Velocity

Explorer.
    Crumbled safety glass littered the seat. He plucked a Kleenex box from the console and used it to scrape the prickly debris off the upholstery.
    He searched for the note that had been taped over the ignition. Evidently the killer had taken it.
    He found the dropped key under the brake pedal. From the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, he retrieved the revolver.
    He had been allowed to keep the gun for the game ahead. The freak didn’t fear it.
    The substance with which Billy had been sprayed—chloroform or some other anesthetic—had a lingering effect. When he bent over, he grew dizzy.
    Behind the wheel, with the door closed, with the engine running, he worried that he might not be fit to drive.
    He turned on the air conditioner, angled two vents at his face.
    As he assessed his transient dizziness, the interior lights went off automatically. Billy turned them on once more.
    He tilted the rearview mirror to inspect his face. He looked like a painted devil: dark red, but the teeth bright; dark red, and the whites of the eyes unnaturally white.
    When he adjusted the mirror again, he saw at once the source of his pain.
    Seeing did not immediately mean believing. He preferred to think that the residual dizziness from the anesthetic might be accompanied by hallucination.
    He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He strove to clear the image in the mirror from his mind, and hoped that when he looked again he would not see the same.
    Nothing had changed. Across his forehead, an inch below the hairline, three large fishhooks pierced his flesh.
    The point and the barb of each hook protruded from the skin. The shank also protruded. The bend of each hook lay under the thin meat of his brow.
    He shuddered and looked away from the mirror.
    There are days of doubt, more often lonely nights, when even the devout wonder if they are heirs to a greater kingdom than this earth and if they will know mercy—or if instead they are only animals like any other, with no inheritance except the wind and the dark.
    This was such a night for Billy. He had known others like it. Always the doubt had receded. He told himself that it would recede again, though this time it was colder and seemed certain to leave a higher water mark.
    The freak had at first seemed to be a player to whom murder was a sport. The fishhooks in the forehead, however, had not been intended as merely a game move; and this was no game.
    To the freak, these killings were something more than murder, but the something more was not a form of chess or the equivalent of poker. Homicide had symbolic meaning for him, and he pursued it with a purpose more serious than amusement. He had some mysterious goal beyond the killing itself, an aim for which he sought completion. Game was the wrong word, Billy needed to find the right one. Until he knew the correct word, he would never understand the killer, and would not find him.
    With Kleenex, he gently swabbed the clotted blood from his eyebrows, wiped most of it off his lids and lashes.
    The sight of the fishhooks had clarified his mind. He wasn’t dizzy anymore.
    His wounds needed attention. He switched on the headlights and drove out of the church parking lot.
    Whatever ultimate goal the freak might have, whatever symbolism he intended with the fishhooks, he must also have hoped to send Billy to a doctor. The physician would require an explanation of the hooks, and any response Billy made would complicate his predicament.
    If he told the truth, he would tie himself to the murders of Giselle Winslow and Lanny Olsen. He would be the primary suspect.
    Without the three notes, he could offer no evidence that the freak existed.
    The authorities would not regard the hooks as credible evidence, for they would wonder if this was a case of self-mutilation. A self-inflicted wound was a ploy that murderers sometimes used to cast themselves as victims and thereby to deflect suspicion.
    He knew the cynicism with which some cops would look upon his dramatic, bizarre, but superficial wounds. He knew it precisely.
    Furthermore, Billy was a fresh-water angler. He fished for trout and bass. These substantial hooks were the size needed to land large bass if you were using live bait instead of lures. In his tackle box at home were hooks identical to those that now drew his blood.
    He dared not go to a doctor. He’d have to be his own physician.
    At 3:30 in the morning, he had the rural roadways to himself. The night was