Velocity

looking for him until sometime Friday.
    Although Valis had denied planting any additional evidence in the wake of Billy’s previous visit, Billy decided to search the house once more. You just couldn’t trust some people.
    He began upstairs, moving with the deliberateness of extreme fatigue, and by the time that he returned to the kitchen, he had not found anything incriminating.
    Thirsty, he took a glass from a cabinet and drew cold tap water. Still wearing gloves, he was unconcerned about leaving prints.
    Thirst quenched, he rinsed the glass, dried it on a dishtowel, and returned it to the cabinet from which he’d taken it.
    Something didn’t feel right.
    He suspected that he had missed a detail that had the power to undo him. Dulled by weariness, his gaze had traveled over some damning evidence without recognizing its importance.
    In the living room once more, he circled the sofa on which Valis had propped Ralph Cottle’s corpse. No stains marred the furniture or the carpet around it.
    Billy took up the cushions to see if anything from Cottle’s pockets might have fallen between them. When he found nothing, he replaced the cushions.
    Still plagued by a disquieting feeling that he had overlooked something, he sat down to brood. Because he was a mess, he didn’t risk soiling a chair but with a sigh of weariness sat cross-legged on the floor.
    He had just killed a man, or something rather like a man, but he could still be concerned about the parlor upholstery. He remained a polite boy. A considerate little savage.
    This contradiction struck him as funny, and he laughed out loud. The more he laughed, the funnier his fussiness about the upholstery seemed to be, and then he was laughing at his own laughter, amused by his inappropriate giddiness.
    He knew this was dangerous laughter, that it could unravel the carefully tied knot of his equilibrium. He stretched out on the carpet, flat on his back, and took long deep breaths to calm himself.
    The laughter relented, he breathed less deeply, and somehow he allowed himself to fall into sleep.
     
     
     

Chapter 74
     
    Billy woke disoriented. For a moment, blinking at the legs of chairs and sofas all around him, he thought that he had fallen asleep in a hotel lobby, and he marveled at how considerate the management had been to leave him undisturbed.
    Then memory tweaked him fully awake.
    Getting to his feet, he gripped the arm of the sofa with his left hand. That was a mistake. The nail wound was inflamed. He cried out and almost fell, but didn’t.
    The day beyond the curtained windows looked fiercely bright and well advanced.
    When he consulted his wristwatch, he saw that it was 5:02 in the afternoon. He had slept almost ten hours.
    Panic flew, and his heart drummed like frantic wings. He thought his unexplained absence must have made him the primary suspect in the disappearance of Valis.
    Then he remembered that he had called in sick for a second day. No one was expecting him to be anywhere. And no one knew he had any connection whatsoever to the dead artist.
    If the police were eager to find anyone, they were searching for Valis himself, to ask him pointed questions about the contents of the jars in his living room.
    In the kitchen, Billy took a drinking glass out of the cabinet. He filled it from the tap.
    Digging in the pockets of his jeans, he found two Anacins and took them with a long drink. He also swallowed one tablet of Cipro and a Vicodin.
    For a moment he felt nauseated, but the feeling passed. Maybe all these medications would interact in a mortal fashion and drop him dead between one step and another, but at least he wouldn’t puke.
    He was no longer troubled by the feeling that he might have left incriminating evidence in this house. That fear had been a symptom of exhaustion. Rested now, reviewing his precautions, he knew that he had not missed anything.
    After locking the house, he returned the spare key to the hole in the tree stump.
    With the advantage of daylight, he opened the tailgate of the Explorer and checked the floor of the cargo space for Valis’s blood. None had soaked through the moving blankets, and the blankets had gone into the lava pipe with the corpse.
    He drove away from the Olsen house with relief, with a cautious optimism, with a growing sense of triumph.
    The site of the Valis project looked like an auto dealership that sold only police vehicles.
    Lots of uniforms milled around the motor home, the tent, the mural. Sheriff