Velocity
Dean Koontz

This book is dedicated to Donna and Steve Dunio, Vito and Lynn Cerra, Ross and Rosemary Cerra. I’ll never figure out why Gerda said yes to me. But now your family has a crazy wing.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY,

The Old Man and the Sea

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance, But all dash to and fro in motor cars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

—T. S. ELIOT,

Choruses from “The Rock”

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

PART ONE The Choice is Yours

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

PART TWO Are You Prepared for Your Second Wound?

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

PART THREE All You Have is How You Live

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

Note

About the Author

Also By Dean Koontz

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE The Choice is Yours

1

With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him.

Henry had been killed by a garden gnome. He had fallen off the roof of his two-story house, onto that cheerful-looking figure. The gnome was made of concrete. Henry wasn’t.

A broken neck, a cracked skull: Henry perished on impact.

This death-by-gnome had occurred four years previously. Ned Pearsall still toasted Henry’s passing at least once a week.

Now, from a stool near the curve of the polished mahogany bar, an out-of-towner, the only other customer, expressed curiosity at the enduring nature of Ned’s animosity.

“How bad a neighbor could the poor guy have been that you’re still so juiced about him?”

Ordinarily, Ned might have ignored the question.He had even less use for tourists than he did for pretzels.

The tavern offered free bowls of pretzels because they were cheap. Ned preferred to sustain his thirst with well-salted peanuts.

To keep Ned tipping, Billy Wiles, tending bar, occasionally gave him a bag of Planters.

Most of the time Ned had to pay for his nuts. This rankled him either because he could not grasp the economic realities of tavern operation or because he enjoyed being rankled, probably the latter.

Although he had a head reminiscent of a squash ball and the heavy rounded shoulders of a sumo wrestler, Ned was an athletic man only if you thought barroom jabber and grudge-holding qualified as sports. In those events, he was an Olympian.

Regarding the late Henry Friddle, Ned could be as talkative with outsiders as with lifelong residents of Vineyard Hills. When, as now, the only other customer was a stranger, Ned found silence even less congenial than conversation with a “foreign devil.”

Billy himself had never been much of a talker, never one of those barkeeps who considered the bar a stage. He was a listener.

To the out-of-towner, Ned declared, “Henry Friddle was a pig.”

The stranger had hair as black as coal dust with traces of ash at the temples, gray eyes bright with dry amusement, and a softly resonant voice. “That’s a strong word—pig.”

“You know what the pervert was doing on his roof? He was trying to piss on my dining-room windows.”

Wiping the bar, Billy Wiles didn’t even glance at the tourist. He’d heard this story so often that he knew all the reactions to it.

“Friddle, the pig, figured the altitude would give his stream more distance,” Ned explained.

The stranger said, “What was he—an aeronautical engineer?”

“He was a college professor. He taught contemporary literature.”

“Maybe reading that stuff drove him to suicide,” the tourist said, which made him more interesting than Billy had first thought.

“No, no,” Ned said impatiently. “The fall was accidental.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Why would you think he was drunk?” Ned wondered.

The stranger shrugged. “He climbed on a roof to urinate on your windows.”

“He was a sick man,” Ned explained, plinking one finger against his empty glass to indicate the desire for another round.

Drawing Budweiser from the tap, Billy said, “Henry Friddle was consumed by vengeance.”

After silent communion with his brew, the tourist asked Ned Pearsall, “Vengeance? So you urinated on Friddle’s windows first?”

“It wasn’t the same thing at all,” Ned warned in a rough tone that advised the outsider to avoid being judgmental.

“Ned didn’t do it from his roof,” Billy said.

“That’s right. I walked up to his house, like a man, stood on his lawn, and aimed at his dining-room windows.”

“Henry and his wife were having dinner at the time,” Billy said.

Before the tourist might express revulsion at the timing of this assault, Ned said, “They were eating quail, for God’s sake.”

“You showered their windows because they were eating quail?”

Ned sputtered with exasperation. “No, of course not. Do I look insane to you?” He rolled his eyes at Billy.

Billy raised his eyebrows as though to say What do you expect of a tourist?

“I’m just trying to convey how pretentious they were,” Ned clarified, “always eating quail or snails, or Swiss chard.”

“Phony bastards,” the tourist said with such a light seasoning of mockery that Ned Pearsall didn’t detect it, although Billy did.

“Exactly,” Ned confirmed. “Henry Friddle drove a Jaguar, and his wife drove a car—you won’t believe this—a car made in Sweden.”

“Detroit was too common for them,” said the tourist.

“Exactly. How much of a snob do you have to be to bring a car all the way from Sweden?”

The tourist said, “I’ll wager they were wine connoisseurs.”

“Big time! Did you know them or something?”

“I just know the type. They had a lot of books.”

“You’ve got ‘em nailed,” Ned declared. “They’d sit on the front porch, sniffing their wine, reading books.”

“Right out in public. Imagine that. But if you didn’t pee on their dining-room windows because they were snobs, why did you?”

“A thousand reasons,” Ned assured him. “The incident of the skunk. The incident of the lawn fertilizer. The dead petunias.”

“And the garden gnome,” Billy added as he rinsed glasses in the bar sink.

“The garden gnome was the last straw,” Ned agreed.

“I can understand being driven to aggressive urination by pink plastic flamingos,” said the tourist, “but, frankly, not by a gnome.”

Ned scowled, remembering the affront. “Ariadne gave it my face.”

“Ariadne who?”

“Henry Friddle’s wife. You ever heard a more pretentious name?”

“Well, the Friddle part brings it down to earth.”

“She was an art professor at the same college. She sculpted the gnome, created the mold, poured the concrete, painted it herself.”

“Having a sculpture modeled after you can be an honor.”

The beer foam on Ned’s upper lip gave him a rabid appearance as he protested: “It was a gnome, pal. A drunken gnome. The nose was as red as an apple. It was carrying a beer bottle in each hand.”

“And its fly was unzipped,” Billy added.

“Thanks so much for reminding me,” Ned grumbled. “Worse, hanging out of its pants was the head and neck of a dead goose.”

“How creative,” said the tourist.

“At first I didn’t know what the hell that meant—”

“Symbolism. Metaphor.”

“Yeah, yeah. I figured it out. Everybody who walked past their place saw it, and got a laugh at my expense.”

“Wouldn’t need to see the gnome for that,” said the tourist.

Misunderstanding, Ned agreed: “Right. Just hearing about it, people were laughing. So I busted up the gnome with a sledgehammer.”

“And they sued you.”

“Worse. They set out another gnome. Figuring I’d bust up the first, Ariadne had cast and painted a second.”

“I thought life was mellow here in the wine country.”

“Then they tell me,” Ned continued, “if I bust up the second one, they’ll put a third on the lawn, plus they’ll manufacture a bunch and sell ‘em at cost to anyone who wants a Ned Pearsall gnome.”

“Sounds like an empty threat,” said the tourist. “Would there really be people who’d want such a thing?”

“Dozens,” Billy assured him.

“This town’s become a mean place since the pâté-and-brie crowd started moving in from San Francisco,” Ned said sullenly.

