Billy Summers

by Stephen King

  He opens the men’s room door. The hall is empty. The lawyers and accountants (Phil among them) are still gawking at the confusion below. Soon they will decide to exit the building, and at least some of them will take the stairs because they are too many for the elevator, but not yet.

  Billy leaves the bathroom and starts down the stairs. He can hear commotion below him, plenty of it, but the flight between four and three is empty. The people on those floors are still gawking out the windows. Not on the second floor, though, that’s all Business Solutions, and even without the translucent shades they wouldn’t have the panoramic view offered by the street-facing windows higher up. He can hear them clumping down the stairs, babbling as they go. Colin White will be among them, but no one should notice he now has a doppelgänger, because Billy will be behind them and nobody is going to be looking back. Not this morning.

  Billy pauses just above the second-floor landing. He stands there until the thundering herd has dried up, then continues down to the first floor, behind a man in khaki cargo shorts and a woman in unfortunate plaid slacks. For a moment he’s forced to stop, probably because there’s a jam-up in the door giving on the first-floor lobby. This makes him nervous, because folks from the upper floors will soon be coming down these stairs. Some of them will be people from five.

  Then the crowd gets moving again, and five seconds later—while Jim, John, Harry, and Phil are still looking out from high above, Billy hopes—he’s in the lobby. Irv Dean has abandoned his post. Billy can see him on the plaza, easy to pick out in his blue security vest. Colin White in his bright orange shirt is also easy to pick out. He’s got his phone raised, taking video of the confusion: cops running up the street toward the smoke billowing from between the Sunspot Café and the travel agency next door, cops and bailiffs shouting for people to go back into the courthouse and shelter in place, people running down from more smoke on the corner, yelling their heads off.

  Colin isn’t the only one taking video. Others, apparently feeling that a raised iPhone makes them invulnerable, are doing the same. But they are the minority, Billy sees as he steps outside. Most people just want to get away. He hears someone yell Active shooter! Someone else is shouting They bombed the courthouse! Another bawls Armed men!

  Billy cuts across the plaza to the right, onto Court Street Place. This short tree-lined diagonal will take him to Second Street, which runs behind the parking garage. He’s not alone, over three dozen people are ahead of him and at least that many behind him, all using this route away from the chaos, but he’s the only one who pays attention to the DPW Transit van parked at the curb. Dana is behind the wheel. Reggie, dressed in the regulation city coverall, is standing by the back door and scanning the crowd. Most of those fleeing Court Street are talking on their phones. Billy wishes he could pretend to do the same, but the Dalton Smith phone is in his jeans, under the parachute pants. A missed opportunity, but you can’t think of everything.

  He knows better than to drop his head because Dana or Reggie might notice that (more likely Dana), but he moves up beside a plump woman who is panting and holding her pocketbook to her breasts like a shield. As they approach the van, Billy turns his head to her and raises his voice in an approximation of Colin White’s when Colin’s doing his I’m-the-gayest-of-them-all shtick. “What happened? Oh my God, what happened?”

  “Some kind of terrorism thing, I think,” the woman replies. “Jesus, there were explosions!”

  “I know!” Billy cries. “Oh my God, I heard!”

  Then they’re past. Billy risks one quick look over his shoulder. He has to make sure they aren’t looking at him. Or coming after him. They’re not. More people than ever are now using Court Street Place to get away; they crowd the sidewalk. Reggie is scoping them hard, standing on his tiptoes, trying to catch sight of Billy. Presumably Dana is, too. Billy speeds up, leaving the plump woman behind, weaving around others. Not quite race-walking, but almost. He turns left on Second Street, left again on Laurel, then right on Yancey. The exodus is behind him now. A young guy on the street grabs Billy by the shoulder, wanting to know what the hell is going on.

  “I don’t know,” Billy says. He shakes free and walks on.

  Behind him, sirens rise in the air.

  7

  His laptop is gone.

  Billy yanks out the packing paper, now splattered with globs of Chinese food from the overflowing dumpster, and uncovers nothing but old cobblestones. His mind sideslips back to Fallujah and the baby shoe. To Taco saying You keep that thing safe, brah. He kept it tied to his belt loop by the laces, bouncing against his hip with the rest of the things he carried. That they all carried.

