Billy Summers

‘Okay. Let’s go. While we’re driving, you can make us a reservation at a motel in Wendover. That’s just over the Utah state line.’

Alice looks around at their current lodgings. ‘I’m not sure the kind of places we’ve been staying have websites. Maybe, but …’ She shrugs.

‘Book us into a chain. The Dalton Smith name is still clean and the pressure’s off. Nobody is going to be looking for us.’

‘Are you sure?’

Billy thinks about it and decides he is. The last thing he said to Nick was for once in your life be honorable, and he thinks that Nick, who was sure he was going to die in his man-cave, will do that. At least for awhile. There’s something else, as well. If Billy succeeds in getting to Klerke, Nick Majarian will be off the hook, and quite possibly with the six-million-dollar bounty in one of his numbered accounts.

Meanwhile, Alice is looking up at him and waiting.

‘I’m sure. Let’s go.’

2

It’s a long story, but it’s a five-hour drive to Wendover and that will be plenty of time for Billy to tell her what he knows and what he’s deduced. But before they roll, he powers up his phone and googles Roger Klerke. The thumbnail biography says he was born in 1954, which makes him sixty-five, but in the accompanying photo he looks at least ten years older. He’s pasty, balding, wrinkled, jowly. His eyes are bright little animals living in sagging pockets of flesh. It’s the face of hard living and indulgence.

‘He’s the man behind this whole shit-show,’ Billy says, and hands her his phone.

She types and sweeps with her finger as Billy pulls out and heads for the 15. She bends over the phone, brushing her hair impatiently away from her face. ‘Holy crap. According to Wikipedia, he practically owns the world, at least media-wise.’

Billy again thinks back to his first meeting with Ken Hoff, the two of them sitting at an umbrella-shaded table outside the Sunspot Café, right across from the building where Billy would eventually take the shot. Hoff with a glass of wine, Billy with a diet soda, Hoff broadcasting a slightly desperate vibe even then. Although along with it, like a fraternal twin, was the mindset that had gotten him in so much trouble and was about to get him in even more. It was the core belief, maybe inculcated in childhood, that he was the star of a movie called The Fabulous Life of Ken Hoff, and no matter how bad things got, in the end he would come out with the girl, the gold watch, and everything.

‘Newspapers, websites, a movie studio, two streaming services …’

‘And TV,’ Billy says. ‘Don’t forget that. Including Channel 6 in Red Bluff, the only station that got footage of the courthouse killing.’

‘Are you thinking—’

‘Yes.’

‘Fuck,’ Alice says softly.

I’m a little bit tight this year, wasn’t that what Hoff said? Cash flow problems since I bought into WWE, but three affils, how could I say no?

‘He owns World Wide Entertainment,’ Alice says. ‘That’s a network plus about twelve cable channels. One of them is that news station that loves Trump. There’s this bunch of rabid commentators—’

‘I know the ones you’re talking about.’

He’s seen WWE News 24, everybody has. It plays all the time in hotel lobbies and airport terminals. Billy sometimes stops for a few minutes to absorb some rightwing pundit’s bilge, then either moves on or changes to one of the movie channels if he has access to the controller. He had no idea they franchised local TV stations, though. Had no idea (at least at first) what Hoff was talking about and didn’t care. He hadn’t thought it was important. But it was. Very. It was how Hoff got into this. It was why the Channel 6 news crew didn’t go chasing the fire in Cody. It was how Ken Hoff ended up dead in his own garage.

‘This guy wanted you to kill Joel Allen? This guy? He’s old. And rich.’

Yes, Billy thinks. Old and rich and used to being emperor. Ken Hoff had only thought he was starring in a movie. Roger Klerke really has been. He’s the man who thinks he deserves everything, and that it should not just be brought to him but that it should be served to perfection. Which included film footage of Joel Allen’s death.

And I was the waiter, Billy thinks.

‘Tell me what happened at Promontory Point.’

Billy does as she asks, skipping over only what Nick told him before Billy sent him into his safe room like a bad kid grounded and confined to his bedroom. When he finishes, she says, ‘You did what you had to do.’

This is true, but it’s the verdict of a young woman barely old enough to buy a legal drink. He’s sure Ken Hoff thought the same. ‘Yes, but it was wrong choices that got me to the point where I had to do it.’

‘That old lady,’ Alice says, and shakes her head. ‘Amazing. Do you think she’ll be all right?’

‘Not if her son dies.’