“So when you didn’t dare take a sledgehammer to the second gnome, you were left with no choice but to pee on their windows.”

“Exactly. But I didn’t just go off half-cocked. I thought about the situation for a week. Then I hosed them.”

“After which, Henry Friddle climbed on his roof with a full bladder, looking for justice.”

“Yeah. But he waited till I had a birthday dinner for my mom.”

“Unforgivable,” Billy judged.

“Does the Mafia attack innocent members of a man’s family?” Ned asked indignantly.

Although the question had been rhetorical, Billy played for his tip: “No. The Mafia’s got class.”

“Which is a word these professor types can’t even spell,” Ned said. “Mom was seventy-six. She could have had a heart attack.”

“So,” the tourist said, “while trying to urinate on your dining-room windows, Friddle fell off his roof and broke his neck on the Ned Pearsall gnome. Pretty ironic.”

“I don’t know ironic,” Ned replied. “But it sure was sweet.”

“Tell him what your mom said,” Billy urged.

Following a sip of beer, Ned obliged: “My mom told me, ‘Honey, praise the Lord, this proves there’s a God.’”

After taking a moment to absorb those words, the tourist said, “She sounds like quite a religious woman.”

“She wasn’t always. But at seventy-two, she caught pneumonia.”

“It’s sure convenient to have God at a time like that.”

“She figured if God existed, maybe He’d save her. If He didn’t exist, she wouldn’t be out nothing but some time wasted on prayer.”

“Time,” the tourist advised, “is our most precious possession.”

“True,” Ned agreed. “But Mom wouldn’t have wasted much because mostly she could pray while she watched TV.”

“What an inspiring story,” said the tourist, and ordered a beer.

Billy opened a pretentious bottle of Heineken, provided a fresh chilled glass, and whispered, “This one’s on the house.”

“That’s nice of you. Thanks. I’d been thinking you’re quiet and soft-spoken for a bartender, but now maybe I understand why.”

From his lonely outpost farther along the bar, Ned Pearsall raised his glass in a toast. “To Ariadne. May she rest in peace.”

Although it might have been against his will, the tourist was engaged again. Of Ned, he asked, “Not another gnome tragedy?”

“Cancer. Two years after Henry fell off the roof. I sure wish it hadn’t happened.”

Pouring the fresh Heineken down the side of his tilted glass, the stranger said, “Death has a way of putting our petty squabbles in perspective.”

“I miss her,” Ned said. “She had the most spectacular rack, and she didn’t always wear a bra.”

The tourist twitched.

“She’d be working in the yard,” Ned remembered almost dreamily, “or walking the dog, and that fine pair would be bouncing and swaying so sweet you couldn’t catch your breath.”

The tourist checked his face in the back-bar mirror, perhaps to see if he looked as appalled as he felt.

“Billy,” Ned asked, “didn’t she have the finest set of mamas you could hope to see?”

“She did,” Billy agreed.

Ned slid off his stool, shambled toward the men’s room, paused at the tourist. “Even when cancer withered her, those mamas didn’t shrink. The leaner she got, the bigger they were in proportion. Almost to the end, she looked hot. What a waste, huh, Billy?”

“What a waste,” Billy echoed as Ned continued to the men’s room.

After a shared silence, the tourist said, “You’re an interesting guy, Billy Barkeep.”

“Me? I’ve never hosed anyone’s windows.”

“You’re like a sponge, I think. You take everything in.”

Billy picked up a dishcloth and polished some pilsner glasses that had previously been washed and dried.

“But then you’re a stone too,” the tourist said, “because if you’re squeezed, you give nothing back.”

Billy continued polishing the glasses.

The gray eyes, bright with amusement, brightened further. “You’re a man with a philosophy, which is unusual these days, when most people don’t know who they are or what they believe, or why.”

This, too, was a style of barroom jabber with which Billy was familiar, though he didn’t hear it often. Compared to Ned Pearsall’s rants, such boozy observations could seem erudite; but it was all just beer-based psychoanalysis.

He was disappointed. Briefly, the tourist had seemed different from the usual two-cheeked heaters who warmed the barstool vinyl.

Smiling, shaking his head, Billy said, “Philosophy. You give me too much credit.”

The tourist sipped his Heineken.

Although Billy had not intended to say more, he heard himself continue: “Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect much, enjoy what you have.”

The stranger smiled. “Be self-sufficient, don’t get involved, let the world go to Hell if it wants.”

“Maybe,” Billy conceded.

“Admittedly, it’s not Plato,” said the tourist, “but it is a philosophy.”

“You have one of your own?” Billy asked.

“Right now, I believe that my life will be better and more meaningful if I can just avoid any further conversation with Ned.”

“That’s not a philosophy,” Billy told him. “That’s a fact.”

At ten minutes past four, Ivy Elgin came to work. She was a waitress as good as any and an object of desire without equal.

Billy liked her but didn’t long for her. His lack of lust made him unique among the men who worked or drank in the tavern.

Ivy had mahogany hair, limpid eyes the color of brandy, and the body for which Hugh Hefner had spent his life searching.

Although twenty-four, she seemed genuinely unaware that she was the essential male fantasy in the flesh. She was never seductive. At times she could be flirtatious, but only in a winsome way.

Her beauty and choirgirl wholesomeness were a combination so erotic that her smile alone could melt the average man’s earwax.

“Hi, Billy,” Ivy said, coming directly to the bar. “I saw a dead possum along Old Mill Road, about a quarter mile from Kornell Lane.”

“Naturally dead or road kill?” he asked.

“Fully road kill.”

“What do you think it means?”

“Nothing specific yet,” she said, handing her purse to him so he could store it behind the bar. “It’s the first dead thing I’ve seen in a week, so it depends on what other bodies show up, if any.”

Ivy believed that she was a haruspex. Haruspices, a class of priests in ancient Rome, divined the future from the entrails of animals killed in sacrifices.

They had been respected, even revered, by other Romans, but most likely they had not received a lot of party invitations.

Ivy wasn’t morbid. Haruspicy did not occupy the center of her life. She seldom talked to customers about it.

Neither did she have the stomach to stir through entrails. For a haruspex, she was squeamish.

Instead, she found meaning in the species of the cadaver, in the circumstances of its discovery, in its position related to the points of the compass, and in other arcane aspects of its condition.

Her predictions seldom if ever came true, but Ivy persisted.

“Whatever it turns out to mean,” she told Billy as she picked up her order pad and a pencil, “it’s a bad sign. A dead possum never indicates good fortune.”

“I’ve noticed that myself.”

“Especially not when its nose is pointing north and its tail is pointing east.”

Thirsty men trailed through the door soon after Ivy, as if she were a mirage of an oasis that they had been pursuing all day. Only a few sat at the bar; the others kept her bustling table to table.

Although the tavern’s middle-class clientele were not high rollers, Ivy’s income from tips exceeded what she might have earned had she attained a doctoral degree in economics.

An hour later, at five o’clock, Shirley Trueblood, the second evening waitress, came on duty. Fifty-six, stout, wearing jasmine perfume, Shirley had her own following. Certain men in barrooms always wanted mothering. Some women, too.

