Velocity

more but feared to tell. The anxiety that now simmered in his faded blue eyes was as pure and intense, if not as immediate, as the terror he described in the photograph of the unknown woman from whom the freak had “harvested” a face.
    Judging by the length of his skeletal fingers and the formidable bones in his knobby wrists, Cottle had once been equipped to fight back. Now, by his own admission, he was weak, not just emotionally and morally, but physically.
    Nevertheless, Billy leaned forward in his chair and tried again to enlist him: “Back me up with the police. Help me—”
    “I can’t even help myself, Mr. Wiles.”
    “You must’ve once known how.”
    “I don’t want to remember.”
    “Remember what?”
    “Anything. I told you—I’m weak.”
    “Sounds like you want to be.”
    Raising the pint to his lips, Cottle smiled thinly and, before taking a drink, said, “Haven’t you heard—the meek shall inherit the earth.”
    “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”
    Licking his lips, which were badly chapped by the heat and by the dehydrating effect of the whiskey, Cottle said, “Why would I?”
    “The meek don’t stand by and watch another man destroyed. The meek aren’t the same as cowards. They’re two different breeds.”
    “You can’t insult me into cooperation. I don’t insult. I don’t care. I know I’m nothing, and that’s all right with me.”
    “Just because you’ve come here to do what he wants, you won’t be safe out there in your cottage.”
    Screwing the cap on the bottle, Cottle said, “Safer than you.”
    “Not at all. You’re a loose end. Listen, the police will give you protection.”
    A dry laugh escaped the stewbum. “Is that why you’ve been so quick to run to them—for their protection?”
    Billy said nothing.
    Emboldened by Billy’s silence, Cottle found a sharper voice that was less mean than smug: “Just like me, you’re nothing, but you don’t know it yet. You’re nothing, I’m nothing, we’re all nothing, and as far as I care, if he leaves me alone, that psycho shithead can do what he wants to anybody because he’s nothing, too.”
    Watching Cottle screw open the pint-bottle cap that he had just screwed shut, Billy said, “What if I throw your ass down those stairs and kick you off my land? He calls me sometimes just to wear on my nerves. What if when he calls I tell him you were drunk, incoherent, I couldn’t understand a thing you said?”
    Cottle’s sunburned and blood-fused face could not turn pale, but his small purse of a mouth, snugged tight with self-satisfaction after his rant, now loosened and poured forth the dull coins of a counterfeit apology. “Mr. Wiles, sir, please don’t take offense at my bad mouth. I can’t control what comes out of it any more than I can control what I pour into it.”
    “He wanted to be sure you told me about the face in the jar, didn’t he?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. He didn’t consult with me, sir. He just put words in my mouth to bring to you, and here I am because I want to live.”
    “Why?”
    “Sir?”
    “Look at me, Ralph.”
    Cottle met his eyes.
    Billy said, “Why do you want to live?”
    As though Cottle had never considered it before, the question seemed to pin down some fluttering thing in his mind, like a rare moth to a specimen board, some ever-restless and ever-contentious and ever-bitter aspect of himself that for a moment he seemed at last disposed to consider. Then his eyes became evasive, and he clasped both hands, not just one, around the pint of whiskey.
    “Why do you want to live?” Billy persisted.
    “What else is there?” Avoiding Billy’s eyes, Cottle raised the bottle in both hands, as if it were a chalice. “I could use just a taste,” he said, as though asking for permission.
    “Go ahead.”
    He took a small sip, but then at once took another.
    “The freak made you tell me about the face in the jar because he wants that image in my head.”
    “If you say so.”
    “It’s about intimidation, about keeping me off balance.”
    “Are you?”
    Instead of answering the question, Billy said, “What else did he send you here to tell me?”
    As if getting down to business, Cottle screwed the cap on the bottle again and this time returned the pint to his coat pocket. “You’ll have five minutes to make a decision.”
    “What decision?”
    “Take off your wristwatch and prop it on the porch railing.”
    “Why?”
    “To