Velocity

“No one in this joint has a chance at Ivy,” Billy assured him.

“You never know,” Ramon had said coyly.

“Don’t tell me you’re packing in the peppers, too.”

“So many I have killer heartburn some nights,” Ramon had said. “But I’m ready.”

With Ramon came the evening bartender, Steve Zillis, whose shift overlapped Billy’s by an hour. At twenty-four, he was ten years younger than Billy but twenty years less mature.

For Steve, the height of sophisticated humor was any limerick sufficiently obscene to cause grown men to blush.

He could tie knots in a cherry stem with just his tongue, load his right nostril with peanuts and fire them accurately into a target glass, and blow cigarette smoke out of his right ear.

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.

2 (#ulink_faad6d75-6153-54b6-9560-d8d2b62b1226)

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.”