The day-shift short-order cook, Ben Vernon, went home. The evening cook, Ramon Padillo, came aboard. The tavern offered only bar food: cheeseburgers, fries, Buffalo wings, quesadillas, nachos…

Ramon had noticed that on the nights Ivy Elgin worked, the spicy dishes sold in greater numbers than when she wasn’t waitressing. Guys ordered more things in tomatillo sauce, went through a lot of little bottles of Tabasco, and asked for sliced jalapeños on their burgers.

“I think,” Ramon once told Billy, “they’re unconsciously packing heat into their gonads to be ready if she comes on to them.”

“No one in this joint has a chance at Ivy,” Billy assured him.

“You never know,” Ramon had said coyly.

“Don’t tell me you’re packing in the peppers, too.”

“So many I have killer heartburn some nights,” Ramon had said. “But I’m ready.”

With Ramon came the evening bartender, Steve Zillis, whose shift overlapped Billy’s by an hour. At twenty-four, he was ten years younger than Billy but twenty years less mature.

For Steve, the height of sophisticated humor was any limerick sufficiently obscene to cause grown men to blush.

He could tie knots in a cherry stem with just his tongue, load his right nostril with peanuts and fire them accurately into a target glass, and blow cigarette smoke out of his right ear.

As usual, Steve vaulted over the end gate in the bar instead of pushing through it. “How’re they hangin’, Kemosabe?”

“One hour to go,” Billy said, “and I get my life back.”

“This is life,” Steve protested. “The center of the action.”

The tragedy of Steve Zillis was that he meant what he said. To him, this common tavern was a glamorous cabaret.

After tying on an apron, he snatched three olives from a bowl, juggled them with dazzling speed, and then caught them one at a time in his mouth.

When two drunks at the bar clapped loudly, Steve basked in their applause as if he were the star tenor at the Metropolitan Opera and had earned the adulation of a refined and knowledgeable audience.

In spite of the affliction of Steve Zillis’s company, this final hour of Billy’s shift passed quickly. The tavern was busy enough to keep two bartenders occupied as the late-afternoon tipplers delayed going home and the evening drinkers arrived.

As much as he ever could, Billy liked the place during this transitional time. The customers were at peak coherency and happier than they would be later, when alcohol washed them toward melancholy.

Because the windows faced east and the sun lay west, softest daylight painted the panes. The ceiling fixtures layered a coppery glow over the burnt-red mahogany paneling and booths.

The fragrant air was savory with the scents of wood flooring pickled in stale beer, candle wax, cheeseburgers, fried onion rings.

Billy didn’t like the place enough, however, to linger past the end of his shift. He left promptly at seven.

If he’d been Steve Zillis, he would have made a production of his exit. Instead, he departed as quietly as a ghost dematerializing from its haunt.

Outside, less than two hours of summer daylight remained. The sky was an electric Maxfield Parrish blue in the east, a paler blue in the west, where the sun still bleached it.

As he approached his Ford Explorer, he noticed a rectangle of white paper under the driver’s-side windshield wiper.

Behind the steering wheel, with his door still open, he unfolded the paper, expecting to find a handbill of some kind, advertising a car wash or a maid service. He discovered a neatly typed message:

If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County.

If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work.

You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.

Billy didn’t at that instant feel the world tilt under him, but it did. The plunge had not yet begun, but it would. Soon.

2

Mickey Mouse took a bullet in the throat. The 9-mm pistol cracked three more times in rapid succession, shredding Donald Duck’s face.

Lanny Olsen, the shooter, lived at the end of a fissured blacktop lane, against a stony hillside where grapes would never grow. He had no view of the fabled Napa Valley.

As compensation for his unfashionable address, the property was shaded by beautiful plum trees and towering elms, brightened by wild azaleas. And it was private.

The nearest neighbor lived at such a distance that Lanny could have partied 24/7 without disturbing anyone. This offered no benefit to Lanny because he usually went to bed at nine-thirty; his idea of a party was a case of beer, a bag of chips, and a poker game.

The location of his property, however, was conducive to target shooting. He was the most practiced shot in the sheriff’s department.

As a boy, he’d wanted to be a cartoonist. He had talent. The Disney-perfect portraits of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, fixed to the hay-bale backstop, were Lanny’s work.

Ejecting the spent magazine from his pistol, Lanny said, “You should have been here yesterday. I head-shot twelve Road Runners in a row, not a wasted round.”

Billy said, “Wile E. Coyote would’ve been thrilled. You ever shoot at ordinary targets?”

“What would be the fun in that?”

“You ever shoot the Simpsons?”

“Homer, Bart—all of them but Marge,” Lanny said. “Never Marge.”

Lanny might have gone to art school if his domineering father, Ansel, had not been determined that his son would follow him into law enforcement as Ansel himself had followed his father.

Pearl, Lanny’s mother, had been as supportive as her illness allowed. When Lanny was sixteen, Pearl had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Radiation therapy and drugs sapped her. Even in periods when the lymphoma was controlled, she did not fully regain her strength.

Concerned that his father would be a useless nurse, Lanny never went away to art school. He remained at home, took up a career in law enforcement, and looked after his mother.

Unexpectedly, Ansel was first to die. He stopped a motorist for speeding, and the motorist stopped him with a .38 fired point-blank.

Having contracted lymphoma at an atypically young age, Pearl lived with it for a surprisingly long time. She had died ten years previously, when Lanny was thirty-six.

He’d still been young enough for a career switch and art school. Inertia, however, proved stronger than the desire for a new life.

He inherited the house, a handsome Victorian with elaborate millwork and an encircling veranda, which he maintained in pristine condition. With a career that was a job but not a passion, and with no family of his own, he had plenty of spare time for the house.

As Lanny shoved a fresh magazine in the pistol, Billy took the typewritten message from a pocket. “What do you make of this?”

Lanny read the two paragraphs while, in the lull of gunfire, blackbirds returned to the high bowers of nearby elms.

The message evoked neither a frown nor a smile from Lanny, though Billy had expected one or the other. “Where’d you get this?”

“Somebody left it under my windshield wiper.”

“Where were you parked?”

“At the tavern.”

“An envelope?”

“No.”

“You see anyone watching you? I mean, when you took it out from under the wiper and read it.”

“Nobody.”

“What do you make of it?”

“That was my question to you,” Billy reminded him.

“A prank. A sick joke.”

Staring at the ominous lines of type, Billy said, “That was my first reaction, but then…”

Lanny stepped sideways, aligning himself with new hay bales faced with full-figure drawings of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. “But then you ask yourself What if…?”

“Don’t you?”

“Sure. Every cop does, all the time, otherwise he ends up dead sooner than he should. Or shoots when he shouldn’t.”

Not long ago, Lanny had wounded a belligerent drunk who he thought had been armed. Instead of a gun, the guy had a cell phone.

“But you can’t keep what-ifing yourself forever,” he continued. “You’ve got to go with instinct. And your instinct is the same as mine. It’s a prank. Besides, you’ve got a hunch who did it.”

“Steve Zillis,” said Billy.

“Bingo.”

