Velocity

by Dean Koontz

  He held the Mace in his right hand, thumb under the safeguard, squarely on the button trigger.

  Instinct whispered that he should trade the Mace for the pistol. Not every instinct was more reliable than reason.

  If he started by shooting Zillis, he had nowhere to go. He must first disable him, not wound him.

  Moving along the hall, he passed the make-believe abattoir where the mannequins sat in bloodless mutilation.

  The better he could hear them, the more the voices had a make-believe quality, too. They were actors sharing a bad performance. A vaguely tinny quality suggested they issued from the speakers of a cheap TV.

  The woman suddenly cried out in pain, but sensuously, as if her pain were also her pleasure.

  Billy had nearly reached the end of the hall when Steve Zillis exited the bathroom, to the left.

  Barefoot, barechested, wearing pajama bottoms, he was scrubbing his teeth with a brush, hurrying to see what was on the television in the bedroom.

  His eyes widened when he spotted Billy. He spoke around the toothbrush: “What the fuh—”

  Billy Maced him.

  Police Mace is highly effective up to a distance of twenty feet, although fifteen is ideal. Steve Zillis stood seven feet from Billy.

  Mace in the mouth and in the nose will somewhat inhibit an attacker. You can stop him hard and fast only if you squirt him liberally in the eyes.

  The stream doused both eyes, point-blank, and also hosed his nostrils.

  Zillis dropped the toothbrush, covered his eyes with his hands, too late, and turned blindly away from Billy. He collided at once with the end wall of the hallway. Making a desperate wheezing sound, he bent over, retching, and spewed gobs of toothpaste foam as if he were a rabid dog.

  The burning in his eyes was hellacious, his pupils open so wide that he could see only a fierce blurred brightness, not even the form of his assailant, not even a shadow. His throat also burned with the chemical that had gone down by way of his nose, and his lungs tried to reject every tainted breath that he drew.

  Billy went in low, grabbed the cuff of a pajama leg, and jerked the man’s left foot out from under him.

  Clawing the air in search of a wall, a doorway, something that would offer support, finding nothing, Zillis dropped hard enough to make the floorboards vibrate.

  Between gasps and wheezes, between fits of choking, he shrieked about his eyes, the pain, the stinging brightness.

  Billy drew the 9-mm pistol and rapped him along the side of the head with the barrel, just hard enough to hurt.

  Zillis howled, and Billy warned, “Quiet down, or I’ll hit you again, harder.”

  When Zillis cursed him, Billy rapped him with the gun once more, not as hard as promised, but that got the idea across.

  “All right,” Billy said. “Okay. You’re not going to see well for twenty minutes, half an hour—”

  Still inhaling in rapid shallow pants, exhaling in shudders, Zillis interrupted Billy: “Jesus, I’m blind, I’m—”

  “It was just Mace.”

  “What’re you nuts?”

  “Mace. No permanent damage.”

  “I’m blind,” Zillis insisted.

  “You stay there.”

  “I’m blind.”

  “You’re not blind. Don’t move.”

  “Shit. It HURTS!”

  A thread of blood unraveled from Zillis’s scalp. Billy hadn’t hit him hard, but the skin had broken.

  “Don’t move, listen to me,” Billy said, “cooperate, and we’ll get through this, it’ll be all right.”

  He realized that he was already comforting Zillis as if the man’s innocence were a foregone conclusion.

  Until now, there had seemed to be a way to do this. A way to do it even if Steve Zillis turned out not to be the freak, and to walk away with minimal consequences.

  In his imagination, however, the opening encounter had not been this violent. A spritz of Mace. Zillis at once disabled, obedient. So easy in the planning.

  They had hardly begun, and the situation seemed out of control.

  Striving to sound confident, Billy said, “You don’t want to be hurt, then just lie there till I tell you what to do next.”

  Zillis wheezed.

  “You hear me?” Billy asked.

  “Shit, yeah, how could I not hear you?”

  “You understand me?”

  “I’m blind here, I’m not deaf.”

  Billy stepped into the bathroom, switched off the water running in the sink, and looked around.

  He did not see what he needed, but he saw something that he did not want to see: his reflection in the mirror. He might have expected to look frantic, even dangerous, and he did. He might have expected to look scared, and he did. He would not have expected to see the potential for evil, but he did.

  chapter 61

  ON THE BEDROOM TV, A NAKED MAN IN A black mask lashed a woman’s breasts with a cluster of leather straps.

  Billy switched off the TV. “I’m thinking about you handling the lemons and limes you slice for drinks, and I want to puke.”

