Billy Summers

They register at another off-brand motel. There are a lot of them in a rough ring around the outskirts of Vegas. While Billy registers them as Dalton Smith and Elizabeth Anderson, Alice plugs four dollars in one of the lobby slots. On the fifth, ten fake cartwheels drop into the trough with a clatter and she squeals like a kid. The desk clerk offers her a choice: ten bucks or motel credit in that amount.

‘How’s the restaurant here?’ Alice asks.

‘Buffet’s pretty good.’ Then he lowers his voice and says, ‘Take the money, honey.’

Alice takes the money and they get to-go at the Sirloin Super Burger down the road. She insists that it be her treat and Billy doesn’t argue.

Back in Billy’s room, she sits at the window and watches the endless traffic streaming toward downtown, and the lights of the hotels and casinos coming on. ‘Sin City,’ she marvels, ‘and here I am in a motel room with a good-looking guy who happens to be twice my age. My mother would just shit.’

Billy throws back his head and laughs. ‘And your sister?’

‘Wouldn’t believe it.’ She points. ‘Are those the Paiute Mountains?’

‘If that’s north, those are them. I think they’re actually called foothills. If it matters.’

She turns to him, no longer smiling. ‘Tell me what you’re going to do.’

He does, and not just because he needs her help with the prep. She listens carefully. ‘It sounds awfully dangerous.’

‘If it looks hinky, I’ll back off and reconsider.’

‘Will you know if it’s hinky? The way your friend Taco knew outside that house in Fallujah?’

‘You remember that, huh?’

‘Will you?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘But you’ll probably go in anyway. The way you went into the Funhouse and look what happened there.’

Billy says nothing. There’s nothing to say.

‘I wish I could go with you.’

He says nothing to that, either. Even if the idea didn’t fill him with horror, the plan wouldn’t work if she were with him and she knows it.

‘How badly do you need that money?’

‘I could get along without it, and most of it’s going to Bucky anyway. The money’s not the reason I’m going. Nick treated me badly. He needs to pay a price, just like the boys who raped you needed to pay a price.’

It’s Alice’s turn to be silent.

‘There’s something else. I don’t think it was Nick’s idea to kill me after the job was done, and I know it wasn’t his idea to put a six-million-dollar price on my head. I want to know who that person is.’

‘And why?’

‘Yes. That too.’

6

The first thing Billy does the next morning is to check the back of the old Dodge truck, because the tools were only tied down, not locked down. Everything is present and accounted for. He’s not surprised, partly because everything in the truckbed and trailer is old and pretty clapped-out, but also because his experience over the years has taught him that the great majority of people are honest. They don’t take what isn’t theirs. People who do – people like Tripp Donovan, Nick Majarian, and whoever is behind Nick – piss him off mightily.

He almost texts Bucky to ask if Bucky can find out what car Nick is currently driving – it would probably be in the VIP area of the Double Domino’s parking garage, undoubtedly something fancy with a vanity plate – then doesn’t do it. Bucky probably could find out, and it might raise a red flag. That’s the last thing Billy wants. He hopes that by now Nick has started to relax.

Once the stores are open, he and Alice go to the nearest Ulta Beauty. This time he’s the one who needs makeup, but he lets Alice do the buying. After that she wants to go to a casino. It’s a bad idea, but she looks so excited and hopeful that he can’t say no. ‘But not the big hotels and not the Strip,’ he says.

Alice consults her phone and directs them to Big Tommy’s Hotel and Gambling Hall in East Las Vegas. She’s carded before she’s allowed in and flashes her new Elizabeth Anderson DL with aplomb. As she wanders around, gawking at the roulette, craps, blackjack, and the ever-spinning Money Wheel, Billy checks around him for guys with a certain look. He doesn’t see any. Most of them out here in the boonies are moms and pops that could stand to lose a few.

He reflects again that Alice is a different girl from the one he brought in out of the pouring rain. On the way to being a better girl, and if what he’s planning goes wrong and she’s damaged more than she has been already, that’s on him. He thinks, I should just quit this shit and take her back to Colorado. Then he remembers Nick pitching him on the so-called ‘safe house,’ all the time knowing the ride to Wisconsin was going to last about six miles until Dana Edison put a bullet in his head. Nick needs to pay. And he needs to meet the real Billy Summers.

‘It’s so noisy!’ Alice says. Her cheeks are bright and her eyes are trying to look everywhere at once. ‘What should I do?’