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Through her ht with a thunderous dru bea as they ascended, shrieking as if testifying to the terror below, as if crying Murder,in the blood-spotted snow, screari that housed Brian McCarthy’s company offices and apartment The ere dark on both floors

The boss had confir were evidently on the road to Santa Barbara by now

Billy returned to the Cadillac in which Pauline Shumpeter had died of a massive stroke but had not soiled herself He boldly reparked it in the lot beside McCarthy’s building

After sheathing his hands in latex gloves, he got out of the car and cliloves because he didn’t intend to reduce this place to molten metal and soot with exotic Russian incendiary weapons He would have preferred to leave fingerprints and then burn the building because his hands sweated in the gloves, and they ist

With a LockAid lock-release gun, he picked the deadbolt pins in twenty seconds, went inside, closed the door behind hiht need to kill

Billy did not usually kill two people per day and assist in the murder and disposal of two others If this had been a take-your-son-to-work day, and if he had had a son, the boy would have colamorous than it really was

Soo a year, even two years, without having to waste a friend like Georgie Jobbs or a coer like Shumpeter

Sure, in his line of work, every day required the commission of felonies, but mostly they were not capital crimes that could earn you a lethal injection and burial at public expense

Episodes of life seldo-is-pointless-and-silly genre, which is why Billy still read so ly, episodes of real life also were not reliably as less as life was portrayed by his favorite writers Once in a while, soful patterns in events, or he would encounter someone whose life seemed to be filled with purpose

On those occasions, Billy would retreat to his books until his doubts were put to rest

If his favorite books failed to encourage a full renewal of his comfortable cynicism, he would kill the person whose life had see had been an illusion

The apartment re on lights

He disliked thehere was real Life was chaos This decor was not authentic

Authentic decor was a deranged old lady living with fifty years of daily newspapers and thousands of bags of trash stacked throughout the residence, her husband dead twelve years on the parlor sofa, and twenty-six cats with various seizure disorders Authentic decor was bos, teneas

Billy loved Vegas His ideal vacation, which he didn’t get to enjoy often enough, was to go to Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash, lose half of it at the tables, win the losses back, then lose the entire bankroll, and kill a perfect stranger chosen at randoly clean neon-free study, Billy unplugged the brain of the computer, carried it from the room, and stood beside the front door When he headed for Santa Barbara, this logic unit would be in the trunk of his car Later, he would flood it with corrosive materials and burn it in a crematorium

The architect had been instructed to take his laptop with him Billy would have to destroy that ain, he searched the file cabinets and found the printouts of all the e-mails that Vanessa had sent to the architect over the past ten years Although the waste can was tall, those files filled it to the briht have saved old e-mail files on diskettes when he updated co that, judging by the labels, needed to be trashed

His purpose here was to eliht, in the event of McCarthy’s disappearance, lead the police to Vanessa

In the study and bedroom, he also searched for a diary He did not expect to find one

As with literature, authentic decor, ideal vacations, and so rim had a theory about diaries

Women were more likely thanto require recording on a daily basis It was not for the -otta-be-, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn’t want to ponder theof life anymore because it scared the crap out of them

He did not find a diary in McCarthy’s apartment, but he did find scores of art-paper tablets full of sketches and detailed drawings, ested that the architect secretly yearned to be not a designer of buildings but instead a fine artist

Pencil drawings littered the kitchen table One of theolden retriever Soht conditions Others were abstract patterns of light and shadow

Billy becas because he inferred that during their creation, the artist had been in emotional chaos Billy was a connoisseur of chaos

He stood at the table, sorting through the pictures, and after a while he found hi sat down The wall clock revealed that he had been with the drawings for more than fifteen minutes, when he would have sworn it had been two or three

Later, still enthralled by the art, he was startled to feel blood trickle down his face

In no pain, puzzled, Billy raised one hand and felt his cheeks, his brow, seeking the wound, which he could not find When he looked at his fingertips, they glistened with a clear fluid

He recognized this substance These were tears In his line of work, he sometimes reduced people to tears

Billy had not wept in thirty-one years, since he had read a huge novel of such stunning brilliance that it had drained him of his last s People were nothing but machines of meat You couldn’t feel sorry for either uffaw so strenuously, for so long, at the folly and bottomless stupidity of humankind that he had also used up his lifetihter

These new tears perplexed Billy

They amazed and astonished him

They also alarmed him

Dread loves were slimy with sweat, which backed up to the cuffs and leaked out at his wrists, dahter, a preparatory lubricant for gales of giggles, he ht have been able to accept the inside him

His contempt for humanity remained so pure that he knew these could not be tears inspired by the richly comic horror of the human condition