by Stephen King
“You want to look like the twenty-first-century version of a saddle bum,” Bucky said while they were playing kick-the-barrels. “God knows there are plenty of them in the West Nine. They drift around, find a little work, then move on.”
Alice asked him what the West Nine were, and Bucky named them off: Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Oregon, and—of course—Nevada. Billy thinks the truck is okay. It might be a needless precaution on their road trip, anyway; Bucky’s right, any bounty hunters will be concentrated in the Vegas metro area. Later, though, when it comes to Promontory Point, the way the truck looks could be vital.
“This has been a good visit,” Bucky says. He’s wearing biballs and an Old 97s T-shirt. “I’m glad you came.”
Alice gives him a hug. Her new blond hair looks good in the morning sun.
“Billy?” Bucky holds out his hand. “You be safe now.”
Billy almost hugs him, that’s the way things are done these days, but he doesn’t. He’s never been much for bro-hugs, even in the sand.
“Thanks, Bucky.” He takes Bucky’s hand in both of his and squeezes lightly, mindful of Bucky’s arthritis. “For everything.”
“Welcome.”
They get in. Billy fires up the engine. It’s rough at first but smooths out. Bucky has agreed to find someone to drive the Fusion back to its home base, thus protecting the Dalton Smith name. Something else on my tab, Billy thinks.
He gets the old truck’s nose pointed down the road. Just as he puts it in first gear, Bucky makes a whoa, whoa gesture and comes over to the passenger side. Alice rolls down her window.
“I want to see you back here,” he tells her. “In the meantime, stay out of his business and stay clean, you hear?”
“Yes,” she says, but Billy thinks she may only be telling Bucky what Bucky wants to hear. Which is okay, Billy thinks. She’ll listen to me. I hope.
He gives a final blip of the horn and gets rolling. An hour and a half later they turn west on I-70 toward Las Vegas.
2
They stop for the night in Beaver, Utah. It’s another motel of the no-tell variety, but not too bad. They get chicken baskets at the Crazy Cow and a couple of cans of Bud at Ray’s 66 on the way back. Later they sit outside their adjoining rooms, draw the obligatory lawn chairs close, and drink the cold beer.
“I read the rest of your story while we were driving,” Alice says. “It’s really good. I can’t wait to read more.”
Billy frowns. “I hadn’t planned on going on after Fallujah.”
“Lalafallujah,” she says, and smiles. Then: “But aren’t you going to write about how you got into the business of killing people for money?”
That makes him wince because it’s so bald. And of course so true. She sees it.
“Bad people, I mean. And how you met Bucky, I’d like to know that.”
Yes, Billy thinks, I could write about that, and maybe I should. Because dig, if that muj hiding behind the door had shot Johnny Capps to death instead of just blowing his legs apart, Billy Summers wouldn’t be here now. Neither would Alice. It comes to him as sort of a revelation—although maybe it shouldn’t—that if Johnny Capps hadn’t lived, Alice Maxwell might well have died of shock and exposure on Pearson Street.
“Maybe I will write it. If I get a chance. Tell me about you, Alice.”
She laughs, but it’s not the free and easy one he’s come to like so much. This one’s a warding-off laugh. “There isn’t much to tell. I’ve always been a fade-into-the-woodwork person. Being with you is the only interesting thing that’s ever happened to me. Other than getting gang raped, I guess.” She utters a sad little snort.
But he’s not going to let it go at that. “You grew up in Kingston. Your mother raised you and your sister. What else? There must be more.”
Alice points to the darkening sky. “I’ve never seen so many stars in my life. Not even at Bucky’s place.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
She shrugs. “Okay, just prepare to be bored. My father owned a furniture store and my mother was his bookkeeper. He died of a heart attack when I was eight and Gerry—she’s my sister—was nineteen and going to beauty school.” Alice touches her hair. “She’d say I did this all wrong.”
“Probably she would, but it looks fine. Go on.”