Lanny assumed an isosceles shooting stance, right leg quartered back for balance, left knee flexed, two hands on the pistol. He took a deep breath and popped Elmer five times as a shrapnel of blackbirds exploded from the elms and tore into the sky.

Counting four mortal hits and one wound, Billy said, “The thing is…this doesn’t seem like something Steve would do—or could.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a guy who carries a small rubber bladder in his pocket so he can make a loud farting sound when he thinks that might be funny.”

“Meaning?”

Billy folded the typewritten message and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “This seems too complex for Steve, too…subtle.”

“Young Steve is about as subtle as the green-apple nasties,” Lanny agreed.

Resuming his stance, he spent the second half of the magazine on Bugs, scoring five mortal hits.

“What if it’s real?” Billy asked.

“It’s not.”

“But what if it is?”

“Homicidal lunatics only play games like that in movies. In real life, killers just kill. Power is what it’s about for them, the power and sometimes violent sex—not teasing you with puzzles and riddles.”

Ejected shell casings littered the grass. The westering sun polished the tubes of brass to a bloody gold.

Aware that he hadn’t quelled Billy’s doubt, Lanny continued: “Even if it were real—and it’s not—what is there to act upon in that note?”

“Blond schoolteachers, elderly women.”

“Somewhere in Napa County.”

“Yeah.”

“Napa County isn’t San Francisco,” Lanny said, “but it’s not unpopulated barrens, either. Lots of people in lots of towns. The sheriff’s department plus every police force in the county together don’t have enough men to cover all those bases.”

“You don’t need to cover them all. He qualifies his targets—a lovely blond schoolteacher.”

“That’s a judgment,” Lanny objected. “Some blond schoolteacher you find lovely might be a hag to me.”

“I didn’t realize you had such high standards in women.”

Lanny smiled. “I’m picky.”

“Anyway there’s also the elderly woman active in charity work.”

Jamming a third magazine in the pistol, Lanny said, “A lot of elderly women are active in charities. They come from a generation that cared about their neighbors.”

“So you aren’t going to do anything?”

“What do you want me to do?”

Billy had no suggestion, only an observation: “It seems like we ought to do something.”

“By nature, police are reactive, not proactive.”

“So he has to murder somebody first?”

“He isn’t going to murder anyone.”

“He says he will,” Billy protested.

“It’s a prank. Steve Zillis has finally graduated from the squirting-flowers-and-plastic-vomit school of humor.”

Billy nodded. “You’re probably right.”

“I’m for sure right.” Indicating the remaining colorful figures fixed to the triple-thick wall of hay bales, Lanny said, “Now before twilight spoils my aim, I want to kill the cast of Shrek.”

“I thought they were good movies.”

“I’m not a critic,” Lanny said impatiently, “just a guy having some fun and sharpening his work skills.”

“Okay, all right, I’m out of here. See you Friday for poker.”

“Bring something,” Lanny said.

“Like what?”

“Jose’s bringing his pork-and-rice casserole. Leroy’s bringing five kinds of salsa and lots of corn chips. Why don’t you make your tamale pie?”

As Lanny spoke, Billy winced. “We sound like a group of old maids planning a quilting party.”

“We’re pathetic,” Lanny said, “but we’re not dead yet.”

“How would we know?”

“If I were dead and in Hell,” Lanny said, “they wouldn’t let me have the pleasure of drawing cartoons. And this sure isn’t Heaven.”

By the time Billy reached his Explorer in the driveway, Lanny Olsen had begun to blast away at Shrek, Princess Fiona, Donkey, and their friends.

The eastern sky was sapphire. In the western vault, the blue had begun to wear off, revealing gold beneath, and the hint of red gesso under the gilt.

Standing by his SUV in the lengthening shadows, Billy watched for a moment as Lanny honed his marksmanship and, for the thousandth time, tried to kill off his unfulfilled dream of being a cartoonist.

3

An enchanted princess, recumbent in a castle tower, dreaming the years away until awakened by a kiss, could not have been lovelier than Barbara Mandel abed at the Whispering Pines.

In the caress of lamplight, her golden hair spilled across the pillow, as lustrous as bullion poured from a smelter’s cauldron.

Standing at her bedside, Billy Wiles had never seen a bisque doll with a complexion as pale or as flawless as Barbara’s. Her skin appeared translucent, as though the light penetrated the surface and then brightened her face from within.

If he were to lift aside the thin blanket and sheet, he would expose an indignity not visited on enchanted princesses. An enteral-nutrition tube had been inserted surgically into her stomach.

The doctor had ordered a slow continuous feeding. The drip pump purred softly as it supplied a perpetual dinner.

She had been in a coma for almost four years.

Hers was not the most severe of comas. Sometimes she yawned, sighed, moved her right hand to her face, her throat, her breast.

Occasionally she spoke, though never more than a few cryptic words, not to anyone in the room but to some phantom of the mind.

Even when she spoke or moved her hand, she remained unaware of everything around her. She was unconscious, unresponsive to external stimulation.

At the moment she lay quiet, brow as smooth as milk in a pail, eyes unmoving behind their lids, lips slightly parted. No ghost breathed with less sound.

From a jacket pocket, Billy took a small wire-bound notebook. Clipped to it was a half-size ballpoint pen. He put them on the nightstand.

The small room was simply furnished: one hospital bed, one nightstand, one chair. Long ago Billy had added a barstool that allowed him to sit high enough to watch over Barbara.

Whispering Pines Convalescent Home provided good care but an austere environment. Half the patients were convalescing; the other half were merely being warehoused.

Perched on the stool beside the bed, he told her about his day. He began with a description of the sunrise and ended with Lanny’s shooting gallery of cartoon celebrities.

Although she had never responded to anything he’d said, Billy suspected that in her deep redoubt, Barbara could hear him. He needed to believe that his presence, his voice, his affection comforted her.

When he had no more to say, he continued to gaze at her. He did not always see her as she was now. He saw her as she’d once been—vivid, vivacious—and as she might be today if fate had been kinder.

After a while he extracted the folded message from his shirt pocket and read it again.

He had just finished when Barbara spoke in murmurs from which meaning melted almost faster than the ear could hear: “I want to know what it says…”

Electrified, he rose from the stool. He leaned over the bed rail to stare more closely at her.

Never before had anything she’d said, in her coma, seemed to relate to anything that he said or did while visiting. “Barbara?”

She remained still, eyes closed, lips parted, apparently no more alive than the object of mourning on a catafalque.

“Can you hear me?”

With trembling fingertips, he touched her face. She did not respond.

He had already told her what the strange message said, but now he read it to her just in case her murmured words had referred to it.

When he finished, she did not react. He spoke her name without effect.

Sitting on the stool once more, he plucked the little notebook from the nightstand. With the small pen, he recorded her seven words and the date that she had spoken them.

He had a notebook for each year of her unnatural sleep. Although each contained only a hundred three-by-four-inch pages, none had been filled, as she did not speak on every—or even most—visits.

I want to know what it says

After dating that unusually complete statement, he flipped pages, looking back through the notebook, reading not the dates but just some of her words.

lambs could not forgive

beef-faced boys

my infant tongue

the authority of his tombstone

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, prism

season of darkness

it swells forward

one great heave

all flashes away

twenty-three, twenty-three

In her words, Billy could find neither coherence nor a clue to any.

