Velocity

on.
    Amazingly, moving on eventually means moving in with Pearl Olsen, the widow of one deputy and the mother of another.
    She makes the offer to rescue Billy from the limbo of child-service custody, and in their first meeting, he knows instinctively that she will always be no more and no less than she appears to be. Although he is only fourteen, he has learned that harmony between reality and appearance may be more rare than any child imagines, and is a quality he may hope to foster in himself.
     
     
     

Chapter 58
     
    Parked in the bright lights of the truck stop, outside the diner, Billy Wiles ate Hershey’s, ate Planters, and brooded about Steve Zillis.
    The evidence against Zillis, while circumstantial, seemed to support suspicion far more than anything that John Palmer had used to justify targeting Billy.
    Nevertheless, he worried that he might be about to move against an innocent man. The mannequins, the bondage pornography, and the general condition of Zillis’s house proved he was a creep and perhaps even deranged, but none of it proved he had killed anyone.
    Billy’s experience at the hands of Palmer left him yearning for certainty.
    Hoping to turn up one case-fortifying fact, even something as thin as the wisp of crescent moon above the diner, Billy picked up the paper that he had bought in Napa and had heretofore had no time to read. The front-page story about Giselle Winslow’s murder.
    Crazily, he hoped that the cops had found a cherry stem tied in a knot near the corpse.
    Instead, what leaped at him from the article, what flew at him as quick as a bat to a moth, was the fact that Winslow’s left hand had been cut off. The freak had taken a souvenir, not a face this time, but a hand.
    Lanny had not mentioned this. But when Lanny had driven into the tavern parking lot as Billy took the second note off the Explorer’s windshield, Winslow’s body had only recently been found. Not all of the details had yet been shared on the sheriffs-department hotline.
    Inevitably, Billy remembered the note that had been taped to his refrigerator seventeen hours earlier and that he had secreted in his copy of In Our Time. The message warned him that “An associate of mine will come to see you at 11:00. Wait for him on the front porch.”
    In memory, he could see the last two lines of that note, which had been baffling at the time, but were less so now. You seem so angry. Have I not extended to you the hand of friendship? Yes, I have.
    Even on first reading, those lines had seemed to be mocking, taunting. Now they jeered him, challenged him to accept that he was hopelessly outclassed.
    Somewhere in his house, the severed hand awaited discovery by the police.
     
     
     

Chapter 59
     
    A man and woman, a trucker couple in jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps—his said PETERBILT; hers said ROAD GODDESS—came out of the diner. The man probed his incisors with a toothpick, while the woman yawned, rolled her shoulders, and stretched her arms. From behind the wheel of the Explorer, Billy found himself staring at the woman’s hands, thinking how small they were, how easily one of them could be hidden. In the attic. Under a floorboard. Behind the furnace. In the back of a closet. In the crawlspace under one of the porches, front or back. Perhaps in the garage, in a workshop drawer. Preserved in formaldehyde or not. If one victim’s hand had been secreted on his property, why not a part of another victim, too? What had the freak harvested from the redhead, and where had he put it? Billy was tempted to drive home at once, to search the house thoroughly from top to bottom. He might need the rest of the night and all of the morning to find these incriminating horrors.
    And if he did not find them, would he spend the coming afternoon in the search, as well? How could he not?
    Once the quest had begun, he would be compelled, obsessed to continue until he discovered the grisly grail.
    According to his wristwatch, it was 1:36 A.M., Thursday morning. The pertinent midnight lay little more than twenty-two hours away. My last killing: midnight Thursday.
    Already Billy was functioning on caffeine and chocolate, Anacin and Vicodin. If he spent his day in a frantic search for body parts, if by twilight he had neither identified the freak nor gotten any rest, he would be physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted; in that condition, he would not be a reliable guardian for Barbara.
    He must not waste time searching for the