Billy Summers

by Stephen King

  So she does.

  2

  They drive back to Riverhead, stopping on the way for Band-Aids, a roll of gauze, tape, hydrogen peroxide, and Betadine ointment. Alice goes into the Walgreens while Billy waits in the car. At the hotel they enter by the side door. Once they’re in his room, she helps him off with the bomber jacket. There’s a hole in it, and another in his shirt. Not a rip but a hole, and not in the side, as he told her. Farther in.

  “Oh my God,” Alice says. Her voice is muffled because her hand is over her mouth. “That’s not a graze, that’s your stomach.”

  “I guess it is. Or maybe a little lower?” He sounds bemused.

  “In the bathroom,” Alice says. “If you don’t want to leave a lot of blood around.”

  But once they’re in there and she helps him get his shirt off, she sees there is almost no blood coming from the red-black hole. She’s able to cover it with one of the Band-Aids after she’s used the hydrogen peroxide and a little Betadine.

  She has to help him back to the bed. He’s walking slowly and listing to the right. His face is sheened with sweat. “Marge,” he says. “Fucking Marge.”

  He sits down but gasps when his body bends. Alice asks him how bad it hurts.

  “Not too bad.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “No,” he says. “Well, a little.”

  She touches his stomach to the right of the hole and he gasps again. “Don’t.”

  “We have to get you to a hos…” She stops. “We can’t, can we? It’s a gunshot wound and they have to report those.”

  “You’re turning outlaw on me,” he says, and grins. “You really are.”

  Alice shakes her head. “I just watch too much television.”

  “I’ll be okay. I saw worse in Iraq and guys were back clearing blocks the next day.”

  Alice shakes her head. “You’re bleeding inside. Aren’t you? And the bullet’s still in there.”

  Billy doesn’t reply. She stares at the Band-Aid. It looks stupid. Like something you’d put on a scrape.

  “Try to lie still tonight. On your back. Do you want Tylenol? I’ve got some in my purse.”

  “If Tylenol’s what you’ve got, I’ll take it.”

  She gives him two and helps him to sit up so he can take them with water. He coughs, cupping his hand over his mouth. She grabs the hand and looks at it. There’s no blood in the palm. Maybe that’s good. Maybe it isn’t. She doesn’t know.

  “Thank you.”

  “No thanks needed. I’d do anything for you, Billy.”

  He presses his lips together. “We need to get out of here in the morning. Early.”

  “Billy, we can’t—”

  “What we can’t do is stay here.”

  “I’ll call Bucky. He’s got connections. One of them might be a doctor in New York who can treat a gunshot wound.”

  Billy shakes his head. “That could happen in a TV show. Not in real life. Bucky’s not that kind of fixer. But if we make it back to Sidewinder, to gun country, he’ll be able to find somebody.”

  “That’s almost two thousand miles! I googled it!”

  Billy nods. “You’ll have to do some of the driving, maybe even most of it, and we need to make it as fast as we can. If there’s a snowstorm, God help us.”

  “Two thousand miles!” It feels like a weight on her shoulders.

  “There might be a way to speed the plow.”

  “Speed the—”

  “It’s the name of a play. Never mind.” Grimacing, he reaches into his back pocket, brings out his wallet, and hands it to her. “Find my ATM card. There’s a machine on the mezzanine level. My passcode in 1055. Can you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “The machine will let you take four hundred dollars. Tomorrow morning, before we leave, you can get another four hundred.”

  “Why so much?”

  “Never mind now. What I’m thinking of may not work anyway, but let’s be optimists. Find the card.”

  She thumbs through his wallet and finds it. The embossed name is Dalton Curtis Smith. She holds it up, eyebrows raised.

  “Go, girl.”

  The girl goes. The mezzanine level is deserted. Muzak plays softly. Alice puts in the plastic and punches the code. She half expects the machine to eat the card, maybe even start sounding an alarm, but it pops back out and the money does, too. All twenties, fresh and uncreased. She folds them and puts the wad in her purse. When she comes back to Billy’s room, he’s lying down.

  “How is it?” she asks.

  “Not terrible. I was able to go to the bathroom and take a leak. No blood. Maybe the bullet being in there is good. It might be stopping up the bleeding.”

  This sounds unlikely to Alice, like her grandmother saying a little cigarette smoke blown into an aching ear would quiet the pain, but she doesn’t say so. She roots in her purse instead and comes out with her bottle of Tylenol. “How about another one of these?”

  “God, yes.”

  She gets him a glass of water in the bathroom and when she comes back he’s sitting up with his hand pressed to his side. He takes the pill and lies down again, wincing.

  “I’m going to stay with you. Don’t even think about arguing with me.”

  He doesn’t. “I’d like to be out of here by six. Seven at the latest. So get some sleep.”

  3

  “And did you?” Bucky asks. “Get some sleep?”

  “A little. Not much. I doubt if he got any. I didn’t know how bad it was, how deep the bullet went in.”

  “I’m guessing it perforated his intestines. Maybe his stomach.”

