Dean Koontz - Velocity

“If you won’t do it, he will,” said Cottle.

“Why would I choose? I’m screwed either way, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. It’s not my business.”

“The hell it’s not.”

“It’s not my business,” Cottle insisted. “I’ve got to sit here till you give me your decision, then I give it to him, and I’m not a part of it anymore. You’ve got just more than two minutes left.”

“I’m going to the cops.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“I’m in shit to my hips,” Billy admitted, “but I’ll only be deeper later.”

When Billy rose from his rocking chair, Cottle said sharply, “Sit down! If you try to leave this porch before I do, you’ll be shot in the head.”

The stewbum stowed bottles in his pockets, not weapons. Even if Cottle had a gun, Billy was confident about taking it from him.

“Not me,” Cottle said. “Him. How he’s watching us right now is through the scope of a high-powered rifle.”

The gloom of the woods to the north, the dazzle of sun on the slope to the east, the rock formations and swales of the fields on the south side of the county road…

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“He can just about read our lips,” Cottle said. “It’s the finest marksman’s gun, and he’s qualified for it. He can nail you at a thousand yards.”

“Maybe that’s what I want.”

“He’s willing to oblige. But he doesn’t think you’re ready. He says you will be eventually. In the end, he says, you’ll ask him to kill you. But not yet.”

Even with his weight of guilt, Billy Wiles suddenly felt like a feather, and he feared a sudden wind. He settled into the rocking chair.

“Why it’s too late to go to the cops,” Cottle said, “is because he planted evidence in her place, on her body.”

The day remained still, but here came the wind. “What evidence?”

“For one thing, some of your hairs in her fist and under her fingernails.”

Billy’s mouth felt numb. “How would he get my hairs?”

“From your shower drain.”

Before the nightmare had begun, when Giselle Winslow had still been alive, the freak had already been in this house.

The shade on the porch no longer held the summer heat at bay. Billy might as well have been standing on blacktop in the sun. “What else besides hairs?”

“He didn’t say. But it’s nothing the police will tie to you… unless for some reason you come under suspicion.”

“Which he can make happen.”

“If the cops start thinking maybe they should ask you for a DNA sample, you’re finished.”

Cottle glanced at the wristwatch.

So did Billy.

“One minute left,” Cottle advised.

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Chapter 23

One minute. Billy Wiles stared at his wristwatch as if it were a bomb clock counting down to detonation.

He wasn’t thinking about the fleeting seconds or the evidence planted at the scene of Giselle Winslow’s murder, or about being in the sights of a highpowered rifle. Instead, he was composing a mental directory of people in his life. Faces flickered rapidly through his mind. Those he liked. Those toward whom he was indifferent. Those he disliked.

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These were dark shoals. He could founder on them. Yet turning his mind away from such thoughts proved as difficult as ignoring a knife held to his throat.

A knife of another kind, a knife of guilt cut him loose from these considerations at last. Realizing how seriously he had been calculating the comparative value of the people in his life, assessing which of them had a lesser right to life than others, he could not repress a shudder of disgust.

“No,” he said, seconds before his time ran out. “No, I’ll never choose. He can go to Hell.”

“Then he’ll choose for you,” Cottle reminded Billy.

“He can go to Hell.”

“All right. It’s your call. It’s on your shoulders, Mr. Wiles. It’s none of my business.”

“Now what?”

“You stay in the chair, sir, right where you are. I’m supposed to go inside to the kitchen phone, wait for his call, and tell him your decision.”

“I’ll go inside,” Billy said. “I’ll take the call.”

“You’re making me crazy,” Cottle said, “you’re gonna get us both killed.”

“It’s my house.”

When he raised the bottle to his mouth, Cottle’s hands shook so badly that the glass rattled against his teeth. Whiskey dribbled down his chin. Without wiping the spill off his face, he said, “He wants you in that chair. You try to go inside, he’ll blow your brains out before you reach the door.”

“What sense does that make?”

“Then he’ll blow my brains out, too, because I couldn’t make you listen to me.”

“He won’t,” Billy disagreed, beginning to intuit something of the freak’s perspective. “He’s not ready to end it, not this way.”

“What do you know? You don’t know. You don’t know squat.”

“He’s got a plan, a purpose, something that might not make sense to you or me, but it makes sense to him.”

“I’m just a useless damn drunk, but even I know you’re full of crap.”

“He wants to work it all out the way he conceived it,” Billy said more to himself than to Cottle, “not just end it in the middle with two head shots.”

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Anxiously surveying the sun-dazzled day beyond the front porch, spraying spittle as he spoke, Ralph Cottle said, “You bullheaded sonofabitch, will you listen to me! You don’t listen!”

“I’m listening.”

“More than anything, he wants things done his way. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Get it? Maybe he doesn’t want you to hear his voice.”

That made sense if the freak was someone whom Billy knew.

Cottle said, “Or maybe he just doesn’t want to listen to your bullshit any more than I do. I don’t know. If you want to answer the phone to show him who’s boss, just to piss him off, and he blows your brains out, I don’t give a rat’s ass. But then he’ll kill me, too, and you can’t choose for me. You can’t choose for me!”

Billy knew that his instincts were right: The freak wouldn’t shoot them.

“Your five minutes are up,” Cottle said worriedly, gesturing toward the watch on the railing. “Six minutes. You’re past six minutes. He won’t like this.”

In truth, Billy didn’t know the freak would hold his fire. He suspected that would be the case, intuited it, but he didn’t know.

“Your time is up. Going on seven minutes. Seven minutes. He expects me to leave the porch, go inside.”

Cottle’s faded blue eyes were boiled in fear. He had so little to live for, yet he was desperate to live. What else is there? he had said.

“Go,” Billy told him.

“What?”

“Go inside. Go to the phone.”

Bolting up from his rocking chair, Cottle dropped the open pint. Several ounces of whiskey spilled from the uncapped mouth.

Cottle didn’t stoop to retrieve his treasure. In fact, in his haste to get to the front door, he kicked the bottle and sent it spinning across the porch floor. At the threshold to the house, he looked back and said, “I’m not sure how quick he’ll call.”

“You just remember every word he says,” Billy instructed. “You remember every word exactly.”

“All right, sir. I will.”

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“And every inflection. You remember every word and how he says it, and you come tell me.”

“I will, Mr. Wiles. Every word,” Cottle promised, and he went into the house.

Billy remained alone on the porch. Perhaps still in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight.

Chapter 24

Three butterflies, aerial geishas, danced out of the sunshine, into the porch shadows. Their silken kimonos flaring and folding and flaring in graceful swirls of color, as bashful as faces hidden behind the pleats of hand-painted fans, they fled, quick, into the brightness from which they had come. Performance.