Velocity

of time. Billy started toward the door. He returned to the bed, dropped to one knee. A waste.
    The freak was gone. He was crazy, but he wasn’t crazy enough to stay here after calling 911 and hanging up on them.
    In the hallway again, Billy hurried to the threshold of the bathroom. Cottle sat alone in there.
    The shower curtain was drawn open. If it had been drawn shut, it would have been a prime place to look.
    A large hall closet housed the oil-fired furnace. It offered no options.
    The living room. An open space, easy to search with a sweep of the eyes.
    The kitchen cabinetry featured a tall, narrow broom closet. No good.
    He tore open the door to the walk-in pantry. Canned goods, boxes of pasta, bottles of hot sauce, household supplies. Nowhere to hide a grown man.
    In the living room again, he shoved the revolver deep under a sofa cushion. It didn’t leave a visible lump, but anyone who sat on the gun would feel it.
    He had left the front door standing open. An invitation. Before hastening once more to the bathroom, he closed the door.
    Cottle with his head tipped back and his mouth open, with his hands together in his lap as if clapping, might have been singing Western swing and keeping time.
    The knife sawed against bone as Billy pulled it out of the wound. Blood smeared the blade.
    With a few Kleenex plucked from a box beside the sink, he wiped the knife clean. He balled up the tissues and put them on top of the toilet tank.
    He folded the blade into the yellow handle and put the knife beside the sink.
    When Billy shifted the corpse sideways on the toilet, the head fell forward, and a gaseous sputter escaped the lips, as if Cottle had died on an inhalation, as if his last breath, until now, had been trapped in his throat.
    He hooked his arms under the dead man’s arms. Trying to avoid the blood-soaked part of the suit coat, Billy hauled him off the toilet.
    Worn thin by a diet of spirits, Cottle weighed hardly more than an adolescent. Carrying him would be too difficult, however, because he was gangly, spindle-legged.
    Fortunately, rigor mortis had not begun to set in. Cottle was limp, flexible.
    Shuffling backward, Billy dragged the body out of the bathroom. The heels of the dead man’s sneakers squeaked and stuttered along the ceramic-tile floor.
    They protested against the polished Santos-mahogany floors of the hall and study, too, all the way around behind the desk, where he lowered the corpse to the hardwood.
    Billy heard himself breathing hard, not so much from exertion as from high anxiety.
    Time rushed away, rushed like a river over a falls.
    After rolling the office chair aside, he shoved the corpse into the knee space. He had to bend the legs to make the dead man fit.
    He swung the chair in front of the computer again. He pushed it as far into the knee space as possible.
    The desk was deep and had a privacy panel on the front. Anyone who came into the room would have to walk all the way behind the work station and peer purposefully into the kneehole to see the cadaver.
    Even then, because of the chair and depending on the angle of view, a casual look might not reveal this grisly secret.
    Shadows would be helpful. Billy switched off the overhead light. He left only the desk lamp aglow.
    In the bathroom once more, he saw a smear of blood on the floor. None had been there before he’d moved Cottle.
    His heart was a kicking horse battering the board walls of his chest.
    One mistake. If he made one mistake here, it would finish him.
    His time perception was whacked. He knew that only a few minutes had passed since he’d set out to search the house, but he felt as if ten minutes had fled, fifteen.
    He wished that he had his wristwatch. He didn’t dare take the time to retrieve it from the front-porch railing.
    With a wad of toilet paper, he wiped the blood off the floor. The tiles came clean, but a faint discoloration remained in a section of grout. It looked like rust, not like blood. That’s what he wanted to believe.
    Into the toilet he dropped the wad of paper as well as the Kleenex with which he had swabbed the blade of the knife. He flushed them away.
    The murder weapon lay on the counter beside the sink. He buried it at the back of a vanity drawer, behind bottles of shaving lotion and suntan oil.
    When he slammed the drawer shut so hastily, so hard, that it banged like a gunshot, he knew he needed to get a tighter grip on himself. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.
    He