Velocity

freak disappeared into the kitchen. He moved around out there, making noise. Looking for something. Doing something.
    Billy spotted the crisp shine of machined steel on the dark hardwood floor of the foyer—the revolver. The weapon lay behind him and beyond his reach.
    Having been to the place of the skull, having consigned Lanny to the lava pipe, Billy had exhausted his capacity for dread, or thought that he had until he realized that he must test the nail to see how securely it fixed him to the floor. He was loath to move his hand.
    The pain was constant but tolerable, bad but not as terrible as he might have imagined. Trying to move the hand, however, trying to pry loose the spike, would be like chewing taffy with an abscessed tooth.
    He wasn’t only loath to move his hand, but also to look at it. Although he knew the image conjured in his mind had to be worse than the reality, his stomach clenched as he turned his head and focused on his wound.
    Except for an excess of fingers, the white latex surgical glove made his hand look like Mickey Mouse’s hand, like the cartoon hands taped to the walls and pointing the way to the chair where Lanny had been posed with one of his mother’s books. The cuff of the glove even had a little roll to it.
    A spidery crawling at his wrist proved to be a trickling thread of blood, which robbed the moment of even dark comedy.
    He expected the bleeding to be much worse than this. The nail obstructed flow. When he extracted it…
    Holding his breath, Billy listened. No noise in the kitchen. Apparently the killer had gone.
    He didn’t want the freak to hear him scream again, didn’t want to give him that satisfaction.
    The nail. The head had not been driven flat to the flesh. About three-quarters of an inch of shank separated the nailhead from his palm. He could see the gripper marks in the steel.
    He had no way of knowing the length of the nail. Judging by its diameter, he estimated that it measured at least three inches from head to point.
    Subtracting both the portion that stood above his palm and the portion that passed through it, as much as an inch and a half might be embedded in the floor. After it penetrated the surface hardwood and the subflooring, little of the nail would remain to grip a joist.
    If it was four inches long, however, it might be securely wedged in a joist. Getting loose would be one inch nastier.
    Houses were well put together in the days when this one had been built. Either two-by-fours or two-by-sixes, most likely set twelve inches center-to-center, supported the subfloor.
    Nevertheless, his odds were good. In every fourteen inches of floor width, only four inches were underlaid by joists.
    Hammer ten nails into the floor at random, and three would find joists. The other seven would penetrate the empty spaces between timbers.
    When he tried to cup his left hand to test its flexibility, he throttled an involuntary howl of pain into a snarl. He couldn’t choke it off entirely.
    No laughter came from the kitchen, supporting his suspicion that the freak had gone.
    Suddenly Billy wondered if, before leaving, the killer had dialed 911.
     
     
     

Chapter 53
     
    As still and attentive as only a corpse can be, Ralph Cottle sat sentinel on the sofa.
    The killer had crossed the dead man’s right leg over his left and had arranged his hands in his lap to give him a casual posture. He seemed to be waiting patiently for his host to appear with a tray of cocktails—or for Sergeants Napolitino and Sobieski.
    Although Cottle had not been mutilated or tricked up with props, Billy thought of the macabre mannequins arranged with such care in Steve Zillis’s house.
    Zillis was tending bar. Billy had seen his car there earlier, when he had stopped across the highway from the tavern to watch the setting sun blaze in the giant mural.
    Cottle later. Zillis later. Now the nail.
    Carefully, Billy turned on his left side to face the pierced hand.
    With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he gripped the head of the nail. He tried gently to wiggle it back and forth, hoping to detect some play in it, but the nail felt rigid, deeply seated.
    If the head had been small, he might have tried to slide his hand up the shank and pull it loose, leaving the nail in the floor.
    The head was broad. Even if he could have tolerated the pain of twisting it backward through his hand, he would have done unthinkable damage in the process.
    When he worked the nail more forcefully, pain