Billy Summers

It’s a joke, so Billy laughs. Richter lets go of his hand, opens the door, then turns back. ‘I see you shaved off your mustache.’

Startled, Billy raises two fingers to his upper lip. What he did was forget to put it on in his haste, and maybe that’s for the best. The mustache is tricky, it needs spirit gum to hold it, and if he applied it crooked, or the spirit gum showed, Richter would have known it was fake and wondered what the fuck.

‘Got tired of picking food out of it,’ Billy says.

Richter laughs. Billy can’t tell if it’s forced. It might be. ‘I hear that, Cuz. Loud and clear.’

He trots down the steps to his scratched SUV, shoulders a bit hunched, maybe because it’s chilly this morning, maybe because he’s expecting Billy to put a bullet in the back of his neck.

He gives a wave before getting in. Billy waves back. Then he hurries downstairs.

3

Billy says, ‘I’m going to visit your bad date today. Tomorrow I’m getting out of Dodge.’

Alice puts a hand to her mouth but drops it when her index finger brushes against her swollen nose. ‘Oh God. Did he recognize you?’

‘My instinct says no, but he’s observant, noticed I didn’t have my mustache anymore—’

‘Jesus!’

‘He assumed I shaved it off, so it’s okay. At least I think so. I’m willing to push my luck one more day. Did you give him a name?’

‘Brenda Collins. My best friend in high school. Did you—’

‘Give him a different one? No, just called you my niece. I told him your mother’s boyfriend beat you up because you wouldn’t go to bed with him.’

Alice nods. ‘That’s good. It covers everything.’

‘Which doesn’t mean he’ll believe it. Stories are one thing, seeing is another. What he saw was a middle-aged fat man with a banged-up underage girl.’

Alice draws herself up, looking offended. Under other circumstances it might have been funny. ‘I’m twenty-one! A legal adult!’

‘Do you get carded in bars?’

‘Well …’

Billy nods, case closed.

‘Maybe,’ Alice says, ‘if you really mean to … well … confront Tripp, we shouldn’t wait until tomorrow. Maybe we should go right now.’

4

He stares at her, simultaneously believing that pronoun and not believing it. And what’s worse, she’s looking at him like it’s a foregone conclusion.

‘Holy shit,’ Billy says. ‘You really do have Stockholm Syndrome.’

‘I don’t because I’m not a hostage. I could have walked out anytime from the Jensens’ apartment, as long as I was quiet on the stairs. You would never have noticed because you’d’ve been all wrapped up in your writing.’

Probably true, Billy thinks. And furthermore—

Alice says it for him. ‘If I was going to run away, I could have done it the first time you went out. For the morning-after pill.’ She pauses, then adds, ‘Plus I gave him a false name.’

‘Because you were scared.’

Alice shakes her head vehemently. ‘You were in the other room. I could have whispered that you were William Summers, who killed that man at the courthouse. We would have been upstairs and in his car before you finished putting on that.’ She pokes him in the fake belly.

‘You can’t go with me. It’s nuts.’

Still, the idea is starting to seep down, like water in dry earth. She can’t go with him all the way to Vegas, but if they can work out a story that protects the Dalton Smith identity, which is now in dire peril, then maybe …

‘Maybe you could go by yourself if you leave Tripp and his friends alone. Because if anything happens to them, they’d connect it to me. Tripp and his friends, I mean. They wouldn’t want to go to the police, but they might decide to hurt me.’

Billy has to hide a smile. She is playing him, and doing a good job of it on short notice. This is quite a change from the puking semiconscious girl he fished out of the rain, the one who sometimes has panic attacks in the night. Billy thinks it’s a change for the better. Plus, she’s right – anything he does to those three they would connect to her. Assuming, that is, she’s the only woman they date-raped last week, which seems likely.

‘Yes,’ Alice says, watching him from under her eyebrows and still playing him for all she’s worth. ‘I guess you better leave them unpunished.’ Then she asks him what he’s smiling about.

‘Nothing. Just that I like you. My friend Taco would have said you’ve got some gimme to you.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘It doesn’t matter. But yeah, those guys need a payback for what they did. I need to think about this.’

Alice says, ‘Can I help you pack while you think?’

5

It’s Billy who does the packing. It doesn’t take long. There’s no room for her new clothes in his suitcase, but he finds a plastic Barnes & Noble bag, the kind with handles, on the top shelf of the bedroom closet and dumps her stuff into that. He carries the AllTechs out to the Fusion in a stack.