Velocity

him now was something new and more terrible than anything heretofore. Not by inaction this time, not by inadvertence, but by conscious intent, Billy was expected to mark someone he knew for death.
    “I won’t do it,” he said.
    Having guzzled a dram or two, Cottle was sliding the wet mouth of the bottle back and forth across his lips, as if he might French kiss it instead of drinking any more. Through his nose, he noisily inhaled the rising fumes.
    “If you won’t do it, he will,” said Cottle.
    “Why would I choose? I’m screwed either way, aren’t I?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. It’s not my business.”
    “The hell it’s not.”
    “It’s not my business,” Cottle insisted. “I’ve got to sit here till you give me your decision, then I give it to him, and I’m not a part of it anymore. You’ve got just more than two minutes left.”
    “I’m going to the cops.”
    “It’s too late for that.”
    “I’m in shit to my hips,” Billy admitted, “but I’ll only be deeper later.”
    When Billy rose from his rocking chair, Cottle said sharply, “Sit down! If you try to leave this porch before I do, you’ll be shot in the head.”
    The stewbum stowed bottles in his pockets, not weapons. Even if Cottle had a gun, Billy was confident about taking it from him.
    “Not me,” Cottle said. “Him. How he’s watching us right now is through the scope of a high-powered rifle.”
    The gloom of the woods to the north, the dazzle of sun on the slope to the east, the rock formations and swales of the fields on the south side of the county road…
    “He can just about read our lips,” Cottle said. “It’s the finest marksman’s gun, and he’s qualified for it. He can nail you at a thousand yards.”
    “Maybe that’s what I want.”
    “He’s willing to oblige. But he doesn’t think you’re ready. He says you will be eventually. In the end, he says, you’ll ask him to kill you. But not yet.”
    Even with his weight of guilt, Billy Wiles suddenly felt like a feather, and he feared a sudden wind. He settled into the rocking chair.
    “Why it’s too late to go to the cops,” Cottle said, “is because he planted evidence in her place, on her body.”
    The day remained still, but here came the wind. “What evidence?”
    “For one thing, some of your hairs in her fist and under her fingernails.”
    Billy’s mouth felt numb. “How would he get my hairs?”
    “From your shower drain.”
    Before the nightmare had begun, when Giselle Winslow had still been alive, the freak had already been in this house.
    The shade on the porch no longer held the summer heat at bay. Billy might as well have been standing on blacktop in the sun. “What else besides hairs?”
    “He didn’t say. But it’s nothing the police will tie to you… unless for some reason you come under suspicion.”
    “Which he can make happen.”
    “If the cops start thinking maybe they should ask you for a DNA sample, you’re finished.”
    Cottle glanced at the wristwatch.
    So did Billy.
    “One minute left,” Cottle advised.
     
     
     

Chapter 23
     
    One minute. Billy Wiles stared at his wristwatch as if it were a bomb clock counting down to detonation.
    He wasn’t thinking about the fleeting seconds or the evidence planted at the scene of Giselle Winslow’s murder, or about being in the sights of a high-powered rifle.
    Instead, he was composing a mental directory of people in his life. Faces flickered rapidly through his mind. Those he liked. Those toward whom he was indifferent. Those he disliked.
    These were dark shoals. He could founder on them. Yet turning his mind away from such thoughts proved as difficult as ignoring a knife held to his throat.
    A knife of another kind, a knife of guilt cut him loose from these considerations at last. Realizing how seriously he had been calculating the comparative value of the people in his life, assessing which of them had a lesser right to life than others, he could not repress a shudder of disgust.
    “No,” he said, seconds before his time ran out. “No, I’ll never choose. He can go to Hell.”
    “Then he’ll choose for you,” Cottle reminded Billy.
    “He can go to Hell.”
    “All right. It’s your call. It’s on your shoulders, Mr. Wiles. It’s none of my business.”
    “Now what?”
    “You stay in the chair, sir, right where you are. I’m supposed to go inside to the kitchen phone, wait for his call, and tell him your decision.”
    “I’ll go