The Darkest Evening of the Year

to make, to that ringbolt in the past to which he had long suspected she was tethered.
    His own revelation surely had helped her. For ten years, he had failed the child whom he had fathered. Whatever Amy had done was not likely to have burdened her with the weight of guilt that Brian felt he had earned.
    Vanessa phoned during their lunch. “You’ll be going through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge.”
    “I didn’t realize it would be this far.”
    “You’re going to whine at me, Bry?”
    “No. I’m just saying.”
    “Ten years of my life are crap because I had to take care of our Piggy Pig, and now you’re going to whine about one day on the road?”
    “Forget I said anything. You’re right. Once we cross the bridge, what?”
    “Stay north on 101. I’ll call with details. Anyway, Bry, you couldn’t have flown to San Francisco and driven from there. Not on short notice, not with the dog.”
    He glanced out the window at Nickie in the Expedition. “So you really are watching us.”
    “My nervous little rich boy says what if the dog’s wired by some scandal-crazy tabloid-TV show. You believe that? The dog ?”
    “I told you, I won’t risk blowing this deal.”
    “I know you won’t, Bry. His security people were going to do an electronic sweep of you, your SUV, soon as you got here. Now they’ll also sweep the dog. Maybe there’s a microphone built into its collar. Maybe there’s a power pack up its butt. Isn’t that hysterical?”
    “If you say so.”
    “See you soon, Bry.”
    She terminated the call.
    Brian picked at the second half of his meal, and Amy seemed to have lost her appetite, too.
    “I want it over,” he said. “I just want Hope away from her.”
    “Then let’s hit the road,” Amy said.
    Back at the Expedition, Nickie got out to take a pee and then graciously accepted two cookies as a reward for having been such a patient girl.
    After the dog sprang into the back of the SUV once more and turned to Brian as he stood at the tailgate, he met her stare and held it. On this clouded day, Nickie’s warm-molasses gaze was not brightened by refracted sunshine, but full of shadows, steady and direct and dark.
    For a moment, he felt nothing strange, but then the centripetal force of these eyes seemed to pull him toward them. He felt his heart quickening, and his mind was bright with a perception of deep mystery and with the desire to understand it that had led him to draw so many studies of her eyes with such obsession.
    In his memory rose the complex and enfolding sound: hiss, whizz, soft clicking, rustle and flump, deep throb and ruffle, crumpcrump-crumpcrump—
    The sound stopped abruptly when the dog turned away from him and went forward into the cargo area.
    Brian became aware of the traffic noise in the street rising slowly from the hush into which he had not until now realized that it had fallen.
    He closed the tailgate and went around to the front passenger door. Amy had expressed the desire to drive.
    In the car, on the open road, they would have privacy. Secrets could more easily be shared.
    On the interstate, bound for the storied city, she was silent for a while but then said, “When I was eighteen, I married a man named Michael Cogland. He probably intended to kill me from the day that I accepted his proposal.”

 
    Chapter
54
    T he previous evening, when he had shot Gunny Schloss, Billy had killed his third person since dawn, having also assisted in two other homicides. When he should have been full of merriment, all the fun had gone out of the day and all the frolic out of him.
    As he drove away from the restaurant in Monterey, feeling the dog’s stare on the back of his head even after he turned the corner, he decided the problem might be that he had killed those people solely for business reasons. He hadn’t wasted any of them just for a lark, simply as an expression of his conviction that life was a parade of fools marching to no purpose.
    Shumpeter had not been a business associate, but he had not been killed as an act of meaningless violence, either. Billy blew him away for his Cadillac and to use his house as a furnace in which to obliterate multiple life-sentences worth of incriminating evidence.
    To his chagrin, Billy realized that he had lost his way. He had gotten so consumed by business that he’d strayed from the philosophy that had given him such a happy and successful life. He had become so serious about the illegal drug dealing, arms