Billy Summers (22 page)

Ken Hoff and David Lockridge weren't the only ones who were out front.

Were they?

Billy texts Giorgio Piglielli, aka Georgie Pigs, aka George Russo, the big literary agent. He uses an alias he knows Giorgio will recognize.

Trilby: Text me back.

He waits. There's no response, and that's fucked up because there
are two things Giorgio always keeps close at hand: his phone and something to eat. Billy tries again.

Trilby: I need to talk to you right away.
Billy considers, then adds:
The contract specified payment on publication day, right?

No dots to say Giorgio is reading his texts or composing a reply. Nothing.

Trilby: Text me.

Nothing.

Billy flips the phone closed and puts it on the coffee table. The worst thing about Giorgio's silence is that Billy's not surprised. There really is a
dumb self
, it seems, and what it hasn't realized until the job has been done and it's too late to go back is that Giorgio has been out front right along with Ken Hoff. Giorgio was with Hoff when they entered the Gerard Tower to show Billy his writer's studio on the fifth floor. And it wasn't Giorgio's first visit to the building, either.
This is George Russo, you met him last week
, Hoff had said to Irv Dean, the security guy.

Is Giorgio back in Nevada? And if so, is he chowing down and drinking milkshakes in Vegas or buried somewhere in the surrounding desert? God knows he wouldn't be the first. Or the hundredth.

They'll trace Giorgio back to Nick even if he's dead, Billy thinks. The two of them have been a team since forever, Nick in charge and Georgie Pigs as his
consigliere
. Billy doesn't know if that's what they really call a guy like Georgie or just something the movies made up, but for sure that's what the fat man has been to Nick: his go-to guy.

Only not since forever, because the first time Billy worked for Nick—it was the third time he assassinated a man for pay—was in 2008, and Giorgio wasn't there. Nick handled that one by himself. He told Billy there was a rape-o working some of the smaller clubs and casinos on the edge of town. The rape-o liked older women, liked to hurt them, finally went overboard and killed one. Nick
found out who he was and wanted a pro from out of town to take care of the guy. Billy, he'd said, had been recommended. Highly.

When Billy came to Vegas the second time, Giorgio was not only there, he did the deal. Nick came in while they were talking, gave Billy a manly hug and a few pats on the back, then sat in the corner sipping a drink and just listening. Until the very end, that was. That second job was less than a year after the first one, the rape-o. Giorgio said the target this time was an independent porno filmmaker named Karl Trilby. He showed Billy a picture of a man who looked eerily like Oral Roberts.

“Trilby like the hat,” Giorgio said, then explained when Billy pretended not to know what he was talking about.

“I don't shoot people just because they make movies of people fucking,” Billy had said.

“What about people who make movies of guys fucking six-year-olds?” Nick had said, and Billy had done the job because Karl Trilby was a bad person.

Billy did three more jobs for Nick, five in all not counting Allen, almost a third of his total. Excluding the dozens of hajis in Iraq he had taken down, that is. Sometimes Nick was there when the offer was made and sometimes he wasn't, but Giorgio always was, so him being on the scene for the Allen job at least part of the time hadn't struck Billy as odd. It should have. Only now does he realize it was
very
odd.

Nick has deniability as long as Giorgio keeps quiet; Nick can say sure I know the guy, but if he did this it was his own deal. I knew nothing about it. Even if the cook and the woman server from that first dinner put him with Giorgio and Billy, which is unlikely, Nick can shrug and say he was there to talk to Giorgio on casino business, the license on the Double Domino was coming up for renewal. And the other guy? As far as Nick knows, just a pal of Giorgio's. Or maybe a bodyguard. Quiet guy. Said his name was Lockridge but otherwise didn't say much at all.

When the cops ask where Nick was when Allen got hit, he can say he was in Vegas and produce plenty of witnesses to back his alibi. Plus casino security footage. That stuff doesn't get recycled every twelve or twenty-four hours; that stuff gets archived for at least a year.

If
Giorgio keeps quiet. But would he stick to that
omertà
shit if
he
was the one getting extradited? If
he
was the one facing the possibility of lethal injection as an accessory to first-degree murder?

Georgie Pigs can't talk if he's under five feet of desert, Billy thinks. It's the great rule when it comes to things like this.

