didn’t like the place enough, however, to linger past the end of his shift. He left promptly at seven.
If he’d been Steve Zillis, he would have made a production of his exit. Instead, he departed as quietly as a ghost dematerializing from its haunt.
Outside, less than two hours of summer daylight remained. The sky was an electric Maxfield Parrish blue in the east, a paler blue in the west, where the sun still bleached it.
As he approached his Ford Explorer, he noticed a rectangle of white paper under the driver’s-side windshield wiper.
Behind the steering wheel, with his door still open, he unfolded the paper, expecting to find a handbill of some kind, advertising a car wash or a maid service. He discovered a neatly typed message:
If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County.
If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work.
You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.
Billy didn’t at that instant feel the world tilt under him, but it did. The plunge had not yet begun, but it would. Soon.
Mickey Mouse took a bullet in the throat. The 9-mm pistol cracked three more times in rapid succession, shredding Donald Duck’s face.
Lanny Olsen, the shooter, lived at the end of a fissured blacktop lane, against a stony hillside where grapes would never grow. He had no view of the fabled Napa Valley.
As compensation for his unfashionable address, the property was shaded by beautiful plum trees and towering elms, brightened by wild azaleas. And it was private.
The nearest neighbor lived at such a distance that Lanny could have partied 24/7 without disturbing anyone. This offered no benefit to Lanny because he usually went to bed at nine-thirty; his idea of a party was a case of beer, a bag of chips, and a poker game.
The location of his property, however, was conducive to target shooting. He was the most practiced shot in the sheriff’s department.
As a boy, he’d wanted to be a cartoonist. He had talent. The Disney-perfect portraits of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, fixed to the hay-bale backstop, were Lanny’s work.
Ejecting the spent magazine from his pistol, Lanny said, “You should have been here yesterday. I head-shot twelve Road Runners in a row, not a wasted round.”
Billy said, “Wile E. Coyote would’ve been thrilled. You ever shoot at ordinary targets?”
“What would be the fun in that?”
“You ever shoot the Simpsons?”
“Homer, Bart—all of them but Marge,” Lanny said. “Never Marge.”
Lanny might have gone to art school if his domineering father, Ansel, had not been determined that his son would follow him into law enforcement as Ansel himself had followed his father.
Pearl, Lanny’s mother, had been as supportive as her illness allowed. When Lanny was sixteen, Pearl had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Radiation therapy and drugs sapped her. Even in periods when the lymphoma was controlled, she did not fully regain her strength.
Concerned that his father would be a useless nurse, Lanny never went away to art school. He remained at home, took up a career in law enforcement, and looked after his mother.
Unexpectedly, Ansel was first to die. He stopped a motorist for speeding, and the motorist stopped him with a .38 fired point-blank.
Having contracted lymphoma at an atypically young age, Pearl lived with it for a surprisingly long time. She had died ten years previously, when Lanny was thirty-six.
He’d still been young enough for a career switch and art school. Inertia, however, proved stronger than the desire for a new life.
He inherited the house, a handsome Victorian with elaborate millwork and an encircling veranda, which he maintained in pristine condition. With a career that was a job but not a passion, and with no family of his own, he had plenty of spare time for the house.
As Lanny shoved a fresh magazine in the pistol, Billy took the typewritten message from a pocket. “What do you make of this?”
Lanny read the two paragraphs while, in the lull of gunfire, blackbirds returned to the high bowers of nearby elms.
The message evoked neither a frown nor a smile from Lanny, though Billy had expected one or the other. “Where’d you get this?”
“Somebody left it under my windshield wiper.”
“Where were you parked?”
“At the tavern.”
“An envelope?”
“No.”
“You see anyone watching you? I mean, when you took it out from under the wiper and read it.”
“Nobody.”
“What do you make of it?”
“That was my question to you,” Billy reminded him.
“A prank. A sick joke.”
Staring at the ominous lines of type, Billy said, “That was my first reaction, but then…”
Lanny stepped sideways, aligning himself with new hay bales faced with full-figure drawings of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. “But then you ask yourself What if…?”
“Don’t you?”
“Sure. Every cop does, all the time, otherwise he ends up dead sooner than he should. Or shoots when he shouldn’t.”
Not long ago, Lanny had wounded a belligerent drunk who he thought had been armed. Instead of a gun, the guy had a cell phone.
“But you can’t keep what-ifing yourself forever,” he continued. “You’ve got to go with instinct. And your instinct is the same as mine. It’s a prank. Besides, you’ve got a hunch who did it.”
“Steve Zillis,” said Billy.
“Bingo.”
Lanny assumed an isosceles shooting stance, right leg quartered back for balance, left knee flexed, two hands on the pistol. He took a deep breath and popped Elmer five times as a shrapnel of blackbirds exploded from the elms and tore into the sky.
Counting four mortal hits and one wound, Billy said, “The thing is…this doesn’t seem like something Steve would do—or could.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a guy who carries a small rubber bladder in his pocket so he can make a loud farting sound when he thinks that might be funny.”
“Meaning?”
Billy folded the typewritten message and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “This seems too complex for Steve, too…subtle.”
“Young Steve is about as subtle as the green-apple nasties,” Lanny agreed.
Resuming his stance, he spent the second half of the magazine on Bugs, scoring five mortal hits.
“What if it’s real?” Billy asked.
“It’s not.”
“But what if it is?”
“Homicidal lunatics only play games like that in movies. In real life, killers just kill. Power is what it’s about for them, the power and sometimes violent sex—not teasing you with puzzles and riddles.”
Ejected