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This was such a night for Billy He had known others like it Always the doubt had receded He told hih this tiher water mark The freak had at first seemed to be a player to whom murder was a sport The fishhooks in the forehead, however, had not been intended as amore was not a form of chess or the equivalent of poker Ho for him, and he pursued it with a purpose oal beyond the killing itself, an ai word, Billy needed to find the right one Until he knew the correct word, he would never understand the killer, and would not find hiently swabbed the clotted blood from his eyebroiped ht of the fishhooks had clarified his mind He wasn’t dizzy anymore

His wounds needed attention He switched on the headlights and drove out of the church parking lot

Whatever ultiht have, whatever symbolism he intended with the fishhooks, he must also have hoped to send Billy to a doctor The physician would require an explanation of the hooks, and any response Billy made would complicate his predicament

If he told the truth, he would tie himself to the murders of Giselle Winslow and Lanny Olsen He would be the primary suspect

Without the three notes, he could offer no evidence that the freak existed The authorities would not regard the hooks as credible evidence, for they would wonder if this was a case of self-mutilation A self-inflicted wound was a ploy that murderers sometimes used to cast themselves as victims and thereby to deflect suspicion

He knew the cynicism hich some cops would look upon his dramatic, bizarre, but superficial wounds He knew it precisely Furtherler He fished for trout and bass These substantial hooks were the size needed to land large bass if you were using live bait instead of lures In his tackle box at home were hooks identical to those that no his blood

He dared not go to a doctor He’d have to be his own physician At 3:30 in the ht was still, but the SUV made its oind, which blustered at the broken-outIn the halogen headlights, flat vineyards, hillside vineyards, and wooded heights remained familiar to his eye but, n barrens

PART 2

ARE YOU PREPARED FOR YOUR SECOND WOUND?

Chapter 17

In February, after the extraction of a iven a prescription for a painkiller, Vicodin, by his periodontist He had used only two of ten tablets

The pharmacy label specified that the medication should be taken with food He had not eaten dinner, and he still had no appetite He needed the ot a baking dish of leftover hoged with clots and the bleeding had stopped, the pain continued unrelenting and ly difficult He chose not to delay the few minutes necessary to zap the dish in the microwave He put it cold on the kitchen table A pink sticker on the pill bottle counseled against consu the painkiller Screw that He had no intention of driving a car or operating heavy machinery in the next several hours He popped the tablet and forked lasagna into hisdoith Elephant beer, a Danish brew boasting a higher alcohol content than other beers

As he ate, he thought about the dead schoolteacher, about Lanny sitting in the bedrooht do next Those lines of thought were not conducive to appetite or to digestion The teacher and Lanny were beyond rescue, and there was no way to foretell the freak’s next ht about Barbara Mandel, mostly about Barbara as she had been, not as she was now in Whispering Pines Inevitably, these rean to worry about ould happen to her if he died

He remembered the small square envelope from her physician He fished it out of his pocket and tore it open

The name Dr Jordan Ferrier was blind embossed on the face of the crea: Dear Billy, When you start tiular rounds, I know the time has come for our semiannual review of her condition Please call my office to schedule an appointment

Sweat beaded the bottle of Elephant beer He used Dr Ferrier’s note card as a coaster to protect the table

"Why don’t you calldish was half full of lasagna Although he had no appetite, he ate everything, shoving food into hiscould satiate anger as easily as it could hunger

Eventually the pain in his forehead substantially subsided He went to his fishing gear in the garage Froler’s kit, he retrieved needle-nose pliers with a wire-cutting edge

In the house again, after locking the back door, he went to the bathroom, where he examined his face in the inal resident of Hell

The freak had inserted the three hooks with care Apparently, he had tried to do as little dae as possible

To suspicious police, that tenderness would have supported the theory that these wounds were self-inflicted

One end of the hook featured the bend and the barb At the other end was an eye to which a snap and leader could be attached Pulling either the barb or the eye through the puncture would further rip the flesh

He used the pliers to snip off the eye froer, he pinched the barbed end and extracted the cut shank When he had removed all three hooks, he took a shower as hot as he could tolerate

After the shower, he sterilized the punctures as best he could with rubbing alcohol and then hydrogen peroxide He applied Neosporin and covered the wounds with gauze pads fixed with adhesive tape

At 4:27 AM, according to the nightstand clock, Billy went to bed A double bed, two sets of pillows His head on one soft pillow, the hard revolver under the other May the judgment not be too heavy upon us…

As his eyelids fell shut of their oeight, he saw Barbara in hisinscrutable statements

I want to knohat it says, the sea What it is that it keeps on saying He was asleep before the clock counted the half hour

In his dream, he lay in a coma, unable to move or to speak, but nonetheless aware of the world around him Doctors in white lab coats and black skion his flesh with steel scalpels, carving clusters of bloody acanthus leaves

Resurgent pain, dull but persistent, woke hi At first, he could not rehtmarish experiences had been dreamed, which real Then he could

He wanted another Vicodin Instead, in the bathroo to take the aspirins with orange juice, he went into the kitchen He had neglected to put the baking pan, crusted with the residue of lasagna, in the dishwasher The empty bottle of Elephant beer stood on Dr Ferrier’s stationery

Morning light flooded the room The blinds had been raised The s had been covered when he’d gone to bed

Taped to the refrigerator was a folded sheet of paper, the fourth e from the killer

Chapter 18