The Darkest Evening of the Year

having sat down. The wall clock revealed that he had been with the drawings for more than fifteen minutes, when he would have sworn it had been two or three.
    Later, still enthralled by the art, he was startled to feel blood trickle down his face.
    In no pain, puzzled, Billy raised one hand and felt his cheeks, his brow, seeking the wound, which he could not find. When he looked at his fingertips, they glistened with a clear fluid.
    He recognized this substance. These were tears. In his line of work, he sometimes reduced people to tears.
    Billy had not wept in thirty-one years, since he had read a huge novel of such stunning brilliance that it had drained him of his last measures of sadness and sympathy for his fellow human beings. People were nothing but machines of meat. You couldn’t feel sorry for either machines or meat.
    That same novel had made him guffaw so strenuously, for so long, at the folly and bottomless stupidity of humankind that he had also used up his lifetime allotment of tears of laughter.
    These new tears perplexed Billy.
    They amazed and astonished him.
    They also alarmed him.
    Dread made his palms clammy.
    The nanopowder-coated latex gloves were slimy with sweat, which backed up to the cuffs and leaked out at his wrists, dampening his shirt sleeves.
    If his tears were tears of laughter, a preparatory lubricant for gales of giggles, he might have been able to accept them. But he did not feel any laughter building inside him.
    His contempt for humanity remained so pure that he knew these could not be tears inspired by the richly comic horror of the human condition.
    Only one other possibility occurred to him—that these were tears shed for himself, for the life that he had made for himself.
    His alarm escalated into fear.
    Self-pity implied that you felt wronged, that life had not been fair to you. You could only have an expectation of fairness if the universe operated according to some set of principles, some tao, and was at its heart benign.
    Such an idea was an intellectual whirlpool, a black hole that would suck him in and destroy him if he allowed its fearsome gravity to capture him for another moment.
    Billy knew well the power of ideas. “You are what you eat,” the nutritionists endlessly hector fast-food addicts, and you are also what ideas you have consumed.
    With the thirst of an insatiable swillpot, he had poured down the fiction of two generations of deep thinkers, and he was pickled in their ideas, comfortably pickled. At fifty-one, he was too old to be transformed from a dill into a gherkin; he would have been too old at twenty-five.
    He did not know why the drawings had brought him to tears.
    Heart racing, breathing like a man in panic, he resisted the desire to study them further to ascertain the reason for their extraordinary effect on him.
    With his happiness and his future at stake, Billy at once gathered up the drawings, hurried with them into Brian McCarthy’s study, and fed them through a paper shredder that stood beside the desk.
    Half convinced that they wriggled with life in his hands, he packed the tangled mass of quarter-inch ribbons of paper into a dark-green plastic garbage bag that he found in the kitchen. Later, in Santa Barbara, he would burn the shredded drawings.
    By the time he carried the computer brain, the wastebasket full of e-mail files, and the bag of shredded drawings to the Cadillac, where he stowed them in the trunk, his heart rate had subsided almost to normal, and he had regained control of his breathing.
    Behind the wheel of the car, he stripped off the disgustingly slimy latex gloves and tossed them into the backseat.
    He blotted his hands on his slacks, on his sport coat, on his shirt, and then drove away from McCarthy’s den of perils.
    By the time he found the freeway entrance, the flow of tears had stopped, and his cheeks had begun to dry.
    He suspected that to blot from his mind the entire disturbing incident, the best thing that he could do would be to kill a total stranger selected on a whim.
    Sometimes, however, even a random act of murder had to wait for a more propitious moment. Billy was already late setting out for Santa Barbara, and he had to make up for lost time.

 
    Chapter
44
    A t Amy’s house, Brian measured kibble and treats into plastic Ziploc bags, more than they would need, enough for three days. He packed them in a tote with a food dish, a water dish, and other dog gear, while Nickie politely and successfully begged