Velocity

door.
    In the living room, Valis was still limp and unconscious, his head hooded by his shirt.
    Billy dragged Valis out of the living room, through the dining area and kitchen, into the cockpit. He tumbled him down the steps and out of the motor home.
    No more than an hour of darkness remained. The slim sickle moon now harvested stars beyond the western horizon.
    He had parked the Explorer between the tent and the motor home, out of sight from the highway. No traffic passed.
    He dragged Valis to the SUV.
    No one lived nearby. The tavern across the highway would be deserted for hours yet.
    When Valis had fired the shot into the armchair, there had been no one to hear.
    Billy opened the tailgate. He unfolded one of the quilted moving blankets with which he had disguised poor Ralph Cottle’s tarp-wrapped body. He smoothed it across the floor of the cargo area.
    On the ground, Valis twitched. He began to moan.
    Billy suddenly felt weak, less with physical fatigue than with an exhaustion of the mind and heart. The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change. However you disguise it, this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
    With another blanket, Billy knelt beside the renowned artist. Thrusting the revolver into those quilted folds, using them as sound suppression, he expended the five remaining rounds in the freak’s chest.
    He dared not wait to see if this time the gun had been heard. Immediately, he unfolded the smoking blanket on the ground and rolled the dead man in it.
    Getting the corpse into the Explorer proved more difficult than he expected. Valis was heavier than scrawny Ralph Cottle.
    If someone had been filming Billy, he would have had in camera a classic piece of macabre comedy. This was one of those moments when he wondered about God; didn’t doubt His existence, just wondered about Him.
    With Valis wrapped and loaded, Billy slammed the tailgate and returned to the motor home.
    The bullet Valis fired had passed through the padded armchair and out the back. By ricochet, it had damaged the wall paneling. Billy tried to track it from there.
    Because his father and mother had been shot with the .38, forensic profiles of the revolver existed. He didn’t think there was a high likelihood that a match would be made, but he didn’t intend to take any chances.
    In a few minutes, he found the spent slug under a coffee table. He pocketed it.
    Police would recognize the hole in the armchair as damage from gunfire. They would know that a weapon had been discharged; and there was nothing to be done about that.
    They would not know, however, whether it had been fired at Valis or by him. Without blood, they would not be able to deduce to whom, if anyone, violence had been committed.
    Turning slowly in a full circle, casting his mind back to the moment, Billy tried to remember if, during the short time he’d been without gloves, he’d touched any surface that could be fingerprinted. No. The place was clean.
    He left the steel blinds shut. He left the tambour panels raised to expose the collection of faces and hands.
    He did not close the door when he stepped out of the motor home. Open, it invited.
    What a surprise for the glamorous crew of artists and artisans.
    No traffic appeared on the highway during the time that he drove away from the motor home, out of the meadow, and onto the pavement.
    What patterns his tires had imprinted in the dust, if they had imprinted any, would be obliterated when the crew arrived in a few hours.
     
     
     

Chapter 73
     
    Once more to the lava pipe, this time by a different route to avoid trampling the same brush as before.
    While Billy removed the redwood lid, the narrow ragged wound of an appropriately bloody dawn opened along the contours of the mountains in the east.
    A prayer didn’t feel appropriate.
    As though his specific gravity were greater than those of the other three cadavers, Valis seemed to drop faster into the hungry shaft than had the dead who preceded him.
    When the sounds of the body’s descent faded into silence, Billy said, “Older and more experienced, my ass.” Then he remembered to drop Lanny’s wallet into the pipe, and he replaced the lid.
    As the night futilely resisted the early purple light, Billy parked the Explorer on the yard behind Lanny’s garage. He let himself into the house.
    This was Thursday, only the second of Lanny’s two days off. No one was likely to wonder about him or to come around