From time to time through the weeks, the months, she smiled faintly. Twice in his experience she had laughed softly.

On other occasions, however, her whispered words disturbed him, sometimes chilled him.

torn, bruised, panting, bleeding

gore and fire

hatchets, knives, bayonets

red in their eyes, their frenzied eyes

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

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

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

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

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

To her lips, her right hand rose as though to feel the texture of her words. “What it is that it keeps on saying.”

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

“Barbara?”

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

She lowered her hand to her breast. The furrows faded from her brow. Her eyes, which as she spoke had roved beneath their lids, grew fixed once more.

Pen poised over paper, Billy waited, but Barbara matched the silence of the room. And the silence deepened, and the stillness, until he felt that he must go or meet a fate similar to that of a prehistoric fly preserved in amber.

She would lie in this hush for hours or for days, or forever.

He kissed her but not on the mouth. That would feel like a violation. Her cheek was soft and cool against his lips.

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

4

Billy did not have the isolation that Lanny enjoyed, but he lived on an acre shrouded by alders and deodar cedars, along a lane with few residences.

He didn’t know his neighbors. He might not have known them even if they had lived closer. He was grateful for their disinterest.

The original owner of the house and the architect had evidently negotiated each other into a hybrid structure, half bungalow, half upscale cabin. The lines were those of a bungalow. The cedar siding, silvered by the weather, belonged on a cabin, as did the front porch with rough-hewn posts supporting the roof.

Unlike most bipolar houses, this one appeared cozy. Diamond-pane, beveled-glass windows—pure bungalow—looked bejeweled when the lights were on. In daylight the leaping-deer weather vane on the roof turned with lazy grace even in turbulent scrambles of wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither the back steps nor the floorboards of the porch creaked. He had plenty of time to keep the place in good, tight condition.

After gutting the kitchen, he himself had built the cabinets. They were cherry wood with a dark stain.

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

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

He poured a cold bottle of Guinness stout into a mug, spiked it with bourbon. When he did drink, he wanted punch in both the texture and the taste.

He was making a pastrami sandwich when the phone rang. “Hello?”

The caller did not respond even when Billy said hello again.

Ordinarily, he would have thought the line was dead. Not this evening.

Listening, he fished the typewritten message from his pocket. He unfolded it and smoothed it flat on the black-granite counter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the dinette table in the kitchen, he ate the sandwich and two dill pickles. He drank a second stout, this time without the added bourbon.

He had no TV. The entertainment shows bored him, and he didn’t need the news.

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

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

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

On one shelf stood a set of Dickens in matched bindings, which Barbara had given him for Christmas. She’d had a passion for Dickens.

These days, he needed to keep busy. Just sitting in a chair with a book made him restless. He felt vulnerable somehow.

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

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

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

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

He did not go to the desk, where the unused computer mocked him. Instead, he sat at a worktable arrayed with his carving tools.

Here also were stacks of white-oak blocks. They had a sweet wood smell. The blocks were raw material for the ornamentations that would decorate the bedroom ceiling, which was currently bare plaster.

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

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

Lying on his back in the dark, staring at a ceiling that he could not see, he waited for his eyes to fall shut. He waited.

He heard something on the roof. Something scratching at the cedar-shake shingles. The owl, no doubt.

The owl did not hoot. Perhaps it was a raccoon. Or something.

He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Twenty minutes past midnight.

You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.

Everything would be all right in the morning. Everything always was. Well, not all right, but good enough to encourage perseverance.

I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying.

A few times, he closed his eyes, but that was no good. They had to fall shut on their own for sleep to follow.

He looked at the clock as it changed from 12:59 to 1:00.

The note had been under the windshield wiper when he had come out of the tavern at seven o’clock. Six hours had passed.

Someone had been murdered. Or not. Surely not.

Below the scratching talons of the owl, if it was an owl, he slept.

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrons regularly offered names for the place. Jackie found their suggestions to be either awkward or inappropriate, or twee.

When Billy arrived at 10:45 Tuesday morning, fifteen minutes before the tavern opened, the only cars in the lot were Jackie’s and Ben Vernon’s. Ben was the day cook.

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

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

Foundations had been poured in early spring. Walls were rising.

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

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

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

None of the animated mural’s moving parts was yet operational; nevertheless, it fostered a convincing illusion of movement, speed.

On commission, a famous artist with a single name—Valis—had designed the thing and had built it with a crew of sixteen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went into the tavern.

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

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

“No.”

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

“I was carving to zydeco.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He did?” Jackie asked.

“Yeah.”

“The Hitler?”

“Well, it wasn’t Bob Hitler.”

“You’re jerking my chain.”

“Look it up.”

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

“Something,” Billy said.

“This guy wrote science fiction.”

“Surprise.”

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

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

“The customers find him amusing,” Billy said.

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

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

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

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

“Ask Celia Reynolds.”

“Who’s she?”

“Lives next door to Steve.”

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

“Celia says he has rages in the backyard.”

“What’s that mean—rages?”

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

“What stuff?”

“Like a dining-room chair.”

“Whose?”

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

“Why?”

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

“On a chair.”

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

“Maybe he likes watermelon,” Billy said.

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

“Cursing all the time.”

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

“What dummies?”

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

“Mannequins?”

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

“Where would he get mannequins?”

“Beats me.”

“This doesn’t sound right.”

“Talk to Celia. She’ll tell you.”

“Has she asked Steve why he does it?”

“No. She’s afraid to.”

“You believe her?”

“Celia isn’t a liar.”

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

“Probably not, but who knows.”

“Maybe you should fire him.”

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

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

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

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

“I’m always a little watchful.”

“I never noticed it.”

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

“Unfair?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before Billy could reply, the first customer of the day came through the door. It was 11:04. The guy wanted brunch: a Bloody Mary with a celery stick.

Jackie and Billy tended bar together through the lunchtime traffic, and Jackie served food to the tables as Ben plated it from the grill.

They were busier than usual because Tuesday was chili day, but they still didn’t need a first-shift waitress. A third of the customers had lunch in a glass, and another third were satisfied with peanuts or with sausages from the brine jar on the bar, or with free pretzels.

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you think that means?”

“What prays has died.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I’m still trying to figure it.”

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

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

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

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

“Who, me? Why would I?”

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

“Did you call me back?”

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

Selecting three plump olives from the condiment tray Steve said, “Anyway, I was out last night with a friend.”

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

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

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

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

“What’s that mean?”

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

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

“Lots of people.” Steve caught the first olive in his mouth, the second, the third, and chewed vigorously to applause from the barstool gallery.

During the last hour of his shift, Billy was markedly more observant of Steve Zillis than usual. Yet he saw nothing suspicious.

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

Well, it didn’t matter. No one had been murdered. The note had been a joke; and sooner or later the punch line would be delivered.

As Billy was leaving the tavern at seven o’clock, Ivy Elgin came to him, restrained excitement in her brandy-colored eyes. “Somebody’s going to die in a church.”

“How do you figure?”

