Billy Summers

‘Get out of there, get out!’ Jamieson shouted. ‘Jump! Time to didi mau!’ But he was laughing, triumphant. They all were. I had my back slapped so often and so hard that I almost fell over as we ran back to the dirty Mitsubishi the l-c had used to drive us out. Albie, Donk, Klew, and the others ran for the little power trucks, a scam that we’d never be able to use again. We could hear yelling across the river, and now there was even more gunfire.

‘Yeah, eat it!’ Big Klew shouted. ‘Eat it big, motherfuckers! Your man just got run over by the big dark horse!’

The l-c’s old station wagon was parked behind the Iraqi power trucks in the turnaround. I opened the back to put in my rifle and Taco’s gear.

‘Hurry the fuck up,’ Jamieson said. ‘We’re blocking those guys in.’

Well, you were the one who parked there, I thought but didn’t say. I tossed in our stuff. When I slammed the hatchback shut, I saw something lying in the dirt. It was a baby shoe. It must have been a little girl’s, because it was pink. I bent down to get it and as I did, some shooter’s blind-luck round punched into the bulletproof glass of the hatchback’s window. If I hadn’t bent down, the round would have gone in the nape of my neck or the back of my head.

‘Get in, get in!’ Jamieson was screaming. Another blind-luck round pinged off the Eagle wagon’s armored side. Or maybe not so blind; by then the shooters had to be all the way down by their side of the river.

I picked up the shoe. I got in the ’Bishi and Jamieson tore out of there, fishtailing and throwing up a cloud of dust the trucks would have to drive through. The l-c wasn’t thinking about that; he was concentrating on saving his ass.

‘They’re shooting the shit out of that boom lift,’ Taco said. He was still laughing, high on the kill. ‘What have you got there?’

I showed it to him and said I thought it had saved my life.

‘You keep that thing safe, brah,’ Taco said. ‘And keep it with you.’

I did. Until the Funhouse, that November. I looked for it just as we started to clear that house in the Industrial Sector and it was gone.

8

Billy finally shuts down and stands at the periscope window of his landlocked submarine, looking out across the little patch of lawn, to the street, to the vacant lot on the other side where the train station once stood. He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing here. Maybe quite awhile. His brain feels blasted, as if he’s just finished taking the world’s longest and most complicated test.

How many words did he write today? He could check the counter on his document – now Billy’s story instead of Benjy’s – but he’s not that OCD. It was a lot, leave it at that, and he’s still got a long way to go. There was the April assault that started less than a week after he killed Jassim, followed by the pullback when the politicians got cold feet. Then the final nightmare that was Operation Phantom Fury. Forty-six days of hell. He won’t put it that way (if he even gets that far) because it’s a cliché, but hell is what it was. Culminating in the Funhouse, which seemed to summarize all the rest. He might skim through some of it but not the Funhouse, because the Funhouse was the point of Fallujah. And what exactly was the point? That it was pointless. Just another house that had to be cleared, but the price they paid.

A few people walk by on Pearson Street. A few cars drive by. One is a police car, but it doesn’t concern Billy. It’s moving leisurely, heading nowhere special and in no hurry to get there. He is still amazed that this part of the city, which is so close to downtown, feels so deserted. On Pearson Street, rush hour is hush hour. He supposes that most people who work in the city’s center haul ass to the suburbs when the workday is done – nicer places like Bentonville, Sherwood Heights, Plateau, Midwood. Even Cody, where he won a little girl a stuffed toy. The neighborhood of which he is now a part doesn’t even have a name, at least that he knows of.

He needs to catch up. Billy flips on Channel 8, the NBC affiliate, wanting to stay away from 6, which will still be running the footage of Allen being shot. 8 comes on with a BREAKING NEWS logo and a soundtrack of ominous violins and thumping drums. Billy doubts that there’s any serious news breaking with the assassin still at large. The assassin has spent the day writing a story that is in grave danger of becoming a book.

It turns out there have been developments, but nothing Billy hasn’t expected and not anything that warrants the disaster soundtrack. One of the anchors says that local businessman Kenneth Hoff has been implicated in ‘the widening assassination conspiracy.’ The other anchor says that Kenneth Hoff’s apparent suicide may have been murder. Holmes, your deductions astound me, Billy thinks.