Billy Summers

Then he has another idea. Maybe not a good idea, but he’ll be able to sleep. He’s sure of it. Billy gets up and takes Shan’s drawing out of his pants pocket. He unfolds it. He looks at the smiling girl with the red ribbons in her hair. He looks at the hearts rising from the flamingo’s head. He remembers Shan going to sleep next to him in the seventh inning of that playoff game. Her head on his arm. Billy puts the picture on the night table with his two phones and is soon asleep himself.

CHAPTER 12

1

Billy wakes up disoriented. The room is completely dark, not even a shred of light leaking in from around the shade of the window facing his backyard. For a moment he just lies there, still half asleep, then remembers there is no window, not in this room. The only window here is the one in his new living room. The one he calls his periscope. This isn’t his large second-floor bedroom on Evergreen Street but the much smaller basement bedroom on Pearson Street. Billy remembers he’s a fugitive.

He gets orange juice from the fridge, just a swallow or two to make it last, then showers off the sweat from yesterday. He dresses, pours milk over a bowl of Alpha-Bits, and turns on the six A.M. news.

The first thing he sees is Giorgio Piglielli. Not a photograph but an Identikit drawing that might as well be a photo, because it’s amazingly good. Billy knows right away who worked with the police artist. Irv Dean, the Gerard Tower security guy, is an ex-cop, and it seems his observational skills are still intact, at least when he’s not reading Motor Trend or examining breasts and butts in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. There’s nothing in the lead report about Ken Hoff. If the police have connected him to the Allen shooting, they haven’t shared it with the news people. At least not yet.

The perky blonde weather girl gives a quick update, talking about how it’s going to be unusually cold for this time of year. She promises a more detailed forecast later, then turns it over to the perky blonde traffic reporter, who warns commuters to expect a slow ride this morning ‘because of a heightened police presence.’

That means roadblocks. The cops are assuming the shooter is still in the city, which is correct. They are also assuming that the fat man calling himself George Russo is also in the city. This, Billy knows, is incorrect. His former literary agent is in Nevada, possibly underground with his considerable bulk already beginning to decay.

After an ad for Chevy trucks, the anchors return with a retired police detective. He is asked to speculate on the possible reasons why Joel Allen was killed. The retired detective says, ‘There’s only one I can see. Someone wanted to shut him up before he could trade information for a reduced sentence.’

‘What kind of sentence reduction could he possibly expect?’ asks one of the anchors. She’s a perky brunette. How can they all be so perky so early? Is it drugs?

‘Life instead of the needle,’ the detective returns, not even having to pause for thought.

Billy is sure this is also correct. The only question is what Allen knew, and why the killing had to be so public. As a warning to others who might share Allen’s knowledge? Ordinarily Billy wouldn’t care. Ordinarily he’s just the mechanic. Only nothing about the situation in which he now finds himself is ordinary.

The anchors turn it over to a reporter who’s interviewing John Colton, one of the Young Lawyers, and Billy doesn’t want to see that. Just a week ago he and Johnny and Jim Albright were matching quarters to see who was going to pay for the tacos. They were on the plaza, laughing and having a good time. Now John looks stunned and woeful. He gets as far as ‘We all thought he was a really decent—’ before Billy kills the television.

He rinses out his cereal bowl, then checks the Dalton Smith phone. There’s a text from Bucky, just three words: No transfer yet. It’s what he expected, but that, added to the expression on Johnny Colton’s face, is no way to start his first day in – might as well call it what it is – captivity.

If there’s been no transfer yet, there probably isn’t going to be any transfer at all. He was paid five hundred thousand up front, and that’s a lot of cheese, but it’s not what he was promised. Up to this morning Billy has been too busy to be really mad about getting stiffed by someone he trusted, but now he’s not busy and he’s pissed like a bear. He did the job, and not just yesterday. He’s been doing this job for over three months, and at far greater personal cost than he ever would have believed. He was promised, and who breaks their promises?

‘Bad people, that’s who,’ Billy says.