  Lying disabled in the hall past the open door, Zillis either didn’t hear him or pretended that he didn’t.

  The bed did not have a headboard or a footboard. The mattress and box springs sat on a wheeled metal frame.

  Because Zillis didn’t bother with such niceties as bedspreads and dust ruffles, the frame of the bed was exposed.

  Billy took the handcuffs from the bread bag. He locked one of the bracelets to the bottom rail of the bed frame.

  “Get up on your hands and knees,” he said. “Crawl toward my voice.”

  Remaining on the hall floor, breathing easier but still noisily, Zillis spat vigorously on the carpet. His flooding tears had carried the Mace to his lips, and the bitter taste had gotten in his mouth.

  Billy went to him and pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the nape of his neck.

  Zillis became very still, wheezing softly.

  Billy said, “You know what this is?”

  “Man.”

  “I want you to crawl into the bedroom.”

  “Shit.”

  “I mean it.”

  “All right.”

  “To the bottom of the bed.”

  Although the only light in the room issued from a dim bedside lamp, Zillis squinted against a stinging, blinding brightness as he crawled to the bed.

  Billy had to redirect him twice. Then: “Sit on the floor with your back against the foot of the bed. That’s good. With your left hand, feel beside you. A set of handcuffs is hanging from the bed rail. There you go.”

  “Don’t do this to me, man.” Zillis’s eyes watered copiously. Fluid bubbled in his nostrils. “Why? What is this?”

  “Put your left wrist in the empty bracelet.”

  “I don’t like this,” Zillis said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “What’re you going to do to me?”

  “That depends. Put it on now.”

  After Zillis fumbled with the cuff, Billy leaned in to test the double lock, which was secure. Zillis still couldn’t see well enough to strike out or to make a play for the gun.

  Steve could drag the bed around the room if he wanted. He could overturn it with effort, dump the mattress and the box springs, and patiently dismantle the bolted frame until he could slide the cuff free. But he couldn’t move fast.

  The carpet looked filthy. Billy wouldn’t sit or kneel on it.

  He went to the dinette alcove off the kitchen and returned with the only straight-backed chair in the house. He stood it in front of Zillis, out of his reach, and sat down.

  “Billy, I’m dying here.”

  “You aren’t dying.”

  “I’m scared about my eyes. I still can’t see.”

  “I want to ask you some questions.”

  “Questions? Are you crazy?”

  “I half feel like it,” Billy admitted.

  Zillis coughed. The single cough became
a fit of coughing, which became a fearsome choking. He wasn’t faking any of it.

  Billy waited.

  When Zillis could speak, his voice was hoarse, and it shook: “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Billy.”

  “Good. Now I want you to tell me where you keep your gun.”

  “Gun? What do I need with a gun?”

  “The one you shot him with.”

  “Shot him? Shot who? I didn’t shoot anybody. Jesus, Billy.”

  “You shot him in the forehead.”

  “No. No way. Not me, man.” His eyes swam with tears induced by the Mace, so they could not be read for deception. He blinked and blinked, trying to see. “Man, if this is some half-assed joke—”

  “You’re the joker,” Billy said. “Not me. You’re the performer.”

  Zillis didn’t react to the word.

  Billy went to the nightstand and opened the drawer.

  “What’re you doing?” Zillis asked.

  “Looking for the gun.”

  “There isn’t a gun.”

  “There wasn’t one earlier, when you weren’t here, but there will be now. You’ll keep it close to you.”

  “You were here earlier?”

  “You wallow in every kind of filth, don’t you, Steve? I wanted to shower in boiling water after I left.”

  Billy opened the door on the bottom of the nightstand, rummaged inside.

  “What’re you going to do if you don’t find a gun?”

  “Maybe I’ll nail your hand to the floor and cut your fingers off one by one.”

  Zillis sounded as if he was about to start crying for real. “Oh, man, don’t say crazy shit like that. What did I do to you? I didn’t do anything to you.”

  Sliding open the closet door, Billy said, “When you were at my place, Stevie, where did you hide the severed hand?”

  A groan escaped Zillis, and he began to shake his head: no, no, no, no.

  The closet shelf over the hanging clothes lay just above eye level. As Billy felt along the shelf for the gun, he said, “And what else did you hide in my place? What did you cut off the redhead? An ear? A breast?”

  “This doesn’t compute,” Zillis said shakily.

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “You’re Billy Wiles, for God’s sake.”

  Returning to the bed, searching for the gun, Billy felt between the mattress and the box springs, which he wouldn’t have had the stomach to do if he hadn’t been wearing the gloves.

