, in spite of the broken-out window that left the vehicle unsecured, he went inside. At 3:40 in the morning, he had his choice of empty booths. Four truckers sat on stools at the counter, drinking coffee and eating pie. They were attended by a beefy waitress with the neck of an NFL fullback and the face of an angel. In her masses of hair, dyed shoe-polish black, she wore yellow butterfly bows.

Billy sat at the counter.

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According to the tag on her uniform, the waitress’s name was Jasmine. She called Billy “honey,” and served the black coffee and lemon pie that he ordered.

Jasmine and the truckers were in a lively conversation when Billy settled on a stool among them. From their exchanges, he learned that one of the men was named Curly, another Arvin. No one addressed the third man as anything but “you,” and the fourth had an upper gold tooth in the front of his mouth. At first they were talking about the lost continent of Atlantis. Arvin proposed that the destruction of that fabled civilization had come to pass because the Atlanteans had gotten involved in genetic engineering and had bred monsters that destroyed them.

This quickly turned the subject from Atlantis to cloning and DNA research, soon after which Curly mentioned the fact that at Princeton or Harvard, or Yale, at one of those hellholes or another, scientists were trying to create a pig with a human brain.

“I’m not sure that’s so new,” Jasmine said. “Over the years, let me tell you, I’ve met my share of human pigs.”

“What would be the purpose of a humanized pig?” Arvin wondered.

“Just because it’s there,” said Y.

“It’s where?”

“Like a mountain is just there,” You clarified. “So some people have to climb it. Other people, they’ve got to make a humanized pig just because maybe they can.”

“What work would it do?” Gold Tooth asked.

“I don’t think they mean for it to have a job,” Curly said.

“They mean for it to do something,” Gold Tooth said.

“One thing’s for sure,” Jasmine declared, “the activists will go nuts.”

“What activists?” Arvin asked.

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“One kind of activist or another,” she said. “Once you’ve got pigs with human brains, that’s the end of anyone allowed to eat ham or bacon.”

“I don’t see why,” said Curly. “The ham and bacon will still come from the pigs that haven’t been humanized.”

“It’ll be a sympathy thing,” Jasmine predicted. “How’re you going to justify eating ham and bacon when your kids go to school with smart pigs and ask them home for sleepovers?”

“That’ll never happen,” You said.

“Never,” Arvin agreed.

“What’ll happen,” Jasmine said, “is these fools playing around with human genes, they’ll do something stupid and kill us all.”

Not one of the four truckers disagreed. Neither did Billy. Gold Tooth still felt the scientists had in mind some kind of work for a humanized pig. “They don’t spend millions of dollars on something like this just for the fun of it, not those people.”

“Oh, they do,” Jasmine disagreed. “Money means nothing to them. It isn’t theirs.”

“It’s taxpayer money,” said Curly. “Yours and mine.”

Billy offered a comment or two, but he mostly listened, familiar with these conversational rhythms, and curiously warmed by them.

The coffee was rich. The pie tasted wonderfully lemony and was topped with toasted meringue.

He was surprised by how calm he felt. Just sitting at the counter, just listening.

“You want to talk about a total waste of money,” said Gold Tooth, “look at this damn fool monstrosity they’re building out by the highway.”

“What—you mean across from the tavern, the thing they’re gonna burn when they no sooner finish it?” Arvin asked.

“Oh, but it’s art,” Jasmine archly reminded them.

“I don’t see how it’s art,” You said. “Doesn’t what’s art have to last?”

“The guy’s going to make millions selling his drawings of it,” Curly told them. “He’s got a hundred merchandising angles.”

“Can anyone just call himself an artist?” Gold Tooth asked. “Don’t they have to pass a test or something?”

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“He calls himself a special kind of artist,” Curly said.

“Special my ass,” said Arvin.

“Honey,” Jasmine told him, “no offense, but your dumpy backside doesn’t look so special to me.”

“What he calls himself,” Curly said, “is a performance artist.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What I take it to mean,” Curly said, “is art that doesn’t last. It’s made to do something, and when it does something, it’s over.”

“What are museums gonna be filled with in a hundred years?” You wondered. “Empty space?”

“There won’t be museums anymore,” Jasmine said. “Museums are for people. There won’t be any people. Just humanized pigs.”

Billy had grown very still. He sat with the coffee cup to his lips, his mouth open, but unable to take a drink.

“Honey, something wrong with the brew?” Jasmine asked.

“No. No, it’s fine. In fact, I’d like another cup. Do you serve it in mugs?”

“We have a triple cup in a plastic container. We call it the Big Shot.”

“Give me one of those,” Billy said.

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An alcove off the diner served as an internet cafe. Six work stations offered links to the World Wide Web.

A trucker sat at one computer, working the keyboard and the mouse, fixated on the screen. Maybe he was checking out his company’s shipping schedules or playing an Internet game, or browsing a porn site. The computer was bolted to a table that provided room for food. A cut-out in the table held Billy’s Big Shot.

He didn’t know the name of Valis’s site, so he started with sites about performance art in general and linked his way to www.valisvalisvalis.com.

The artist maintained an elaborate and inviting site. Billy streamed colorful video of the Australian bridge to which Valis had fixed twenty thousand red balloons. He watched them pop all at once.

He sampled artist statements about individual projects. They were overblown and semicoherent, slathered with the unmusical jargon of modern art.

In a windy interview, Valis said that every great artist was “a fisher of men,” because they wanted to “touch the souls, even capture the souls” of those who saw their work.

Valis helped aficionados better understand the intention of each of his projects by providing three lines of “spiritual guidance.” Each line contained three words. Billy pored over several of them.

From his wallet, he extracted the paper on which were printed the six lines that had been contained in three documents on the red diskette that he’d found in Ralph Cottle’s clasped hands. He unfolded it and smoothed it flat on the table.

The first line—Because I, too, am a fisher of men.

The fifth line—My last killing: midnight Thursday.

The sixth line—Your suicide: soon thereafter.

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The second, third, and fourth lines were chillingly similar to the “spiritual guidance” that Valis provided to assist his admirers in reaching a fuller appreciation of his works.

The first line of these guides always referred to the style of the project, of the performance. In this case, the style was Cruelty, violence, death. The second line summarized the techniques by which the artist intended to execute the work of art. With Billy, the technique was Movement, velocity, impact.

The third line described the medium or media in which Valis proposed to create. In this current performance, the media were Flesh, blood, bone. Sometimes the most successful serial killers are vagabonds, footloose roamers who cover a lot of ground between their homicidal activities. The freak didn’t look at killing as a game. Only in part did he view it as a performance. For him, the essence was the art of it.

From the performance-art Web sites, Billy had learned that this artist of death had always been camera-shy. Valis claimed to believe that the art should be more important than the artist. He’d seldom been photographed. Such a philosophy allowed him celebrity and wealth—and yet a degree of anonymity.

www.valisvalisvalis.com offered an official portrait. This proved to be not a photo but a realistic and detailed pencil drawing that the artist himself had done.

