"She's a nice girl. She's a decent girl."

"That's what I mean. I know I could clean up my act if she-"

"A good woman can turn a man around," Billy said. "But not a man who's as far down the rathole as you are. If you call her or see her, even just once, I'll know. And I'll find you. You believe that?"

Zillis said nothing.

"And if you touch her," Billy said, "so help me G.o.d, I'll kill you, Steve."

"This is 50 not right," Zillis said.

"Do you believe me? You better believe me, Steve."

When Billy put his hand on the grip of the holstered pistol, Zillis said, "Hey. All right. I hear you."

"Good. I'm leaving now."

"This place sucks anyway," Zillis said. "Wine country is just another word for farm. I'm not a farm boy."

"No, you're not," Billy said from the doorway.

"There's no action around here."

"There's no zing," Billy agreed.

"Screw you."

Billy said, "Happy trails, Kemosabe."

Chapter 66.

By the time that he'd driven only half a mile from Zillis's place, Billy had the shakes so bad that he had to pull to the curb, put the Explorer in park, and get control of himself.

Under pressure, he had become the thing he most despised. For a while, he had become John Palmer.

Paying Zillis ten thousand bucks didn't make Billy any less like Palmer, either.

When the shakes subsided, he didn't put the SUV in gear because he didn't know where to go from here. He felt that he was at a brink. You don't drive over a brink.

He wanted to go home, but nothing there would help him work out a solution to this puzzle.

He wanted to go home just to be home. He recognized the familiar reclusive urge. Once home, he could sit at his carving bench with the blocks of oak, and the world could go to h.e.l.l.

Except this time, he would go to h.e.l.l with it. He could not take Barbara home with him, and if he left her alone and in jeopardy, he would have trashed his only excuse for living.

Events had thrust him into action, into the rush of life, yet he felt isolated and beyond desperation.

For too long he'd done no proper sowing and now had no harvest. His friends were all acquaintances. Though life is community, he had no community.

In fact, his situation was worse than isolation. The friends who were no more than acquaintances were now not even acquaintances as much as they were suspects. He had carpentered for himself a loneliness of exquisite paranoia.

Pulling away from the curb, Billy drove with no destination in mind, as far as he was aware. Like a bird, he rode the currents of the night, intent only upon staying aloft and not falling into absolute despair before some gleam of hope appeared.

He had learned more about Ivy Elgin in one brief visit to her house than he had troubled himself to know about her during the years they had worked together. And though he liked Ivy, he found her more mysterious now than when he had known so much less about her.

He did not think that she could have any connection to the freak committing these murders. But his experience with his own mother and father reminded him that he could not be sure of anyone.

Harry Avarkian was a kind man and a fine attorney-but also one of three trustees overseeing seven million dollars, a temptation that could not be discounted. Before Barbara, Billy had been to Harry's house only once. Barbara socialized him. They had gone to Harry's for dinner half a dozen times in a year-but since the coma, Billy had not visited Harry anywhere but at his office.

He knew Harry Avarkian. But he didn't know him.

Billy's mind circled to Dr. Ferrier. Which was crazy. Prominent physicians in the community didn't go around killing people.

Except Dr. Ferrier wanted Billy to cooperate with him in the killing of Barbara Mandel. Remove the feeding tube in her stomach. Let her die. Let her starve to death in her coma.

If you were willing to decide for another-for someone in no obvious pain-that her quality of life was insufficient to warrant the expenditure of resources on her behalf, how easy was it to make a step from pulling a plug to pulling a trigger?

Ridiculous. Yet he didn't know Ferrier a fraction as well as he had known his father; and in violation of all Billy thought he had known, his father had swung that polished-steel lug wrench with something like vicious glee.

John Palmer. He was a man whose love of power was clear for all to see, but whose internal landscape remained as enigmatic as an alien planet.

The more Billy considered the people he knew, the more he brooded on the possibility that the killer might be a perfect stranger, the more he became agitated to no purpose.

He told himself to care and not to care, to be still. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by way of dispossession. And what you do not know is the only thing you know.

Driving and yet giving himself to that inner stillness, he came in a short while, without conscious intention, to the truck stop. He parked where he had parked before, in front of the diner.

His left hand ached. When he fisted and opened it, he could feel that it had begun to swell. The Vicodin had worn off. He didn't know whether or not he should take another, but he should get some Motrin.

He was hungry, but the thought of another candy bar curdled his appet.i.te. He needed a caffeine jolt, but he wanted more than pills.

