As usual, Steve vaulted over the end gate in the bar instead of pushing through it. “How’re they hangin’, Kemosabe?”
“One hour to go,” Billy said, “and I get my life back.”
“This is life,” Steve protested. “The center of the action.”
The tragedy of Steve Zillis was that he meant what he said. To him, this common tavern was a glamorous cabaret.
After tying on an apron, he snatched three olives from a bowl, juggled them with dazzling speed, and then caught them one at a time in his mouth.
When two drunks at the bar clapped loudly, Steve basked in their applause as if he were the star tenor at the Metropolitan Opera and had earned the adulation of a refined and knowledgeable audience.
In spite of the affliction of Steve Zillis’s company, this final hour of Billy’s shift passed quickly. The tavern was busy enough to keep two bartenders occupied as the late-afternoon tipplers delayed going home and the evening drinkers arrived.
As much as he ever could, Billy liked the place during this transitional time. The customers were at peak coherency and happier than they would be later, when alcohol washed them toward melancholy.
Because the windows faced east and the sun lay west, softest daylight painted the panes. The ceiling fixtures layered a coppery glow over the burnt-red mahogany paneling and booths.
The fragrant air was savory with the scents of wood flooring pickled in stale beer, candle wax, cheeseburgers, fried onion rings.
Billy didn’t like the place enough, however, to linger past the end of his shift. He left promptly at seven.
If he’d been Steve Zillis, he would have made a production of his exit. Instead, he departed as quietly as a ghost dematerializing from its haunt.
Outside, less than two hours of summer daylight remained. The sky was an electric Maxfield Parrish blue in the east, a paler blue in the west, where the sun still bleached it.
As he approached his Ford Explorer, he noticed a rectangle of white paper under the driver’s-side windshield wiper.
Behind the steering wheel, with his door still open, he unfolded the paper, expecting to find a handbill of some kind, advertising a car wash or a maid service. He discovered a neatly typed message:
If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County.
If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work.
You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.
Billy didn’t at that instant feel the world tilt under him, but it did. The plunge had not yet begun, but it would. Soon.
chapter 2
MICKEY MOUSE TOOK A BULLET IN THE THROAT.
The 9-mm pistol cracked three more times in rapid succession, shredding Donald Duck’s face.
Lanny Olsen, the shooter, lived at the end of a fissured blacktop lane, against a stony hillside where grapes would never grow. He had no view of the fabled Napa Valley.
As compensation for his unfashionable address, the property was shaded by beautiful plum trees and towering elms, brightened by wild azaleas. And it was private.
The nearest neighbor lived at such a distance that Lanny could have partied 24/7 without disturbing anyone. This offered no benefit to Lanny because he usually went to bed at nine-thirty; his idea of a party was a case of beer, a bag of chips, and a poker game.
The location of his property, however, was conducive to target shooting. He was the most practiced shot in the sheriff’s department.
As a boy, he’d wanted to be a cartoonist. He had talent. The Disney-perfect portraits of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, fixed to the hay-bale backstop, were Lanny’s work.
Ejecting the spent magazine from his pistol, Lanny said, “You should have been here yesterday. I head-shot twelve Road Runners in a row, not a wasted round.”
Billy said, “Wile E. Coyote would’ve been thrilled. You ever shoot at ordinary targets?”
“What would be the fun in that?”
“You ever shoot the Simpsons?”
“Homer, Bart—all of them but Marge,” Lanny said. “Never Marge.”
Lanny might have gone to art school if his domineering father, Ansel, had not been determined that his son would follow him into law enforcement as Ansel himself had followed his father.
Pearl, Lanny’s mother, had been as supportive as her illness allowed. When Lanny was sixteen, Pearl had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Radiation therapy and drugs sapped her. Even in periods when the lymphoma was controlled, she did not fully regain her strength.
Concerned that his father would be a useless nurse, Lanny never went away to art school. He remained at home, took up a career in law enforcement, and looked after his mother.
Unexpectedly, Ansel was first to die. He stopped a motorist for speeding, and the motorist stopped him with a.38 fired point-blank.
Having contracted lymphoma at an atypically young age, Pearl lived with it for a surprisingly long time. She had died ten years previously, when Lanny was thirty-six.
He’d still been young enough for a career switch and art school. Inertia, however, proved stronger than the desire for a new life.
He inherited the house, a handsome Victorian with elaborate millwork and an encircling veranda, which he maintained in pristine condition. With a career that was a job but not a passion, and with no family of his own, he had plenty of spare time for the house.