Perhaps intentionally, the portrait was not entirely faithful to Valis’s actual appearance, but Billy at once recognized him. He was the Heineken drinker who, on Monday afternoon, had sat in patient amusement as Ned Pearsall had regaled him with the story of Henry Friddle’s death by garden gnome. You’re an interesting guy, Billy Barkeep.

Even then, the freak had known Billy’s last name, although he had pretended ignorance of it. He must have known almost everything about him. For reasons only Valis might ever understand, Billy Wiles had been identified, researched, and chosen for this performance.

Now, in addition to the other selections under the portrait, Billy noticed one titled Hello, Billy.

Although he no longer had much capacity for surprise, he stared at it for a minute.

At last he moved the mouse and clicked.

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The portrait vanished, and on the screen appeared instructions: PRIVATE

LEVEL—ENTER CODEWORD.

Billy drank coffee. Then he typed Wiles and pressed ENTER. At once he received a reply: You are worthy.

Those three words remained before him for ten seconds, and then the screen went blank.

Only that and nothing more.

The pencil portrait returned. The selections under it no longer included Hello, Billy.

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No lights brightened the massive dimensional mural. The wheels, flywheels, gears, crankshafts, connecting rods, pipes, and strange armatures dwindled into the darkness.

Tormented, besieged, the giant human figure was dark-shrouded in its silent struggle.

The yellow-and-purple tent stood in shadowed swags, but inviting amber light shone at the windows of the big motor home.

Billy first pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the highway and studied the vehicle from a distance.

The sixteen artists and artisans who were building the mural under Valis’s direction did not live on site. They were block-booked for six months at the Vineyard Hills Inn.

Valis, however, lived here for the duration. The motor home had electrical and water hookups.

Its waste-water holding tanks were pumped out twice a week by Glen’s Reliable Septic Service. Glen Gortner was proud of his fame by association, even though he thought the mural was “something I ought to be pumping away, too.”

Not sure if he would stop or just cruise past, Billy drove the Explorer off the shoulder of the road, down a gentle embankment, into the meadow. He swung around to the far side of the motor home.

The door to the driver’s compartment stood open. Light angled down the steps and painted a welcome mat on the ground.

He stopped. For a while he sat with the engine running, one foot on the brake, one poised above the accelerator.

Most of the windows were not covered. He couldn’t see anyone in the spaces beyond.

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Only the windows toward the rear, which were probably in the bedroom, featured curtains. Lamps glowed there, too, filtered by a golden material. Inescapably, Billy concluded that he was expected.

He was loath to accept this invitation. He wanted to drive away. He had nowhere to go.

Less than twenty hours remained until midnight, when as foretold the “last killing” would occur. Barbara, still in jeopardy.

Because of evidence that Valis might have planted in addition to what had been on the cadavers, Billy remained a potential suspect in the disappearances that would soon become known to the police: Lanny, Ralph Cottle, the redheaded young woman.

Somewhere in his house or garage, or buried in his yard, was the hand of Giselle Winslow. Surely other souvenirs, as well.

He put the Explorer in park, doused the headlights, but did not switch off the engine.

Near the dark tent stood a Lincoln Navigator. Evidently it was what Valis used for local travel. You are worthy.

Billy pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves.

Some stiffness but no pain troubled his left hand.

He wished he had not taken a Vicodin at Lanny’s. Unlike most painkillers, Vicodin left the mind clear, but he worried that if his perceptions and reflexes were dulled even half a percent, that lost edge might be the death of him. Maybe the caffeine tablets and the coffee would compensate. And the lemon pie.

He switched off the engine. In the first instant thereafter, the night seemed as silent as any house of the deaf.

In consideration of the unpredictability of this adversary, he prepared for action both lethal and otherwise.

As to the choice of a deadlier weapon, he preferred the .38 revolver because of its familiarity. He had killed with it before.

He got out of the Explorer.

Songs of crickets rose to dispel the silence, and the throat-clearing of toads. Pennants on the tent whispered in the barest breath of a breeze. Billy walked to the open door of the motor home. He stood in the light but hesitated to ascend the steps.

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From inside, all edges smoothed off by the high-quality speakers of the motor-home sound system, which apparently doubled as intercom, a voice said,

“Barbara could be allowed to live.”

Billy climbed the steps.

The cockpit featured two stylish swiveling armchairs for the driver and copilot. They were upholstered in what might have been ostrich skin. Remotely operated, the door closed behind Billy. He assumed that it locked, as well.

In this highly customized vehicle, a bulkhead separated the cockpit from the living quarters. Another open door awaited him.

Billy stepped into a dazzling kitchen. Everything in shades of cream and honey. Marble floor, bird’s-eye maple cabinets with the sinuous rounded contours of ship’s cabinetry. The exceptions were black-granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances.

From the in-ceiling speakers, Valis’s mellow and compelling voice made a proposal: “I could whip up an early breakfast if you’d like.”

The marble floor continued into a built-in dining area that could comfortably seat six, eight in a pinch.

The top of the maple table had been inlaid with ebonized wenge, carnelian, and holly wood as white as bone, in an intertwining ribbon motif-spectacular and expensive craftsmanship.

Through an archway in another bulkhead, Billy entered a large living room.

None of the fabrics cost less than five hundred a square yard, the carpet twice as much. The custom furniture was contemporary, but the numerous Japanese bronzes were priceless examples of the finest Meiji-period work. According to some of the tavern regulars, who’d read about this motor home on the Internet, it had cost over a million and a half. That would not include the bronzes.

Sometimes vehicles like this were called “land yachts.” The term wasn’t hyperbole.

The closed door at the farther end of the living room no doubt led to a bedroom and bath. It would be locked.

Valis must be in that final redoubt. Listening, watching, and well armed. Billy swiveled toward a soft noise behind him.

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On the living-room side, the dining-area bulkhead had been finished with beautiful narrow-reed bamboo tambour. These panels slowly rolled up and out of sight, revealing secret display cases.

And now blinds of brushed stainless steel descended to cover all the windows, but with a sudden pneumatic snap that startled.

Billy didn’t think those blinds were solely decorative. Getting through them and out a window would be difficult if not impossible. During the design and installation phase, they had most likely been called

“security” devices.

As the ascending tambour panels continued to reveal more display cases, the voice of Valis came from the speakers again: “You may see my collection, as few ever have. Uniquely, you will be given the chance to leave here alive after seeing it. Enjoy.”

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The padded interiors of the cabinets behind the tambour panels were upholstered in black silk. Clear glass jars of two sizes held the collection. The base of each jar nestled in a niche in its shelf. A black-enameled clamp held the lidded top, fixing it to the underside of the shelf above. These containers would not move whatsoever when the motor home was in motion. They wouldn’t make one clink.

Each jar was lighted by fiber-optic filaments under it, so the contents glowed against the backdrop of black silk. As the lamplight in the living room now dimmed to enhance the effect of the display, Billy thought of aquariums. Each of these small glass worlds contained not fish but a memory of murder. In a preservative fluid floated faces and hands.

Every face was ghostly, each like a pale mantis perpetually swimming, the features of one hardly distinguishable from those of the others. The hands were different from one another, said more about each victim than did the faces, and were less grisly than he would have assumed, ethereal and strange.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Valis said, and sounded somewhat like HAL 9000

in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“They’re sad,” Billy said.

