Billy Summers

‘Sure. Nick felt okay about it, because Allen was what I always pretended to be, just your basic mechanic who fixed problems with a gun instead of socket wrenches and a timing computer. He gave Allen photos of Patrick’s apartment building, photos of the apartment itself, the code to the service entrance, the car exchange after the job was done, anything he might need to do the job clean and quick.’ Billy pauses. ‘Nick didn’t tell me all that, but I’ve worked for him before. I knew the drill. What he didn’t tell Allen was why and Allen didn’t ask.’

‘But he asked Patrick, didn’t he? Before he killed him.’

Billy thinks that over. ‘It’s possible, but it seems unlikely for a guy like Joel Allen. He’d be a lot more likely to just do the job. No conversation, just point and shoot.’

‘Maybe Patrick offered him the thumb drive in exchange for …’ Alice stops. ‘Except he couldn’t, could he? He didn’t have it. Thought he was home free once his appointment was announced to the board.’

‘Nick doesn’t know what happened, and Allen can’t tell us how he found out about Roger Klerke and the kid in Tijuana, but I have an idea. Allen was told to make it look like a robbery, maybe committed by some fellow user who met Patrick along the Los Angeles drug trail. He was told to take any money or jewelry he found. He was supposed to toss the jewelry, watches and gold chains and shit like that, but he could keep the money as a little bonus. So after he killed Patrick he searched the place and might have found a picture, maybe more than one, that Patrick kept in reserve. At least one that showed his father’s face nice and clear while he was … doing what he was doing. Does that make sense?’

Alice nods hard enough to make her hair bounce. ‘I bet it happened just that way. Even if the picture or pictures were in a safe, Allen could have been given the combination with the rest of his background info. Would he really have recognized the man in the picture?’

Based on what he knows about Joel Allen, Billy doesn’t see him as the sort of guy who watched the WWE business channel or read the Bloomberg report. ‘Probably not at first, but it wouldn’t have taken him long to find out. A few Google searches would have shown him that he’d killed the son of a billionaire who also happened to be a pedophile.’

Alice’s eyes are intent. She’s totally into this now. Billy thinks again that a rinky-dink business school in Red Bluff would have wasted a lot of potential. And hairdressing school? Forget it.

‘So this paid killer, this mechanic, this cleaner, had two things worth money – that the father was almost certainly the one who paid to have the son killed, and the father also raped a child. Because he “just wanted to see what it was like.”’ Some of the light goes out of her eyes when she says that.

‘I doubt if he tried to turn what he knew into cash, although he might have down the line. He would’ve known that blackmailing someone as rich and powerful as Roger Klerke would be a tremendous risk. I think he kept it as a hole card. Which he eventually had to play not for money but because of his own stupidity.’

Double stupidity, Billy thinks, if you count in the lady writer.

‘Almost like he wanted to be caught,’ Alice says. ‘Some repeat killers do.’ She rewinds what she’s said and puts a hand on his wrist. ‘Ones without a moral code, I mean.’

Is that what you call it? Billy wonders.

‘I doubt if Allen wanted to get caught. And if he was able to figure out what made that picture such a valuable commodity, I guess he wasn’t completely stupid, either.’

‘If he wasn’t completely stupid, why kill that man over a poker game? And why attack that woman in LA?’

Well, Billy thinks, Allen believed the poker game guy was cheating. And the lady writer pepper-sprayed him. But neither of those things goes to the heart of Alice’s question.

‘My guess? Simple arrogance. Do you want to stop somewhere for dinner?’

She shakes her head. ‘Let’s drive straight through and eat when we get there. I want to hear the rest.’

5

Billy feels surer about this part even though it’s still mostly guesswork. After Allen was arrested for assault and attempted rape in LA, he must have known he’d be connected almost immediately with the murder and attempted murder back east in Red Bluff. There was a lively trade in cell phones in the county lockup, most of them burners. Allen could have gotten hold of one, called Nick, and said that if he had to go back to Red Bluff and stand trial for murder in a death penalty state, a very rich man, initials RK, was probably going to spend the rest of his life in jail, possibly getting buggered by Harvey Weinstein. And if anything happened to Allen in LA lockup, RK was going to be very, very sorry.