Billy Summers

He gets to his feet, rolls his shoulders to loosen them, then picks up the girl. Without the adrenaline to boost him, he guesses her weight at one-fifteen. Maybe one-twenty. Not much of a match for three men. Did they all rape her? Billy guesses that if they were together and one did, they all did. He will ask her when she comes around, for all the good it will do. He doubts if she’ll be able to remember and what she’ll want to know is why he didn’t call the police or take her to the nearest ER.

She’s sinking into a U shape again and Billy ends up dropping her onto the bed instead of putting her down on it gently, as he intended. She opens her eyes a bit, then closes them again and resumes snoring. He doesn’t want to wrestle with her anymore, but he also doesn’t want her lying there naked. She’s going to be freaked out enough when she wakes up. He gets a T-shirt from the bureau, sits beside her, lifts her with his left arm and gets the shirt over her head with his right hand. Her fuzzy sounds of protest fade back into snores when he gets it past her face and over her shoulders.

‘Help me now.’ He lifts one of her arms and after a couple of failures manages to poke it through the short sleeve. ‘Little help, okay?’

Some part of her must hear him because she raises her other arm and finally wavers it into the sleeve. He lays her back down, blows out a breath, and arms sweat from his forehead. The shirt is bunched above her breasts. He pulls it down in front, lifts her, pulls it down in back. She’s shivering again and whimpering a little. Billy puts an arm under her knees, lifts her, and yanks the hem of the shirt down over her buttocks and thighs.

God, like dressing a baby, Billy thinks.

He hopes she won’t piss the bed – he’s only got this one set of sheets and the nearest laundromat is three blocks away – but he knows there’s a good chance she will. At least most of the bleeding has stopped. He supposes it could have been worse. They could have torn her wide open, even killed her. That might even have been what they meant to do, dumping her the way they did, but Billy doubts it. He thinks they were all just really drunk. Or high on something mean, like crystal. The assholes probably thought she’d come around and walk home, sadder but wiser.

He stands, wipes his brow again, and pulls up the blanket. She clutches it at once, pulls it to her chin, and turns on her side. That’s good because she might vomit again. He can’t believe she has anything left to bring up, considering all she puked out in the foyer, but there’s no way to tell.

Even with the blanket, she’s shivering.

What am I supposed to do with you? Billy thinks. Just what the fuck am I supposed to do with you, tell me that.

It’s a question he can’t answer. All he knows is that he’s in the mother of all messes.

4

He gets a fresh pair of boxers from the bureau, leaving just one. He goes out to the living room and lies down on the couch. He doubts he’ll sleep, but if he does it will be thin and he’ll hear her if she gets up and tries to leave the apartment. And do what? Stop her, of course, if only because it’s cold and raining and damn near blowing a gale, from the sound. But that’s tonight. When she wakes up in the morning, hungover and disoriented and in a stranger’s apartment, clothes gone—

Her clothes. Still on the floor, in a sodden heap.

Billy gets off the couch and takes them into the bathroom. On the way he stops to look at his uninvited guest. She’s stopped snoring but she’s still shivering. A sodden clot of hair lies against one of her cheeks. He bends and pushes it away.

‘Please, I don’t want to,’ she says.

Billy freezes, but when there’s nothing more he goes into the bathroom. There’s a hook on the door. He hangs the cheap jacket on it. There’s a shower-tub combo of the sort found in cut-rate motels. He wrings out her shirt and skirt in the tub and drapes them over the shower curtain rod to dry. The jacket has three zip-style pockets, a little one above the left breast and two bigger diagonal ones on the side. There’s nothing in the breast pocket. There’s a man’s wallet in one of the side pockets and a phone in the other.

He removes the SIM card and puts the phone back in the pocket it came from for the time being. He opens the wallet. The first thing he finds is her driver’s license. Her name is Alice Maxwell and she’s from Kingston, Rhode Island. She’s twenty years old. No, check that, just turned twenty-one. DMV photographs are awful as a rule, something you’re even embarrassed to show the cop who stops you for speeding, but hers is pretty good. Or maybe Billy only thinks that because he’s seen her looking far worse than any DL photo. Her eyes are wide and blue. There’s a little smile on her lips.

First license, he thinks. She hasn’t even had it renewed yet, because it’s still got the one A.M. restriction for teenagers.