Velocity

of playing cards, and a whistle in the form of a plastic canary.
    Cottle’s wallet contained six one-dollar bills, a five, and fourteen ten-dollar bills. These last must have come from the freak. Ten dollars for each year of your innocence, Mr. Wiles.
    Basically frugal, Billy didn’t want to bury the money with the body. He considered dropping it in the poor box at the church where he had parked—and been assaulted—the previous night.
    Squeamishness trumped frugality. Billy left the money in the wallet. As dead pharaohs had been sent to the Other Side with salt, grain, wine, gold, and euthanized servants, so Ralph Cottle would travel across the Styx with spending money.
    Among the few other items in the wallet were two of interest, the first a worn and creased snapshot of Cottle as a young man. He looked handsome, virile, radically different from the beaten man of his later years but recognizable. With him was a lovely young woman. They were smiling. They looked happy.
    The second item was a 1983 membership card in the American Society of Skeptics. Ralph Thurman Cottle, member since 1978.
    Billy kept the snapshot and the membership card and returned everything else to Cottle’s hip pocket.
    He rolled the cadaver tightly in the tarp. He folded the ends down and secured the bundle with yards of strapping tape.
    His expectation had been that, inside multiple layers of opaque polyurethane, the body might pass for a rug wrapped in protective plastic. It looked like a corpse in a tarp.
    Using the rope, he fashioned a tightly knotted handle to one end of the packaged cadaver, by which it could be dragged.
    He did not intend to dispose of Cottle until after dark. The cargo space in his Explorer was encircled by windows. SUV’s were useful vehicles, but if you were going to be transporting corpses in broad daylight, you better have a car with a roomy trunk.
    Because he’d begun to feel that his house was being as freely traveled as a public bus terminal, Billy hauled the body out of the study, to the living room, where he left it behind the sofa. It could not be seen from the front door or from the doorway to the kitchen.
    At the kitchen sink, he vigorously scrubbed his hands with multiple applications of liquid soap, in near-scalding water.
    Then he made a ham sandwich. Ravenous, he wondered how he could have an appetite after the gruesome business he had just concluded.
    He would not have thought that his will to survive had remained this strong during his years of retreat. He wondered what other qualities, good and bad, he would rediscover or discover in himself during the thirty-six hours ahead. There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
     
     
     

Chapter 34
     
    As Billy finished the ham sandwich, the telephone rang.
    He didn’t want to answer it. He didn’t receive a lot of calls from friends, and Lanny was dead. He knew who this must be. Enough was enough.
    On the twelfth ring, he pushed his chair back from the table.
    The freak had never said anything on the phone. He didn’t want to reveal his voice. He would do nothing but listen to Billy in mocking silence.
    On the sixteenth ring, Billy got up from the table.
    These calls had no purpose but to intimidate. Taking them made no sense.
    Billy stood by the phone, staring at it. On the twenty-sixth ring, he lifted the handset.
    The digital readout revealed ho caller ID.
    Billy didn’t say hello. He listened.
    After a few seconds of silence on the other end, a mechanical click was followed by a hiss. Pops and scratches punctuated the hiss: the sound of blank audio tape passing over a playback head.
    When the words came, they were in a series of voices, some men, some women. No individual spoke more than three words, often just one.
    Judging by the inconstant volume levels and other tells, the freak had constructed the message by sampling existing audio, perhaps books on tape by different readers. “I will… kill a… pretty redhead. If you… say… waste the bitch… I will… kill… her… quickly. Otherwise… she will… suffer… much… torture. You… have… one minute… to… say… waste the bitch. The choice… is… yours.”
    Again, the hiss and pop and scratch of blank tape…
    The conundrum had been perfectly constructed. It allowed an evasive man no room for further evasion.
    Previously, Billy had been morally co-opted only to the extent that the choice of the victims had been made