Velocity

“What’s this all about?”
    Billy shrugged. “I don’t know. Lately I’ve just been… spooked.”
    After a silence, Harry said, “Maybe it’s time for you to get a life again.”
    “I’ve got a life,” Billy said, his voice too sharp considering that Harry was a friend and a decent guy.
    “You can look after Barbara, be faithful to her memory, and still have a life.”
    “She’s not just a memory. She’s alive. Harry, you’re the last person I want to have to punch in the mouth.”
    Harry sighed. “You’re right. No one can tell you what your heart should feel.”
    “Hell, Harry, I’d never punch you in the mouth.”
    “Did I look scared?”
    Laughing softly, Billy said, “You looked you. You looked like a Muppet.”
    The graceful shadows of sunlit olive trees moved on the window glass, and in the room.
    After a silence, Harry Avarkian said, “There are cases in which people have come out of a botulism coma with most of their faculties intact.”
    “They’re rare,” Billy acknowledged.
    “Rare isn’t the same as never.”
    “I try to be realistic, but I don’t really want to be.”
    “I used to like vichyssoise,” Harry said. “Now if I even happen to see it on a shelf in a supermarket, I get sick to my stomach.”
    While Billy had been working at the tavern one Saturday, Barbara had opened a can of soup for dinner. Vichyssoise. She made a grilled-cheese sandwich as well.
    When she didn’t answer her phone Sunday morning, he went to her apartment, let himself in with his key. He found her unconscious on the bathroom floor.
    At the hospital she had been treated with antitoxin promptly enough to spare her from death. And now she slept. And slept.
    Until she woke, if she woke, the extent of brain damage could not accurately be determined.
    The manufacturer of the soup, a reputable company, instantly pulled an entire run of vichyssoise off store shelves. Out of more than three thousand cans, only six were found to be contaminated.
    None of the six showed telltale signs of swelling; therefore, in a way, Barbara’s suffering had spared at least six other people from a similar fate.
    Billy never managed to find any comfort in that fact.
    “She’s a lovely woman,” Harry said.
    “She’s pale and thin, but she’s still beautiful to me,” Billy said. “And inside somewhere, she’s alive. She says things. I’ve told you. She’s alive in there, and thinking.”
    He watched the olive-tree shadows projected onto the desk by the lens of the window.
    He did not look at Harry. He didn’t want to see the pity in the attorney’s eyes.
    After a while, Harry talked about the weather some more, and then Billy said, “Did you hear, at Princeton—or maybe it’s Harvard—scientists are trying to make a pig with a human brain?”
    “They’re doing crap like that everywhere,” Harry said. “They never learn. The smarter they are, the dumber they get.”
    “The horror of it.”
    “They don’t see the horror. Just the glory and the money.”
    “I don’t see the glory.”
    “What glory could anyone have seen in Auschwitz? But some did.”
    Following a mutual silence, Billy met Harry’s eyes. “Do I know how to cheer up a room, or what?”
    “I haven’t laughed so hard since Abbott and Costello.”
     
     
     

Chapter 36
     
    At an electronics store in Napa, Billy bought a compact video camera and recorder. The equipment could be used in the usual fashion or could be set instead to compile a continuous series of snapshots taken at intervals of a few seconds.
    In its second mode, loaded with the proper custom disk, the system was able to provide week-long recorded surveillance similar to that in the average convenience store.
    Considering that the Explorer’s broken window didn’t allow him to lock any valuables in the vehicle, he paid for his purchases and arranged to return for them in half an hour.
    From the electronics store, he went in search of a newspaper-vending machine. He found one in front of a pharmacy.
    The lead story concerned Giselle Winslow. The schoolteacher had been murdered in the early hours of Tuesday morning, but her body had not been found until late Tuesday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours previously.
    The picture of her in the newspaper was different from the one tucked in the book on Lanny Olsen’s lap, but they were photos of the same attractive woman.
    Carrying the newspaper, Billy walked to the main branch of the county library. He had a