Velocity. Part 44

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

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

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

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

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

He dared not wait to see if this time the gun had been heard. Immediately, he unfolded the smoking blanket on the ground and rolled the dead man in it.

Getting the corpse into the Explorer proved more difficult than he expected. Valis was heavier than scrawny Ralph Cottle.

If someone had been filming Billy, he would have had in camera a cla.s.sic piece of macabre comedy. This was one of those moments when he wondered about G.o.d; didn't doubt His existence, just wondered about Him.

With Valis wrapped and loaded, Billy slammed the tailgate and returned to the motor home.

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

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

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

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

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

Turning slowly in a full circle, casting his mind back to the moment, Billy tried to remember if, during the short time he'd been without gloves, he'd touched any surface that could be fingerprinted. No. The place was clean.

He left the steel blinds shut. He left the tambour panels raised to expose the collection of faces and hands.

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

What a surprise for the glamorous crew of artists and artisans.

No traffic appeared on the highway during the time that he drove away from the motor home, out of the meadow, and onto the pavement.

What patterns his tires had imprinted in the dust, if they had imprinted any, would be obliterated when the crew arrived in a few hours.

Chapter 73.

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

While Billy removed the redwood lid, the narrow ragged wound of an appropriately b.l.o.o.d.y dawn opened along the contours of the mountains in the east.

A prayer didn't feel appropriate.

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

When the sounds of the body's descent faded into silence, Billy said, "Older and more experienced, my a.s.s." Then he remembered to drop Lanny's wallet into the pipe, and he replaced the lid.

As the night futilely resisted the early purple light, Billy parked the Explorer on the yard behind Lanny's garage. He let himself into the house.

This was Thursday, only the second of Lanny's two days off. No one was likely to wonder about him or to come around looking for him until sometime Friday.

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

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

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

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

Something didn't feel right.

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

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

Billy took up the cushions to see if anything from Cottle's pockets might have fallen between them. When he found nothing, he replaced the cushions.

Still plagued by a disquieting feeling that he had overlooked something, he sat down to brood. Because he was a mess, he didn't risk soiling a chair but with a sigh of weariness sat cross-legged on the floor.

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

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

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

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

Chapter 74.

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

Then memory tweaked him fully awake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lots of uniforms milled around the motor home, the tent, the mural. Sheriff John Palmer would be one of them because there were also TV-NEWS vans standing b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper along the shoulder of the highway.

Billy realized that he was still wearing latex gloves. All right. No problem. No one could see and wonder why.

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

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

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

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

When he stepped across the kitchen threshold, he allowed his instinct to guide him. Valis wouldn't have brought Giselle Winslow's hand here in a jar full of formaldehyde. Such a container would have been too awkward and fragile to allow quick work on the sly. Instinct suggested the simplest solution.

He went to the refrigerator and opened the freezer drawer at the bottom. Among the containers of ice cream and packages of leftovers were two foil-wrapped objects that he did not recognize.

He opened them on the floor. Two hands, each from a different woman. One of them had probably belonged to the redhead.

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

Billy couldn't stop trembling as he rewrapped the hands. For a while, he had thought that he had become inured to horror. He had not.

Before the day was done, he would have to throw out all the contents of the freezer. No contamination could have occurred, but the thought of contamination sickened him. He might have to trash the refrigerator itself.

He wanted the hands out of the house. He didn't expect the police to knock on the door with a search warrant, but he wanted the hands gone, anyway.

Burying them somewhere on the property seemed like a bad idea. At the very least, he would have dreams about them clawing out of their small graves and creeping into the house at night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy stood watching as the bird described a widening gyre.

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

The business with the women's hands had suppressed his appet.i.te. He didn't think he would feel comfortable eating at home.

Maybe he would return to the truck stop for dinner. He felt as if he owed the waitress, Jasmine, even a bigger tip than the one he had previously left her.

In the hallway, heading for the bathroom, Billy saw a light in his office. When he looked through the doorway, he found the shades drawn, as he had left them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went into the kitchen, opened an Elephant beer, and used it to chase a pair of Motrin. The inflammation in his left hand worried him a little.

At the table with the beer, and with a few first-aid items, he tried to introduce iodine into the nail wound, then applied a fresh liquid bandage.