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The freak had prepared for all contingencies He was nothing if not thorough And he had been confident his script would play out as he had intended

Billy deleted the docuainst hi on how events unfolded fro it from the directory did not remove it from the hard disk He would have to find a way to ask someone as a computer maven

When he shut down the computer, he realized that he had still not heard the patrol-car engines start up

Chapter 33

Peeling the shade aside at a study , Billy discovered the driveway e sunshine He had become so absorbed with the diskette that he had not heard the car engines start The sergeants had gone He had expected to discover another challenge on the diskette: a choice between two innocent victi a decision No doubt another one would coent business He had plenty of it

He went to the garage and returned with a length of rope and one of the polyurethane drop cloths hich he covered furniture when he had repainted the interior of the house in the spring He unfolded this tarp on the study floor in front of the desk

After wrestling Cottle’s body out of the knee space and dragging it around the desk, he rolled it onto the drop cloth

The prospect of turning out the dead ot on with it, anyway

Billy wasn’t looking for planted evidence that would incriminate him If the freak had salted the corpse, he had been subtle about it; Billy would not find everything

Besides, he intended to dispose of the body in a place where it would never be found For that reason, he was unconcerned about leaving fingerprints on the plastic sheeting

The suit coat had two inner pockets In the first, Cottle had kept the pint of whiskey that he had spilled From the second, Billy extracted a pint of rum, and returned it

In the two outer pockets of the coat were cigarettes, a cheap butane lighter, and a roll of butterscotch Life Savers In the front pants pockets, he found sixty-seven cents in coins, a deck of playing cards, and a whistle in the form of a plastic canary

Cottle’s wallet contained six one-dollar bills, a five, and fourteen tendollar bills These last must have come from the freak Ten dollars for each year of your innocence, Mr Wiles

Basically frugal, Billy didn’t want to bury theit in the poor box at the church where he had parked--and been assaulted--the previous night

Squeaality Billy left the money in the wallet As dead pharaohs had been sent to the Other Side with salt, grain, wine, gold, and euthanized servants, so Ralph Cottle would travel across the Styx with spendingthe few other items in the wallet were two of interest, the first a worn and creased snapshot of Cottle as a young man He looked handsome, virile, radically different fronizable With hi They looked happy

The second item was a 1983 membership card in the American Society of Skeptics Ralph Thurman Cottle, member since 1978

Billy kept the snapshot and theelse to Cottle’s hip pocket

He rolled the cadaver tightly in the tarp He folded the ends down and secured the bundle with yards of strapping tape

His expectation had been that, inside ht pass for a rug wrapped in protective plastic It looked like a corpse in a tarp

Using the rope, he fashioned a tightly knotted handle to one end of the packaged cadaver, by which it could be dragged

He did not intend to dispose of Cottle until after dark The cargo space in his Explorer was encircled by s SUV’s were useful vehicles, but if you were going to be transporting corpses in broad daylight, you better have a car with a rooun to feel that his house was being as freely traveled as a public bus ter room, where he left it behind the sofa It could not be seen from the front door or froorously scrubbed his hands withwater

Then he made a ham sandwich Ravenous, he wondered how he could have an appetite after the gruesoht that his will to survive had re his years of retreat He wondered what other qualities, good and bad, he would rediscover or discover in hi the thirty-six hours ahead There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not

Chapter 34

As Billy finished the ha

He didn’t want to answer it He didn’t receive a lot of calls froh was enough On the twelfth ring, he pushed his chair back fro on the phone He didn’t want to reveal his voice He would do nothing but listen to Billy in ot up from the table

These calls had no purpose but to inti the at it On the twenty-sixth ring, he lifted the handset

The digital readout revealed ho caller ID

Billy didn’t say hello He listened

After a few seconds of silence on the other end, a mechanical click was followed by a hiss Pops and scratches punctuated the hiss: the sound of blank audio tape passing over a playback head

When the words came, they were in a series of voices, some men, some women No individual spokeby the inconstant volume levels and other tells, the freak had constructed theaudio, perhaps books on tape by different readers "I will… kill a… pretty redhead If you… say… waste the bitch… I will… kill… her… quickly Otherwise… she will… suffer… much… torture You… have… one ain, the hiss and pop and scratch of blank tape…

The conundrum had been perfectly constructed It allowed an evasive man no room for further evasion

Previously, Billy had been morally co-opted only to the extent that the choice of the victims had been made because of his inaction, and in Cottle’s case because of the refusal to act

In the choice between a lovely schoolteacher and a charitable old woic unless you were biased toward the beautiful and against the aged Making an active decision resulted in neither less nor greater tragedy than did inaction

When the possible victims had been an un edy had seemed to be the death of the mother In that case, the choice had been constructed so that Billy’s failure to go to the police ensured theto his weakness

Once again, he was being asked to choose between two evils, and thereby become the freak’s collaborator But this ti, he would be sentencing the redhead to torture, to a protracted and hideous death By responding, he would be granting her a degree of mercy

He could not save her

In either case, death

But one death would be cleaner than the other

The running audio tape produced two h he couldn’t breathe, but he could He felt as though he would choke if he tried to s, but he didn’t choke "… fifteen seconds…"

His rew thick He didn’t believe that he could speak, but he did: "Waste the bitch"