Velocity

John Palmer would be one of them because there were also TV-NEWS vans standing bumper-to-bumper along the shoulder of the highway.
    Billy realized that he was still wearing latex gloves. All right. No problem. No one could see and wonder why.
    Not a single available space remained in the parking lot at the tavern. The news of Valis and his grisly collection would bring out all the regulars as well as new customers, with something more to talk about than pigs with human brains. Good for Jackie.
    When Billy’s house came into view, the sight of it warmed him. Home. With the artist dead, the locks would not have to be rekeyed. Security was his again, and privacy.
    In the garage, he cleaned out the Explorer, bagged the trash, put away the power screwdriver and other tools.
    Somewhere on this property were incriminating souvenirs, a last bit of cleanup to be done.
    When he stepped across the kitchen threshold, he allowed his instinct to guide him. Valis wouldn’t have brought Giselle Winslow’s hand here in a jar full of formaldehyde. Such a container would have been too awkward and fragile to allow quick work on the sly. Instinct suggested the simplest solution.
    He went to the refrigerator and opened the freezer drawer at the bottom. Among the containers of ice cream and packages of leftovers were two foil-wrapped objects that he did not recognize.
    He opened them on the floor. Two hands, each from a different woman. One of them had probably belonged to the redhead.
    Valis had used the new non-stick foil. The manufacturer would be pleased to hear that it worked as advertised.
    Billy couldn’t stop trembling as he rewrapped the hands. For a while, he had thought that he had become inured to horror. He had not.
    Before the day was done, he would have to throw out all the contents of the freezer. No contamination could have occurred, but the thought of contamination sickened him. He might have to trash the refrigerator itself.
    He wanted the hands out of the house. He didn’t expect the police to knock on the door with a search warrant, but he wanted the hands gone, anyway.
    Burying them somewhere on the property seemed like a bad idea. At the very least, he would have dreams about them clawing out of their small graves and creeping into the house at night.
    Until he could decide what to do with them, he put the frozen hands in a small picnic cooler.
    From his wallet, he thought to extract the folded snapshot of Ralph Cottle as a young man, Cottle’s membership card in the American Society of Skeptics, and the photo of the redhead. He had kept these with the vague idea of turning the tables on the freak and planting bits of evidence on him. He tossed them in the cooler with the hands.
    He had Lanny’s cell phone, which he hesitated to add to the cooler. As if the hands would strip off their foil shrouds and call 911. He put the cell phone on the kitchen table.
    To get the hands out of the house, he took the cooler to the garage and put it in the Explorer, on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. He locked the garage after himself.
    The hot afternoon had waned. Six-thirty-six.
    High overhead, a hawk conducted its last hunt of the day.
    Billy stood watching as the bird described a widening gyre.
    Then he went inside, eager to take a long shower as hot as he could tolerate.
    The business with the women’s hands had suppressed his appetite. He didn’t think he would feel comfortable eating at home.
    Maybe he would return to the truck stop for dinner. He felt as if he owed the waitress, Jasmine, even a bigger tip than the one he had previously left her.
    In the hallway, heading for the bathroom, Billy saw a light in his office. When he looked through the doorway, he found the shades drawn, as he had left them.
    He didn’t remember leaving the desk lamp on, but he had split in a hurry, eager to dispose of Cottle. Without going around the desk, he switched off the lamp.
    Although Cottle was no longer sitting on the toilet, Billy could too easily remember him there. This was his only bathroom, however, and his desire for a shower proved greater than his squeamishness.
    The hot water gradually melted the aches from his muscles. The soap smelled glorious.
    A couple of times, he grew claustrophobic behind the shower curtain and became half convinced that he had been cast in the Janet Leigh role in a gender-reversal version of Psycho.
    Happily, he managed not to embarrass himself by whipping the curtain open. He