Billy Summers

He does a few stretches before running up and down the stairs, because he can’t go to a walk-in clinic if he pops a hamstring. He hears no TV behind the Jensens’ door, so Alice is probably sleeping. And healing, he hopes, although Billy doubts that any woman ever heals completely after being raped. It leaves a scar and he guesses that on some days the scar aches. He guesses that even ten years later – twenty, thirty – it still aches. Maybe it’s like that, maybe it’s like something else. Maybe the only men who can know for sure are men who have been raped themselves.

As he runs the stairs, he thinks about the men who did it to her, and they are men. She said that Tripp Donovan is twenty-four, and Billy guesses Jack and Hank, Donovan’s rapin’ roomies, must be about the same age. Men, not boys. Bad ones.

He comes back into the basement apartment out of breath, but feeling loose and warm, ready to get back at it for another hour or maybe even two. Before he can get going, his laptop bings with a text message. It’s from Bucky Hanson, now hunkered down in the Great Wherever. No money has been transferred. Don’t think it’s going to happen. What are you going to do?

Get it, Billy texts back.

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That night he sits beside Alice on the couch. She looks good in her black pants and striped shirt. When he turns off the TV and says he wants to talk to her she looks frightened.

‘Is it something bad?’

Billy shrugs. ‘You tell me.’

She listens to him carefully, her wide eyes steady on his. When he finishes, she says, ‘You would do that?’

‘Yes. They need a payback for what they did to you, but that’s not the only reason. What men like that have done once they’ll do again. Maybe you’re not even the first.’

‘You’d be taking a risk. It could be dangerous.’

He thinks of the gun in Don Jensen’s nightstand and says, ‘Probably not very.’

‘You can’t kill them. I don’t want that. Tell me you won’t kill them.’

The idea hasn’t even crossed Billy’s mind. They need to pay, but they also need to learn, and those who are obliterated are beyond lessons. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No killing.’

‘And I really don’t care about Jack and Hank. They weren’t the ones who pretended to like me and got me to come to that apartment.’

Billy says nothing, but he does care about Jack and Hank, assuming they participated, and based on what he saw when she was undressed, he’s sure that at least one of them did. Probably both.

‘But I care about Tripp,’ she says, and puts a hand on his arm. ‘If he was hurt that would make me happy. I suppose that makes me a bad person.’

‘It makes you human,’ Billy says. ‘Bad people need to pay a price. And the price should be high.’

CHAPTER 16

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We could hear heavy small-arms fire and explosions in other parts of the city, but until the shit hit the fan, our area in the Jolan was relatively quiet. We cleared the first three houses in our section, Block Lima, with no trouble. Two were empty. There was a kid in the third one, not armed and not wired up to explode. We made him take off his shirt to be sure. We sent him to the police station with a couple of army guys who were headed that way with their own prisoners. We knew that kid would probably be back on the street by nightfall, because the cop shop was basically a turnstile. He was lucky to be alive at all, because we were still red-assed about losing Albie Stark. Din-Din actually raised his gun, but Big Klew pushed the barrel down and said to leave the kid alone.

‘The next time we see him he’ll have an AK,’ George said. ‘We ought to just kill them all. Fucking roaches.’

The fourth house was the biggest on the block, a regular estate. It had a domed roof and a courtyard with palms on the inside to give it shade. Some rich Ba’athist’s crib, no doubt. The whole thing was surrounded by a high concrete wall painted with a mural of children playing ball and skipping rope and running around while several women looked on. Probably with approval, but it was hard to tell because they were so bundled up in their abayahs. There was also a man standing off to the side. Our terp, Fareed, said he was the mutawaeen. The women watched the children, Fareed said, and the mutawaeen watched the women to make sure they did nothing that might incite lust.

We all got a kick out of Fareed, because his accent made him sound like a Yooper from Traverse City. Lots of the terps sounded like Michiganders, who knows why. ‘Dat picture means dis house, the al’atfal, da kiddies, can come und play.’

‘So it’s a funhouse,’ Donk said.

‘No, dey don’t allow fun in da house,’ Fareed said. ‘Just in da yard.’

Donk rolled his eyes and snickered, but no one laughed outright. We were still thinking of Albie, and how it could have been any one of us.

‘Come on, you guys,’ Taco said. ‘Let’s get some.’ He handed Fareed the bullhorn that had GOOD MORNING VIETNAM printed on the side in Sharpie and told him

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