He stops tossing the phone from hand to hand and texts Giorgio one more time. Still no response. He could try texting or phoning Nick, but even if he reached him, could he trust anything Nick might say? No. The only thing Billy can trust is a million-five transferred to his offshore account, then transferred again, through electronic jiggery-pokery, to another one that Dalton Smith can access. Bucky would do that part when he gets to wherever he's decided to go, but only if the money is there to transfer.

Tonight Billy can do nothing more, so he goes to bed. It isn't even nine o'clock, but it's been a long day.

He lies with his hands beneath the pillow in that ephemeral cool pocket, thinking it doesn't make sense. No way does it.

Ken Hoff yes, okay. There's a certain breed of fast-dealing small-city sharpie who believes that no matter how deep the shit, someone will always throw him a rope. These are the broad-smiling, firm-handshaking hustlers in Izod polos and Bally loafers who could have come with
self-involved optimist
stamped on their birth certificates. But Giorgio Piglielli is different. He's eating himself to death, sure, but so far as Billy can tell, in most other ways he's a hard-eyed realist. And yet he's all over this thing. Why is that?

Billy lets it go. He drops into sleep and dreams of the desert. Not the one in the suck, though, where everything smells of gunpowder, goats, oil, and exhaust. The one in Australia. There's a huge rock out there, Ayers Rock it's called but its real name is Uluru, a word that's spooky even to say, one that sounds like wind around the eaves. A holy place for the aboriginal people who saw it first. Saw it, worshipped it, but never presumed to think they owned it. They understand that if there's a God, it's God's rock. Billy has never been there, but he's seen pictures of it in movies like
A Cry in the Dark
and magazines like
National Geographic
and
Travel
. He would like to go there, has even daydreamed about moving to Alice Springs, which is only a four-hour drive from Uluru, where the Rock raises its improbable head. Living there quietly. Writing, maybe, in a room filled with sunshine and a little garden outside.

His two phones are on the night table beside the bed. He has turned them off, but when he wakes up around three AM, needing to empty his bladder, Billy touches the power button on each of them to see if anything's come in. There's nothing from Giorgio on the burner, which doesn't surprise him. He doesn't expect to hear from the fat man again, although he supposes that in a world where a conman can get elected president anything is possible. There is a message on the Dalton Smith phone, though. It's a news push from the local paper.
Prominent Businessman Commits Suicide
.

Billy uses the bathroom, then sits on the bed and reads the story. It's brief. The prominent businessman is, of course, Kenneth P. Hoff. One of his Green Hills neighbors was jogging by and heard a gunshot that seemed to have come from Hoff's garage. This was around seven PM. The neighbor called 911. The police arrived and found Hoff dead behind the wheel of his car, which was running. There was a bullet hole in his head and a revolver in his lap.

There will be a longer, more detailed story later today or maybe tomorrow. It will recap Hoff's business career. There will be the usual shocked quotes from his friends and business associates. There
will be references to “current financial troubles” but no details, because other local movers and shakers, still very much alive, wouldn't care for that. His ex-wives will say nicer things about him than they surely told their divorce lawyers, and at the funeral they'll show up in black and dab their eyes with tissues—carefully, to protect their mascara. Billy doesn't know if the paper will say the car he was found in was a red Mustang convertible, but he's sure it was.

Hoff's connection to the Allen shooting, surely the motive for his suicide, will come later.

The story won't report the coroner's likely supposition, that the depressed man decided to kill himself by inhaling carbon monoxide, got impatient, and blew his brains out instead. Billy knows that isn't how it went down. The only thing he doesn't know is which of Nick's hardballs administered the killshot. It could have been Frank or Paulie or Reggie or someone he hasn't even met, possibly an import from Florida or Atlanta, but it's hard for Billy to see anyone but Dana Edison with his bright blue eyes and dark red manbun.

Did he march Hoff into the garage at gunpoint? Maybe he didn't need to, maybe he just told Hoff they were going to sit in his car and talk about how the situation was going to be resolved, and to Hoff's benefit. A self-involved optimist and designated patsy might buy that. He sits behind the wheel. Dana sits in the passenger bucket. Ken says
what's the plan
. Dana says
it's this
and shoots him. Then he turns on the engine, leaves through the back door, and rides away, silently, in a golf cart. Because that's what Green Hills is, a golf course with condos.

Maybe it didn't go down exactly that way, and maybe it wasn't Edison, but Billy's pretty sure he's got the picture in broad strokes. Which leaves Giorgio, the last piece of unfinished business.

Well, no, Billy thinks. There's me.