  He doesn’t need the fucking laptop, he has the flash drive with Benjy’s story on it, Rudy “Taco” Bell and the others still unwritten but waiting in the wings. He can go on once he gets to the basement apartment. There’s nothing on the lappie to connect him to his Dalton Smith life, even if someone, some supergeek out of a movie, could crack the password. The only connection to his Dalton Smith life besides the Jensens is Bucky Hanson, and he has only communicated with Bucky on a phone that no longer exists.

  So let it go. No choice and no loss.

  But it feels like such bad luck. Such a bad omen. Almost like a final summation of a shit job he should have known better than to take.

  He pounds his fist against the side of the dumpster hard enough to hurt and listens to the sirens. Right now he’s not worried about police, they are all headed to the courthouse, where some major clusterfuck is going down, but he has to worry about Reggie and Dana. Once they get tired of waiting, they’ll either conclude Billy’s gotten trapped in Gerard Tower or that he’s crossed them up. They can’t do anything if he’s still in the building, but if he’s decided to abandon the plan and strike out on his own, they can start cruising the streets and looking for him.

  It’s not like the baby shoe, Billy thinks. And hell, the baby shoe wasn’t magic either, just magical thinking. The shit that happened after I lost it means nothing. Fortunes of war, baby, and so is this. Someone found the lappie and stole it, it’s gone, and you have to get under cover before that Transit van shows up, rolling slow.

  He thinks of Dana Edison’s sharp little eyes behind those rimless spectacles. Billy got past those eyes once and doesn’t want to risk giving the man a second chance. He has to get to the basement apartment on Pearson Street, and fast.

  Billy gets to his feet and hurries to the mouth of the alley. He sees a few cars but no Transit van. He starts to turn right, then freezes, amazed and disgusted at his own stupidity. It’s as if the dumb self has become his real self. He was just about to head for Pearson Street still wearing the wig, the Rolling Stones jacket, and the fucking parachute pants. Like wearing a neon sign saying CHECK ME OUT.

  He runs back down the alley, stripping off the wig and jacket as he goes. Behind the dumpster again, he frees the waistband granny knot holding up the idiotic parachute pants, pushes them down, and steps out of them. He squats and bundles everything together. He shoves the bundle as deep as he can under the crumpled heaps of bespattered packing paper… and touches something. It’s hard and thin. Can it be the brim of a gimme cap?

  It is. Did he really push it that far behind the dumpster? He tosses it aside and reaches in deeper, leaning his shoulder against the dumpster’s rusty side, the smell of Chinese food a miasma. His outstretched fingers brush something else. He knows what it is and can’t believe it. He stretches further, his cheek now against the dumpster’s rusty side, and grasps the handle of his laptop case. He pulls it out and looks at it unbelievingly. He could swear he didn’t push it in that far, but it seems he did. He tells himself it’s nothing like thinking he threw away the wrong phone, nothing at all like that, but it is.

  Agreeing to be in this city so long was a mistake. Monopoly was a mistake. Having a backyard barbecue was a mistake. Knocking over those tin birds in the shooting gallery? Mistake. Having time to think and act like a normal person
was the biggest mistake of all. He’s not a normal person. He’s a hired assassin, and if he doesn’t think like who and what he is, he’ll never get clear.

  He uses a relatively clean swatch of the packing paper to wipe off the hat and the laptop case. He slings the strap over his shoulder and pulls on the gimme cap, which was once clean and is now grimy. He goes to the head of the alley and peers out again. A cop car comes squalling around the next corner, lights and siren. Billy pulls back until it passes. Then he heads out, walking briskly toward Pearson Street and the apartment building across from the demolished railway station. He thinks of Fallujah again, the endless sweeps through the narrow streets with the baby shoe bouncing against his hip. Waiting for the patrol to be over. Wanting to go back to the relative safety of the base a mile outside of town, where there would be hot food, touch football, maybe a movie under the desert stars.

