“The choice is yours,” Lanny repeated.
Billy didn’t want a falling-out between them. He lived on the more companionable side of the line between recluse and hermit, and he did not want to find himself straddling that divide.
Perhaps sensing his friend’s concern, Lanny took a softer tack: “All I’m asking is throw me a line. I’m in quicksand here.”
“For God’s sake, Lanny.”
“I know. It sucks. There’s no way it doesn’t.”
“Don’t try to manipulate me like that again. Don’t hammer me.”
“I won’t. I’m sorry. It’s just, the sheriff’s a hardass. You know he is. With my ten card, this is all he needs to take my badge, and I’m still six years short of a full pension.”
As long as he met Lanny’s eyes and saw the desperation in them, and saw something worse than desperation that he didn’t want to name, he couldn’t compromise with him. He had to look away and pretend to be speaking to the Lanny he’d known before this encounter.
“What are you asking me to do?”
Reading capitulation in the question, Lanny spoke in a still more conciliatory voice. “You won’t regret this, Billy. It’s going to be all right.”
“I didn’t say I’d do whatever you want. I just need to know what it is.”
“I understand. I appreciate it. You’re a true friend. All I’m asking is an hour, one hour to think.”
Shifting his gaze from the tavern to the cracked blacktop at his feet, Billy said, “There’s not much time. With the first message, it was six hours. Now it’s five.”
“I’m only asking for one. One hour.”
“He must know I get off work at seven, so that’s probably when the clock starts ticking. Midnight. Then before dawn he kills one or the other, and by action or inaction, I’ve made a choice. He’ll do what he’ll do, but I don’t want to think I decided it for him.”
“One hour,” Lanny promised, “and then I’ll go to Sheriff Palmer. I just have to figure the approach, the angle that’ll save my ass.”
A familiar shriek, but seldom heard in this territory, raised Billy’s attention from the blacktop to the sky.
White on sapphire, three sea gulls kited against the eastern heavens. They rarely ventured this far north from San Pablo Bay.
“Billy, I need those notes for Sheriff Palmer.”
Watching the sea gulls, Billy said, “I’d rather keep them.”
“The notes are evidence,” Lanny said plaintively. “That bastard Palmer will rip me a new one if I don’t take custody of the evidence and protect it.”
As the summer evening waned toward the darkness that always drove gulls to seaside roosts, these birds were so out of place that they seemed to be an omen. Their piercing, cold cries brought a creeping chill to the nape of Billy’s neck.
He said, “I only have the note I just found.”
“Where’s the first one?” Lanny asked.
“I left it in my kitchen, by the phone.”
Billy considered going into the tavern to ask Ivy Elgin the meaning of the birds.
“All right. Okay,” Lanny said. “Just give me the one you’ve got. Palmer’s gonna want to come talk to you. We can get the first note then.”
The problem was, Ivy claimed to be able to read portents only in the details of dead things.
When Billy hesitated, Lanny grew insistent: “For God’s sake, look at me. What is it with the birds?”
“I don’t know,” Billy replied.
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know what it is with the birds.” Reluctantly, Billy fished the note from his pocket and gave it to Lanny. “One hour.”
“That’s all I need. I’ll call you.”
As Lanny turned away, Billy put a hand on his shoulder, halting him. “What do you mean you’ll call? You said you’d bring Palmer.”
“I’ll call you first, as soon as I’ve figured out how to tweak the story to give myself cover.”
‘“Tweak,’” Billy said, loathing the word.
Falling silent, the circling sea gulls wheeled away toward the westering sun.
“When I call,” Lanny said, “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna tell Palmer, so we’ll be on the same page. Then I’ll go to him.”
Billy wished that he had never surrendered the note. But it was evidence, and logic dictated that Lanny should have it.
“Where are you going to be in an hour—at Whispering Pines?”
Billy shook his head. “I’m stopping there, but only for fifteen minutes. Then I’m going home. Call me at my place. But there’s one more thing.”
Impatiently, Lanny said, “Midnight, Billy. Remember?”
“How does this psycho know what choice I make? How did he know I went to you and not to the police? How will he know what I do in the next four and a half hours?”
No answer but a frown occurred to Lanny.
“Unless,” Billy said, “he’s watching me.”
Surveying the vehicles in the parking lot, the tavern, and the arc of embracing elms, Lanny said, “Everything was going so smooth.”
“Was it?”
“Like a river. Now this rock.”
“Always a rock.”
“That’s true enough,” Lanny said, and walked away toward his patrol car.
Mother Olsen’s only child appeared defeated, slump-shouldered and baggy-assed.
Billy wanted to ask if everything was all right between them, but that was too direct. He couldn’t think of another way to phrase the question.
Then he heard himself say, “Something I’ve never told you and should have.”
Lanny stopped, looked back, regarding him warily.
“All those years your mom was sick and you looked after her, gave up what you wanted…that took more of the right stuff than cop work does.”
As though embarrassed, Lanny looked at the trees again and said almost as if discomfited, “Thanks, Billy.” He seemed genuinely touched to hear his sacrifice acknowledged.
Then as if a perverse sense of shame compelled him to discount, if not mock, his virtue, Lanny added, “But all of that doesn’t leave me with a pension.”
Billy watched him get in the car and drive away.
In a silence of vanished sea gulls, the breathless day waned, while the hills and the meadows and the trees gradually drew more shadows over themselves.
On the farther side of the highway, the forty-foot wooden man strove to save himself from the great grinding wheels of industry or brutal ideology, or modern art.
Barbara’s face against the dimpled background of the pillow was Billy’s despair and his hope, his loss and his expectation.
She was an anchor in two senses, the first beneficial. The sight of her held Billy