As Lanny shoved a fresh magazine in the pistol, Billy took the typewritten message from a pocket. “What do you make of this?”
Lanny read the two paragraphs while, in the lull of gunfire, blackbirds returned to the high bowers of nearby elms.
The message evoked neither a frown nor a smile from Lanny, though Billy had expected one or the other. “Where’d you get this?”
“Somebody left it under my windshield wiper.”
“Where were you parked?”
“At the tavern.”
“An envelope?”
“No.”
“You see anyone watching you? I mean, when you took it out from under the wiper and read it.”
“Nobody.”
“What do you make of it?”
“That was my question to you,” Billy reminded him.
“A prank. A sick joke.”
Staring at the ominous lines of type, Billy said, “That was my first reaction, but then…”
Lanny stepped sideways, aligning himself with new hay bales faced with full-figure drawings of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. “But then you ask yourself What if…?”
“Don’t you?”
“Sure. Every cop does, all the time, otherwise he ends up dead sooner than he should. Or shoots when he shouldn’t.”
Not long ago, Lanny had wounded a belligerent drunk who he thought had been armed. Instead of a gun, the guy had a cell phone.
“But you can’t keep what-ifing yourself forever,” he continued. “You’ve got to go with instinct. And your instinct is the same as mine. It’s a prank. Besides, you’ve got a hunch who did it.”
“Steve Zillis,” said Billy.
“Bingo.”
Lanny assumed an isosceles shooting stance, right leg quartered back for balance, left knee flexed, two hands on the pistol. He took a deep breath and popped Elmer five times as a shrapnel of blackbirds exploded from the elms and tore into the sky.
Counting four mortal hits and one wound, Billy said, “The thing is…this doesn’t seem like something Steve would do—or could.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a guy who carries a small rubber bladder in his pocket so he can make a loud farting sound when he thinks that might be funny.”
“Meaning?”
Billy folded the typewritten message and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “This seems too complex for Steve, too…subtle.”
“Young Steve is about as subtle as the green-apple nasties,” Lanny agreed.
Resuming his stance, he spent the second half of the magazine on Bugs, scoring five mortal hits.
“What if it’s real?” Billy asked.
“It’s not.”
“But what if it is?”
“Homicidal lunatics only play games like that in movies. In real life, killers just kill. Power is what it’s about for them, the power and sometimes violent sex—not teasing you with puzzles and riddles.”
Ejected shell casings littered the grass. The westering sun polished the tubes of brass to a bloody gold.
Aware that he hadn’t quelled Billy’s doubt, Lanny continued: “Even if it were real—and it’s not—what is there to act upon in that note?”
“Blond schoolteachers, elderly women.”
“Somewhere in Napa County.”
“Yeah.”
“Napa County isn’t San Francisco,” Lanny said, “but it’s not unpopulated barrens, either. Lots of people in lots of towns. The sheriff’s department plus every police force in the county together don’t have enough men to cover all those bases.”
“You don’t need to cover them all. He qualifies his targets—a lovely blond schoolteacher.”
“That’s a judgment,” Lanny objected. “Some blond schoolteacher you find lovely might be a hag to me.”
“I didn’t realize you had such high standards in women.”
Lanny smiled. “I’m picky.”
“Anyway there’s also the elderly woman active in charity work.”
Jamming a third magazine in the pistol, Lanny said, “A lot of elderly women are active in charities. They come from a generation that cared about their neighbors.”
“So you aren’t going to do anything?”
“What do you want me to do?”
Billy had no suggestion, only an observation: “It seems like we ought to do something.”
“By nature, police are reactive, not proactive.”
“So he has to murder somebody first?”
“He isn’t going to murder anyone.”
“He says he will,” Billy protested.
“It’s a prank. Steve Zillis has finally graduated from the squirting-flowers-and-plastic-vomit school of humor.”
Billy nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“I’m for sure right.” Indicating the remaining colorful figures fixed to the triple-thick wall of hay bales, Lanny said, “Now before twilight spoils my aim, I want to kill the cast of Shrek.”
“I thought they were good movies.”
“I’m not a critic,” Lanny said impatiently, “just a guy having some fun and sharpening his work skills.”
“Okay, all right, I’m out of here. See you Friday for poker.”
“Bring something,” Lanny said.
“Like what?”
“Jose’s bringing his pork-and-rice casserole. Leroy’s bringing five kinds of salsa and lots of corn chips. Why don’t you make your tamale pie?”
As Lanny spoke, Billy winced. “We sound like a group of old maids planning a quilting party.”
