Billy’s hand tightened on the cell phone. “I drove past earlier. His car was parked out front.”
“It’s a day off for Steve, remember?”
Billy had forgotten.
“When I couldn’t get a temp to fill your shift, Steve came in from three to nine to save my ass. What’re you doing out driving around when you’re sick?”
“I was going to a doctor’s appointment. Steve could only give you six hours?”
“He had stuff to do before and after.”
Like kill a redhead before, nail Billy’s hand to a floor after.
“What did the doctor say?” Jackie asked.
“It’s a virus.”
“That’s what they always say when they don’t know what the hell it really is.”
“No, I think it’s really a forty-eight-hour virus.”
“As if a virus knows from forty-eight hours,” Jackie said. “You go in with a third eye growing out of your forehead, they’ll say it’s a virus.”
“Sorry about this, Jackie.”
“I’ll survive. It’s just the tavern business, after all. It’s not war.”
Pressing END to terminate the call, Billy Wiles felt very much at war.
222
On a kitchen counter lay Lanny Olsen’s wallet, car keys, pocket change, cell phone, and 9-mm service pistol, where they had been since the previous night.
Billy took the wallet. When he left, he would also take the cell phone, the pistol, and the Wilson Combat holster.
From the items in the bread drawer, he selected half a loaf of whole wheat in a tie-top plastic bag.
Outside, standing at the eastern end of the porch, he threw the slices of bread onto the lawn. The morning birds would feast.
In the house once more, he lined the empty plastic bag with a dishtowel. A gun case with glass doors stood in the study. In drawers under the doors, Lanny kept boxes of ammunition, four-inch aerosol cans of chemical Mace, and a spare police utility belt.
On the belt were pouches for backup magazines, a Mace holder, a Taser sleeve, a handcuff case, a key holder, a pen holder, and a holster. It was all ready to go.
From the belt, Billy removed a loaded magazine. He also took the handcuffs, a can of Mace, and the Taser. He put those items in the bread bag.
223
Quick winged presences, perhaps bats feeding on moths in the first hour of Thursday morning, swooped low through the yard, past Billy, and climbed. When he followed the sound of what he could not see, his gaze rose to the thinnest silver shaving of a new moon.
Although it must have been there earlier, making its way west, he had not noticed this fragile crescent until now. Not surprising. Since nightfall, he’d had little time for the sky, his attention grimly earthbound.
Ralph Cottle, limbs stiffened at inconvenient angles by rigor mortis, wrapped in a blanket because no plastic drop cloth could be found, held in a bundle by Lanny’s entire collection of neckties—three—did not drag easily across the sloped yard to the brush line.
Cottle had said that he was nobody’s hero. And certainly he had died a coward’s death.
He had wanted to live even his shabby existence because—What else is there?—he could not imagine that something better might be his to strive for, or to accept.
In the moment when the blade slipped between his ribs and stopped his heart, he would have realized that while life could be evaded, death could not. Billy felt a certain solemn sympathy for even this man, whose despair had been deeper than Billy’s and whose resources had been shallower. And so when the brush and brambles snared the soft blanket and made dragging the body too difficult, he picked it up and hauled it across his shoulder, without revulsion or complaint. Under the burden, he staggered but didn’t collapse.
He had returned minutes earlier to remove, once again, the lid from the redwood frame. The open vent waited.
Cottle had said there wasn’t one world but a billion, that his was different from Billy’s. Whether that had been true or not, here their worlds became one. The bundled body dropped. And hit. And tumbled. And dropped. Into the dark, the vacant into the vacant.
When silence endured, suggesting that the skeptic had reached his deep rest with the good son and the unknown woman, Billy shoved the cover into place, used his flashlight to be sure the holes were aligned, and screwed it down once more.
224
He hoped never to see this place again. He suspected, however, that he would have no choice but to return.
Driving away from the Olsen house, he did not know where to go. Eventually he must confront Steve Zillis, but not at once, not yet. First he needed to prepare himself.
