Velocity. Part 14

"You said money was one thing. What was the other?"

"He'd kill me if I didn't come see you."

"That's what he threatened to do?"

"He doesn't make threats, Mr. Wiles."

"Sounds like one."

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

"Do you know what he's done?" Billy asked.

"No, sir. And don't you tell me."

"There's two of us now who know he's real. We can corroborate each other's story."

"Don't even talk that way."

"Don't you see, he's made a mistake."

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

"But he's got to be stopped," Billy said.

"Not by me. I'm n.o.body's hero. Don't you tell me what he's done. Don't you dare."

"Why shouldn't I tell you?"

"That's your world. It isn't mine."

"There's just one world."

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

"We're sitting here on the same porch."

"No, sir. It looks like one porch, but it's two, all right. You know that's true. I see it in you."

"See what?"

"I see the way you're a little like me."

Chilled, Billy said, "You can't see anything. You won't even look at me."

Ralph Cottle met Billy's eyes again. "Have you seen the woman's face in the jar like a jellyfish?"

The conversation had suddenly switched from the main track to a strange spur line.

"What woman?" Billy asked.

Cottle knocked back another slug from the pint. "He says he's had her in the jar three years."

"Jar? Better stop pouring down that nose paint, Ralph. You're not making much sense."

Cottle closed his eyes and grimaced, as if he could see what he now described. "It's a two-quart jar, maybe bigger, with a wide-mouth lid. He changes the formaldehyde regularly to keep it from clouding."

Beyond the porch, the sky was crystalline. High in the clear light, a lone hawk circled, as clean as a shadow.

"The face tends to fold into itself," Cottle continued, "so you don't at first see a face. It's like something from the sea, clenched yet billowy. So he gently shakes the jar, gently swirls the contents, and the face... it blossoms."

The gra.s.s is sweet and green across the lawn, then taller and golden where nature alone tends to it. The two gra.s.ses produce distinct fragrances, each crisp and pleasant in its own way.

"You recognize an ear first," said Ralph Cottle. "The ears are attached, and the cartilage gives them shape. There's cartilage in the nose, too, but it hasn't held its shape very well. The nose is just a lump."

From the shining heights, the hawk descended in a narrowing gyre, describing silent and harmonious curves.

"The lips are full, but the mouth is just a hole, and the eyes are holes. There's no hair, 'cause he cut only from one ear to the other, from the top of the brow to the bottom of the chin. You can't tell it's a woman's face, and not a man's. He says she was beautiful, but there's no beauty in the jar."

Billy said, "It's just a mask, latex, a trick."

"Oh, it's real. It's as real as terminal cancer. He says it was the second act in one of his best performances."

"Performances?"

"He has four photos of her face. In the first, she's alive. Then dead. In the third, the face is partly peeled back. In the fourth, her head is there, her hair, but the soft tissue of her face is gone, nothing but bone, the grinning skull."

From graceful gyre to sudden plunge, the hawk knifed toward the tall gra.s.s.

The pint told Ralph Cottle that he needed fortification, and he drank a new foundation for his crumbling courage.

Following a fumy exhalation, he said, "The first photo, when she was alive, maybe she was pretty like he says. You can't tell because... she's all terror. She's ugly with terror."

The tall gra.s.s, previously motionless in the fixative heat, stirred briefly in a single place, where feathers thrashed the stalks.

"The face in that first picture," Cottle said, "is worse than the one in the jar. It's a lot worse."

The hawk burst from the gra.s.s and soared. Its talons clutched something small, perhaps a field mouse, which struggled in terror, or didn't. At this distance, you couldn't be sure.

Cottle's voice was a file rasping on ancient wood. "If I don't do exactly what he wants me to, he promises to put my face in a jar. And while he harvests it, he'll keep me alive, and conscious."

In the bright pellucid sky, the rising hawk was as black and clean as a shadow once more. Its wings cleaved the shining air, and the high thermals were the pristine currents of a river through which it swam, and dwindled, and vanished, having killed only what it needed to survive.

Chapter 21.

Rockless in the rocking chair, Ralph Cottle said that he lived in a ramshackle cottage by the river. Two rooms and a porch with a view, the place had been hammered together in the 1930's and had been falling apart ever since.

Long ago, unknown rugged individuals had used the cottage for fishing vacations. It had no electric service. An outhouse served as the toilet. The only running water was what pa.s.sed in the river.

"I think mainly it was a place for them to get away from their wives," Cottle said. "A place to drink and get drunk. It still is."