“I was a B student in high school. Had a few dates but no boyfriend. There were popular kids, but I wasn’t one of them. There were unpopular kids—you know, the ones who always get pranked and laughed at—but I wasn’t one of them, either. Mostly I did what my mom and my sister said.”
“Except about going to beauty school.”
“I almost said yes to that too, because I sure wasn’t going to a smart-peoples’ college. I didn’t take many of the courses you need for that.” She thinks about it. Billy lets her. “Then one night I was lying in bed, almost asleep, and I all at once came full awake. Snapped awake. Almost fell out of bed. Did that ever happen to you?”
Billy thinks about Iraq and says, “Many times.”
“I thought, ‘If I do that, if I do what they want, it will never end. I’ll be doing what they want for the rest of my life and one day I’ll wake up old right here in little old Kingston.’ ” She turns to him. “And do you know what my mom and Gerry would say if they knew what happened to me in Tripp’s apartment, and what I’m doing now, being here with you? They’d say ‘See what it got you.’ ”
Billy puts out a hand to touch her shoulder. She turns to him before he can and he sees the woman she might be, if time and fate are kind.
“And do you know what I’d say? I’d say I don’t care, because this is my time, I deserve to have my time, and this is what I want.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, Alice. That’s fine.”
“Yes. It is. You bet it is. As long as you don’t get killed.”
That’s something he can’t promise, so he says nothing. They look at the stars awhile longer and drink their beer and she says nothing until she tells him she thinks she’ll go to bed.
3
Billy doesn’t go to bed. He has a pair of texts from Bucky. The first says the landscaping company that does the work at Promontory Point is called Greens & Gardens. The man who runs the crew might be Kelton Freeman or Hector Martinez, but it might be someone else entirely. It’s a high-turnover business.
The following text says that Nick often stays at the Double during the week but always tries to get back to his estate in Paiute for the weekend. Especially for Sundays. Never misses the Giants during football season, Bucky adds. Everybody who knows him knows that.
You can take the boy out of New York, Billy thinks, but you can’t take New York out of the boy. He texts back, Any luck with the garage?
Bucky’s response is quick: No.
Billy has brought the pictures, both Google Earth and Zillow. He studies them for awhile. Then he opens his laptop and looks up a handful of Spanish phrases. He won’t have to say them when and if the time comes but he says them now, over and over, committing them to memory. He almost certainly won’t need all of them. He might need none of them. But it’s always best to be ready.
Me llamo Pablo Lopez.
Esta es mi hija.
Estos son para el jardín.
Mi es sordo y mudo: I am a deafmute.
4
They go back to the Crazy Cow for breakfast, then get on the road. Billy wouldn’t want to push the old truck, and he doesn’t have to. It’s only a couple of hundred miles to Vegas, and he won’t move against Nick until Sunday, when the pros play football and the compound at the end of Cherokee Drive is apt to be at its most quiet. No groundskeepers or landscapers and hopefully no hardballs. He checked the schedule and the Giants play the Cardinals at four PM eastern, which will be one PM in Nevada.
To pass the time, he tells Alice how he got into the business from which he now considers himself retired. Johnny Capps was the first link in the chain that ends—so far, there’s
at least one more link still to be forged—on Interstate 70 heading west.
“He’s the one who got shot in the legs in that house. The one they left alive to try and lure the rest of you in.”
“Yes. Clay Briggs—Pillroller—got him stabilized and he was airlifted out. Johnny spent a long time in a shitty VA hospital and got hooked on dope while they were trying to rehab what couldn’t be rehabbed. Eventually Uncle Sam sent him back to Queens in his wheelchair, hooked through the bag.”
“That’s so sad.”
Well, Billy tells her, at least the dope addict part of Johnny’s story had a happy ending. His cousin Joey reached out to him, a guy who’d kept the Italian family name of Cappizano, although he was of course called Joey Capps. With permission from one of the larger New York organizations—and of course the Sinaloa Cartel, who controlled the dope business—Joey Capps ran his own little organization, one so modest it was really more of a posse. Joey offered his wounded warrior cousin a job as an accountant, but only if he could get clean.