He lies down again, but this time sleep eludes him. Some of it is the way the old three-story house creaks. The wind has picked
up, and without the railway station to block it, that wind blows straight through the vacant lot and across Pearson Street. Every time Billy starts to drift, the wind hoots around the eaves, saying
Uluru, Uluru
. Or there's another creak that sounds like a footstep on a loose board.

Billy tells himself a little insomnia doesn't matter, he can sleep the whole day away tomorrow if he so chooses, he won't be going anywhere for awhile, but the early morning hours are such long hours. There's too much to imagine, none of it good.

He thinks he will get up and read. He has no actual books except for
Thérèse Raquin
, but he can download something to his laptop and read in bed until he gets sleepy.

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.

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 AM 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 blond 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 blond 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.

He goes to the local newspaper. The headline is big—
COURTHOUSE ASSASSINATION!
—but it probably looks bigger and better in print than it does on his iPhone screen. The story tells him nothing he doesn't already know, but the lead photo makes it clear why Sheriff Vickery wasn't in attendance at Chief Conlee's press conference. The pic shows that absurd Stetson hat lying on the steps, with no county sheriff to hold it up. Sheriff Vickery beat feet. Sheriff Vickery skedaddled. This picture is worth a thousand words. For him it wouldn't have been a press conference, it would have been a walk of shame.

Good luck getting re-elected with that photo to explain, Billy thinks.

He goes upstairs to tend Daphne and Walter, then stops with the spray bottle in his hand, wondering if he's crazy. He's supposed to water them, not drown them. He checks the Jensens' fridge and sees nothing he wants but there's a package of English muffins
on the counter with one left and he toasts it up, telling himself that if he doesn't use it, it will just get moldy. There are regular windows up here and he sits in a bar of sun, munching his muffin and thinking about what he's avoiding. Which is Benjy's story, of course. It's the only job he has to do now that he's finished the one that brought him here. But it means writing about the Marines, and there's so much, starting with the bus to Parris Island, basic… just so much.

Billy rinses off the plate he's used, dries it, puts it back in the cupboard, and goes downstairs. He looks out the periscope window and sees the usual not much. The pants he wore yesterday are on the bedroom floor. He picks them up and feels in the pockets, almost hoping he's lost the flash drive somewhere along the way, but it's there with his keys, one of them to Dalton Smith's leased Ford Fusion in the parking garage on the other side of town. Waiting until he feels it's safe to leave.
When the heat goes down
, as they say in those movies about the last job that always goes wrong.

The flash drive feels like it's gained weight. Looking at it, a marvelous storage device that would have seemed like science fiction only thirty years ago, there are two things he can't believe. One is how many words he's already put on it. The other is that there can possibly be any more. Twice as many. Four times as many. Ten, twenty.

He opens the laptop he thought he'd lost, a more expensive lucky charm than a battered baby shoe all grimy with dirt but otherwise about the same deal, and powers it up. He types in the password, plugs in the flash drive, and drags the single stored document to the laptop's screen. He looks at the first line—The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm—and feels a kind of despair. This is good work, he feels sure of it, but what felt light when he started now feels heavy, because he has a responsibility to make the rest just as good, and he's not sure he can do it.

He goes to the periscope window and looks out at more nothing,
wondering if he's just discovered why so many would-be writers are unable to finish what they have started. He thinks of
The Things They Carried
, surely one of the best books about war ever written, maybe
the
best. He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.

All over the world there are half-finished books—memoirs, poetry, novels, surefire plans for getting thin or getting rich—in desk drawers, because the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down.

Some other time, they think. Maybe when the kids are a little older. Or when I retire.

Is that it? Will it be too heavy if he tries writing about the bus ride and the jarhead haircut and the first time Sergeant Uppington asked him
Do you want to suck my cock, Summers? Do you? Because you look like a cocksucker to me
.

Ask?

Oh no, he didn't ask, Billy thinks, unless it was what you call a rhetorical question. He shouted in my face, his nose just an inch from mine, his spittle warm on my lips, and I said
Sir no sir, I do not want to suck your cock
and he said
Is my cock not good enough for you, Private Summers, you cocksucking poor excuse for a recruit?

How it all comes back, and can he write it all, even as Benjy Compson?