“The mantis. What prays has died.”

“Which church?” he asked.

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

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

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

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

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

Although he worked with Ivy five days a week, the impact of her extraordinary beauty and sexuality could make him forget, at times, that she was in some ways more girl than woman, sweet and guileless, virtuous even if not pure.

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

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

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

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

6

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

He wanted nothing more than to sit with Barbara for a while and then to go home. He didn’t see her seven times a week, but he visited more days than not.

His stops at Whispering Pines were one of the blocks with which the foundation of his simple life had been built. He looked forward to them as he looked forward to quitting-time and carving.

He was not a stupid man, however, and not even merely smart. He knew that his life of seclusion might easily deteriorate into one of solitude.

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

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

He did not have much of what he wanted in life. But by nature he was prudent enough to recognize that if he threw away the note, he would also be throwing away everything that now sustained him. His life would be not merely different but worse.

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

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

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

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

“Billy. Dear sweet Jesus, Billy.”

“What?”

“I’m sweating. Look at me sweating.”

“What? What is it?”

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

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

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

“Look at me.”

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

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

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

Lanny licked his lips. “Giselle Winslow.”

“I don’t know her.”

“Neither do I.”

“Where?”

“She taught English down in Napa.”

“Blond?”

“Yeah.”

“And lovely,” Billy guessed.

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

“Nearly to death.”

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

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

“Her sister found her just two hours ago.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing smelled real about it,” Lanny said.

“About what?”

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

“Was she married?” Billy asked.

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

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

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

“Was she married?” Billy asked again.

“Who?”

“The woman. The schoolteacher. Giselle Winslow.”

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

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

“What does it matter?”

“It matters,” Billy said.

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

“It matters to me, Lanny.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe I should have,” Billy said.

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

“Defense against what?”

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

“What’s a ten card?”

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

“What’d you do?”

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

“I didn’t say you were.”

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

“All right. Okay.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

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

Although he glanced at his wristwatch, Billy waited.

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

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

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

Sympathetic but unwilling to yield the paper, which was now damp with his own perspiration, Billy unfolded and read it.

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

If you do go to the police, I will kill a young mother of two.

You have five hours to decide. The choice is yours.

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

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

“I’ve got to go down to Napa.”

“Why?”

“To give both these notes to the police.”

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

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

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

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

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

“This one does.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”

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

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

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

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

“The choice is yours,” Lanny repeated.

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

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

“For God’s sake, Lanny.”

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

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

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

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

“What are you asking me to do?”

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

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

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

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

“I’m only asking for one. One hour.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the summer evening waned toward the darkness that always drove gulls to seaside roosts, these birds were so out of place that they seemed to be an omen. Their piercing, cold cries brought a creeping chill to the nape of Billy’s neck.

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

“Where’s the first one?” Lanny asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know,” Billy replied.

“You don’t know what?”

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

“That’s all I need. I’ll call you.”

As Lanny turned away, Billy put a hand on his shoulder, halting him. “What do you mean you’ll call? You said you’d bring Palmer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No answer but a frown occurred to Lanny.

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

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

“Was it?”

“Like a river. Now this rock.”

“Always a rock.”

“That’s true enough,” Lanny said, and walked away toward his patrol car.

Mother Olsen’s only child appeared defeated, slump-shouldered and baggy-assed.

Billy wanted to ask if everything was all right between them, but that was too direct. He couldn’t think of another way to phrase the question.

Then he heard himself say, “Something I’ve never told you and should have.”

Lanny stopped, looked back, regarding him warily.

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

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

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

Billy watched him get in the car and drive away.

In a silence of vanished sea gulls, the breathless day waned, while the hills and the meadows and the trees gradually drew more shadows over themselves.

On the farther side of the highway, the forty-foot wooden man strove to save himself from the great grinding wheels of industry or brutal ideology, or modern art.

7

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

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

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

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

This evening, peace was more elusive than usual.

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

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

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

“—soft black drizzle—”

“—death of the sun—”

“—the scarecrow of a suit—”

“—livers of fat geese—”

“—narrow street, high houses—”

“—a cistern to hold the fog—”

“—strange forms…ghostly motion—”

“—clear-sounding bells—”

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

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

This evening she responded with silence, and occasionally with a sigh uncolored by emotion, as if she were a machine that breathed in a shallow rhythm with louder exhalations caused by random power surges.

After reading aloud two sequences, Billy returned the notebook to his pocket.

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

He paced the room. The window drew him.

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

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

Seventy or eighty feet from the window, a man alone stood in one of those lanes. He had no tools with him and did not appear to be at work.

If he was a grower or a vintner out for a walk, he must not be in a hurry. He stood in one place, feet planted wide apart, hands in his trouser pockets.

He seemed to be studying the convalescent home.

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

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

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

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

Considering that any coma was a far deeper sleep than mere sleep itself, Billy wondered if hers were more intense than ordinary dreams—full of fevered action, crashing with a thunderstorm of sound, drenched in color.

He worried that her dreams were nightmares, vivid and perpetual.

When he kissed her forehead, she murmured, “The wind is in the east…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8

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

Nevertheless, when he found the back door of the house ajar, he considered waiting in the yard until Lanny arrived with Sheriff Palmer.

That option occupied his consideration only for a moment. He didn’t care if Lanny and Palmer thought he was gutless, but he didn’t want to think it of himself.

He went inside. No one waited in the kitchen.

The draining daylight drizzled down the windows more than it penetrated them. Warily, he turned on lights as he went through the house.

He found no intruder in any room or closet. Curiously, he saw no signs of intrusion, either.

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

That possibility had to be discounted when he found the spare key on a kitchen counter, near the phone. It should have been taped to the bottom of one of twenty cans of wood stain and varnish stored on a shelf in the garage.

Billy had last used the spare key five or six months previously. He could not possibly have been under surveillance that long.

Suspecting the existence of a key, the killer must have intuited that the garage was the most likely place in which it would have been hidden.

Billy’s professionally equipped woodworking shop occupied two-thirds of that space, presenting numerous drawers and cabinets and shelves where such a small item could have been hidden. The search for it might have taken hours.

If the killer, after visiting the house, intended to announce his intrusion by leaving the spare key in the kitchen, logic argued that he would have saved himself the time and trouble of the search. Instead, why wouldn’t he have broken one of the four panes of glass in the back door?

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

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

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

Lanny knew where the spare key was kept. When he had asked for the first note, as evidence, Billy had told him that it was here, in the kitchen.

Lanny had also asked where to find him in an hour, whether he would be going directly home or to Whispering Pines.

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

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

Billy didn’t want to believe such a thing. He sought excuses for Lanny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In retrospect, Billy heard markedly greater desperation in his friend’s voice than he had heard at the time:

I never really wanted this life…but the thing is…whether I wanted it or not, it’s what I’ve got now. It’s all I have. I want a chance to keep it.

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

The wall clock showed 8:09.

In less than four hours, regardless of the choice that Billy made, someone would die. He wanted this responsibility off his shoulders.

Lanny was supposed to call him by 8:30.

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

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

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

His friend’s betrayal, if that’s what it was, had reduced Billy to the cautious calculations of a guilty man, although he had done nothing wrong.