“What an odd word to choose,” Valis said. “They delight me.”

“They fill me with despair.”

“Despair,” Valis said, “is good. Despair can be the nadir of one life and the starting point of an ascent into another, better one.”

Billy didn’t turn away from the collection in fear or revulsion. He assumed that he was being watched by closed-circuit cameras. His reaction seemed to be important to Valis.

Besides, as despair-inspiring as this display might be, it had a hideous elegance, and exerted a certain fascination.

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The collector had not been so coarse as to include genitalia or breasts. Billy suspected that Valis did not kill for any kind of sexual gratification, did not rape his female victims, perhaps because to do so would be to acknowledge at least that single aspect of shared humanity. He seemed to want to think of himself as a creature apart.

Neither did the artist deform his collection with the gaudy and grotesque. No eyeballs, no internal organs.

Faces and hands, faces and hands.

Staring at the illuminated jars, Billy thought of mimes dressed all in black with white-powdered faces and white-gloved hands.

Although perverse, here was an aesthetic mind at work.

“A sense of balance,” Billy said, describing the vivid display, “a harmony of line, a sensitivity to form. Perhaps most important, a restraint that is chaste but not fastidious.”

Valis said nothing.

Curiously, by standing face to face with Death and not letting fear control, Billy was at last no longer evading life to any degree, but embracing it.

“I have read your book of short stories,” Valis said.

“In critiquing your work,” Billy told him, “I wasn’t inviting criticism of my own.”

A short surprised laugh escaped Valis, a warm laugh as the speakers translated it. “Actually, I found your fiction to be fascinating, and strong.”

Billy did not reply.

“They are the stories of a seeker,” Valis said. “You know the truth of life, but you circle around that fruit, circle and circle, reluctant to admit it, to taste it.”

Turning from the collection, Billy moved to the nearest Meiji bronzes, a pair of fish, sinuous, simply but exquisitely detailed, the bronze meticulously finished to mimic the tone and texture of rusted iron.

“Power,” Billy said. “Power is part of the truth of life.”

Behind the locked door, Valis waited.

“And emptiness,” Billy said. “The void. The abyss.”

He moved to another bronze: a robed scholar and a deer sitting side by side, the scholar bearded and smiling, his robe embroidered with gold inlay.

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“The choice,” Billy said, “is chaos or control. With power, we can create. With power and chaste intent, we create art. And art is the only answer to chaos and the void.”

After a silence, Valis said, “Only one thing holds you to the past. I can release you from it.”

“By one more murder?” Billy asked.

“No. She can live, and you can move on to a new life… when you know.”

“And what is it you know that I don’t?”

“Barbara,” Valis said, “lives in Dickens.”

Billy heard a sharp intake of breath, his own, an expression of surprise and recognition.

“While in your house, Billy, I reviewed the pocket notebooks you’ve filled with things she said in coma.”

“Have you?”

“Certain phrases, certain constructions resonated with me. On your livingroom shelves, the complete set of Dickens—that belonged to her.”

“Yes.”

“She had a passion for Dickens.”

“She’d read all the novels, several times each.”

“But not you.”

“Two or three,” Billy said. “Dickens never clicked with me.”

“Too full of life, I suspect,” Valis said. “Too full of faith and exuberance for you.”

“Perhaps.”

“She knows those stories so well, she’s living them in dreams. The words she speaks in coma come sequentially in certain chapters.”

“Mrs. Joe,” Billy said, recalling his most recent visit to Barbara. “I’ve read that one. Joe Gargery’s wife, Pip’s sister, the bullying shrew. Pip calls her

‘Mrs. Joe.’”

“Great Expectations,” Valis confirmed. “Barbara lives all the books, but more often the lighter adventures, seldom the horrors of A Tale of Two Cities.”

“I didn’t realize…”

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“She’s more likely to dream A Christmas Carol than the bloodiest moments of the French Revolution,” Valis assured him.

“I didn’t realize, but you did.”

“In any case, she knows no fear or pain because each adventure is a wellknown road, a pleasure and a comfort.”

Billy moved through the living room, to another bronze, then past it.

“She needs nothing you can give her,” Valis said, “and nothing more than what she has. She lives in Dickens, and she knows no fear.”

Intuiting what was wanted to bring the artist forth, Billy put down the revolver on an antique Shinto altar table to the left of the bedroom door. Then he retraced his steps to the middle of the living room and sat in an armchair.

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Handsomer than the self-portrait in pencil that could be viewed on his Web site, Valis entered.

Smiling, he picked up the revolver from the altar table and examined it. Beside the armchair in which Billy sat, on a small table, stood another Japanese bronze from the Meiji period: a plump smiling dog held a turtle on a leash.

Valis approached with the handgun. Not unlike Ivy Elgin, he walked with a dancer’s grace and as if gravity were not quite able to force the soles of his shoes flat to the floor.

His thick, soot-black hair, dusted with ashes at the temples. His smile so engaging. His gray eyes luminous, pellucid, and direct.

He had the presence of a movie star. The self-assurance of a king. The serenity of a monk.

Standing in front of the armchair, he aimed the revolver at Billy’s face.

“This is the gun.”

“Yes,” Billy said.

“You shot your father with it.”

“Yes.”

“How did that feel?”

Staring into the muzzle, Billy said, “Terrifying.”

“And your mother, Billy?”

“Right.”

“It felt right to shoot her?”

“At the time, in the instant,” Billy said.

“And later?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

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“Wrong is right. Right is wrong. It’s all perspective, Billy.”

Billy said nothing. In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

Peering at him along the barrel of the gun, Valis said, “Who do you hate, Billy?”

“I don’t think anyone.”

“That’s good. That’s healthy. Hate and love exhaust the mind, inhibit clear thinking.”

“I like these bronzes very much,” Billy said.

“Aren’t they wonderful? You can enjoy the form, the texture, the immense skill of the artist, and yet not care a damn thing about the philosophy behind them.”

“Especially the fish,” Billy said.

“Why the fish in particular?”

“The illusion of movement. The appearance of speed. They look so free.”

“You’ve led a slow life, Billy. Maybe you’re ready for some movement. Are you ready for speed?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suspect you do.”

“I’m ready for something.”

“You came here intending violence,” Valis said.

Billy raised his hands from the arms of the chair and stared at the latex gloves. He stripped them off.

“Does this feel strange to you, Billy?”

“Totally.”

“Can you imagine what might happen next?”

“Not clearly.”

“Do you care, Billy?”

“Not as much as I thought I would.”

Valis squeezed off a shot. The bullet punched into the broad back of the armchair, two inches from Billy’s shoulder.

Unconsciously, he must have known the shot was coming. He saw in his mind’s eye the raven on the window, the still and silent and watchful raven.

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Then the bang came, and he did not fly or even flinch, but sat in a Zen indifference.

Valis lowered the gun. He settled into an armchair that faced Billy’s. Billy closed his eyes and leaned his head back.

“I could have killed you two ways without leaving the bedroom,” Valis said.

This was surely true. Billy didn’t ask how.

“You must be very tired,” Valis said.

