Velocity

science.”
    Realizing that an innocent man, with nothing to fear, would not stare anxiously at the house, waiting for Napolitino to finish the search, Billy turned away from it and gazed out across the valley, at vineyards dwindling in a golden glare, toward mountains rising in blue haze.
    “Crab will do it,” Sobieski said.
    “What?”
    “Crab, shrimp, lobster—if it’s a little off, it’ll cause true mayhem.”
    “I had lasagna last night.”
    “That sounds pretty safe.”
    “Maybe not my lasagna,” Billy said, trying to match Sobieski’s apparent nonchalance.
    “Come on, Vince,” the sergeant said with a trace of impatience. “I know you’re thorough, copadre. You don’t have to prove anything to me.” Then of Billy he asked, “You have an attic?”
    “Yeah.”
    The sergeant sighed. “He’ll want to check the attic.”
    Out of the west came a flock of small birds, swooping low and then soaring, swooping low again. They were flickers, unusually active for this heat.
    “Are you hunting for one of these?” Sobieski asked.
    The deputy offered the open end of a roll of breath mints.
    For an instant Billy was bewildered, until he realized that his hands were in his pockets again, fingering the bullets.
    He took his hands out of his chinos. “I’m afraid it’s a little late for this,” he said, but accepted the mint.
    “Occupational hazard, I guess,” said Sobieski. “A bartender, you’re around the stuff all day.”
    Sucking on the mint, Billy said, “Actually, I don’t drink that much. I woke up at three in the morning, couldn’t turn my mind off, worrying about things I can’t control anyway, thought a shot or two would knock me out.”
    “We all have nights like that. I call it the blue willies. You can’t drink them away, though. A mug of hot chocolate will cure just about any insomnia, but not even that works with the blue willies.”
    “When the hooch didn’t do the job, it still seemed like a way to pass the night. Then the morning.”
    “You hold it well.”
    “Do I?”
    “You don’t seem blotto.”
    “I’m not. I’ve been tapering off the last few hours, trying to ease out of it to avoid a hangover.”
    “Is that the trick?”
    “It’s one of them.”
    Sergeant Sobieski was easy to talk to: far too easy.
    The flickers swooped low in their direction again, abruptly banked and soared and banked again, thirty or forty individuals flying as if with a single mind.
    “They’re a real nuisance,” Sobieski said of the birds.
    With pointed bills, flickers sought preferred houses and stables and churches of Napa County to drill elaborate lacelike patterns in wooden cornices, architraves, eaves, bargeboards, and corner boards.
    “They never bother my place,” Billy said. “It’s cedar.”
    Many people found the flickers’ destructive work so beautiful that damaged wood trim was not always replaced until time and weather brought it down.
    “They don’t like cedar?” Sobieski asked.
    “I don’t know. But they don’t like mine.”
    Having drilled its lacework, the flicker plants acorns in many of the holes, high on the building where the sun can warm them. After a few days, the bird returns to listen to the acorns. Hearing noise in some, not in others, it pecks open the noisy acorns to eat the larvae that are living inside.
    So much for the sanctity of the home.
    Flickers and sergeants will do their work.
    Slowly, relentlessly, they will do it.
    “It’s not such a big place,” Billy said, allowing himself to sound slightly impatient, as he imagined that an innocent man would.
    When Sergeant Napolitino returned, he did not come out of the front door. He appeared along the south side of the house, from the direction of the detached garage.
    He did not approach with one hand resting casually on his gun. Maybe that was a good sign.
    As if by the sight of Napolitino, the birds were chased to a far corner of the sky.
    “That’s a nice wood shop you’ve got,” he told Billy. “You could do just about anything in there.”
    Somehow the young sergeant made it sound as if Billy might have used the power tools to dismember a body.
    Looking out across the valley, Napolitino said, “You’ve got a pretty terrific view here.”
    “It’s nice,” Billy said.
    “It’s paradise.”
    “It is,” Billy agreed.
    “I’m surprised you keep all your window shades down.”
    Billy had relaxed too soon. He said only half coherently, “When it’s this hot, I do, the