Dean Koontz - Velocity

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.

47

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 creamcolored 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.

48

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.

Chapter 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.

49

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.

50

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.