Velocity. Part 33

With exercise, the ache in his hand had grown worse. He took one tablet of Cipro, one of Vicodin.

He decided to eradicate all evidence of his friend's drinking binge. The house should offer nothing unusual for the police to contemplate.

When Lanny went missing long enough, they would come here to knock, to look through the windows. They would come inside. If they saw that he'd been pouring down rum, they might infer depression and the possibility of suicide.

The sooner they leaped to dire conclusions, the sooner they would search the farther reaches of the property. The longer that the trampled brush had to recover, the less likely they would ever focus on the securely covered lava pipe.

When all was neat and when the garbage bag of evidence was tied shut, when only Ralph Cottle remained to be attended, Billy used his cell phone to call the back bar number at the tavern.

Jackie O'Hara answered. "Tavern."

"How're the pigs with human brains?" Billy asked.

"They drink at some other joint."

"Because the tavern is a family bar."

"That's right. And always will be."

"Listen, Jackie-"

"I hate 'listen, Jackie.' It always means I'm going to be screwed."

"I'm going to have to take off tomorrow, too."

"I'm screwed."

"No, you're just melodramatic."

"You don't sound that sick."

"It's not a head cold. It's a stomach thing."

"Hold the phone to your gut, let me listen."

"Suddenly you're a harda.s.s."

"It doesn't look right, the owner working the taps too much."

"The place is so busy, Steve can't handle a midnight crowd by himself?"

"Steve isn't here, just me."

Billy's hand tightened on the cell phone. "I drove past earlier. His car was parked out front."

"It's a day off for Steve, remember?"

Billy had forgotten.

"When I couldn't get a temp to fill your shift, Steve came in from three to nine to save my a.s.s. What're you doing out driving around when you're sick?"

"I was going to a doctor's appointment. Steve could only give you six hours?"

"He had stuff to do before and after."

Like kill a redhead before, nail Billy's hand to a floor after.

"What did the doctor say?" Jackie asked.

"It's a virus."

"That's what they always say when they don't know what the h.e.l.l it really is."

"No, I think it's really a forty-eight-hour virus."

"As if a virus knows from forty-eight hours," Jackie said. "You go in with a third eye growing out of your forehead, they'll say it's a virus."

"Sorry about this, Jackie."

"I'll survive. It's just the tavern business, after all. It's not war."

Pressing END to terminate the call, Billy Wiles felt very much at war.

On a kitchen counter lay Lanny Olsen's wallet, car keys, pocket change, cell phone, and 9-mm service pistol, where they had been since the previous night.

Billy took the wallet. When he left, he would also take the cell phone, the pistol, and the Wilson Combat holster.

From the items in the bread drawer, he selected half a loaf of whole wheat in a tie-top plastic bag.

Outside, standing at the eastern end of the porch, he threw the slices of bread onto the lawn. The morning birds would feast.

In the house once more, he lined the empty plastic bag with a dishtowel.

A gun case with gla.s.s doors stood in the study. In drawers under the doors, Lanny kept boxes of ammunition, four-inch aerosol cans of chemical Mace, and a spare police utility belt.

On the belt were pouches for backup magazines, a Mace holder, a Taser sleeve, a handcuff case, a key holder, a pen holder, and a holster. It was all ready to go.

From the belt, Billy removed a loaded magazine. He also took the handcuffs, a can of Mace, and the Taser. He put those items in the bread bag.

Chapter 56.

Quick winged presences, perhaps bats feeding on moths in the first hour of Thursday morning, swooped low through the yard, past Billy, and climbed. When he followed the sound of what he could not see, his gaze rose to the thinnest silver shaving of a new moon.

Although it must have been there earlier, making its way west, he had not noticed this fragile crescent until now. Not surprising. Since nightfall, he'd had little time for the sky, his attention grimly earthbound.

Ralph Cottle, limbs stiffened at inconvenient angles by rigor mortis, wrapped in a blanket because no plastic drop cloth could be found, held in a bundle by Lanny's entire collection of neckties-three-did not drag easily across the sloped yard to the brush line.

Cottle had said that he was n.o.body's hero. And certainly he had died a coward's death.

He had wanted to live even his shabby existence because-What else is there?-he could not imagine that something better might be his to strive for, or to accept.

In the moment when the blade slipped between his ribs and stopped his heart, he would have realized that while life could be evaded, death could not.

Billy felt a certain solemn sympathy for even this man, whose despair had been deeper than Billy's and whose resources had been shallower.

And so when the brush and brambles snared the soft blanket and made dragging the body too difficult, he picked it up and hauled it across his shoulder, without revulsion or complaint. Under the burden, he staggered but didn't collapse.

He had returned minutes earlier to remove, once again, the lid from the redwood frame. The open vent waited.

