Velocity

proved easy, but Lanny down the first flight was a hard thing to hear. In its half-fetal position, the body rapped and knocked step by step, managing to sound bony and gelatinous at the same time.
    At the landing, Billy reminded himself that Lanny had betrayed him in an attempt to save a job and pension, and that they were both here because of that. This truth, while inescapable, didn’t make the descent of the final flight of steps any less disturbing.
    Getting the body along the lower hall, through the kitchen, and across the back porch was easy enough. Then more steps, just a short flight, and they were in the yard.
    He considered loading the body in the Explorer and driving it as close to the ancient vent as possible. The distance was not great, however, and dragging Lanny all the way to his final resting place seemed to require no more exertion than to heave him into the SUV and wrestle him out again.
    Like a banked furnace, the land now returned the stored heat of the day, but at last a faint breeze came down out of the stars.
    En route, the sloping yard and the swath of tall grass and knee-high brush beyond proved longer than he had imagined it would be from the foot of the porch steps. His arms began to ache, his shoulders, his neck.
    The hook wounds, which had not recently bothered him, began to throb with new heat.
    Somewhere along the way, he realized that he was crying. This scared him. He needed to remain tough.
    He understood the source of the tears. The nearer that he drew to the lava pipe, the less Billy was able to regard his burden as an incriminating cadaver. Neither anointed nor eulogized, this was Lanny Olsen, the son of the good woman who had opened her heart and her home to an emotionally devastated fourteen-year-old boy.
    Now in the starlight, to Billy’s dark-adapted eyes, the knob of rock embracing the lava pipe looked increasingly like a skull.
    No matter what lay ahead, whether a mountain of skulls or a vast plain of them, he could not go back, and he certainly could not bring Lanny to life again, for he was only Billy Wiles, a good bartender and a failed writer. There were no miracles in him, only a stubborn hope, and a capacity for blind perseverance.
    So in the starlight and the hot breeze, he came to the place of the skull. There, he didn’t delay, not even to catch his breath, but pushed the wrapped cadaver into the hole.
    He lay against the redwood frame, peering into the bottomless blackness, listening to the long descent of the body, the only way he could bear witness.
    When silence came, he closed his eyes against the dark below and said, “It is finished.”
    Of course only this task was finished, and others lay ahead of him, perhaps some as bad, though surely none worse.
    He had left the flashlight and the power screwdriver on the ground beside the lava pipe. He slid the redwood lid into place, fished the steel screws out of his pockets, and secured the cover.
    Sweat had washed the last tears from his face by the time that he returned to the house.
    Behind the garage, he left the screwdriver and the flashlight in the Explorer. The latex gloves were torn. He stripped them off, stuffed them into the SUV’s litter bag, and drew on a fresh pair.
    He returned to the house to inspect it from top to bottom. He dared leave nothing behind to indicate that either he or a dead body had been there.
    In the kitchen, he could not decide what to do about the rum, cola, sliced lime, and other items on the table. He gave himself time to think about them.
    Intending to start upstairs, in the master bedroom, he followed the rose-flowered runner along the hallway to the front of the house. As he approached the foyer, he grew aware of an unexpected brightness to his right, beyond the living-room archway.
    The revolver in his hand suddenly became less a burdensome weight than an essential tool.
    On his first pass through the house, on his way upstairs to see if Lanny’s body remained in the bedroom armchair, Billy had switched on the overhead fixture in the living room, but only that. Now every lamp was aglow.
    Sitting on a sofa, facing the archway, a testament to unreason and the durability of thrift-shop clothes, sat Ralph Cottle.
     
     
     

Chapter 51
     
    Ralph Cottle had incredibly shed his plastic shroud, improbably ascended from thousands of feet beneath the valley floor, impossibly let himself into the Olsen house, just forty minutes after whistling down the lava pipe, and all while