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…
105
“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.
106
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.
107
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.”