A transient sting of mingled pain and anger would have been understandable. Instead, resentment swelled in him so thick, so quick, that his chest grew tight and he had difficulty swallowing.

Destroying the notes and lying about them might spare Lanny dismissal from the force, but Billy’s situation would be made worse. Lacking evidence, he would find it more difficult to convince the authorities that his story was true and that it might shed light on the killer’s psychology.

If he approached them now, he risked looking like a publicity seeker or like a bartender who sampled too much of his wares. Or like a suspect.

Riveted by that thought, he stood very still for a minute, exploring it. Suspect.

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

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

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

He splashed his greasy face with cold water, washed his hands in hot.

He paced the kitchen. He sat briefly at the table, then paced some more.

At 8:30, he stood by the telephone, staring at it, although he had every reason to believe that it would not ring.

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

The kitchen was too warm. He felt stifled.

At 8:45, Billy stepped outside, onto the back porch. He needed fresh air.

With the door wide open behind him, he could hear the telephone if it rang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

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

In just three hours, a fate would be decided, a death ordained, and if the killer followed a pattern, someone would be murdered before dawn.

The key to the SUV lay on the dinette table. Billy picked it up.

He considered setting out in search of Lanny Olsen. What he had thought was resentment, earlier, had been mere exasperation. Now he knew real resentment, a dark and bitter brooding. He badly wanted confrontation.

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

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

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

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

The mute listener on the line the previous night had been Giselle Winslow’s murderer. Billy had no proof, but no doubt, either.

Maybe he would call this evening, too. If Billy could speak to him, something might be accomplished, something learned.

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

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

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

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

He hung the key to the SUV on a pegboard.

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

He stood in the center of the kitchen.

He glanced at the phone.

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

He just stood there, studying the polished black-granite floor at his feet.

He kept an immaculate house. The granite was glossy, spotless.

The blackness under his feet appeared to have no substance, as if he were standing on air, high in the night itself, with five miles of atmosphere yawning below, wingless.

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

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

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

He glanced at the SUV key dangling on the pegboard.

He went to the phone and stood staring at it.

He sat at the table.

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

After a while, he went to the study, where he spent so many evenings carving architectural ornaments at a corner worktable.

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

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

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

Without a carver’s vise, he could work only on the finer details of the leaves, which was engraving work akin to scrimshaw. The blade scraped a hollow sound from the oak, as if this were bone, not wood.

At ten minutes past ten o’clock, less than two hours before the deadline, he abruptly decided that he would go to the sheriff.

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

Billy snared the key from the pegboard, opened the door, stepped onto the back porch—and halted.

If you do go to the police, I will kill a young mother of two.

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

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

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

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

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

What if the children awakened? As witnesses, they might be eliminated.

The madman had not promised to kill only the mother.

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

Billy returned to the kitchen and closed the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At 11:45, after patting his hands dry on a dishtowel, he got a cold Guinness and drank it from the bottle. He finished it too fast.

Five minutes after the first beer, he opened a second. He poured it in a glass to encourage himself to sip it and make it last.

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

Eleven-fifty. Countdown.

As much as Billy wanted to lie to himself, he couldn’t be fooled. He had made a choice, all right. The choice is yours. Even inaction is a choice.

The mother who had two children—she wouldn’t die tonight. If the homicidal freak kept his end of the bargain, the mother would sleep the night and see the dawn.

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

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

He finished the second Guinness as midnight arrived. He wanted a third. And a fourth.

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

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

Nothing more would happen tonight, except that without the beer, Billy wouldn’t be able to sleep. He might find himself carving again.

His hands ached. Not from his three insignificant wounds. From having clutched the tools too tightly. From having held the chunk of oak in a death grip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The listener. The freak.

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

The caller did not respond.

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

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

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

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

The freak would not be baited. He disconnected.

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

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

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

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

10

Graceful in starlight with oaks, the church stood along the main highway, a quarter of a mile from the turnoff to Lanny Olsen’s house.

Billy drove to the southwest corner of the parking lot. Under the cloaking gloom of a massive California live oak, he doused the headlights and switched off the engine.

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

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

Billy had a gun, of course.

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

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

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

This particular Smith & Wesson tipped the scale at only thirty-six ounces, but maybe the extra weight that he felt was its history.

He got out of the Explorer and locked the doors.

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

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

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

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

He halted to let his eyes grow accustomed to the moonless dark.

Motionless, he listened. The air was still. No traffic moved on the distant highway. His presence had silenced the cicadas and the toads. He could almost hear the stars.

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

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

At the second house, a dog ran loose in the fenced yard. It did not bark, but raced back and forth along the high pickets, whimpering for Billy’s attention.

Lanny’s place lay a third of a mile past the house with the dog. At every window, light of one quality or another fired the glass or gilded the curtains.

In the yard, Billy crouched beside a plum tree. He could see the west face of the house, which was the front, and the north flank.

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

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

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

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

A cartoonist might be expected also to be a prankster. The funny streak in Lanny had been repressed for so long, however, that it was less of a streak than a thread. He made reasonably good company, but he wasn’t a load of laughs.

Billy didn’t intend to wager his life—or a nickel—that Lanny Olsen had hoaxed him.

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

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

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

An invitation this bold seemed to suggest a trap.

Billy expected to find Lanny Olsen dead inside.

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

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

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

If he had known, perhaps he would have made a different choice. Choosing the death of a friend would be harder than dropping the dime on a nameless stranger. Even if the stranger was a mother of two.

He didn’t want to think about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

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

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

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

Billy got the message, all right, but he chose to ignore it for the time being.

He left the front door open in case he needed to make a quick exit.

Holding the revolver with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling, he stepped through an archway to the left of the foyer. The living room looked as it had when Mrs. Olsen had been alive, ten years ago. Lanny didn’t use it much.

The same was true of the dining room. Lanny ate most of his meals in the kitchen or in the den while watching TV.

In the hallway, taped to the wall, another cartoon hand pointed toward the foyer and the stairs, opposite from the direction in which he was proceeding.

Although the TV was dark in the den, flames fluttered in the gas-log fireplace, and in a bed of faux ashes, false embers glowed as if real.

On the kitchen table stood a bottle of Bacardi, a double-liter plastic jug of Coca-Cola, and an ice bucket. On a plate beside the Coke gleamed a small knife with a serrated blade and a lime from which a few slices had been carved.

Beside the plate stood a tall, sweating glass half full of a dark concoction. In the glass floated a slice of lime and a few thin slivers of melting ice.

After stealing the killer’s first note from Billy’s kitchen and destroying it with the second to save his job and his hope of a pension, Lanny had tried to drown his guilt with a series of rum and Cokes.

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

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

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

From a kitchen drawer, Billy removed a clean dishtowel. After wiping the metal drawer-pull and the knob on the pantry door, he tucked one end of the cloth under his belt and let it hang from his side in the manner of a bar rag.

On a counter near the cooktop lay Lanny’s wallet, car keys, pocket change, and cell phone. Here, too, was his 9-mm service pistol with the Wilson Combat holster in which he carried it.

