Billy Summers

Tonight, with summer past and autumn on the come, he lies awake, troubled. Not by the gun in the golf bag. He’s thinking about the job he’s agreed to do with the gun. As a rule he never goes further than the two basics: taking the shot and getting out of Dodge. This time it’s different, and not just because it’s the last time he plans to take a life for pay. It’s different because it has a smell, the way Hoff’s breath had a smell when he snared Billy in that clumsy and unexpected embrace.

Somebody got in touch with Hoff, he thinks, then realizes that’s not so. Nobody got in touch with Hoff, because Hoff is a nobody. He may think he’s a somebody, with his real estate developments and his movie theaters and his red Mustang convertible, but he’s just a big fish in a small pond, and not really that big, either. And this is a big deal. Lots of people are getting paid. Hoff himself, for one. Some of his debts are paid already, and he seems to think all of them will be cleared after Joel Allen goes down. Then there’s Nick, and the troops Nick has fielded for this op. They are not squad strength, but almost. And maybe it is a squad. There could be more Nick hasn’t told him about.

Nobody got in touch with Hoff. Somebody got in touch with Nick, and told him to bring Hoff on board. Billy remembers thinking, the first time he met with Hoff at the Sunspot Café, that Nick and Hoff must be affiliated. Now he’s one step from being positive that’s not true. Hoff wanted a casino license but didn’t get one. Would that have happened if he were tight with Nick, who knows how to finagle such things? A casino was a license to print money, after all, and Hoff needs money.

Is the somebody behind this the same somebody who gave Hoff a heads-up about that putative warehouse fire in Cody? Maybe. Probably.

And consider Joel Allen, now incarcerated in Los Angeles. He’s in protective custody, presumably as snug as a bug in a rug. He has a lawyer fighting extradition. Why, when Allen must know he’ll be shipped back here eventually? It’s not because the food is better in LA County. Is he buying time? Trying to make a deal with the somebody who set all this mishegas in motion, maybe using his lawyer as the go-between?

The somebody must know Allen will be sent back here eventually, and when he gets here, Billy Summers will put him down before he can trade what he knows. The somebody must know there’s a risk Allen has an insurance policy – pictures, recordings, maybe a written confession to something (Billy can’t imagine what). Only the somebody must feel the risk has to be taken, and that it’s an acceptable one. The somebody could be right. Probably is. Guys like Allen don’t take out insurance policies; guys like Allen feel invulnerable. He may be good at the paid hits, but the crimes that have gotten him in his current barrel of shit were crimes of impulse.

Besides, Mr Somebody may feel he has no choice. Whatever the secret is, it’s bad. Allen can’t be allowed to find himself standing trial in a death penalty state. Not with something hot he can trade.

Billy starts to drift into sleep. Before he goes under his last thought is of Monopoly, about how you try to stop the slide into bankruptcy by selling your properties one by one. It rarely works.

7

As he’s getting into his car the next morning, Corrie Ackerman cuts across her lawn and his. She’s got a brown bag, and something inside it smells delicious.

‘I made cranberry muffins. Shan and Derek both get hot lunch at school, but they like a little something extra. I had these two left over. They’re for you.’

‘That’s really nice,’ he says, taking the bag. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to save at least one of them for Jamal when he comes home?’

‘I did put one by for him, but I want you to eat both of these, you hear?’

‘I think I can carry out that mission,’ Billy says, smiling.

‘You’ve lost weight.’ She pauses. ‘You’re okay, right?’

Billy looks down at himself, surprised. Has he lost weight? It seems he has. A hole in his belt that used to go unused is now in service. Then he looks back at her. ‘I’m fine, Corrie.’

‘You look healthy enough, but that isn’t what I meant. Or not all I meant. Is your book going okay?’

‘Gangbusters.’

‘Then maybe you just need to eat more. Healthy stuff. Greens and yellow vegetables, not just take-out pizza and Taco Bell. In the long run, bachelor food is worse than booze. You come to dinner tonight. Six o’clock. I’m making shepherd’s pie. I load in the carrots and peas.’

‘That sounds good,’ Billy says. ‘As long as I’m not putting you out.’

‘You’re not, and I need to say thank you. You have been very good to my kids. Shanice’s crush on you got even bigger when you won her that flamingo.’ She lowers her voice, as if imparting a secret. ‘She changed its name from Frankie to Dave.’

As he drives toward downtown, Billy thinks of Shan changing her flamingo’s name and feels happy because she did that and shame because the name is, after all, a lie.

8