The Darkest Evening of the Year

work, if you started weeping for no reason—or even for a good reason—you were on a slippery slope.
    In the living room, he opened the Dom Perignon and poured the champagne not into one of the handsome flutes but instead into a drinking glass. He selected a miniature bottle of fine cognac from the honor bar, opened it, and spiked the champagne.
    Pacing through the wonderfully cavernous suite, he sucked at his drink, but by the time he had drained the glass, he felt no better.
    Because he would be seeing Harrow in the afternoon and could not afford a hangover, he dared not risk a series of such concoctions.
    The only other solace at hand were the weapons in the second suitcase. They were new purchases, gifts to himself. Other men indulged themselves with golf clubs, but Billy didn’t golf.
    He returned to the bedroom and put the suitcase on the bed. With the smallest key on his chain, he disengaged the locks.
    When he opened the case, the firearm and accessories were there in the left half, as he had packed them.
    In his current mood, he had half expected that the always before reliable FedEx had confused his bag with an identical one belonging to, say, a vacationing Mormon dentist or a Bible salesman, and that the contents would give him no fun at all.
    The right half of the case contained a second gun, but on top lay a sheaf of papers. The first was McCarthy’s pencil drawing of the golden retriever.
    Billy didn’t remember exploding out of the bedroom, but in the living room, the bottle of champagne rattled against the rim of the glass as he poured.
    He needed ten minutes to decide that he had to go back into the bedroom and examine the drawings—which, damn it, he had shredded in McCarthy’s office, bagged, and later tossed into the cremator at the funeral home.
    If the drawings could survive the cremator and show up in his luggage, there was no argument against the possibility that Gunny Schloss, shot ten times and consigned to the fire, might be waiting in the bathroom when Billy went in there to piss.
    He approached the open suitcase with caution—and discovered that the sheaf of papers were not torn from McCarthy’s art tablet. They were the pages of a monthly tabloid-format newspaper published for hunters, target shooters, and other gun aficionados. He had packed the publication himself three days previously.
    The reappearance of the drawing had been entirely the work of his imagination. This discovery was an enormous relief. And then it wasn’t. A man with Billy Pilgrim’s responsibilities—and with his associates—could not survive long if he lost his nerve.

 
    Chapter
50
    P iggy sits at the desk with magazines. Piggy likes pictures. She cuts them out of magazines.
    She can’t have words.
    Mother says Piggy is too dumb to read words. Reading words is for people with brains in their heads.
    Piggy, poor baby, if you try to learn to read, your fat funny little head will explode.
    Piggy can read hope when she sees it. She can read other words, a few.
    Her head is okay. Maybe it will go bang with one more word. Probably not.
    Mother lies. A lot.
    Mother lives to lie, and she lies to live. Bear said so.
    Piggy, your mom doesn’t just lie to you and everybody else. She also lies to herself.
    This is true. Weird but true.
    Here’s one way Piggy knows it’s true: Being told lies makes you unhappy. Her mother is always unhappy.
    Lying to herself gets your mom through the day. If she ever faced the truth, she’d fall apart.
    Sometimes on a star, sometimes no star, Piggy wishes Mother wouldn’t lie.
    But she doesn’t want her mother to fall apart, either.
    Maybe Mother sometimes feels she will fall apart, so she tears a doll apart instead. Something to think about.
    Here’s another way Piggy knows Mother lies to herself: She thinks nothing bad can happen to her.
    Something bad already happened to her. Piggy doesn’t know what bad thing happened to her mother, but you can tell it happened. You can tell.
    Bear knew Mother always lies. But Mother lied to Bear, and Bear believed some of her lies.
    Weird but true.
    Mother and Bear were together to Make Some Money. Everyone needs to Make Some Money.
    Piggy and her mother are always going new places, meeting new friends. All friends, everywhere, talk how to Make Some Money.
    Usually they talk guns when they talk money. You Make Some Money with guns.
    Piggy does not like guns. She will never Make Some Money.
    So Bear wanted to Make Some Money, but he