Billy picked up the cell phone, switched it on, and summoned voice mail. The only message in storage was the one that he himself had left for Lanny earlier in the evening.

This is Billy. I’m at home. What the hell? What’ve you done? Call me now.

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

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

Which would make him a suspect.

He had brooded about the voice mail during the drive to the church parking lot and during the walk through the meadow. Deleting it seemed the wisest course if he found what he expected to find on the second floor.

He switched off the cell phone and used the dishtowel to wipe it clean of prints. He returned it to the counter where he had found it.

If someone had been watching right then, he would have figured Billy for a calm, cool piece of work. In truth, he was half sick with dread and anxiety.

An observer might also have thought that Billy, judging by his meticulous attention to detail, had covered up crimes before. That wasn’t the case, but brutal experience had sharpened his imagination and had taught him the dangers of circumstantial evidence.

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

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

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

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

At the moment, he couldn’t think of anything to be done about the phone-company records. He put it out of his mind.

More urgent matters required his attention. Like finding the corpse, if one existed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He left the kitchen and followed the hall to the foyer. At least the stairs were not dark; there was light here below, at the landing, and at the top.

Ascending, he did not bother calling Lanny’s name. He knew that he would receive no answer, and he doubted that he could have found his voice anyway.

12

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

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

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

Using the dishtowel, he wiped all the doorknobs after he touched them.

With only the one space remaining to be searched, he stood in the hall, listening. No pin dropped.

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

He entered the master bedroom, where two lamps glowed.

The rose-patterned wallpaper chosen by Lanny’s mother had not been removed after she died and not even, a few years later, after Lanny moved out of his old room into this one. Age had darkened the background to a pleasing shade reminiscent of a light tea stain.

The bedspread had been one of Pearl Olsen’s favorites: rose in color overall, with embroidered flowers along the borders.

Often during Mrs. Olsen’s illness, following chemotherapy sessions, and after her debilitating radiation treatments, Billy had sat with her in this room. Sometimes he just talked to her or watched her sleep. Often he read to her.

She had liked swashbuckling adventure stories. Stories set during the Raj in India. Stories with geishas and samurai and Chinese warlords and Caribbean pirates.

Pearl was gone, and now so was Lanny. Dressed in his uniform, he sat in an armchair, legs propped on a footstool, but he was gone just the same.

He had been shot in the forehead.

Billy didn’t want to see this. He dreaded having this image in his memory. He wanted to leave.

Running, however, was not an option. It never had been, neither twenty years ago nor now, nor any time between. If he ran, he would be chased down and destroyed.

The hunt was on, and for reasons he didn’t understand, he was the ultimate game. Speed of flight would not save him. Speed never saved the fox. To escape the hounds and the hunters, the fox needed cunning and a taste for risk.

Billy didn’t feel like a fox. He felt like a rabbit, but he would not run like one.

The lack of blood on Lanny’s face, the lack of leakage from the wound suggested two things: that death had been instantaneous and that the back of his skull had been blown out.

No bloodstains or brain matter soiled the wallpaper behind the chair. Lanny had not been drilled as he sat there, had not been shot anywhere in this room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy could see the title, the author’s name, and the jacket illustration. The story was about a search for treasure and true love in the South Pacific.

A long time ago, he had read this novel to Pearl Olsen. She had liked it, but then she had liked them all.

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

The psychopath had arranged all of this. The tableau satisfied him and had emotional meaning to him, or it was a message—a riddle, a taunt.

Before disturbing the scene, Billy studied it. Nothing about it seemed compelling or clever, nothing that might have excited the murderer enough to motivate him to put forth such effort in its creation.

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

Lanny had betrayed Billy; but that didn’t matter anymore. On the edge of the Dark, on the brink of the Void, few offenses were worth remembering. The only things worth recalling were the moments of friendship and laughter.

If they had been at odds on Lanny’s last day, they were on the same team now, with the same and singular adversary.

Billy thought he heard a noise in the hall.

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

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

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

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

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

13

As he stood at the head of the stairs, listening, pain had begun to throb in Billy’s temples. He realized that his teeth were clenched tighter than the jaws of a vise.

He tried to relax and breathe through his mouth. He rolled his head from side to side, working the stiffening muscles of his neck.

Stress could be beneficial if you used it to stay focused and alert. Fear could paralyze, but also sharpen the survival instinct.

He returned to the master bedroom.

Approaching the door, he suddenly thought body and book would be gone. But Lanny still sat in the armchair.

From a tissue box on one of the nightstands, Billy plucked two Kleenex. Using them as an impromptu glove, he moved the dead man’s hand off the book.

Leaving the book on the cadaver’s lap, he opened it to the place that had been marked by the photograph.

He expected sentences or paragraphs to have been highlighted in some fashion: a further message. But the text was pristine.

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

She was young and blond and pretty. Nothing in the picture gave a clue to her profession, but Billy knew that she had been a teacher.

Her killer must have found this snapshot in her house, down in Napa. Before or after finding it, he brutally beat the beauty out of her.

No doubt the freak had left the photograph in the book to confirm for the authorities that the two murders had been the work of the same man. He was bragging. He wanted the credit that he had earned.

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

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

If it was possible to feel genuinely heartbroken over the fate of a stranger, the photo of this young woman would have done the job had Billy stared at it too long. He returned it to the book and closed it in the yellowing pages.

After putting the dead man’s hand atop the book, as it had been, he wadded the two Kleenex in his fist. He went into the bathroom that was part of the master suite, pushed the plunger with the Kleenex, and then dropped them into the whirling water in the toilet bowl.

In the bedroom, he stood beside the armchair, not sure what he should do.

Lanny did not deserve to be left here alone without benefit of prayer or justice. If not a close friend, he had nevertheless been a friend. Besides, he was Pearl Olsen’s son, and that ought to count for a lot.

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

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

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

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

Likewise, the definition of victory was known only to him. Winning the pot, capturing the king, scoring the final touchdown might mean, in this case, sending Billy to prison for life not for any rational reason, not so the freak himself could escape justice, but for the sheer fun of it.

Considering that he could not even discern the shape of the playing field, Billy didn’t relish being interrogated by Sheriff John Palmer.

He needed time to think. A few hours at least. Until dawn.

“I’m sorry,” he told Lanny.

He switched off one of the bedside lamps and then the other.

If the house glowed like a centenarian’s birthday cake through the night, someone might notice. And wonder. Everyone knew Lanny Olsen was an early-to-bed guy.

The house stood at the highest and loneliest point of the dead-end lane. Virtually no one drove up here unless they were coming to see Lanny, and no one was likely to visit during the next eight or ten hours.

Midnight had turned Tuesday to Wednesday. Wednesday and Thursday were Lanny’s days off. No one would miss him at work until Friday.

Nevertheless, one by one, Billy returned to the other upstairs rooms and switched off those lights as well.

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

In the kitchen, he closed the door to the porch and locked it.

He intended to take Lanny’s spare key with him.

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

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

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

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

14

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

Frequently, he glanced back. As far as he could tell, no one followed him.

Moonless, the night favored a stalker. It should have favored Billy, too, but he felt exposed by the stars.

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

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

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