  “You’re Billy Wiles,” Zillis repeated.

  “Which means what—that you didn’t think I’d know how to take care of myself?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Billy. I didn’t.”

  Going around to the other side of the bed, Billy said, “Well, I know how to take care of myself, all right, even if I don’t exactly ring the bell on the zing meter.”

  Recognizing his own words, Zillis said, “I didn’t mean anything by that. You think that was an insult? I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Billy searched between mattress and box springs again. Nothing.

  “I say things, Billy. You know how I am. I’m always joking. You know me. Hell, Billy, I’m an asshole. You know I’m an asshole, all the time talking, half the time not listening to myself.”

  Billy returned to the chair and sat again. “Can you see me better, Stevie?”

  “Not much, no. I need some Kleenex.”

  “Use the bed sheet.”

  With his free hand, Zillis pawed loose the thin blanket tucked into the foot of the bed. He freed a corner of the sheet, mopped his face with it, blew his nose.

  Billy said, “Do you have an ax?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Do you own an ax, Stevie?”

  “No.”

  “Be truthful with me, Stevie.”

  “Billy, don’t.”

  “Do you own an ax?”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “Do you own an ax, Stevie?”

  “Yes,” Zillis admitted, and a sob of dread escaped him.

  “You’re either one hell of an actor or you’re really just poor dumb Steve Zillis,” Billy said, and it was the latter possibility that had begun to worry him.

  chapter 62

  “WHEN YOU’RE CHOPPING THE MANNEQUINS in the backyard,” Billy asked, “do you dream that they’re real women?”

  “They’re just mannequins.”

  “Do you like to chop watermelons because they’re red inside? Do you like to see the red meat explode, Stevie?”

  Zillis seemed astonished. “What? She told you about that? What’d she tell you?”

  “Who is ‘she,’ Stevie?”

  “The old bitch next door. Celia Reynolds.”

  “You’re in no position to call anyone an old bitch,” Billy said. “You’re in no position at all.”

  Zillis looked chastened. He nodded in eager agreement. “You’re right. I’m sorry. She’s just lonely. I know. But Billy, she’s a nosy old lady. She just can’t mind her own business. She’s always at her windows, watching from behind the blinds. You can’t go out in the yard, she isn’t watching you.”

  “And there’s a lot of things you do that you can’t afford for people to see, aren’t there, Stevie?”

  “No. I don’t do anything. I just want some privacy. So a couple times I gave her a show with the ax. Played crazy. Just to spook her off.”

  “Spook her off.”

  “Just to make her mind her own business. I only did it three times, and the third time I let her know it was a show, let her know I could see her watching.”

  “How did you let her know?”

  “I’m not proud of this now.”

  “I’m sure there’s a lot you’re not proud of, Stevie.”

  “I gave her the finger,” Zillis said. “The third time, I chopped a mannequin and a watermelon—which I don’t dream are anything but what they are—and I walked over to the fence, and I gave her the finger big time.”

  “You chopped up a chair once.”

  “Yeah. I chopped up a chair. So what?”

  “The one I’m sitting on is the only chair you have.”

  “I used to have two. I only needed one. It was just a chair.”

  “You like to see women being hurt,” Billy said.

  “No.”

  “Did you just this evening find the porno under the bed? Did some gremlin put it there, Stevie? Should we call Orkin and have them send a gremlin exterminator?”

  “Those aren’t real women.”

  “They’re not mannequins.”

  “I mean, they’re not really being hurt. They’re acting.”

  “But you like to watch.”

  Zillis said nothing. He hung his head.

  In some ways, this was easier than Billy had expected it to be. He had thought that asking deeply unpleasant questions and listening to another human being grovel in despondent self-justification would be so distressing that he would not be able to sustain a productive interrogation. Instead, he had a sense of power from which he drew confidence. And satisfaction. The ease of it surprised him. The ease of it scared him.

  “They’re very nasty videos, Stevie. They’re very sick.”

  “Yes,” Zillis said softly. “They are. I know.”

  “Have you ever made any videos of yourself hurting women that way?”

  “No. God, no.”

  “You’re whispering, Stevie.”

  He raised his chin from his chest, but he wouldn’t look toward Billy. “I’ve never hurt a woman that way.”

  “Never? You’ve never hurt a woman that way?”

  “No. I swear.”

  “How have you hurt them, Stevie?”

  “I never have. I couldn’t.”

  “You’re such a choirboy, is that it?”

  “I like to…watch it.”