“And he did?”
“Yes. I got the whole story from him when we reconnected. He went into a rehab—his cousin paid—and then went to NA meetings three and four times a week until he died a few years ago. Lung cancer got him.”
Alice is frowning. “He went to NA meetings to get off dope, but his day job was pushing dope?”
“Not pushing it, counting and washing the money from the trade. But yeah, it comes to the same thing, and once I pointed that out to him. You know what he said? That there are recovered alcoholics tending bar all over the world. He sponsored people, he said, and some of them got clean and resumed their lives. That’s how he put it, they resumed their lives.”
“God, talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.”
Billy tells her that he almost signed up for another tour in the suck, decided he’d be crazy to do it—suicidal-crazy—and took off the uniform. Kicked around, trying to decide what came next for a guy whose job for a lot of years had been shooting other guys in the T-box. That was when Johnny got in touch.
There was a Jersey guy, he said, who liked to pick up women in bars and then beat them up. He probably had some kind of childhood trauma he was trying to work out, Johnny said, but fuck a bunch of childhood trauma, this was a very bad guy. He put the last woman in a coma, and this woman happened to be a Cappizano. Only a second cousin or maybe a third, but still a Cappizano. The only problem was this guy, this beater of women, was part of a larger and more powerful organization headquartered across the river in Hoboken.
Joey took Johnny Capps along for a sit-down with the head of this organization, and it turned out the New Jersey guys didn’t have much use for this shitpoke, either. He was trouble, a nasty stronzo madre with rings on the fingers of both hands, the better to beat the living crap out of women instead of taking them home to fuck them as any natural man would want to do, or even fottimi nel culo, which some men liked and even some women. But no woman likes getting her face beat off.
The upshot was that the capo couldn’t give Joey Capps permission to off the stronzo madre, because there would have to be retribution. But if an outsider did it, and if both outfits—the Hoboken organization and the much smaller Queens crew—paid for it, the thorn could be pulled. Call it mob diplomacy.
“So Johnny Capps called you.”
“He did.”
“Because you were the best?”
“The best he knew, anyway. And he knew my history.”
“The man who killed your little sister.”
“That, yes. I looked into the guy before I agreed to take the job, got a little of his history. Even went to see the woman he put into a coma. She was on life-support machinery, and you could tell she was never coming back. The monitor…” Billy draws a straight line above the steering wheel. “So I did him. It really wasn’t much different from what I did in Iraq.”
“Did you like it?”
“No.” Billy says it with no hesitation. “Not in the sand and not back here. Never.”
“Johnny’s cousin got you other jobs?”
“Two more, and there was one I turned down because the guy… I don’t know…”
“Didn’t seem bad enough?”
“Something like that. Then Joey introduced me to Bucky, and Bucky introduced me to Nick, and that’s where we are.”
“I’m guessing there’s quite a lot more to it.”
She’s guessing right, but Billy doesn’t want to say any more, let alone go into the details of the jobs he did for Nick and for others. He has never said any of this, not to anyone, and he’s appalled to hear that part of his life told out loud. It’s sordid and stupid. Alice Maxwell, business school student and rape survivor, is sitting in an old truck with a man who killed people for a living. It was his fucking job. And is he going to kill Nick Majarian? If he gets the chance, very likely. So, a question: is killing for honor better than killing for money? Probably not, but that won’t stop him.
Alice is silent for a bit, thinking it over. Then she says, “You told me that because you think you might never get a chance to write it down. Isn’t that right?”
It is, but he doesn’t want to say so out loud.
“Billy?”
“I told you because you wanted to know,” he says finally, and turns on the radio.
5
They register at another off-brand motel. There are a lot of them in a rough ring around the outskirts of Vegas. While Billy registers them as Dalton Smith and Elizabeth Anderson, Alice plugs four dollars in one of the lobby slots. On the fifth, ten fake cartwheels drop into the trough with a clatter and she squeals like a kid. The desk clerk offers her a choice: ten bucks or motel credit in that amount.
