Billy Summers

He locks the car and goes back inside. He brought the shiny new MacBook Pro back from his office and parked it on the kitchen table. Now he opens it and reads what he’s written as Benjy Compson. It’s only a couple of pages, ending with Benjy shooting Bob Raines. He reads it over three times, trying to see it as Nick must have. Because Nick has read it, after that crack about writers using their own experiences Billy has no doubt of it.

He doesn’t care if Nick finds out about his childhood, for all Billy knows Nick has checked that out already. What Billy does care about is protecting the dumb self, at least for now. He won’t be able to sleep until he makes sure that there’s nothing in those two or three pages that makes him seem too smart. So he goes over it a fourth time.

At last he shuts the laptop down. He doesn’t think there’s anything in the prose that a C student in English couldn’t have written, assuming most of it really happened. The spelling is mostly good, and the punctuation, but Nick would chalk that up to autocorrect. Although the Word program isn’t able to detect the difference between can’t and cant, the computer always turns dont into don’t, it underlines misspellings in red, it even notes the most egregious grammatical lapses. The verb tenses in what he’s written come and go, which is fine because that’s above the computer’s pay grade … although the day will probably come when it flags those, too.

But he’s uneasy.

He’s never had reason to distrust Nick, who is undoubtedly a bad person but who has always played straight with Billy. He is not playing straight now, or he wouldn’t have denied cloning the Pro. Would not have cloned it in the first place. Billy feels he can still assume the job is straight, the first quarter of the payout is in his bank account, five hundred thousand dollars, tall tickets, but this whole thing still feels wrong. Not big wrong, just a little wonky. It’s like one of those shots you sometimes see in a movie where the camera has been slightly tilted to give you a sense of disorientation. Dutching is what movie people call that kind of tilt, and that’s how this job feels: dutched. Not enough to call it off, which he might not be able to do anyway now that he’s said yes, but enough to be concerning.

And there’s the getaway plan Nick sprang on him. If you’ve already got something worked out, go with God, he’d said. But if you don’t, me and Giorgio had an idea that might work fine.

Nick’s idea isn’t a problem because it’s bad; it’s not. It’s good. But disappearing after the job is done has always been Billy’s responsibility, and for Nick to get in his business like that is … well …

‘Dutched,’ Billy murmurs to his empty kitchen.

Nick said that six weeks ago, when this job looked like becoming a reality, he sent Paul Logan up to Macon and told him to buy a Ford Transit van, not new but not more than three years old. Transits were the workhorses of Red Bluff’s Department of Public Works fleet. Billy has already seen several, painted yellow and blue with the motto WE ARE HERE TO SERVE painted on the sides. The brown Transit Frank bought in Georgia was now in a garage on the outskirts of town, painted in DPW colors and with the DPW motto.

‘I’ll have a good idea of when Allen’s extradition is getting close,’ Nick said. He was sipping a little more brandy. ‘Those guys I told you about – the ones coming in – will start being out and about in that van, always looking busy but not really doing anything. Never staying too long in one place but always near the courthouse and the Gerard Tower. An hour here, two hours there. Becoming part of the scenery, in other words. Like you, Billy.’

On the day of Allen’s arrival, Nick said this bogus DPW van would be parked around the corner from the Gerard Tower. The bogus city workers would maybe open a manhole cover and pretend to be doing something inside. When the shot came, and the flashpot explosions, people would run everywhere. Including from the Gerard Tower and including Billy Summers, who would race around the corner and into the back of the van. There he would jump into a pair of DPW coveralls.

‘The van pulls around to the courthouse,’ Nick said. ‘Cops are already on the scene. My guys – and you – pile out and ask if there’s anything they can do to help. Put up sawhorses to block the street, or something. In all the confusion, it will look a hundred per cent natural. You see that?’

Billy saw. It was bold and it was good.

‘The cops—’

‘They probably tell us to get lost,’ Billy said. ‘We’re city workers but we’re civilians. Is that right?’

Nick laughed and clapped his hands. ‘See? Anyone who thinks you’re stupid is full of shit. My guys say yes sir, officers, and off you drive. And you keep driving. After switching vehicles, of course.’

‘Driving to where?’