Billy decides he can't. He pulls the curtain closed and goes back to the laptop, meaning to turn it off and spend the day watching TV.
Ellen DeGeneres
,
Hot Bench
,
Kelly and Ryan
, and
The Price Is Right
all before lunch. Then a nap and then some afternoon soap operas. He can finish with
John Law
, who tick-tocks his gavel like Coolio in the old music videos and takes no shit in his courtroom. But as he reaches for the off button, a thought comes from nowhere. It's almost as if someone has whispered in his ear.

You're free. You can do whatever you want.

Not physically free, God no. He'll be cooped up in this apartment at least until the police decide to lift their roadblocks, and even then it would be wise to stay a few days longer just to be sure. But in terms of his story, he's free to write whatever the fuck he wants. And
how
he wants. With no one looking over his shoulder, monitoring what he writes, he no longer has to pretend to be a dumb person writing about a dumb person. He can be a smart person writing about a young man (for that's what Benjy will be if Billy picks up the narrative again) who is poorly educated and naïve, but far from stupid.

I can let go of the Faulkner shit, Billy thinks. I can write
he and I
instead of
me and him
. I can write
can't
instead of
cant
. I can even use quotation marks for dialogue if I want to.

If he's writing strictly for himself, he can tell what's important to him and skip what isn't. He doesn't have to write about the jarhead haircut, even though he could. He doesn't have to write about Uppington screaming in his face, although he might. He doesn't have to write about the boy—Haggerty or Haverty, Billy can't remember which—who had a heart attack running and was taken away to the base infirmary, and Sergeant Uppington said he was fine and maybe he was and maybe he died.

Billy discovers that despair has given way to a kind of bullheaded eagerness. Maybe it's even arrogance. And so what if it is? He can tell whatever he wants. And will.

He begins by hitting global replace and changing Benjy to Billy and Compson to Summers.

I started my basic training at Parris Island. I was supposed to be there for three months but was only there for eight weeks. There was the usual shouting and bullshit and some of the boots quit or
washed out but I wasn't one of them. The quitters and washouts might have had someplace to go back to, but I did not.

The sixth week was Grass Week, when we learned how to break down our weapons and put them back together. I liked that and was good at it. When Sergeant Uppington had us do what he called “an arms race,” I always came in first. Rudy Bell, of course everybody called him Taco, was usually second. He never beat me, but sometimes he came close. George Dinnerstein was usually last and had to hit it and give Sergeant “Up Yours” Uppington twenty-five, with Up's foot on George's ass the whole time. But George could shoot. Not as good as I could, but yes, he could put three out of every four in the center mass of a paper target at three hundred yards. Me, I could put four out of four center mass at seven hundred yards, almost every time.

There was no shooting during Grass Week, though. That week we just took our guns apart and put them back together again, chanting the Rifleman's Creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.” And so on. The part I remember best is the part that says “Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.”

The other thing we did during Grass Week was sit on our asses in the grass. Sometimes for six hours at a stretch.

Billy stops there, smiling a little and remembering Pete “Donk” Cashman. Donk fell asleep sitting in the tall South Carolina grass and Up Yours got down on his knees and screamed in his face to wake him up.
Is this boring you, Marine?

Donk bolted to his feet so hard and fast he almost fell over, yelling
Sir no sir!
even before he was fully awake. He was George Dinnerstein's buddy and picked up the nickname Donk because he had a habit of grabbing his crotch and yelling
Honk my donk
. He never told Up to honk it, though.

The memories are piling in as Billy suspected they would—knew, really—but Grass Week isn't what he wants to write about.
He doesn't want to write about Donk right now either, although he might later. He wants to write about Week 7, and all that happened after that.

Billy bends to it. The hours pass, unseen and unfelt. There's magic in this room. He breathes it in and breathes it out.

After Grass Week came Firing Week. We used the M40A, which is the military version of the Remington 700. Five-shot box, tripod mounted, NATO bottleneck rounds.

“You must see your target but your target must not see you.” Up told us that over and over. “And no matter what you've seen in the movies,
snipers do not work alone
.”

Even though it wasn't Sniper School, Uppington put us in teams of two, spotter and shooter. I teamed with Taco and George teamed with Donk. I mention them because we ended up together in Fallujah, both Vigilant Resolve in April of '04 and Phantom Fury that November. Me and Taco

Billy stops, shaking his head, reminding himself the
dumb self
is in the past. He deletes and starts again.

Taco and I switched back and forth during Firing Week, me shooting and him spotting, then him shooting and me spotting. George and Donk started that way, too, but Up told them to quit it. “You shoot, Dinner Winner. Cash, you just spot.”