Velocity

better believe me, Steve.”
    When Billy put his hand on the grip of the holstered pistol, Zillis said, “Hey. All right. I hear you.”
    “Good. I’m leaving now.”
    “This place sucks anyway,” Zillis said. “Wine country is just another word for farm. I’m not a farm boy.”
    “No, you’re not,” Billy said from the doorway.
    “There’s no action around here.”
    “There’s no zing,” Billy agreed.
    “Screw you.”
    Billy said, “Happy trails, Kemosabe.”
     
     
     

Chapter 66
     
    By the time that he’d driven only half a mile from Zillis’s place, Billy had the shakes so bad that he had to pull to the curb, put the Explorer in park, and get control of himself.
    Under pressure, he had become the thing he most despised. For a while, he had become John Palmer.
    Paying Zillis ten thousand bucks didn’t make Billy any less like Palmer, either.
    When the shakes subsided, he didn’t put the SUV in gear because he didn’t know where to go from here. He felt that he was at a brink. You don’t drive over a brink.
    He wanted to go home, but nothing there would help him work out a solution to this puzzle.
    He wanted to go home just to be home. He recognized the familiar reclusive urge. Once home, he could sit at his carving bench with the blocks of oak, and the world could go to Hell.
    Except this time, he would go to Hell with it. He could not take Barbara home with him, and if he left her alone and in jeopardy, he would have trashed his only excuse for living.
    Events had thrust him into action, into the rush of life, yet he felt isolated and beyond desperation.
    For too long he’d done no proper sowing and now had no harvest. His friends were all acquaintances. Though life is community, he had no community.
    In fact, his situation was worse than isolation. The friends who were no more than acquaintances were now not even acquaintances as much as they were suspects. He had carpentered for himself a loneliness of exquisite paranoia.
    Pulling away from the curb, Billy drove with no destination in mind, as far as he was aware. Like a bird, he rode the currents of the night, intent only upon staying aloft and not falling into absolute despair before some gleam of hope appeared.
    He had learned more about Ivy Elgin in one brief visit to her house than he had troubled himself to know about her during the years they had worked together. And though he liked Ivy, he found her more mysterious now than when he had known so much less about her.
    He did not think that she could have any connection to the freak committing these murders. But his experience with his own mother and father reminded him that he could not be sure of anyone.
    Harry Avarkian was a kind man and a fine attorney—but also one of three trustees overseeing seven million dollars, a temptation that could not be discounted. Before Barbara, Billy had been to Harry’s house only once. Barbara socialized him. They had gone to Harry’s for dinner half a dozen times in a year—but since the coma, Billy had not visited Harry anywhere but at his office.
    He knew Harry Avarkian. But he didn’t know him.
    Billy’s mind circled to Dr. Ferrier. Which was crazy. Prominent physicians in the community didn’t go around killing people.
    Except Dr. Ferrier wanted Billy to cooperate with him in the killing of Barbara Mandel. Remove the feeding tube in her stomach. Let her die. Let her starve to death in her coma.
    If you were willing to decide for another—for someone in no obvious pain—that her quality of life was insufficient to warrant the expenditure of resources on her behalf, how easy was it to make a step from pulling a plug to pulling a trigger?
    Ridiculous. Yet he didn’t know Ferrier a fraction as well as he had known his father; and in violation of all Billy thought he had known, his father had swung that polished-steel lug wrench with something like vicious glee.
    John Palmer. He was a man whose love of power was clear for all to see, but whose internal landscape remained as enigmatic as an alien planet.
    The more Billy considered the people he knew, the more he brooded on the possibility that the killer might be a perfect stranger, the more he became agitated to no purpose.
    He told himself to care and not to care, to be still. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by way of dispossession. And what you do not know is the only thing you know.
    Driving and yet giving himself to that inner stillness, he came in a