Velocity Read Free Page A

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 pointblank.
    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