“We’re pathetic,” Lanny said, “but we’re not dead yet.”
“How would we know?”
“If I were dead and in Hell,” Lanny said, “they wouldn’t let me have the pleasure of drawing cartoons. And this sure isn’t Heaven.”
By the time Billy reached his Explorer in the driveway, Lanny Olsen had begun to blast away at Shrek, Princess Fiona, Donkey, and their friends.
The eastern sky was sapphire. In the western vault, the blue had begun to wear off, revealing gold beneath, and the hint of red gesso under the gilt.
Standing by his SUV in the lengthening shadows, Billy watched for a moment as Lanny honed his marksmanship and, for the thousandth time, tried to kill off his unfulfilled dream of being a cartoonist.
chapter 3
AN ENCHANTED PRINCESS, RECUMBENT IN A castle tower, dreaming the years away until awakened by a kiss, could not have been lovelier than Barbara Mandel abed at the Whispering Pines.
In the caress of lamplight, her golden hair spilled across the pillow, as lustrous as bullion poured from a smelter’s cauldron.
Standing at her bedside, Billy Wiles had never seen a bisque doll with a complexion as pale or as flawless as Barbara’s. Her skin appeared translucent, as though the light penetrated the surface and then brightened her face from within.
If he were to lift aside the thin blanket and sheet, he would expose an indignity not visited on enchanted princesses. An enteral-nutrition tube had been inserted surgically into her stomach.
The doctor had ordered a slow continuous feeding. The drip pump purred softly as it supplied a perpetual dinner.
She had been in a coma for almost four years.
Hers was not the most severe of comas. Sometimes she yawned, sighed, moved her right hand to her face, her throat, her breast.
Occasionally she spoke, though never more than a few cryptic words, not to anyone in the room but to some phantom of the mind.
Even when she spoke or moved her hand, she remained unaware of everything around her. She was unconscious, unresponsive to external stimulation.
At the moment she lay quiet, brow as smooth as milk in a pail, eyes unmoving behind their lids, lips slightly parted. No ghost breathed with less sound.
From a jacket pocket, Billy took a small wire-bound notebook. Clipped to it was a half-size ballpoint pen. He put them on the nightstand.
The small room was simply furnished: one hospital bed, one nightstand, one chair. Long ago Billy had added a barstool that allowed him to sit high enough to watch over Barbara.
Whispering Pines Convalescent Home provided good care but an austere environment. Half the patients were convalescing; the other half were merely being warehoused.
Perched on the stool beside the bed, he told her about his day. He began with a description of the sunrise and ended with Lanny’s shooting gallery of cartoon celebrities.
Although she had never responded to anything he’d said, Billy suspected that in her deep redoubt, Barbara could hear him. He needed to believe that his presence, his voice, his affection comforted her.
When he had no more to say, he continued to gaze at her. He did not always see her as she was now. He saw her as she’d once been—vivid, vivacious—and as she might be today if fate had been kinder.
After a while he extracted the folded message from his shirt pocket and read it again.
He had just finished when Barbara spoke in murmurs from which meaning melted almost faster than the ear could hear: “I want to know what it says….”
Electrified, he rose from the stool. He leaned over the bed rail to stare more closely at her.
Never before had anything she’d said, in her coma, seemed to relate to anything that he said or did while visiting. “Barbara?”
She remained still, eyes closed, lips parted, apparently no more alive than the object of mourning on a catafalque.
“Can you hear me?”
With trembling fingertips, he touched her face. She did not respond.
He had already told her what the strange message said, but now he read it to her just in case her murmured words had referred to it.
When he finished, she did not react. He spoke her name without effect.
Sitting on the stool once more, he plucked the little notebook from the nightstand. With the small pen, he recorded her seven words and the date that she had spoken them.
He had a notebook for each year of her unnatural sleep. Although each contained only a hundred three-by-four-inch pages, none had been filled, as she did not speak on every—or even most—visits.
I want to know what it says
After dating that unusually complete statement, he flipped pages, looking back through the notebook, reading not the dates but just some of her words.
lambs could not forgive
beef-faced boys
my infant tongue
the authority of his tombstone
Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes
, prism
season of darkness
it swells forward
one great heave
all flashes away
twenty-three, twenty-three
In her words, Billy could find neither coherence nor a clue to any.
From time to time through the weeks, the months, she smiled faintly. Twice in his experience she had laughed softly.
On other occasions, however, her whispered words disturbed him, sometimes chilled him.
torn, bruised, panting, bleeding
gore and fire