The Darkest Evening of the Year

associate of Harrow.
    Everybody liked pudgy balding Billy and wanted to hug him, but they feared Harrow and wanted to kiss his butt. Fear always trumped affection, and it was Billy’s experience that most human beings also preferred butt-kissing to hugging.
    Once it was known that Billy had fallen from Harrow’s grace, every old friend he met would want to kill him right away, to please Harrow. Friendship wasn’t worth the heart it was written on, as Billy himself had proved many times, as when he had shot Georgie Jobbs. A heart was just meat, people were meat, meat didn’t care. Did a filet mignon care about a pork chop? No.
    As Tyrone Slothrop, he would have to go somewhere Harrow and his crowd would never travel. Like Oklahoma or Utah or South Dakota. This would be a hardship, but he would find lots of crime to commit in his new turf; and there were people to kill no matter where you went.
    He would have to lose weight, grow a mustache, cut off an ear. If a friend of Harrow’s did cross Tyrone’s path in Pierre, South Dakota, he would maybe do a double take, but then say Nah, it can’t be Billy. Billy had two ears. As a disguise, cutting off an ear is better than a Tyrolean hat and fake gold teeth combined and cubed.
    Maybe he was getting his groove back. His life was beginning to seem meaningless and brutal and comic again, just like the fiction he admired.
    He got out of the rented SUV with the plastic bag of crap from Redwing’s house and the Glock 18. He had taken the silencer off the Glock. The boss wanted to hear the bang.
    He walked up the slope and chose a position just below the crest, at the edge of the small copse of trees.
    The fog imparted a pleasant chill to his exposed face and his bare head, and it suppressed most noises. He could barely hear the surf breaking, which sounded like ten thousand people whispering in the distance.
    Thinking in similes and metaphors was a not always welcome consequence of being formed by literature.
    Like ten thousand people whispering in the distance.
    It wasn’t a very good simile, because why would ten thousand people be gathered anywhere to whisper?
    Once the simile was in his head, he couldn’t cast it out, and it began to annoy him. Annoyance phased into uneasiness, and soon uneasiness became a deep disquiet.
    As improbable as the image was, the thought of ten thousand people whispering together began to creep him out.
    All right. Enough. It was just a damn simile. It didn’t mean anything. Nothing meant anything, ever. He was doing fine. He was back in his groove. He was just swell. Hi-ho.

 
    Chapter
61
    T hey turned toward the coast and were eventually found by fog again, which didn’t creep around them on little cat feet but prowled forward with no less menace than a pack of lions.
    Vanessa called Brian three times at fifteen-minute intervals, with additional bursts of directions, as her wealthy paranoid fiancé tried to thwart any tabloid-television crews that might be tailing them with or without their knowledge.
    The absurdity of it seemed to confirm the reality of Vanessa’s story, and by the time they reached the white gate, Amy wanted to believe that the document signing, while awkward and unpleasant, would not be an intolerable ordeal.
    Even with fog lights, they almost didn’t see the gate. The red reflectors were nearly defeated by the curdled mist.
    When Brian, who was driving, pushed a button on the call post, Vanessa answered. “It’s a mile and a half past the gate, Bry. Piggy’s packed and I’ve got Dom Perignon on ice. Let’s get this done. I’m so happy the little freak is getting out of here, I might pee myself.”
    Amy had not heard the woman before. She was struck that, even through the cheap speaker on the call post, the voice was throaty yet strong, and uncommonly seductive.
    The gate swung open, and they passed through, and as the barrier swung shut again, Nickie growled.
    The dog stood behind them in the cargo space. She looked left, right, and then forward through the windshield. The growl was low but not brief. She held it in her throat, then let it deepen, as though warning something off that didn’t take the first growl seriously enough to suit her.
    Braking to a stop, Brian said, “Maybe the fog spooks her.”
    “Maybe,” Amy said. “Where are the security people Vanessa said would sweep the car, us, and Nickie?”
    “She said it’s still a mile and a half to his place. There’s probably a more formal