“V.”

“How’s your hand?”

“Okay. Vicodin.”

“And your forehead?”

“Noble.”

Billy wondered if his eyes were moving under his lids, the way Barbara’s sometimes did in her dreams. They felt still.

“I had a third wound planned for you,” Valis said.

“Can it wait until next week?”

“You’re a funny guy, Billy.”

“I don’t feel that funny.”

“Do you feel relieved?”

“Mmmmmm.”

“Are you surprised by that?”

“Yeah.” Billy opened his eyes. “Are you surprised?”

“No,” the artist said. “I saw the potential in you.”

“When?”

“In your short stories. Before I ever met you.” Valis put the revolver on a table beside his chair. “Your potential so explicit on the page. As I researched your life, the potential became clearer.”

“Shooting my parents.”

“Not that so much. The loss of trust.”

“I see.”

“Without trust, there can be no tranquil resting of the mind.”

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“No rest,” Billy said. “No real peace.”

“Without trust, there can be no belief. No belief in kindness. Or integrity. In anything.”

“You have more insight into me than I do.”

“Well, I’m older,” Valis said. “And more experienced.”

“Way more experienced,” Billy said. “How long have you planned this performance? Not just since Monday in the bar.”

“Weeks and weeks,” said Valis. “Great art requires preparation.”

“Did you take the commission for the mural because I was here, or did the commission come first?”

“Together,” Valis said. “It was quite serendipitous. Things often are.”

“Amazing. And here we are.”

“Yes, here we are.”

“ ‘Movement, velocity, impact,’” Billy said, quoting Valis’s summary for the style of this production. “In light of how the performance is turning out, I think I would edit that to ‘Movement, velocity, freedom.’”

“Like the fish.”

“Yes. Like the fish. Do you want freedom, Billy?”

“Yes.”

“I am entirely free.”

Billy said, “How long have you been… ?”

“Thirty-two years. Since I was sixteen. The first few were embarrassments. Crude hacking. No control. No technique. No style.”

“But now…”

“Now, I have become who I am. Do you know my name?” Billy met those gray and lustrous eyes.

“Yes,” Valis answered for him. “I see you do. You know my name.”

A thought occurred to Billy, and he leaned forward slightly in his chair, curious. “Are the others on your project crew…”

“Are they what?”

“Are they… previous successes of yours?”

Valis smiled. “Oh, no. None of them has ever seen my collection. Men like you and I… we’re rare, Billy.”

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“I suppose so.”

“You’re probably full of questions about all this.”

“Maybe when I’ve gotten some sleep.”

“I was out to Deputy Olsen’s house a little while age. You left it clean as a whistle.”

Billy grimaced. “You didn’t plant something else out there, did you?”

“No, no. I knew we were getting close to this moment, no need to torment you further. I just walked the house, admiring how your mind worked, how thorough you were.”

Billy yawned. “Circumstantial evidence. I have this fear of it.”

“You must be very tired.”

“I’m whacked.”

“I’ve only one bedroom, but you’re welcome to a sofa.”

Billy shook his head. “This amazes me.”

“That I’m hospitable?”

“No. That I’m Am;.”

“Art transforms, Billy.”

“Will I feel different when I wake up?”

“No,” Valis said. “You’ve made your choice.”

“They were something, those choices.”

“They gave you an opportunity to understand your potential.”

“Those sofas look so clean, and I’m a mess.”

“You’re fine,” Valis said. “They’re Scotchgarded.”

As they rose simultaneously from their chairs, Billy pulled the Mace from under his T-shirt.

Apparently surprised, Valis tried to turn his face away.

They were only ten feet apart, and Billy sprayed him in the eyes. Blinded, Valis pawed for the revolver on the table but knocked it to the floor.

Billy ducked past him, scooped up the gun, and Valis clawed at the air, trying to find him.

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Coming around behind the freak, Billy hammered the back of his skull with the butt of the revolver, then hit him again.

With none of his usual grace, Valis crashed to the floor on his face. Billy went to his knees to be sure the freak was out. He was.

Valis wore his shirt tucked in his pants. Billy tugged it loose and pulled it over the man’s head, forming a tight hood by tying the tails together. His purpose was not to blindfold Valis but to form a bandage in case his scalp began bleeding where the gun clipped it. Billy wanted to avoid getting bloodstains on the carpet.

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Billy stretched his hands into the latex gloves. He got to work. The bedroom was even more sumptuous than the rest of the motor home. The bathroom glowed and lustered, a jewel box of marble, glass, beveled mirrors, and gold-plated fixtures.

Embedded at a slant in the top of a ribbon-maple bedroom desk, a touchsensitive screen provided control of the electronic systems from music to security.

Apparently, these controls had to be accessed by entering a code. Fortunately, Valis had left the system open after using it to put up the tambour panels and put down the steel blinds at the windows.

All controls featured idiot-proof labels. Billy unlocked the front door. In the living room, Valis was still limp and unconscious, his head hooded by his shirt.

Billy dragged Valis out of the living room, through the dining area and kitchen, into the cockpit. He tumbled him down the steps and out of the motor home.

No more than an hour of darkness remained. The slim sickle moon now harvested stars beyond the western horizon.

He had parked the Explorer between the tent and the motor home, out of sight from the highway. No traffic passed.

He dragged Valis to the SUV.

No one lived nearby. The tavern across the highway would be deserted for hours yet.

When Valis had fired the shot into the armchair, there had been no one to hear.

Billy opened the tailgate. He unfolded one of the quilted moving blankets with which he had disguised poor Ralph Cottle’s tarp-wrapped body. He smoothed it across the floor of the cargo area.

On the ground, Valis twitched. He began to moan.

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Billy suddenly felt weak, less with physical fatigue than with an exhaustion of the mind and heart. The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change. However you disguise it, this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

With another blanket, Billy knelt beside the renowned artist. Thrusting the revolver into those quilted folds, using them as sound suppression, he expended the five remaining rounds in the freak’s chest.

He dared not wait to see if this time the gun had been heard. Immediately, he unfolded the smoking blanket on the ground and rolled the dead man in it. Getting the corpse into the Explorer proved more difficult than he expected. Valis was heavier than scrawny Ralph Cottle.

If someone had been filming Billy, he would have had in camera a classic piece of macabre comedy. This was one of those moments when he wondered about God; didn’t doubt His existence, just wondered about Him. With Valis wrapped and loaded, Billy slammed the tailgate and returned to the motor home.

The bullet Valis fired had passed through the padded armchair and out the back. By ricochet, it had damaged the wall paneling. Billy tried to track it from there.

Because his father and mother had been shot with the .38, forensic profiles of the revolver existed. He didn’t think there was a high likelihood that a match would be made, but he didn’t intend to take any chances.

In a few minutes, he found the spent slug under a coffee table. He pocketed it.

Police would recognize the hole in the armchair as damage from gunfire. They would know that a weapon had been discharged; and there was nothing to be done about that.

They would not know, however, whether it had been fired at Valis or by him. Without blood, they would not be able to deduce to whom, if anyone, violence had been committed.

