Billy Summers

Tell him the girl’s name is Rosalie. She has a window. It opens three days from now and will close four days after that. Price is negotiable but floor is $8,000 for one hour. Tell him Rosalie is ‘prime stuff.’ Tell him to check with Judy Blatner if he doubts that. If you want, tell him that you will make the arrangements free of charge to compensate for the unavoidable complications on the Allen job. Tell him the delivery rep will be Darren Byrne’s cousin, Steven Byrne. Let me know as soon as you hear.

He signs it B.

They stay that night at a Holiday Inn Express in Lincoln, Nebraska. Billy is bringing in their luggage on a courtesy trolley when his phone dings with a text. He observes, with zero nostalgia, that it’s from his old literary agent.

‘Giorgio?’ Alice asks.

‘Yes.’

‘What does it say?’

Billy hands her his phone.

GRusso: He wants her. November 4, 8 PM 775 Montauk Highway. Text me thumbs up or down.

‘Are you sure you want to do this? Your call, Alice.’

She finds and sends it.

CHAPTER 23

We left Lincoln early and drove east on 1-80. For the first hour or so we didn’t talk much. Alice had my lappie open and was reading everything I’d written in the summerhouse. On the outskirts of Council Bluffs a car blipped past us with a clown and a ballerina looking at us from the back seat. The clown waved. I waved back.

‘Alice!’ I said. ‘Do you know what today is?’

‘Thursday?’ She didn’t look up from the screen. It made me think of Derek Ackerman and his friend Danny Fazio back on Evergreen Street, hypnotized by whatever they were looking at on their phones.

‘Not just any Thursday. It’s Halloween.’

‘Okay.’ Still not looking up.

‘What did you go as? Your favorite, I mean.’

‘Mmm … once I was Princess Leia.’ Still not looking up from what she was reading. ‘My sister took me around the neighborhood.’

‘In Kingston, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Get much swag?’

She finally looked up. ‘Let me read, Billy, I’m almost done.’

So I let her read and we rolled deeper into lowa. No big changes there, just miles of flatland. At last she closed the laptop. I asked her if she’d read it all.

‘Just to where I came into the story. The part where I threw up and almost choked. That was hard to read about, so I stopped. By the way, you forgot to change my name.’

‘I’ll make a note.’

‘The rest I knew.’ She smiles. ‘Remember The Blacklist on Netflix? And how we watered the plants?’

‘Daphne and Walter.’

‘Do you think they lived?’

‘I’m sure they did.’

‘Bullshit. You don’t know if they did or not.’

I admitted that was true.

‘And neither do I. But we can believe they did if we want to, can’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We can.’

‘That’s the advantage of not knowing.’ Alice was staring out the window at miles of cornfields, all brown now and waiting for winter. ‘People can choose to believe any old thing they want. I choose to believe that we’ll get to Montauk Point, and do what we came to do, and get away with it, and live happily ever after.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll choose to believe that, too.’

‘After all, you’ve never been caught yet. All those killings, and you got away with them all.’

‘I’m sorry you had to read about that. But you said I should write down everything.’

She shrugged. ‘They were bad people. They all had that in common. You didn’t shoot any priests or doctors or … or crossing guards.’

That made me laugh and Alice smiled a little, but I could tell she was thinking. I let her do it. The miles rolled by.

‘I’m going back to the mountains,’ she said at last. ‘I might even live with Bucky for awhile. What do you think of that?’

‘I think he’d like it.’

‘Just to get started. Until I can find work and get my own place and start saving up money to go back to school. Because you can start college whenever you want. Sometimes people don’t start college until they’re in their forties or even their sixties, right?’

‘I saw a thing on TV about a man who started when he was seventy-five and got his diploma when he was eighty. My Spidey sense tells me it’s not business school you’re thinking about.’

‘No, regular school. Maybe even the University of Colorado. I could live in Boulder. I liked that town.’

‘Any idea what you’d want to study?’