Cottle had said there wasn't one world but a billion, that his was different from Billy's. Whether that had been true or not, here their worlds became one.

The bundled body dropped. And hit. And tumbled. And dropped. Into the dark, the vacant into the vacant.

When silence endured, suggesting that the skeptic had reached his deep rest with the good son and the unknown woman, Billy shoved the cover into place, used his flashlight to be sure the holes were aligned, and screwed it down once more.

He hoped never to see this place again. He suspected, however, that he would have no choice but to return.

Driving away from the Olsen house, he did not know where to go. Eventually he must confront Steve Zillis, but not at once, not yet. First he needed to prepare himself.

In another age, men on the eve of battle had gone to churches to prepare themselves spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. To incense, to candlelight, to the humility that the shadow of the redeemer pressed upon them.

In those days, every church had been open all day and night, offering unconditional sanctuary.

Times had changed. Now some churches might remain open around the clock, but many operated according to posted hours and locked their doors long before midnight.

Some withheld perpetual sanctuary because of the costs of heat and electricity. Budgets trump mission.

Others were plagued by vandals with cans of spray paint and by the faithless who, in a mocking spirit, came to copulate and leave their condoms.

In previous ages of rampant hatred, such intolerance had been met with resolve, with teaching, and with the cultivation of remorse. Now the clerical consensus was that locks and alarms worked better than the former, softer remedies.

Rather than travel from church to church, trying their doors and finding only sanctuary by prior appointment, Billy went where most modern men in need of a haven for contemplation were drawn in post-midnight hours: to a truck stop.

Because no interstate highways crossed the county, the available facility, along State Highway 29, was modest by the standards of the Little America chain that operated truck stops the size of small towns. But it featured banks of fuel pumps illuminated to rival daylight, a convenience store, free showers, Internet access, and a 24/7 diner that offered fried everything and coffee that would stand your hair on end.

Billy didn't want the coffee or cholesterol. He sought only the bustle of rational commerce to balance the irrationality with which he'd been dealing, and a place so public that he would not be at risk of attack.

He parked in a s.p.a.ce outside the diner, under a lamppost of such wattage he could read by the light that fell through the windshield.

From the glove box, he took foil packets of moist towelettes. He used them to scrub his hands.

They had been invented to mop up after a Big Mac and fries in the car, not to sterilize the hands after disposing of corpses. But Billy wasn't in a position-or of a mind-to be fussy.

His left hand, nailed and unpaled, felt hot and slightly stiff. He flexed it slowly, gingerly.

Because of the Vicodin, he felt no pain. That might not be good. A growing problem with the hand, not sensed, might manifest in a sudden weakness of grip at the very moment in the evolving crisis when strength was needed.

With warm Pepsi, he washed down two more Anacin, which had some effect as an anti-inflammatory. Motrin would have been better, but what he had was Anacin.

The right dose of caffeine could compensate somewhat for too little sleep, but too much might fray the nerves and compel him to rash action. He took another No-Doz anyway.

Busy hours had pa.s.sed since he had eaten the Hershey's and the Planters bars. He ate another of each.

While he ate, he considered Steve Zillis, his prime suspect. His only suspect.

The evidence against Zillis seemed overwhelming. Yet it was all circ.u.mstantial.

That did not mean the case was unsound. Half or more of the convictions obtained in criminal courts were based on convincing webs of circ.u.mstantial evidence, and far less than one percent of them were miscarriages of justice.

Murderers did not obligingly leave direct evidence at the scenes of their crimes. Especially in this age of DNA comparison, any felon with a TV could catch the CSI shows and educate himself in the simple steps that he must take to avoid self-incrimination.

Everything from antibiotics to zydeco had its downside, however, and Billy knew too well the dangers of circ.u.mstantial evidence.

He reminded himself that the problem had not been the evidence. The problem had been John Palmer, now the sheriff, then an ambitious young lieutenant bucking for a promotion to captain.

The night that Billy had made an orphan of himself, the truth had been horrific but clear and easily determined.

Chapter 57.

From a dream erotic, fourteen-year-old Billy Wiles is awakened by raised voices, angry shouting.

At first he is confused. He seems to have rolled out of a fine dream into another that is less pleasing.

He pulls one pillow over his head and buries his face in a second, trying to press himself back into the silken fantasy.

Reality intrudes. Reality insists.

The voices are those of his mother and father, rising from downstairs, so loud that the intervening floor hardly m.u.f.fles them.

Our myths are rich with enchanters and enchantresses: sea nymphs that sing sailors onto rocks, Circe turning men into swine, pipers playing children to their doom. They are metaphors for the sinister secret urge to self-destruction that has been with us since the first bite of the first apple.

Billy is his own piper, allowing himself to be drawn out of bed by the dissonant voices of his parents.