“Really? You’d want the cops to see the scene of the crime, have them tramping through here, with the bondage pornos, those mannequins in the next room?”
Although still scared, Zillis found sufficient self-pity to pout. “Who died and made you God?”
Billy shook his head. “Steve, you’re pathetic. You’ll take the ten thousand, be glad you’re alive, and get out. Plus one more thing—don’t ever call Mandy Pollard again.”
“Wait a minute. You can’t—”
“Don’t call her, don’t see her. Not ever.”
“Billy, she could make all the difference for me.”
“She’s a nice girl. She’s a decent girl.”
262
“That’s what I mean. I know I could clean up my act if she—”
“A good woman can turn a man around,” Billy said. “But not a man who’s as far down the rathole as you are. If you call her or see her, even just once, I’ll know. And I’ll find you. You believe that?”
Zillis said nothing.
“And if you touch her,” Billy said, “so help me God, I’ll kill you, Steve.”
“This is 50 not right,” Zillis said.
“Do you believe me? You better believe me, Steve.”
When Billy put his hand on the grip of the holstered pistol, Zillis said,
“Hey. All right. I hear you.”
“Good. I’m leaving now.”
“This place sucks anyway,” Zillis said. “Wine country is just another word for farm. I’m not a farm boy.”
“No, you’re not,” Billy said from the doorway.
“There’s no action around here.”
“There’s no zing,” Billy agreed.
“Screw you.”
Billy said, “Happy trails, Kemosabe.”
263
By the time that he’d driven only half a mile from Zillis’s place, Billy had the shakes so bad that he had to pull to the curb, put the Explorer in park, and get control of himself.
Under pressure, he had become the thing he most despised. For a while, he had become John Palmer.
Paying Zillis ten thousand bucks didn’t make Billy any less like Palmer, either.
When the shakes subsided, he didn’t put the SUV in gear because he didn’t know where to go from here. He felt that he was at a brink. You don’t drive over a brink.
He wanted to go home, but nothing there would help him work out a solution to this puzzle.
He wanted to go home just to be home. He recognized the familiar reclusive urge. Once home, he could sit at his carving bench with the blocks of oak, and the world could go to Hell.
Except this time, he would go to Hell with it. He could not take Barbara home with him, and if he left her alone and in jeopardy, he would have trashed his only excuse for living.
Events had thrust him into action, into the rush of life, yet he felt isolated and beyond desperation.
For too long he’d done no proper sowing and now had no harvest. His friends were all acquaintances. Though life is community, he had no community.
In fact, his situation was worse than isolation. The friends who were no more than acquaintances were now not even acquaintances as much as they were suspects. He had carpentered for himself a loneliness of exquisite paranoia.
264
Pulling away from the curb, Billy drove with no destination in mind, as far as he was aware. Like a bird, he rode the currents of the night, intent only upon staying aloft and not falling into absolute despair before some gleam of hope appeared.
He had learned more about Ivy Elgin in one brief visit to her house than he had troubled himself to know about her during the years they had worked together. And though he liked Ivy, he found her more mysterious now than when he had known so much less about her.
He did not think that she could have any connection to the freak committing these murders. But his experience with his own mother and father reminded him that he could not be sure of anyone.
Harry Avarkian was a kind man and a fine attorney—but also one of three trustees overseeing seven million dollars, a temptation that could not be discounted. Before Barbara, Billy had been to Harry’s house only once. Barbara socialized him. They had gone to Harry’s for dinner half a dozen times in a year—but since the coma, Billy had not visited Harry anywhere but at his office.
He knew Harry Avarkian. But he didn’t know him.
Billy’s mind circled to Dr. Ferrier. Which was crazy. Prominent physicians in the community didn’t go around