Turning slowly in a full circle, casting his mind back to the moment, Billy tried to remember if, during the short time he’d been without gloves, he’d touched any surface that could be fingerprinted. No. The place was clean. He left the steel blinds shut. He left the tambour panels raised to expose the collection of faces and hands.

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He did not close the door when he stepped out of the motor home. Open, it invited.

What a surprise for the glamorous crew of artists and artisans. No traffic appeared on the highway during the time that he drove away from the motor home, out of the meadow, and onto the pavement. What patterns his tires had imprinted in the dust, if they had imprinted any, would be obliterated when the crew arrived in a few hours.

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Once more to the lava pipe, this time by a different route to avoid trampling the same brush as before.

While Billy removed the redwood lid, the narrow ragged wound of an appropriately bloody dawn opened along the contours of the mountains in the east.

A prayer didn’t feel appropriate.

As though his specific gravity were greater than those of the other three cadavers, Valis seemed to drop faster into the hungry shaft than had the dead who preceded him.

When the sounds of the body’s descent faded into silence, Billy said,

“Older and more experienced, my ass.” Then he remembered to drop Lanny’s wallet into the pipe, and he replaced the lid.

As the night futilely resisted the early purple light, Billy parked the Explorer on the yard behind Lanny’s garage. He let himself into the house. This was Thursday, only the second of Lanny’s two days off. No one was likely to wonder about him or to come around looking for him until sometime Friday.

Although Valis had denied planting any additional evidence in the wake of Billy’s previous visit, Billy decided to search the house once more. You just couldn’t trust some people.

He began upstairs, moving with the deliberateness of extreme fatigue, and by the time that he returned to the kitchen, he had not found anything incriminating.

Thirsty, he took a glass from a cabinet and drew cold tap water. Still wearing gloves, he was unconcerned about leaving prints.

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Thirst quenched, he rinsed the glass, dried it on a dishtowel, and returned it to the cabinet from which he’d taken it.

Something didn’t feel right.

He suspected that he had missed a detail that had the power to undo him. Dulled by weariness, his gaze had traveled over some damning evidence without recognizing its importance.

In the living room once more, he circled the sofa on which Valis had propped Ralph Cottle’s corpse. No stains marred the furniture or the carpet around it.

Billy took up the cushions to see if anything from Cottle’s pockets might have fallen between them. When he found nothing, he replaced the cushions. Still plagued by a disquieting feeling that he had overlooked something, he sat down to brood. Because he was a mess, he didn’t risk soiling a chair but with a sigh of weariness sat cross-legged on the floor.

He had just killed a man, or something rather like a man, but he could still be concerned about the parlor upholstery. He remained a polite boy. A considerate little savage.

This contradiction struck him as funny, and he laughed out loud. The more he laughed, the funnier his fussiness about the upholstery seemed to be, and then he was laughing at his own laughter, amused by his inappropriate giddiness.

He knew this was dangerous laughter, that it could unravel the carefully tied knot of his equilibrium. He stretched out on the carpet, flat on his back, and took long deep breaths to calm himself.

The laughter relented, he breathed less deeply, and somehow he allowed himself to fall into sleep.

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Billy woke disoriented. For a moment, blinking at the legs of chairs and sofas all around him, he thought that he had fallen asleep in a hotel lobby, and he marveled at how considerate the management had been to leave him undisturbed.

Then memory tweaked him fully awake.

Getting to his feet, he gripped the arm of the sofa with his left hand. That was a mistake. The nail wound was inflamed. He cried out and almost fell, but didn’t.

The day beyond the curtained windows looked fiercely bright and well advanced.

When he consulted his wristwatch, he saw that it was 5:02 in the afternoon. He had slept almost ten hours.

Panic flew, and his heart drummed like frantic wings. He thought his unexplained absence must have made him the primary suspect in the disappearance of Valis.

Then he remembered that he had called in sick for a second day. No one was expecting him to be anywhere. And no one knew he had any connection whatsoever to the dead artist.

If the police were eager to find anyone, they were searching for Valis himself, to ask him pointed questions about the contents of the jars in his living room.

In the kitchen, Billy took a drinking glass out of the cabinet. He filled it from the tap.

Digging in the pockets of his jeans, he found two Anacins and took them with a long drink. He also swallowed one tablet of Cipro and a Vicodin.

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For a moment he felt nauseated, but the feeling passed. Maybe all these medications would interact in a mortal fashion and drop him dead between one step and another, but at least he wouldn’t puke.

He was no longer troubled by the feeling that he might have left incriminating evidence in this house. That fear had been a symptom of exhaustion. Rested now, reviewing his precautions, he knew that he had not missed anything.

After locking the house, he returned the spare key to the hole in the tree stump.

With the advantage of daylight, he opened the tailgate of the Explorer and checked the floor of the cargo space for Valis’s blood. None had soaked through the moving blankets, and the blankets had gone into the lava pipe with the corpse.

He drove away from the Olsen house with relief, with a cautious optimism, with a growing sense of triumph.

The site of the Valis project looked like an auto dealership that sold only police vehicles.

Lots of uniforms milled around the motor home, the tent, the mural. Sheriff John Palmer would be one of them because there were also TV-NEWS

vans standing bumper-to-bumper along the shoulder of the highway. Billy realized that he was still wearing latex gloves. All right. No problem. No one could see and wonder why.

Not a single available space remained in the parking lot at the tavern. The news of Valis and his grisly collection would bring out all the regulars as well as new customers, with something more to talk about than pigs with human brains. Good for Jackie.

When Billy’s house came into view, the sight of it warmed him. Home. With the artist dead, the locks would not have to be rekeyed. Security was his again, and privacy.

In the garage, he cleaned out the Explorer, bagged the trash, put away the power screwdriver and other tools.

Somewhere on this property were incriminating souvenirs, a last bit of cleanup to be done.

When he stepped across the kitchen threshold, he allowed his instinct to guide him. Valis wouldn’t have brought Giselle Winslow’s hand here in a jar

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full of formaldehyde. Such a container would have been too awkward and fragile to allow quick work on the sly. Instinct suggested the simplest solution. He went to the refrigerator and opened the freezer drawer at the bottom. Among the containers of ice cream and packages of leftovers were two foilwrapped objects that he did not recognize. He opened them on the floor. Two hands, each from a different woman. One of them had probably belonged to the redhead.

Valis had used the new non-stick foil. The manufacturer would be pleased to hear that it worked as advertised.

Billy couldn’t stop trembling as he rewrapped the hands. For a while, he had thought that he had become inured to horror. He had not. Before the day was done, he would have to throw out all the contents of the freezer. No contamination could have occurred, but the thought of contamination sickened him. He might have to trash the refrigerator itself. He wanted the hands out of the house. He didn’t expect the police to knock on the door with a search warrant, but he wanted the hands gone, anyway. Burying them somewhere on the property seemed like a bad idea. At the very least, he would have dreams about them clawing out of their small graves and creeping into the house at night.

Until he could decide what to do with them, he put the frozen hands in a small picnic cooler.

From his wallet, he thought to extract the folded snapshot of Ralph Cottle as a young man, Cottle’s membership card in the American Society of Skeptics, and the photo of the redhead. He had kept these with the vague idea of turning the tables on the freak and planting bits of evidence on him. He tossed them in the cooler with the hands.