After stowing the pistol and the revolver under the front seat, in spite of the broken-out window that left the vehicle unsecured, he went inside.

At 3:40 in the morning, he had his choice of empty booths.

Four truckers sat on stools at the counter, drinking coffee and eating pie.

They were attended by a beefy waitress with the neck of an NFL fullback and the face of an angel. In her ma.s.ses of hair, dyed shoe-polish black, she wore yellow b.u.t.terfly bows.

Billy sat at the counter.

Chapter 67.

According to the tag on her uniform, the waitress's name was Jasmine. She called Billy "honey," and served the black coffee and lemon pie that he ordered.

Jasmine and the truckers were in a lively conversation when Billy settled on a stool among them. From their exchanges, he learned that one of the men was named Curly, another Arvin. No one addressed the third man as anything but "you," and the fourth had an upper gold tooth in the front of his mouth.

At first they were talking about the lost continent of Atlantis. Arvin proposed that the destruction of that fabled civilization had come to pa.s.s because the Atlanteans had gotten involved in genetic engineering and had bred monsters that destroyed them.

This quickly turned the subject from Atlantis to cloning and DNA research, soon after which Curly mentioned the fact that at Princeton or Harvard, or Yale, at one of those h.e.l.lholes or another, scientists were trying to create a pig with a human brain.

"I'm not sure that's so new," Jasmine said. "Over the years, let me tell you, I've met my share of human pigs."

"What would be the purpose of a humanized pig?" Arvin wondered.

"Just because it's there," said Y.

"It's where?"

"Like a mountain is just there," You clarified. "So some people have to climb it. Other people, they've got to make a humanized pig just because maybe they can."

"What work would it do?" Gold Tooth asked.

"I don't think they mean for it to have a job," Curly said.

"They mean for it to do something," Gold Tooth said.

"One thing's for sure," Jasmine declared, "the activists will go nuts."

"What activists?" Arvin asked.

"One kind of activist or another," she said. "Once you've got pigs with human brains, that's the end of anyone allowed to eat ham or bacon."

"I don't see why," said Curly. "The ham and bacon will still come from the pigs that haven't been humanized."

"It'll be a sympathy thing," Jasmine predicted. "How're you going to justify eating ham and bacon when your kids go to school with smart pigs and ask them home for sleepovers?"

"That'll never happen," You said.

"Never," Arvin agreed.

"What'll happen," Jasmine said, "is these fools playing around with human genes, they'll do something stupid and kill us all."

Not one of the four truckers disagreed. Neither did Billy.

Gold Tooth still felt the scientists had in mind some kind of work for a humanized pig. "They don't spend millions of dollars on something like this just for the fun of it, not those people."

"Oh, they do," Jasmine disagreed. "Money means nothing to them. It isn't theirs."

"It's taxpayer money," said Curly. "Yours and mine."

Billy offered a comment or two, but he mostly listened, familiar with these conversational rhythms, and curiously warmed by them.

The coffee was rich. The pie tasted wonderfully lemony and was topped with toasted meringue.

He was surprised by how calm he felt. Just sitting at the counter, just listening.

"You want to talk about a total waste of money," said Gold Tooth, "look at this d.a.m.n fool monstrosity they're building out by the highway."

"What-you mean across from the tavern, the thing they're gonna burn when they no sooner finish it?" Arvin asked.

"Oh, but it's art," Jasmine archly reminded them.

"I don't see how it's art," You said. "Doesn't what's art have to last?"

"The guy's going to make millions selling his drawings of it," Curly told them. "He's got a hundred merchandising angles."

"Can anyone just call himself an artist?" Gold Tooth asked. "Don't they have to pa.s.s a test or something?"

"He calls himself a special kind of artist," Curly said.

"Special my a.s.s," said Arvin.

"Honey," Jasmine told him, "no offense, but your dumpy backside doesn't look so special to me."

"What he calls himself," Curly said, "is a performance artist."

"What's that mean?"

"What I take it to mean," Curly said, "is art that doesn't last. It's made to do something, and when it does something, it's over."

"What are museums gonna be filled with in a hundred years?" You wondered. "Empty s.p.a.ce?"

"There won't be museums anymore," Jasmine said. "Museums are for people. There won't be any people. Just humanized pigs."

Billy had grown very still. He sat with the coffee cup to his lips, his mouth open, but unable to take a drink.

"Honey, something wrong with the brew?" Jasmine asked.

"No. No, it's fine. In fact, I'd like another cup. Do you serve it in mugs?"

"We have a triple cup in a plastic container. We call it the Big Shot."