A fireplace provided heat and allowed simple cooking. What meals Cottle ate were spooned from hot cans.

Once the property had been privately owned. Now it belonged to the county, perhaps seized for back taxes. Like much government land, it was poorly managed. No bureaucrats or game wardens had bothered Ralph Cottle since the day, eleven years ago, when he had cleaned out the cottage, put down his bedroll, and settled in as a squatter.

No neighbors lived within sight or within shouting distance. The cottage was a secluded outpost, which suited Cottle just fine.

Until 3:45 the previous morning, when he had been prodded awake by a visitor in a ski mask: Then what had seemed like cozy privacy had become a terrifying isolation.

Cottle had fallen asleep without extinguishing the oil lamp by which he read Western novels and drank himself to sleep. In spite of that light, he hadn't absorbed any useful details about the killer's appearance. He couldn't estimate the man's height or weight.

He claimed the madman's voice had no memorable characteristics.

Billy figured Cottle knew more but feared to tell. The anxiety that now simmered in his faded blue eyes was as pure and intense, if not as immediate, as the terror he described in the photograph of the unknown woman from whom the freak had "harvested" a face.

Judging by the length of his skeletal fingers and the formidable bones in his k.n.o.bby wrists, Cottle had once been equipped to fight back. Now, by his own admission, he was weak, not just emotionally and morally, but physically.

Nevertheless, Billy leaned forward in his chair and tried again to enlist him: "Back me up with the police. Help me-"

"I can't even help myself, Mr. Wiles."

"You must've once known how."

"I don't want to remember."

"Remember what?"

"Anything. I told you-I'm weak."

"Sounds like you want to be."

Raising the pint to his lips, Cottle smiled thinly and, before taking a drink, said, "Haven't you heard-the meek shall inherit the earth."

"If you won't do it for yourself, do it for me."

Licking his lips, which were badly chapped by the heat and by the dehydrating effect of the whiskey, Cottle said, "Why would I?"

"The meek don't stand by and watch another man destroyed. The meek aren't the same as cowards. They're two different breeds."

"You can't insult me into cooperation. I don't insult. I don't care. I know I'm nothing, and that's all right with me."

"Just because you've come here to do what he wants, you won't be safe out there in your cottage."

s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the cap on the bottle, Cottle said, "Safer than you."

"Not at all. You're a loose end. Listen, the police will give you protection."

A dry laugh escaped the stewb.u.m. "Is that why you've been so quick to run to them-for their protection?"

Billy said nothing.

Emboldened by Billy's silence, Cottle found a sharper voice that was less mean than smug: "Just like me, you're nothing, but you don't know it yet. You're nothing, I'm nothing, we're all nothing, and as far as I care, if he leaves me alone, that psycho s.h.i.thead can do what he wants to anybody because he's nothing, too."

Watching Cottle screw open the pint-bottle cap that he had just screwed shut, Billy said, "What if I throw your a.s.s down those stairs and kick you off my land? He calls me sometimes just to wear on my nerves. What if when he calls I tell him you were drunk, incoherent, I couldn't understand a thing you said?"

Cottle's sunburned and blood-fused face could not turn pale, but his small purse of a mouth, snugged tight with self-satisfaction after his rant, now loosened and poured forth the dull coins of a counterfeit apology. "Mr. Wiles, sir, please don't take offense at my bad mouth. I can't control what comes out of it any more than I can control what I pour into it."

"He wanted to be sure you told me about the face in the jar, didn't he?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He didn't consult with me, sir. He just put words in my mouth to bring to you, and here I am because I want to live."

"Why?"

"Sir?"

"Look at me, Ralph."

Cottle met his eyes.

Billy said, "Why do you want to live?"

As though Cottle had never considered it before, the question seemed to pin down some fluttering thing in his mind, like a rare moth to a specimen board, some ever-restless and ever-contentious and ever-bitter aspect of himself that for a moment he seemed at last disposed to consider. Then his eyes became evasive, and he clasped both hands, not just one, around the pint of whiskey.

"Why do you want to live?" Billy persisted.

"What else is there?" Avoiding Billy's eyes, Cottle raised the bottle in both hands, as if it were a chalice. "I could use just a taste," he said, as though asking for permission.

"Go ahead."

He took a small sip, but then at once took another.

"The freak made you tell me about the face in the jar because he wants that image in my head."

"If you say so."

"It's about intimidation, about keeping me off balance."