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.
He didn’t want to choose. He didn’t want anyone to die.
In all of Napa County, there might be dozens of young mothers with two children. Maybe a hundred, two hundred, maybe more.
Even with five hours, they couldn’t have identified and alerted all the possible targets. They would have to use the media to warn the public. That might take days.
Now, with less than two hours, nothing substantive would be done. They might spend longer than that just questioning Billy.
55
The young mother, obviously preselected by the killer, would be murdered.
What if the children awakened? As witnesses, they might be eliminated. The madman had not promised to kill only the mother.
On damp night air, a musky smell wafted from the rich layers of mast on the woodland floor and drifted from the trees to the porch. Billy returned to the kitchen and closed the door.
Later, whittling leaf details, he pricked a thumb. He didn’t get a Band-Aid. The puncture was small; it should close quickly.
When he nicked a knuckle, he remained too intensely involved with the carving to bother attending to it. He worked faster, and didn’t notice when he sustained a third tiny cut.
To an observer, had there been one, it might have seemed as though Billy wanted to bleed.
Because his hands remained busy, the wounds kept weeping. The wood soaked up the blood.
In time, he realized that the oak had completely discolored. He dropped the carving and put aside the blade.
He sat for a while, staring at his hands, breathing hard for no reason. In time, the bleeding stopped, and it didn’t start up again when he washed his hands at the sink.
At 11:45, after patting his hands dry on a dishtowel, he got a cold Guinness and drank it from the bottle. He finished it too fast. Five minutes after the first beer, he opened a second. He poured it in a glass to encourage himself to sip it and make it last.
He stood with the Guinness in front of the wall clock.
Eleven-fifty. Countdown.
As much as Billy wanted to lie to himself, he couldn’t be fooled. He had made a choice, all right. The choice is yours. Even inaction is a choice. The mother who had two children—she wouldn’t die tonight. If the homicidal freak kept his end of the bargain, the mother would sleep the night and see the dawn.
Billy was part of it now. He could deny, he could run, he could leave his window shades down for the rest of his life and cross the line from recluse to hermit, but he could not escape the fundamental fact that he was part of it.
56
The killer had offered him a partnership. He had wanted no part of it. But now it turned out to be like one of those business deals, one of those aggressive stock offers, that writers in the financial pages called a hostile takeover. He finished the second Guinness as midnight arrived. He wanted a third. And a fourth.
He told himself he needed to keep a clear head. He asked himself why, and he had no credible answer.
