Читать книгу Velocity - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 14

Billy had not been threatened in either of the notes. The danger confronting him was not to life and limb. He would have preferred physical peril to the moral jeopardy that he faced.

Nevertheless, when he found the back door of the house ajar, he considered waiting in the yard until Lanny arrived with Sheriff Palmer.

That option occupied his consideration only for a moment. He didn’t care if Lanny and Palmer thought he was gutless, but he didn’t want to think it of himself.

He went inside. No one waited in the kitchen.

The draining daylight drizzled down the windows more than it penetrated them. Warily, he turned on lights as he went through the house.

He found no intruder in any room or closet. Curiously, he saw no signs of intrusion, either.

By the time that he returned to the kitchen, he had begun to wonder if he might have failed to close and lock the door when he had left the house earlier in the day.

That possibility had to be discounted when he found the spare key on a kitchen counter, near the phone. It should have been taped to the bottom of one of twenty cans of wood stain and varnish stored on a shelf in the garage.

Billy had last used the spare key five or six months previously. He could not possibly have been under surveillance that long.

Suspecting the existence of a key, the killer must have intuited that the garage was the most likely place in which it would have been hidden.

Billy’s professionally equipped woodworking shop occupied two-thirds of that space, presenting numerous drawers and cabinets and shelves where such a small item could have been hidden. The search for it might have taken hours.

If the killer, after visiting the house, intended to announce his intrusion by leaving the spare key in the kitchen, logic argued that he would have saved himself the time and trouble of the search. Instead, why wouldn’t he have broken one of the four panes of glass in the back door?

As Billy puzzled over this conundrum, he suddenly realized that the key lay at the very spot on the black-granite counter where he had left the first typewritten message from the killer. It was gone.

Turning in a full circle, he saw the note neither on the floor nor on another counter. He pulled open the nearest drawers, but it was not in this one or in this one, or in this one…

Abruptly he realized that Giselle Winslow’s killer had not been here, after all. The intruder had been Lanny Olsen.

Lanny knew where the spare key was kept. When he had asked for the first note, as evidence, Billy had told him that it was here, in the kitchen.

Lanny had also asked where to find him in an hour, whether he would be going directly home or to Whispering Pines.

A sense of deep misgiving overcame Billy, a general uneasiness and doubt that began to curdle his trust.

If Lanny had all along intended to come here and collect the note as essential evidence, not later with Sheriff Palmer but right away, he should have said so. His deception suggested that he was not in a mood to serve and protect the public, or even to back up a friend, but was focused first on saving his own skin.

Billy didn’t want to believe such a thing. He sought excuses for Lanny.

Maybe after driving away from the tavern in his patrol car, he had decided that, after all, he must have both of the notes before he approached Sheriff Palmer. And maybe he didn’t want to make a call to Whispering Pines because he knew how important those visits were to Billy.

In that case, however, he would have written a brief explanation to leave in place of the killer’s note when he took it.

Unless…If his intention was to destroy both notes instead of going to Palmer, and later to claim that Billy had never come to him prior to the Winslow murder, such a replacement note would have been evidence to refute him.

Always, Lanny Olsen had seemed to be a good man, not free of faults, but basically good and fair and decent. He’d sacrificed his dreams to stand by his ailing mother for so many years.

Billy dropped the spare key in his pants pocket. He did not intend to tape it again to the bottom of the can in the workshop.

He wondered just how many bad reports were on Lanny’s ten card, exactly how lazy he had been.

In retrospect, Billy heard markedly greater desperation in his friend’s voice than he had heard at the time:

I never really wanted this life…but the thing is…whether I wanted it or not, it’s what I’ve got now. It’s all I have. I want a chance to keep it.

Even most good men had a breaking point. Lanny might have been closer to his than Billy could have known.

The wall clock showed 8:09.

In less than four hours, regardless of the choice that Billy made, someone would die. He wanted this responsibility off his shoulders.

Lanny was supposed to call him by 8:30.

Billy had no intention of waiting. He snatched the handset from the wall phone and keyed in Lanny’s personal cell-phone number.

After five rings, he was switched to voice mail. He said, “This is Billy. I’m at home. What the hell? What’ve you done? Call me now.”

Instinct told him not to attempt to reach Lanny through the sheriff’s-department dispatcher. He would be leaving a trail that might have consequences he could not foresee.

His friend’s betrayal, if that’s what it was, had reduced Billy to the cautious calculations of a guilty man, although he had done nothing wrong.

A transient sting of mingled pain and anger would have been understandable. Instead, resentment swelled in him so thick, so quick, that his chest grew tight and he had difficulty swallowing.

Destroying the notes and lying about them might spare Lanny dismissal from the force, but Billy’s situation would be made worse. Lacking evidence, he would find it more difficult to convince the authorities that his story was true and that it might shed light on the killer’s psychology.

If he approached them now, he risked looking like a publicity seeker or like a bartender who sampled too much of his wares. Or like a suspect.

Riveted by that thought, he stood very still for a minute, exploring it. Suspect.

His mouth had gone dry. His tongue cleaved to his palate.

He went to the kitchen sink and drew a glass of cold water from the tap. At first he could barely choke down a mouthful, but then he drained the glass in three long swallows.

Too cold, drunk too fast, the water wrung a brief sharp pain from his chest, and washed nausea through his gut. He put the glass on the drain-board. He leaned over the sink until the queasi-ness passed.

He splashed his greasy face with cold water, washed his hands in hot.

He paced the kitchen. He sat briefly at the table, then paced some more.

At 8:30, he stood by the telephone, staring at it, although he had every reason to believe that it would not ring.

At 8:40, he used his cell phone to call Lanny’s cellular number, leaving the house phone open. He got voice mail again.

The kitchen was too warm. He felt stifled.

At 8:45, Billy stepped outside, onto the back porch. He needed fresh air.

With the door wide open behind him, he could hear the telephone if it rang.

Indigo in the east, the sky overhead and to the west trembled faintly with the iridescent vibrations of an orange-and-green sunset.

The encircling woods bristled dark, growing darker. If a hostile observer had taken up position in that timber, crouching in ferns and philodendrons, none but a sharp-nosed dog could have known that he was out there.

A hundred toads, all unseen, had begun to sing in the descending gloom, but in the kitchen, past the open door, all was silent.

Perhaps Lanny just needed a little more time to find a way to tweak the truth.

Surely he cared about more than himself. He could not have been reduced so totally, so quickly, to the most base self-interest.

He was still a cop, lazy or not, desperate or not. Sooner than later he would realize that he couldn’t live with himself if, by obstructing the investigation, he contributed to more deaths.

The ink-spill in the east soon saturated the sky overhead, while in the west, all was fire and blood.