“You won’t spot him,” Cottle said, “and he won’t like it that you’re trying. Come back, sit down.”
Billy remained on his feet at the railing.
“You’ve wasted half a minute, Mr. Wiles, forty seconds.”
Billy didn’t move.
“You don’t know what a box you’re in,” Cottle said anxiously. “You’re gonna need every minute he’s given you to think.”
“So tell me about the box.”
“You have to be sitting down. For God’s sake, Mr. Wiles.” Cottle wrung his voice as a worried old woman might wring her hands. “He wants you sitting in the chair.”
Billy returned to the rocking chair.
“I just want to be done with this,” Cottle said. “I just want to do what he told me and get out of here.”
103
“Now you’re the one wasting time.”
One of the five minutes had passed.
“All right, okay,” Cottle said. “This is him talking now. You understand?
This is him.”
“Get on with it.”
Cottle nervously licked his lips. He slipped the pint from his coat, not seeking a taste at the moment, instead clutching it with both hands, as if it were a talisman with the occult power to lift the fog of whiskey that blurred his memory, ensuring that he would deliver the message clearly enough to save his face from being pickled in a jar.
“ ‘I will kill someone you know. You will select the target for me from people in your life,’” Cottle quoted. “ ‘This is your chance to rid the world of some hopeless asshole.’”
“The twisted sonofabitch,” Billy said, and discovered that both of his hands were fisted, with nothing to punch.
“ ‘If you don’t select the target for me,’” Cottle continued quoting, “ ‘I will choose someone in your life to kill. You have five minutes to decide. The choice is yours, if you have the balls to make it.’”
The effort to recall the precise wording of the message reduced Ralph Cottle to a hive of buzzing nerves. Countless anxieties swarmed through him and were glimpsed in his darting eyes, in his twitching face, in his trembling hands; Billy could almost hear the thrumming wings of dread. While Cottle had recited the freak’s challenge and conditions, with the penalty of death hanging over him if he got them wrong, the pint bottle had been a talisman with the power to inspire, but now he needed the contents. Staring at the wristwatch on the porch railing, Billy said, “I don’t need five minutes. Hell, I don’t even need the three that’re left.”
104
Without intention, by not going to the police and getting them involved, he had already contributed to the death of one person in his life: Lanny Olsen. By his inaction, he had spared the mother of two, but he had doomed his friend. Lanny himself had been partly if not largely responsible for his own death. He had taken the killer’s notes and had destroyed them to save his job and his pension, at the cost of his life.
Nevertheless, some of the blame lay with Billy. He could feel the weight; and always would.
What the freak demanded of him now was something new and more terrible than anything heretofore. Not by inaction this time, not by inadvertence, but by conscious intent, Billy was expected to mark someone he knew for death.
“I won’t do it,” he said.
Having guzzled a dram or two, Cottle was sliding the wet mouth of the bottle back and forth across his lips, as if he might French kiss it instead of drinking any more. Through his nose, he noisily inhaled the rising fumes.
“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.”