  Nine blocks, he tells himself. Nine blocks and you’re home and dry. Nine blocks and this particular patrol is over. No movie under the stars, that was Billy Summers, but Dalton Smith has both YouTube and iTunes on one of his AllTech computers. No violence, no explosions, just people doing zany things. Plus kissing at the end.

  Nine blocks.

  8

  He has done seven of those blocks, and the more modern part of the city is behind him, when he sees a city Transit van roll across an intersection ahead. Billy supposes it could be another DPW Transit, they all look the same, but it’s moving slow, almost coming to a stop in the middle of West Avenue before speeding up again.

  Billy has stepped into a doorway. When the van doesn’t return, he starts walking again, always looking ahead for cover should it return. If they come back and see him, he’s probably going to be dead. The closest thing he has to a weapon are the keys on his keyring. Unless, of course, Nick was playing straight with him all along. In that case he might get no more than a harsh tongue-lashing, but he has no intention of finding out. Either way, he has to keep going if he wants to get to the apartment building.

  He pauses at the intersection, looking in the direction the Transit van went. He sees nothing but a few cars and a UPS truck. Billy trots across the street, head lowered, helpless not to think of Route 10 in Fallujah, also known as IED Alley.

  He turns onto Pearson, jogs one final block, and there’s his building. He has to cross the street to get to it, and he feels an insane itching on his right shoulderblade, as if someone—it would be Dana, of course—is zeroing the sight of a silenced pistol in on it. The near-constant wind that blows across the rubble-strewn vacant lot sends a coupon fold-in sheet from the local newspaper against one of his ankles and Billy gives a little skip of surprise.

  He hurries along the frost-heaved walk of 658, then up the steps. He looks over his shoulder for the Transit van, sure he’ll see it, but the street is deserted. The sirens are all behind him, like the rest of his David Lockridge life. He tries one key and it’s wrong. He tries another and that one is wrong, too. He thinks of the phone he could have lost and the laptop he could have lost, the way he lost the baby shoe.

  Easy, he thinks. Those are your Evergreen Street keys, you never took them off your keyring, so chill out. You’re almost home free.

  The next one opens the foyer door. He steps inside and closes it. He looks out through a ragged mesh of lace curtain, maybe Beverly Jensen’s work. He sees nothing, sees nothing, sees a crow land on some of the jagged rubble across the street, sees the crow take off, sees nothing, sees a kid on a trike with his mother walking patiently beside him, sees another sheet of newspaper go cartwheeling across the patched pavement, has time to think the patched pavement of Pearson Street, and then he sees the Transit van, going slow. Billy holds perfectly still. He can see through the mesh, but Reggie in the passenger seat can’t see in. He might notice a sudden movement behind the lace curtain, though. Billy thinks the other one certainly would.

  The Transit van moves on. Billy waits for its brake lights to flash. They don’t, and then it’s out of sight. He’s not sure he’s safe, but he thinks he is. Hopes. He goes downstairs and lets himself into the apartment. Not home, just a place to hide, but for the time being that’s good enough.

  CHAPTER 11

  1

  The basement apartment’s one window is covered by a length of burgundy cloth. Billy pushes it aside on its rod and sits down, thinking again that the apartment is like a submarine and this window is his periscope. He stays on the couch for fifteen minutes, arms folded across his chest, waiting for the Transit van to come back. It may even stop if Dana, who is no fool, decides the place might be worth checking out. Unlikely, when there are several rundown neighborhoods ringing the central city, but not impossible.

  Billy has become more and more sure if they find him they mean to kill him.

  Billy has no handgun, although it would have been simple enough to get one. There are gun sales in the area almost every day of the week, it seems. Not that he would have set foot in the building where the sale was being held when he could have bought a reliable piece in the parking lot for cash, no questions asked. Something simple, a .32 or .38 that could be easily concealed. It wasn’t forgetfulness in that case, he just hadn’t foreseen a situation where he might need one.

  Although, he thinks, if you changed the plan without telling Nick, you must have foreseen something.

  If they do come back—paranoid, but within the realm of possibility—what could Billy do about it? Not much. There’s a butcher knife in the kitchen. And a meat fork. He could use the meat fork on the first one in, and he knows that would be Reggie. The easy one. Then Dana would do him.

