Billy Summers

‘Not bad,’ he says, but her eyes are on him and he says, ‘Actually pretty bad. I’m going to get in back and stretch out as much as I can. Give me two of those ten-milligram Oxys. Maybe I can sleep.’

She supports him to the back door as best she can and helps him in. She wants to pull up his shirt and look at the area around the Band-Aid, but he won’t let her and she doesn’t press him, partly because she knows he wants her to get going and partly because she knows she wouldn’t like what she’d see.

The pill is working. At first she thinks it’s her imagination, but the way her heartbeat is ramping up isn’t imagination, and neither is the way her vision seems to be clarifying. There’s grass around the rest area’s little brick comfort station and she can see the shadow thrown by each blade. A fluttering potato chip bag looks, there’s no other word for it, delicious. She discovers that she wants to drive now, wants to watch as the Mitsubishi swallows up the miles.

Billy either reads her mind or knows from experience how the Adderall is hitting a girl who’s never taken a stimulant stronger than her morning coffee. ‘Sixty-five,’ he says. ‘Seventy if you have to pass a semi. We don’t want any flashing blue lights, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Let’s roll.’

5

‘We rolled, all right,’ Alice says. ‘My mouth got dry and I finished both my Diet Coke and his Sprite, but I didn’t have to pee for the longest time. It was like I left my bladder at Happy Jack’s Truck Stop.’

‘Speed does that,’ Bucky says. ‘You probably didn’t want to eat, either.’

‘I didn’t, but knew I had to. I stopped around three o’clock for sandwiches. Billy stayed in back. He was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him.’

Bucky doubts very much if Billy was sleeping, not with internal bleeding and a spreading infection, but he keeps quiet on that score.

‘I took two more of the pills and kept driving. We stopped for the night at a no-tell motel – our specialty – outside Gary, Indiana. Billy was awake by then, but he made me check in. I had to help him to the room. He could barely walk. I told him to take more of the OxyContin and he said he had to save them for tomorrow. I got him on the bed and looked at the wound. He didn’t want me to, but by then he was too weak to stop me.’

Alice’s voice remains steady through all of this, but she wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater again and again.

‘Was it turning black?’ Bucky asks. ‘Necrotic?’

Alice nods. ‘Yes, and swollen. I said we had to get him help and he said no. I said I was going to get him a doctor and he couldn’t stop me. He said that was true, but if I did, there was a good chance I’d spend thirty or forty years in jail. By then it was on the news. About Klerke. Do you think he was just trying to scare me?’

Bucky shakes his head. ‘He was trying to take care of you. If the cops – and the Feebs, they’d be involved – could connect you to what went down at Klerke’s place, you’d go away for a very long time. And once the cops put you with Billy at that Hyatt, you’d be connected.’

‘You’re saying that to make me feel better.’

Bucky gives her an impatient look. ‘Of course I am, but it happens to be the truth.’ He pauses. ‘When did he die, Alice?’

6

Neither of them sleep worth a damn, Billy because he’s in pain that must be excruciating, Alice because she’s still feeling the remnants of speed-up pills her system has never encountered before. Around four-thirty in the morning, long before first light, he tells her they need to get going. He says she’ll have to help him to the car, and he’d like that to happen before the world wakes up.

He takes four of the remaining Oxy tens and uses the bathroom. She goes in after him. He’s flushed away the worst of the blood, but there’s still some on the rim of the toilet and on the tiles. She wipes it up and takes the plastic trash bag with them: outlaw mentality.

By then the pain pills are working, but it still takes almost ten minutes to get him to the car because he has to rest after every two or three steps. He’s leaning heavily on her and gasping like a man who’s just finished a marathon. His breath is rank. She’s terrified that he’ll faint and she’ll have to drag him (because she can’t carry him), but they make it all right.

Slowly, with a series of little whimpering cries she hates to hear, he manages to crawl into the back seat. But when he’s in as well as he can be, with his head pillowed on one arm, he manages a remarkably sunny smile.

‘Fucking Marge. If she’d hit just half an inch further to the left, we could have avoided all this mishegas.’

‘Fucking Marge,’ she agrees.

‘Keep it at sixty-five except to pass. Seventy-five once we get to Iowa and Nebraska. We don’t want to see any flashing blue lights.’

‘No flashing lights, roger that,’ she says, and gives him a salute.

He smiles. ‘I love you, Alice.’

Alice takes two of the Adderall. She considers and adds a third. Then she gets going.