Velocity. Part 15

"Are you?"

Instead of answering the question, Billy said, "What else did he send you here to tell me?"

As if getting down to business, Cottle screwed the cap on the bottle again and this time returned the pint to his coat pocket. "You'll have five minutes to make a decision."

"What decision?"

"Take off your wrist.w.a.tch and prop it on the porch railing."

"Why?"

"To count off the five minutes."

"I can count them with the watch on my wrist."

"Putting it on the railing is a signal to him that the countdown has started."

Woods to the north, shadowy and cool in the hot day. Green lawn, then tall golden gra.s.s, then a few well-crowned oaks, then a couple of houses down-slope and to the east. To the west lay the county road, trees and fields beyond it.

"He's watching now?" Billy asked.

"He promised he would be, Mr. Wiles."

"From where?"

"I don't know, sir. Just please, please take off your watch and prop it on the railing."

"And if I won't?"

"Mr. Wiles, don't talk that way."

"But if I won't?" Billy pressed.

His baritone rasp thinned to a higher register as Cottle said, "I told you, he'll take my face, and me awake when he does. I told you."

Billy got up, removed his Timex, and propped it on the railing so that the watch face could be seen from both of the rocking chairs.

As the sun approached the zenith of its arc, it penetrated the landscape and melted shadows everywhere but in the woods. The green-cloaked conspiratorial trees revealed no secrets.

"Mr. Wiles, you've got to sit down."

Brightness fell from the air, and a chrome-yellow glare hazed the fields and furrows, forcing Billy to squint at numberless places where a man could lie in the open, effectively camouflaged by nothing more than spangled sunlight.

"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 G.o.d'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."

"Now you're the one wasting time."

One of the five minutes had pa.s.sed.

"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 a.s.shole.'"

"The twisted sonofab.i.t.c.h," 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 b.a.l.l.s to make it.'"

Chapter 22.

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 wrist.w.a.tch on the porch railing, Billy said, "I don't need five minutes. h.e.l.l, I don't even need the three that're left."

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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+t 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 stewb.u.m 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."

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...

"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 wrist.w.a.tch.

So did Billy.

"One minute left," Cottle advised.

Chapter 23.

One minute. Billy Wiles stared at his wrist.w.a.tch 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 high-powered 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.

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, a.s.sessing 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 h.e.l.l."

"Then he'll choose for you," Cottle reminded Billy.

"He can go to h.e.l.l."

"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."