Velocity

Chapter 1
     
    With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him.
    Henry had been killed by a garden gnome. He had fallen off the roof of his two-story house, onto that cheerful-looking figure. The gnome was made of concrete. Henry wasn’t.
    A broken neck, a cracked skull: Henry perished on impact.
    This death-by-gnome had occurred four years previously. Ned Pearsall still toasted Henry’s passing at least once a week.
    Now, from a stool near the curve of the polished mahogany bar, an out-of-towner, the only other customer, expressed curiosity at the enduring nature of Ned’s animosity.
    “How bad a neighbor could the poor guy have been that you’re still so juiced about him?”
    Ordinarily, Ned might have ignored the question. He had even less use for tourists than he did for pretzels.
    The tavern offered free bowls of pretzels because they were cheap. Ned preferred to sustain his thirst with well-salted peanuts.
    To keep Ned tipping, Billy Wiles, tending bar, occasionally gave him a bag of Planters.
    Most of the time Ned had to pay for his nuts. This rankled him either because he could not grasp the economic realities of tavern operation or because he enjoyed being rankled, probably the latter.
    Although he had a head reminiscent of a squash ball and the heavy rounded shoulders of a sumo wrestler, Ned was an athletic man only if you thought barroom jabber and grudge-holding qualified as sports. In those events, he was an Olympian.
    Regarding the late Henry Friddle, Ned could be as talkative with outsiders as with lifelong residents of Vineyard Hills. When, as now, the only other customer was a stranger, Ned found silence even less congenial than conversation with a “foreign devil.”
    Billy himself had never been much of a talker, never one of those barkeeps who considered the bar a stage. He was a listener.
    To the out-of-towner, Ned declared, “Henry Friddle was a pig.”
    The stranger had hair as black as coal dust with traces of ash at the temples, gray eyes bright with dry amusement, and a softly resonant voice. “That’s a strong word—pig.”
    “You know what the pervert was doing on his roof? He was trying to piss on my dining-room windows.”
    Wiping the bar, Billy Wiles didn’t even glance at the tourist. He’d heard this story so often that he knew all the reactions to it.
    “Friddle, the pig, figured the altitude would give his stream more distance,” Ned explained.
    The stranger said, “What was he—an aeronautical engineer?”
    “He was a college professor. He taught contemporary literature.”
    “Maybe reading that stuff drove him to suicide,” the tourist said, which made him more interesting than Billy had first thought.
    “No, no,” Ned said impatiently. “The fall was accidental.”
    “Was he drunk?”
    “Why would you think he was drunk?” Ned wondered.
    The stranger shrugged. “He climbed on a roof to urinate on your windows.”
    “He was a sick man,” Ned explained, plinking one finger against his empty glass to indicate the desire for another round.
    Drawing Budweiser from the tap, Billy said, “Henry Friddle was consumed by vengeance.”
    After silent communion with his brew, the tourist asked Ned Pearsall, “Vengeance? So you urinated on Friddle’s windows first?”
    “It wasn’t the same thing at all,” Ned warned in a rough tone that advised the outsider to avoid being judgmental.
    “Ned didn’t do it from his roof,” Billy said.
    “That’s right. I walked up to his house, like a man, stood on his lawn, and aimed at his dining-room windows.”
    “Henry and his wife were having dinner at the time,” Billy said.
    Before the tourist might express revulsion at the timing of this assault, Ned said, “They were eating quail, for God’s sake.”
    “You showered their windows because they were eating quail?”
    Ned sputtered with exasperation. “No, of course not. Do I look insane to you?” He rolled his eyes at Billy.
    Billy raised his eyebrows as though to say What do you expect of a tourist?
    “I’m just trying to convey how pretentious they were,” Ned clarified, “always eating quail or snails, or Swiss chard.”
    “Phony bastards,” the tourist said with such a light seasoning of mockery that Ned Pearsall didn’t detect it, although Billy did.
    “Exactly,” Ned confirmed. “Henry Friddle drove a Jaguar, and his wife drove a car—you won’t believe