Dean Koontz - Velocity

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 sheriffsdepartment dispatcher. He would be leaving a trail that might have consequences he could not foresee.

51

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 drainboard. He leaned over the sink until the queasiness 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.

52

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.

Chapter 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.

53

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.

54

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.