“How’s the restaurant here?” Alice asks.
“Buffet’s pretty good.” Then he lowers his voice and says, “Take the money, honey.”
Alice takes the money and they get to-go at the Sirloin Super Burger down the road. She insists that it be her treat and Billy doesn’t argue.
Back in Billy’s room, she sits at the window and watches the endless traffic streaming toward downtown, and the lights of the hotels and casinos coming on. “Sin City,” she marvels, “and here I am in a motel room with a goodlooking guy who happens to be twice my age. My mother would just shit.”
Billy throws back his head and laughs. “And your sister?”
“Wouldn’t believe it.” She points. “Are those the Paiute Mountains?”
“If that’s north, those are them. I think they’re actually called foothills. If it matters.”
She turns to him, no longer smiling. “Tell me what you’re going to do.”
He does, and not just because he needs her help with the prep. She listens carefully. “It sounds awfully dangerous.”
“If it looks hinky, I’ll back off and reconsider.”
“Will you know if it’s hinky? The way your friend Taco knew outside that house in Fallujah?”
“You remember that, huh?”
“Will you?”
“I think so, yes.”
“But you’ll probably go in anyway. The way you went into the Funhouse and look what happened there.”
Billy says nothing. There’s nothing to say.
“I wish I could go with you.”
He says nothing to that, either. Even if the idea didn’t fill him with horror, the plan wouldn’t work if she were with him and she knows it.
“How badly do you need that money?”
“I could get along without it, and most of it’s going to Bucky anyway. The money’s not the reason I’m going. Nick treated me badly. He needs to pay a price, just like the boys who raped you needed to pay a price.”
It’s Alice’s turn to be silent.
“There’s something else. I don’t think it was Nick’s idea to kill me after the job was done, and I know it wasn’t his idea to put a six-million-dollar price on my head. I want to know who that person is.”
“And why?”
“Yes. That too.”
6
The first thing Billy does the next morning is to check the back of the old Dodge truck, because the tools were only tied down, not locked down. Everything is present and accounted for. He’s not surprised, partly because everything in the truckbed and trailer is old and pretty clapped-out, but also because his experience over the years has taught him that the great majority of people are honest. They don’t take what isn’t theirs. People who do—people like Tripp Donovan, Nick Majarian, and whoever is behind Nick—piss him off mightily.
He almost texts Bucky to ask if Bucky can find out what car Nick is currently driving—it would probably be in the VIP area of the Double Domino’s parking garage, undoubtedly something fancy with a vanity plate—then doesn’t do it. Bucky probably could find out, and it might raise a red flag. That’s the last thing Billy wants. He hopes that by now Nick has started to relax.
Once the stores are open, he and Alice go to the nearest Ulta Beauty. This time he’s the one who needs makeup, but he lets Alice do the buying. After that she wants to go to a casino. It’s a bad idea, but she looks so excited and hopeful that he can’t say no. “But not the big hotels and not the Strip,” he says.
Alice consults her phone and directs them to Big Tommy’s Hotel and Gambling Hall in East Las Vegas. She’s carded before she’s allowed in and flashes her new Elizabeth Anderson DL with aplomb. As she wanders around, gawking at the roulette, craps, blackjack, and the ever-spinning Money Wheel, Billy checks around him for guys with a certain look. He doesn’t see any. Most of them out here in the boonies are moms and pops that could stand to lose a few.
He reflects again that Alice is a different girl from the one he brought in out of the pouring rain. On the way to being a better girl, and if what he’s planning goes wrong and she’s damaged more than she has been already, that’s on him. He thinks, I should just quit this shit and take her back to Colorado. Then he remembers Nick pitching him on the so-called “safe house,” all the time knowing the ride to Wisconsin was going to last about six miles until Dana Edison put a bullet in his head. Nick needs to pay. And he needs to meet the real Billy Summers.