He had Lanny’s cell phone, which he hesitated to add to the cooler. As if the hands would strip off their foil shrouds and call 911. He put the cell phone on the kitchen table.

To get the hands out of the house, he took the cooler to the garage and put it in the Explorer, on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. He locked the garage after himself.

The hot afternoon had waned. Six-thirty-six.

High overhead, a hawk conducted its last hunt of the day.

Billy stood watching as the bird described a widening gyre.

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Then he went inside, eager to take a long shower as hot as he could tolerate.

The business with the women’s hands had suppressed his appetite. He didn’t think he would feel comfortable eating at home.

Maybe he would return to the truck stop for dinner. He felt as if he owed the waitress, Jasmine, even a bigger tip than the one he had previously left her. In the hallway, heading for the bathroom, Billy saw a light in his office. When he looked through the doorway, he found the shades drawn, as he had left them.

He didn’t remember leaving the desk lamp on, but he had split in a hurry, eager to dispose of Cottle. Without going around the desk, he switched off the lamp.

Although Cottle was no longer sitting on the toilet, Billy could too easily remember him there. This was his only bathroom, however, and his desire for a shower proved greater than his squeamishness.

The hot water gradually melted the aches from his muscles. The soap smelled glorious.

A couple of times, he grew claustrophobic behind the shower curtain and became half convinced that he had been cast in the Janet Leigh role in a gender-reversal version of Psycho.

Happily, he managed not to embarrass himself by whipping the curtain open. He concluded his shower without being knifed.

He wondered how much time would have to pass before he got over the heebie-jeebies. Most likely, the rest of his life.

After toweling off and dressing, he applied a fresh bandage to the hook wounds in his forehead.

He went into the kitchen, opened an Elephant beer, and used it to chase a pair of Motrin. The inflammation in his left hand worried him a little. At the table with the beer, and with a few first-aid items, he tried to introduce iodine into the nail wound, then applied a fresh liquid bandage. Beyond the windows, twilight approached.

He intended to go to Whispering Pines and spend a few hours. He had arranged to stay throughout the night in a prayer vigil; but in spite of his tenhour sleep, he didn’t think he would be able to stay that long. With Valis dead, midnight had no meaning.

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When Billy had tended to the nail wound, as he sat at the table finishing the beer, his attention fell on the microwave. The security video. All this while, he’d been recording himself at the table. Then he realized that he had caught himself taking the hands out of the freezer. The camera had a wide-angle lens, but he didn’t believe that it could have captured his gruesome work well enough to serve as evidence.

Nevertheless…

He got the stepladder from the pantry. He climbed it and opened the cabinet above the microwave.

Using the reverse-scan mode, he studied the small review screen, watching himself walk backward around the kitchen. The angle had not revealed the severed hands.

Suddenly wondering whether Valis might have visited the house for some purpose between the time Billy had left the previous day and their meeting in the motor home before dawn, he continued the reverse scan beyond his entrance shortly after six o’clock.

He didn’t have to go all the way to the previous day. At 3:07 this same day, while Billy had still been asleep at the Olsen place, a man walked backward out of the living room, across the kitchen to the door, and reversed out of the house.

The intruder was not Valis, of course, because Valis was dead.

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Billy couldn’t remember the number. Using Lanny’s cell phone, he called directory assistance in Denver, and they put him through to Detective Ramsey Ozgard.

Billy paced while the phone rang out there in the shadow of the Rockies. Maybe Valis had been confident of Billy’s conversion because he had previously bent someone else instead of destroying him. None of the sixteen members of his crew was like him, but that didn’t mean the artist was a lone hunter.

Ramsey Ozgard answered on the fifth ring, and Billy identified himself as Lanny Olsen, and Ozgard said, “I hear blood in your voice, Deputy. Tell me you’ve got your man.”

“I think I will have shortly,” Billy said. “I’ve got an urgent situation here. I need to know—the year Judith Kesselman vanished, was there a professor at the university, calling himself Valis?”

“Not a professor,” Ozgard said. “He was the artist in residence for six months. At the end of his time, he did this ridiculous thing he called performance art, wrapped two campus buildings in thousands of yards of blue silk and hung them with—”

Billy interrupted. “Steve Zillis had a perfect alibi.”

“It was watertight,” Ozgard assured him. “I can walk you through it if you have ten minutes.”

“I don’t. But tell me—do you remember—at the university, what was Zillis’s major?”

“He was an art major.”

“Sonofabitch.”

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No wonder Zillis hadn’t wanted to talk about the mannequins. They weren’t just expressions of the sick dreams of a sociopathic killer—they were his art.

At that point, Billy hadn’t yet discovered the key words that would reveal the identity of the freak-performance art. He’d had only performance, and Zillis instinctively hadn’t wanted to give him the rest of it, not when he was doing so well playing a harmless, put-upon pervert.

“The son of a bitch deserves an Oscar,” Billy said. “I left his place feeling like the world’s worst shit, the way I treated him.”

“Deputy?”

“The famous and respected Valis vouched for Steve Zillis—didn’t he?—

said that Steve was with him on a retreat or something on the day Judith Kesselman disappeared.”

“You’re right. But you’d only jump to that if—”

“Turn on your evening news, Detective Ozgard. By the time Judi Kesselman vanished, Steve and Valis were working together. They were each other’s alibi. Gotta go.”

Billy remembered to press END before dropping Lanny’s phone. He still had Lanny’s pistol and Taser. He threaded the Wilson Combat holster onto his belt.

From the closet in his bedroom, he snared a sport coat, shrugged into it to conceal the pistol as best he could.

He slipped the Taser in an inner coat pocket.

What had Steve been doing here in the afternoon? By then he would have known that his mentor had been outed, the collection of hands and faces discovered. He might even suspect that Valis was dead.

Billy remembered finding the light on in the study. He went in there, all the way behind the desk this time, and found the computer in sleep mode. He hadn’t left it on.

When he moved the mouse, a document appeared. Can torture wake the comatose? Her blood, her mutilation will be your third wound. Billy flew through the house. He leaped off the back-porch steps, stumbled when he landed, and ran.

Night had fallen. An owl hooted. Wings against the stars.

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At 9:06 the guest parking lot in front of Whispering Pines contained only one car. Visiting hours ended at nine.

They hadn’t locked the front door yet. Billy pushed inside, crossed to the main nurses’ station.

Two nurses were behind the counter. He knew them both. He said, “I made arrangements to stay—”

The overhead lights went out. The parking-lot lights died, too. The main hall was almost as black as a lava pipe.

He left the nurses in confusion and followed the corridor toward the west wing.

At first he hurried, but within a dozen steps, in the dark, he collided with a wheelchair, grabbed at it, felt the shape of it.

From the chair, a frightened old woman said, “What’s happening, what’re you doing?”

“It’s all right, you’ll be okay,” he assured her, and went on. He didn’t move as fast now, arms in front of him like a blind man feeling for obstructions.

Wall-mounted emergency lights flickered on, then off, pulsed again and died.

