“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.
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.
Perhaps this was the word that defined the killer, that would lead to an explanation of his actions, and that if understood would reveal his Achilles’
heel.
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According to Ralph Cottle, the freak had referred to the murder of a woman and to the peeling away of her face as “the second act” in one of his
“best performances.”
In assuming that the psychopath considered murder to be largely a thrilling game, Billy had been wrong. Sport might be part of it, but this man wasn’t entirely or even primarily motivated by a perverse sense of fun. Billy didn’t quite know what to make of the word performance. Maybe to his nemesis, the world was a stage, reality was a fraud, and all was artifice. How that view could explain this homicidal behavior—or predict it—Billy didn’t know, couldn’t guess. Nemesis represented wrong thinking. A nemesis was an enemy who could not be defeated. The better word was adversary. Billy had not given up hope.
With the front door standing open, the ring of the telephone would carry to the front porch. He had not heard it yet.
Lazily rocking the chair, not to make a harder target of himself, but to disguise his anxiety and thus rob the killer of the chance to take any satisfaction from it, Billy studied the nearest California live oak and then the next to the nearest.
They were huge old trees with broad canopies. Their trunks and branches looked black in the bright sun.
In those shadowy arbors, a sniper might find a crook of branches to serve as a platform to accommodate him and a tripod for his rifle. The two nearest houses down-slope, one on this side of the road, one on the farther side, were well within the thousand-yard range. If nobody had been home, the freak could have broken into one of those places; he might now be at an upstairs window. Performance.
Billy was not able to think of any person in his life to whom that word had greater relevance than it did to Steve Zillis. The tavern was a stage to Steve. Was it logical, however, that the freak, a vicious serial killer with a
