Velocity

and midnight?”
    “What does it matter?”
    “It matters,” Billy assured him. “Where were you?”
    “You’re gonna hurt… you’re gonna kill me anyway.”
    “I’m not going to kill you, and I didn’t kill Judith Kesselman. I’m pretty sure you killed her.”
    “Me?” His amazement rang as true as any reaction he’d had since this had started.
    “You’re really good at this,” Billy told him.
    “Good at what? Killing people? You’re bugshit crazy! I never killed anyone.”
    “Steve, if you can convince me you have a solid alibi for nine to midnight, then this is over. I’m out of here, and you’re free.”
    Zillis looked dubious. “That easy?”
    “Yes.”
    “After all this—it’s over that easy?”
    “It could be. Depending on the alibi.”
    Zillis worried over his answer.
    Billy began to think he was concocting it from scratch.
    Then Zillis said, “What if I tell you where I was, and it turns out that’s why you’re here, because you already know where I was, and you want to hear me say it so you can beat the shit out of me.”
    “I’m not following you,” Billy told him.
    “All right. Okay. I was with someone. I never heard her mention you, but if you have a thing for her, what’re you going to do to me?”
    Billy regarded him with disbelief. “You were with a woman?”
    “I wasn’t with her, not like in bed. It was just a date. A late dinner, which had to be later ‘cause I covered for you. This was our second date.”
    “Who?”
    Steeling himself against Billy’s jealous outrage, Zillis said, “Amanda Pollard.”
    “Mandy Pollard? I know her. She’s a nice girl.”
    Warily, Zillis said, “That’s it—‘She’s a nice girl’?”
    The Pollards owned a successful vineyard. They grew grapes on contract for one of the valley’s finest vintners. Mandy was about twenty, pretty, friendly. She worked in the family business. Judging by all evidence, she was wholesome enough to have come from an era better than this one.
    Billy let his gaze travel the sleazy bedroom, from the porno-tape package lying on the floor beside the TV to the pile of dirty laundry in one corner.
    “She’s never been here,” Zillis said. “We’ve only had two dates. I’m looking for a better place, a nice apartment. I want to get rid of all this stuff. Make a clean start.”
    “She’s a decent girl.”
    “She is,” Zillis eagerly agreed. “I think with her in my corner, I could clean up my act, start over, do the right thing for once.”
    “She ought to see this place.”
    “No, no. Billy, no, for God’s sake. This isn’t the me I want to be. I want to be better for her.”
    “Where did you go to dinner?”
    Zillis named a restaurant. Then: “We got there about twenty past nine. We left at about a quarter past eleven because we were the only people in the place by then.”
    “After that?”
    “We went for a drive. A nice drive. I don’t mean we parked. She isn’t like that. We just drove around, talking, listening to music.”
    “Until when?”
    “I took her home a little after one o’clock.”
    “And came back here.”
    “Yeah.”
    “And put on a porno flick of a guy whipping a woman.”
    “All right. I know what I am, but I also know what I can be.”
    Billy went to the nightstand and picked up the phone. It had a long cord. He brought it to Zillis. “Call her.”
    “What, now? Billy, it’s after three in the morning.”
    “Call her. Tell her how much you enjoyed the evening, how very special she is. She won’t mind if you wake her up for that.”
    “We don’t have that kind of relationship yet,” Zillis worried. “She’s gonna think this is weird.”
    “You call her and let me listen in,” Billy said, “or I jam this pistol in your ear and blow your brains out. What do you think?”
    Zillis’s hands shook so badly that he misdialed twice. He got it right the third time.
    Hunkering beside his captive, the muzzle of the pistol pressed against Zillis’s side so he wouldn’t get a half-wise idea, Billy listened to Mandy Pollard answer the phone and express surprise at hearing from her new beau at that hour.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Mandy told Zillis. “You didn’t wake me. I was just lying here staring at the ceiling.”
    Zillis’s voice had a tremor, but Mandy might easily have assumed he was nervous about calling at this late hour and about expressing his affection more directly than perhaps he had done previously.
    For a few minutes, Billy