An authoritative male voice calmly called out, “Please stay in your rooms. We will come to you. Please stay in your rooms.”

The emergency sconces tried to function again. But they pulsed at onethird brightness, and erratically.

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These flares and leaping shadows were disorienting, but Billy could see well enough to avoid the people in the halls. Another nurse, an orderly, an elderly man in pajamas, looking bewildered…

A fire alarm issued an electronic ululation. A recorded voice began to give evacuation instructions.

A woman in a walker intercepted Billy as he approached her, plucked at his sleeve, seeking information.

“They’ve got it under control,” he assured her as he hurried past. He turned the corner into the west wing. Just ahead, on the right. The door stood open.

The room was dark. No auxiliary sconce in here. His own body blocked what little light pulsed in from the west hall.

Slamming doors, a cacophony of slamming doors, which weren’t doors at all, but his heart.

He felt his way toward the bed. He should have reached it. He went two steps farther. The bed wasn’t here.

He pirouetted blindly, sweeping his arms through the air. All he found was the barstool.

Her bed was on wheels. Someone had moved her.

In the hallway again, he looked left, looked right. A few of the ambulatory patients had come out of their rooms. A nurse was marshaling them for an orderly exit.

Through the dance of light and shadow, Billy saw a man pushing a bed at the far end of the hall, moving fast toward a flashing red EXIT sign. Dodging patients, nurses, phantoms of shadow, Billy ran.

The door at the end of the hall banged open as the man slammed the bed through it.

A nurse grabbed Billy by the arm, halting him. He tried to pull loose, but she had a grip.

“Help me roll some of the bedridden out of here,” she said.

“There’s no fire.”

“There must be. We’ve got to evacuate them.”

“My wife,” he declared, though he and Barbara had never married, “my wife needs help.”

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He tore loose of the nurse, nearly knocking her off her feet, and hurried toward the flashing exit sign.

He shoved through the door, into the night. Dumpsters, cars and SUV’s in a staff parking lot.

For a moment, he didn’t see the man, the bed. There. An ambulance waited thirty feet away, to the left, its engine running. The wide rear door stood open. The guy with the bed had almost reached it.

Billy drew the 9-mm pistol but didn’t dare use it. He might hit Barbara. Crossing the blacktop, he holstered the pistol, fumbled the Taser out of an inner coat pocket.

At the last instant, Steve heard Billy coming. The freak had a pistol. He fired twice as he turned.

Billy was already coming in under Steve’s arm. The gun boomed over his head.

He jammed the business end of the Taser into Steve’s abdomen and clicked the trigger. He knew it would work through thin clothing, a shirt, but he had never checked to be sure that it contained fresh batteries. Zillis spasmed as the electric charge cried havoc along the wires of his nervous system. He didn’t merely drop his gun but flung it away. His knees buckled. He rapped his head on the bumper of the ambulance as he fell. Billy kicked him. He tried to kick him in the head. He kicked him again. The fire department would be coming. The police. Sheriff John Palmer, sooner or later.

He put his hand to Barbara’s face. Her breath feathered his palm. She seemed to be all right. He could feel her eyes moving under her lids, dreaming Dickens.

Glancing back at Whispering Pines, he saw that no one had yet evacuated through the west-wing exit.

He rolled Barbara’s bed aside.

On the ground, Steve was twitching, saying, “Unnn, unnn, unnn,” in a bad imitation of an epileptic fit.

Billy zapped him again with the Taser, then pocketed it.

He grabbed the freak by his belt, by the collar of his shirt, hauled him off the blacktop. He didn’t think he had the strength to lift and shove Zillis into the back of the ambulance, but panic flushed him with adrenaline.

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The knuckles of the freak’s right hand rapped uncontrollably against the floor of the ambulance, as did the back of his skull.

Billy slammed the door, seized the foot rail of Barbara’s bed, and pushed her toward Whispering Pines.

When he was less than ten feet from the door, it opened, and an orderly appeared, leading a patient in a walker.

“This is my wife,” Billy said. “I got her out. Will you look after her while I help some others?”

“It’s covered,” the orderly assured him. “I better get her a safe distance if there’s fire.”

Urging the man in the walker to keep pace with him, the orderly pushed Barbara away from the building but also away from the waiting ambulance. When Billy got behind the wheel and pulled the driver’s door shut, he heard the freak drumming his heels against something and making strangled noises that might have been fractured curses.

Billy didn’t know how long the effect of a Tasering lasted. Maybe he was wrong to pray for convulsions, but he did.

He found the brake release, the gear shift, and he pulled around to the front of the building. He parked beside his Explorer.

People were coming out of the building, into the parking lot. They were too busy to wonder about him.

He transferred the cooler with the severed hands to the ambulance and then got away from there. He went two blocks before he could locate the switch for the emergency beacons and the siren.

By the time he passed the fire trucks, coming out from Vineyard Hills, the ambulance was in full flash and voice.

He figured the more he called attention to himself, the less suspicious he appeared. He broke every speed limit going through the northeast end of town, and turned due east on the state route that led to the Olsen house. When he was two miles out of town, with vineyards to both sides of the road, he heard the freak muttering more coherently and banging around back there, evidently trying to get up.

Billy pulled to the shoulder of the road, parked, but left the beacons flashing. He climbed between the seats, into the back.

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On his knees, clutching the bracketed oxygen cylinder, Zillis wanted badly to get to his feet. His eyes were bright, like those of a coyote at night. Billy zapped him again, and Zillis flopped, twitched, but a Taser wasn’t a deadly weapon.

If he shot the freak, blood might spray over all the life-support equipment, an ungodly mess. And evidence.

On the wheeled stretcher were two thin foam pillows. Billy grabbed both. Flat on his back, rolling his head from side to side, Zillis had no muscle control whatsoever.

Billy dropped on his chest with both knees, driving the breath out of him, cracking more than one of his ribs, and shoved the pillows over his face. Although the freak fought for life, he fought ineffectively. Billy almost couldn’t finish it. He made himself think about Judith Kesselman, her lively eyes, her elfin smile, and he wondered if Zillis had shoved a spear-point iron stave into her, whether he had cut off the top of her skull while she was alive and handed it to her as a drinking cup. Then it was over.

Sobbing but not for Zillis, he climbed once more behind the steering wheel. He drove onto the highway.

Two miles from the turnoff to the Olsen place, Billy killed the emergency beacons and the siren. He slowed below the speed limit.

Because the alarm at Whispering Pines had been false, the fire-department crew would not linger. By the time he eventually returned the ambulance, the staff parking lot would be deserted again.

He had left his power screwdriver at home. He was pretty sure that Lanny owned one. He would borrow it. Lanny wouldn’t care.

As he reached the house, he saw the sickle moon, a little thicker this night than last, and the silver blade perhaps somewhat sharper.

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All year, the valley is home to rock doves and to band-tailed pigeons, to the song sparrow and to the even more musical dark-eyed junco. The long-winged, long-tailed falcons known as American kestrels also stay the year. Their distinctive plumage is bright and cheerful. Their shrill, clear call sounds like killy-killy-killy-killy, which should not be pleasing to the ear, but is.

