The Darkest Evening of the Year

He reliably functions flawlessly.
    Billy is also brutal, without an instant’s hesitation in his brutality, utterly without remorse or second thoughts. Yet unlike most other men with these qualities, he is highly intelligent and sane .
    Billy is a jewel, a treasure, irreplaceable. Harrow regrets the necessity of killing him later.
    The other reason Harrow does not want to participate in the early stages of the action is because he has a program written for the evening, one that he has refined for months. He wants the full enjoyment of realizing the show as he conceived it.
    He prefers to delay his entrance, giving Amy an hour or more to anticipate his arrival. She must be humiliated, emotionally broken, and in a state of terror before he appears.
    Harrow will see his ex-wife after she has been reduced to the condition of a caged breeder dog in those puppy mills against which she crusades. Then he will prove to her that worse horrors exist.
    At gunpoint, she and the architect will undress. They will be chained to chairs.
    Then Billy will leave, and Harrow will listen from an adjoining room as Moongirl breaks down Amy.
    He will enter when she can’t stop sobbing, and all that he will do at first is fix open her eyes so she cannot close them.
    He wants her to see what Moongirl will do to Brian. The father of the freak will end the evening as a eunuch.
    No transgression exists that won’t be committed here this night.
    Harriet Weaver would be proud of him. She’d been his nanny, who from the cradle quietly schooled him to understand that the values of his family were repressive, that the world was a more exciting place for the transgressors than for the submissives. They had shared such thrilling secrets from the earliest days of his memory.
    At Harriet’s instruction, he exhibited behavior problems that she convinced the family could be resolved by home-schooling, with her as the only tutor, and when all his time was spent with her, he obliged by behaving much better. She hated the Coglands and all their kind, and she was right, for in the end he hated them, too.
    The incoming fog carries a chill and the fecund scent of the sea. Harrow is invigorated by it, and by anticipation.
    At the first burst of gunfire, he steps across the threshold, out of the house, onto the brick deck, alert, standing tall and stiff with expectation.
    An answering weapon, of a different character from the first, damps his excitement but does not greatly discourage him.
    He stands motionless, listening. Perhaps Billy moved in on them with a gun in each hand, Old-West style. Billy does have flair.
    When half a minute passes, a minute, with no further gunplay, it seems that the two-gun theory might be correct.
    Then the engine roar swells, as if Billy is driving them down to the house when he was instructed to walk them, cuffed together. But with the engine noise comes others: a banshee shriek of tortured metal, a series of small collisions that suggests a runaway vehicle.
    Harrow backs off the deck, into the open doorway.
    Headlights dimly announcing it, the Expedition careens through the fog, across the corner of the deck, and across the rocks toward the oval yard.
    Because the SUV passes so close and because the interior lights are on, Harrow can see that no one is behind the wheel.
    The yard is lost in fog, and when he hears the Expedition come to a violent stop, he can only assume that it has crashed into the giant Montezuma pine.
    He steps into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind him.
    At the table, Moongirl has been arranging surgical instruments. The commotion outside has caused her to pause in her preparations.
    “Trouble,” he says.
    “Watch out for the dog.”
    “You’re the one afraid of it.”
    “I’m not afraid. It can’t smell me.”
    He can make no sense of that.
    “I just want it dead,” she says.
    “I think it is.”
    She stares at him.
    Harriet Weaver had such eyes, though gray, not bottle-green.
    He says, “Amy and Brian are probably dead, too.”
    “Billy? Why would he?”
    “We had a weird conversation earlier.”
    She waits.
    “He was testing me somehow.”
    “That could get him dead.”
    “I gave him all the pieces of this. I should have split it up.”
    “It’s over just like that?”
    “Billy figured out he’s the last link between me and Amy, no future in that. So he kills them to show me no hard feelings, but he’s not coming down here.”
    “You’ll find him.”
    “He’s going ‘on