  When fifteen minutes have passed and the bogus DPW truck hasn’t returned, Billy decides they have either moved on to another part of the city, maybe to check out the house on Evergreen Street, or have gone back to the McMansion to await further orders from Nick. He closes the curtain, shutting out the view, and looks at his watch. It’s twenty to eleven. How the time flies when you’re having fun, he thinks.

  Channels 2 and 4 are broadcasting the usual morning drivel, but with crawls about the shooting and the explosions running across the bottom of the screen. The real motherlode is Channel 6, where they have trashed their morning shows to go live at the scene. They’ve got the goods to do that because someone in their news department dispatched a crew to the courthouse to cover Allen’s arraignment, and didn’t send them to Cody when the warehouse fire broke out. It might have been neglect or outright laziness, you didn’t wind up as the head of news in a small border south city like Red Bluff because you were Walter Cronkite, but whoever was in charge is going to look mighty wise in retrospect.

  ONE DEAD, NO REPORTED INJURIES IN COURTHOUSE CATASTROPHE, reads the chyron at the bottom of the screen. The correspondent in the red dress is still doing her thing, although she’s now doing it on the corner of Main Street, because Court Street has been closed off. It looks to Billy like the city’s entire police force is down there, plus two forensics vans, one from the state police.

  “Bill,” the reporter says, presumably speaking to the anchor back in the studio, “I’m sure there’ll be a press conference later, but as of now we have no official word to pass on. We do have eyes on the scene, though, and I want to show you something that George Wilson, my incredibly brave cameraman, spotted just a few minutes ago. George, can you show that again?”

  George raises the camera, centers it on Gerard Tower, then zeroes in on the fifth floor. There’s hardly any shake in the image even at maximum zoom, and Billy can’t help admiring that. Cameraman George stood his ground when the shit hit the fan, kept his head when those all about him were losing theirs, he got footage that will no doubt go national, and thanks to his sharp eyes he’s probably just a step and a half behind the police at this point. He could have been a Marine, Billy thinks. Maybe he was. Just another jarhead bullet-sponge over there in the suck. For all I know, I could have passed him on what we called the Brooklyn Bridge, or hunkered down beside him in the Jola
n graveyard while the wind blew and the shit flew.

  The Channel 6 viewing audience, Billy among them, is treated to the image of a window with a shooter’s loophole cut into it. The sunglare on the glass helps, just as Dana said it would.

  “That is almost certainly where the shot came from,” the reporter says, “and we should know very soon who was using that office. The police may know already.”

  The picture switches to Bill in the studio. He’s looking suitably grave. “Andrea, we want to run your original story again, for people who may have just joined the broadcast. It’s really extraordinary.”

  They go to the video. Billy sees the SUV approaching with its blues alight. The door opens and the portly sheriff gets out. He has big ears, almost Clark Gable size. They seem to be anchoring his ridiculous Stetson. Andrea approaches, holding out the mic. The courthouse cops move in, but the sheriff holds up an imperious hand to stop them so she can ask her question.

  “Sheriff, has Joel Allen confessed to the murder of Mr. Houghton?”

  The sheriff smiles. His accent is as southern as grits and collard greens. “We don’t need a confession, Ms. Braddock. We’ve got all we need to get a conviction. Justice will be done. You can count on that.”

  The reporter in the red dress—Andrea Braddock—steps back. George Wilson centers his camera on the opening door of the SUV. Out comes Joel Allen, like a movie star popping out of his trailer. Andrea Braddock steps forward to ask another question but backs off obediently when the sheriff raises his hands to her.

  You’ll never make the jump to the bigtime like that, Andrea, Billy thinks. You have to push, girl.

  He leans forward. This is the moment, and it’s fascinating to see it from another angle, a different perspective. He hears the shot, a liquid whipcrack of sound. He doesn’t see the damage the bullet does, the editor in the Channel 6 video room has blurred it out, but he sees Allen’s body fly forward and hit the steps. The picture joggles and dips as Cameraman George goes into his reflexive crouch, then steadies again. After holding on the body for a moment, the camera pans to the widebody cop who’s looking up to find the source of the shot.