Billy bought a new refrigerator. And a microwave.

He knocked down a wall, combining his study with the living room because he had plans to use the space differently from the way it had been used before.

After choosing a cheerful butter-yellow color, he repainted every room. He threw out the carpets and furniture, and purchased everything new, because he didn’t know where the redhead might have been sitting or lying when she had been strangled or otherwise dispatched.

He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts. When he was not at work on the house or behind the bar at the tavern, he sat in the room at Whispering Pines or on his front porch, reading the novels of Charles Dickens, the better to know where Barbara lived.

With the coming of autumn, the wood-pewees move on from the valley, and their pee-didip, pee-didip is not heard until spring. Most of the willow flycatchers migrate as well, although a few may adapt and linger.

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By autumn, Valis remained big news, especially in the tabloids and on those TV shows that tricked up carnival-freak show huckstering to pass for investigative journalism. They would feed on him for a year at least, like flickers feed on the larvae in noisy acorns, though Nature had not given them the imperative that she had given to the flickers.

Steve Zillis had been linked to Valis. Sightings of the pair—disguised but recognizable—were reported in South America, in Asia, in the more ominous regions of the former Soviet Union.

Lanny Olsen was assumed to be dead but also in some mysterious way a hero. He had not been a detective, merely a deputy, and never before had he been a motivated officer; however, his calls to Ramsey Ozgard, of the Denver PD, indicated that he had reason to suspect Zillis and, in the end, Valis as well. No one could explain why Lanny had not taken his suspicions to a superior. Sheriff Palmer said only that Lanny always had been “a lone wolf who did some of his best work outside the usual channels,” and for some reason no one laughed or asked the sheriff what the hell he was talking about. One theory—popular at the bar—held that Lanny had shot and wounded Valis, but that Steve Zillis had come on scene and murdered Lanny. Then Steve had driven away with Lanny’s body to dispose of it, and with the wounded artist, as well, to nurse him to health in some hideaway, since all legitimate doctors are required to report gunshot wounds.

No one knew in what vehicle Steve had fled, as his own car was in the garage at his house; but obviously he had stolen wheels from someone. He hadn’t taken the motor home because he had never before driven it, and no doubt because he feared that it would attract too much attention once Valis had been reported missing.

Psychologists and criminologists with knowledge of sociopathic behavior argued against the idea that one homicidal psychopath would be inclined selflessly to nurse another homicidal psychopath back to health. The notion of these two monsters behaving with tender-hearted concern toward each other appealed to the press, however, and to the public. If Count Dracula and the Frankenstein monster could be good friends, as they had been in a couple of old films, Zillis might be stirred to minister to his grievously wounded artist mentor.

No one ever noticed that Ralph Cottle had vanished.

Surely the young redhead had been missed, but perhaps she had come from a distant part of the nation and had been snatched on the road while passing through the wine country. If there were stories in some other state

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about her disappearance, she was never connected to the Valis affair, and Billy never learned her name.

People go missing every day. The national news media don’t have sufficient space or time to report upon the fall of every sparrow. Although wood-pewees and most willow flycatchers leave with the summer, the common snipe appears when autumn trends toward winter, as does the ruby-crowned kinglet, which has a high, clear, lively song of many phrases.

In those rarefied circles where the simplest thoughts are deep and where even gray has shades of gray, a movement arose to complete the unfinished mural. And burn it as planned. Valis might have been insane, the argument went; but art is art nonetheless, and must be respected.

The burning drew such an enthusiastic crowd of Hells Angels, organized anarchists, and sincere nihilists that Jackie O’Hara closed his doors that weekend. He didn’t want their trade at a family tavern.

By late autumn, Billy quit his bartending job and brought Barbara home. One end of the expanded living room served as both her bedroom and his office. With her quiet company, he found that he could write again. Although Barbara did not require life-support machines, only a pump to supply a steady food drip through the tube in her stomach, Billy initially depended on continuous help from registered nurses. He learned to care for her, however, and after several weeks, he seldom needed a nurse other than at night, when he slept.

He emptied her catheter bag, changed her diapers, cleaned her, bathed her, and was never repulsed. He felt better doing these things for her than he felt when he let strangers do them. In truth, he did not expect that tending to her in this fashion would make her seem more beautiful to him, but that was what happened.

She had saved him once, before she’d been taken from him, and now she saved him again. After the terror, the brutal violence, the murder, she gave him the opportunity to become acquainted with compassion and to find in himself a gentleness that otherwise he might have lost forever.

Strange, how the friends began to visit. Jackie, Ivy, the cooks Ramon and Ben, and Shirley Trueblood. Harry Avarkian often drove up from Napa. They sometimes brought members of their families, as well as friends of theirs who became Billy’s friends. Increasingly, people seemed to enjoy hanging around the Wiles place. They had a crowd on Christmas Day.

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By spring, when the wood-pewees and willow flycatchers returned in numbers, Billy had widened the front door and ramped the threshold to accommodate Barbara’s bed on the porch. With an extension cord to keep her food pump working and to allow adjustment of the mattress, she was able to lie in an elevated position, her face to the warm spring breezes. On the porch, he read, sometimes aloud. And listened to the bird songs. And watched her dreaming A Christmas Carol.

That was a good spring, a better summer, a fine autumn, a lovely winter. That was the year when people began to call him Bill instead of Billy, and somehow he didn’t notice until the new name was the common usage. In the spring of the following year, one day when he and Barbara were together on the porch, Bill was reading to himself when she said, “Barn swallows.”

He no longer kept a notebook of the things that she said, for he no longer worried that she was afraid and lost and suffering. She was not lost. When he looked up from his book, he discovered a flock of that very bird, moving as one, describing graceful patterns over the yard beyond the porch. He looked at her and saw that her eyes were open and that she seemed to be watching the swallows.

“They’re more graceful than other swallows,” he said.

“I like them,” she said.

The birds were elegant with their long, slender, pointed wings and their long, deeply forked tails. Their backs were dark blue, their breasts orange.

“I like them very much,” she said, and closed her eyes.

After holding his breath for a while, he said, “Barbara?”

She did not answer. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Hope, love, and faith are all in the waiting. Power is not the truth of life; the love of power is the love of death.

The barn swallows flew elsewhere. Bill returned to the book that he had been reading.

What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.

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NOTE

In moments of stress and indecision, words of wisdom enter Billy Wiles’s mind, and he is guided by them. Although Billy does not make an attribution, these words are from the work of T.S. Eliot.

Chapter 9:

Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain, and from the friend who has something to lose.

Also in that chapter:

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

Chapter 13:

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility.

Chapter 17:

May the judgment not be too heavy upon us.

Chapter 33:

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

Chapter 66:

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by way of dispossession. And what you do not know is the only thing you know.

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Chapter 71:

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

Chapter 72:

The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change. However you disguise it, this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Chapter 77:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

The Napa County Sheriff’s Department in this fiction bears no resemblance to the superlative law-enforcement agency of the same name in the real world, nor is any person in this story based in any way whatsoever on any real person in Napa County, California.

Barbara’s most mysterious statement—want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying—is from Dombey and Son.

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