LITMIR.BIZ

       10

      Graceful in starlight with oaks, the church stood along the main highway, a quarter of a mile from the turnoff to Lanny Olsen’s house.

      Billy drove to the southwest corner of the parking lot. Under the cloaking gloom of a massive California live oak, he doused the headlights and switched off the engine.

      Picturesque chalk-white stucco walls with decorative buttresses rose to burnt-orange tile roofs. In a belfry niche stood a statue of the Holy Mother with her arms open to welcome suffering humanity.

      Here, every baptized baby would seem to be a potential saint. Here, every marriage would appear to have the promise of lifelong happiness regardless of the natures of the bride and groom.

      Billy had a gun, of course.

      Although it was an old weapon, not one of recent purchase, it remained in working order. He had cleaned and stored it properly.

      Packed away with the revolver had been a box of .38 cartridges. They showed no signs of corrosion.

      When he had taken the weapon from its storage case, it felt heavier than he remembered. Now as he picked it off the passenger’s seat, it still felt heavy.

      This particular Smith & Wesson tipped the scale at only thirty-six ounces, but maybe the extra weight that he felt was its history.

      He got out of the Explorer and locked the doors.

      A lone car passed on the highway. The side-wash of the headlights reached no closer than thirty yards from Billy.

      The rectory lay on the farther side of the church. Even if the priest was an insomniac, he would not have heard the SUV.

      Billy walked farther under the oak, out from its canopy, into a meadow. Wild grass rose to his knees.

      In the spring, cascades of poppies had spilled down this sloped field, as orange-red as a lava flow. They were dead now, and gone.

      He halted to let his eyes grow accustomed to the moonless dark.

      Motionless, he listened. The air was still. No traffic moved on the distant highway. His presence had silenced the cicadas and the toads. He could almost hear the stars.

      Confident of his dark-adapted vision though of nothing else, he set out across the gently rising meadow, angling toward the fissured and potholed blacktop lane that led to Lanny Olsen’s place.

      He worried about rattlesnakes. On summer nights as warm as this, they hunted field mice and younger rabbits. Unbitten, he reached the lane and turned uphill, passing two houses, both dark and silent.

      At the second house, a dog ran loose in the fenced yard. It did not bark, but raced back and forth along the high pickets, whimpering for Billy’s attention.

      Lanny’s place lay a third of a mile past the house with the dog. At every window, light of one quality or another fired the glass or gilded the curtains.

      In the yard, Billy crouched beside a plum tree. He could see the west face of the house, which was the front, and the north flank.

      The possibility existed that this entire thing had in fact been a hoax and that Lanny was the hoaxer.

      Billy did not know for a fact that a blond schoolteacher had been murdered in the city of Napa. He had taken Lanny’s word for it.

      He had not seen a report of the homicide in the newspaper. The killing supposedly had been discovered too late in the day to make the most recent edition. Besides, he rarely read a newspaper.

      Likewise, he never watched TV. Occasionally he listened for weather reports on the radio, while driving, but mostly he relied on a CD player loaded with zydeco or Western swing.

      A cartoonist might be expected also to be a prankster. The funny streak in Lanny had been repressed for so long, however, that it was less of a streak than a thread. He made reasonably good company, but he wasn’t a load of laughs.

      Billy didn’t intend to wager his life—or a nickel—that Lanny Olsen had hoaxed him.

      He remembered how sweaty and anxious and distressed his friend had been in the tavern parking lot, the previous evening. In Lanny, what you saw was what he was. If he’d wanted to be an actor instead of a cartoonist, and if his mother had never gotten cancer, he would still have wound up as a cop with a problematic ten card.

      After studying the place, certain that no one was watching from a window, Billy crossed the lawn, passed the front porch, and had a look at the south flank of the house. There, too, every window glowed softly.

      He circled to the rear, staying at a distance, and saw that the back door stood open. A wedge of light lay like a carpet on the dark porch floor, welcoming visitors across the kitchen threshold.

      An invitation this bold seemed to suggest a trap.

      Billy expected to find Lanny Olsen dead inside.

       If you don’t go to the police and get them involved, I will kill an unmarried man who won’t much be missed by the world.

      Lanny’s funeral would not be attended by thousands of mourners, perhaps not even by as many as a hundred, though some would miss him. Not the world, but some.

      When Billy had made his choice to spare the mother of two, he had not realized that he had doomed Lanny.

      If he had known, perhaps he would have made a different choice. Choosing the death of a friend would be harder than dropping the dime on a nameless stranger. Even if the stranger was a mother of two.

      He didn’t want to think about that.

      Toward the end of the backyard stood the stump of a diseased oak that had been cut down long ago. Four feet across, two feet high.

      On the east side of the stump was a hole worn by weather and rot. In the hole had been tucked a One Zip plastic bag. The bag contained a spare house key.

      After retrieving the key, Billy circled cautiously to the front of the house. He returned to the concealment of the plum tree.

      No one had turned

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