  “Could you have found him a doctor? If I’d called you?”

  Bucky thinks it over. “No, but I could have reached out to someone who might have been able to reach out to someone else on short notice. Someone of a medical persuasion.”

  “Would Billy have known that?”

  Bucky shrugs. “He knows I have a lot of connections in different fields.”

  “Then why wouldn’t he at least have let me try it?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to,” Bucky says. “Maybe, Alice, he just wanted to get you here and be done.”

  4

  They leave the hotel at six-thirty. Billy is able to walk to the car unassisted. He says that with a couple more of Alice’s Tylenol onboard, the pain is pretty manageable. Alice wants to believe it and can’t. He’s walking with a limp, hand pressed to his left side. He gets into the passenger seat with the slow, almost glassy care of an old man with arthritic hips. She starts the engine and gets the heater going against the morning chill, then hurries back inside to get another four hundred dollars from the ATM. She snags a trolley for their luggage and trundles it out to the car.

  “Let’s roll,” he says, trying to buckle his seatbelt. “Fuck, I can’t get this.”

  She does it for him, and then they roll.

  It’s Route 27 to the Long Island Expressway and the LIE to I-95. The traffic gets progressively heavier on the Expressway, and Alice drives sitting bolt upright, hands clutching the wheel at ten and two, nervous about the river of cars passing on both her left and right. She’s only had a driver’s license for slightly over three years and she’s never driven in traffic like this. In her mind she sees half a dozen accidents waiting to happen because of her inexperience. In the worst, they are killed instantly in a four-car pile-up. In the second-worst, they survive but the responding police discover that her companion has a bullet in his gut.

  “Take the next exit,” Billy says. “We’ll switch. I’m going to drive us through the metro area, then across New Jersey. Once we’re in PA, you can take over. You’ll be fine.”

  “Can you?”

  “Absolutely.” The strained grin she doesn’t like appears. His face is damp again, sweat running in little rivulets, and his cheeks are flushed. Can he have a fever-induced infection already? Alice doesn’t know, but she knows Tylenol won’t stop it if he does. “If we’re lucky,
I may even be able to do it in relative comfort.”

  Alice changes lanes to line up with the exit. Someone honks and she jumps. Her heart skips in her chest. The traffic is insane.

  “That was their bad,” Billy says. “Tailgating son of a bitch. Probably a Yankee fan. There—see that sign? That’s what we want.”

  The sign shows a hand-waving truck driver jumping back and forth over a sixteen-wheeler outlined in pink neon. Below it, also in pink neon: HAPPY JACK’S TRUCK STOP.

  “Saw it on our way out. On a better day, before Marge perforated me.”

  “We have almost a full tank of gas, Billy.”

  “Gas isn’t what we want. Pull around back. And put this in your purse.” From under the seat he takes Marge’s Smith & Wesson ACP.

  “I don’t want it.” This is absolutely true. She never wants to touch another gun in her life.

  “I get that but take it anyway. It’s not loaded. The chances that you even have to show it are about one in a hundred.”

  She takes it, drops it in her purse, and drives around to where she sees dozens of ranked long-haul trucks, most of them grumbling quietly.

  “No lot lizards. They must be sleeping in.”

  “What are lot lizards? Whores? Truck-stop whores?”

  “Yes.”

  “Charming.”

  “You need to stroll around those trucks, kind of like you were shopping back at those malls where you bought your clothes. Because shopping is what you’re doing.”

  “Won’t they think I’m a lizard?”

  This time it’s not the grin but the smile she’s come to love. He scans her blue jeans, her parka, and most of all her face, which is innocent of makeup. “Not a chance. I want you to hunt for a truck with the visor turned down. There’ll be something green on it, like a piece of paper or celluloid. Or maybe some ribbon on the doorhandle. If the trucker is in the cab, you step up and knock on his window. With me?”

  “Yes.”

  “If the driver doesn’t just wave you off, if he rolls down his window, you say that you’re on a long trip, like coast to coast long, and your boyfriend is having back spasms. Tell him you’re doing most of the driving and you were hoping to find some pain med stronger than aspirin or Tylenol for him and some stimulants stronger than coffee or Monster Energy for you. Got it?”

  Now she understands the two visits to the ATM.

  “I’m hoping for OxyContin but Percs or Vikes would be okay. If it’s Oxy, tell him you’ll pay ten for tens or eighty for eighties.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ten bucks for ten milligram tablets, eighty for eighty milligrams—the greenies. If he tries to jack you up to double that…” Billy shifts in his seat and grimaces. “Tell him to take a hike. Speed for you. Adderall is good, Provigil maybe even better. Got it?”

  Alice nods. “I need to go inside and pee first. I’m pretty nervous.”

  Billy nods and closes his eyes. “Lock up, right? I’m in no shape to fight off a carjacker.”

  She pees, picks up some snacks and drinks in the store, then goes out and starts walking around the trucks out back. Someone wolf-whistles after her. She ignores it. She’s looking for a turned-down visor with something green on it, or a ribbon blowing from a doorhandle. What she finds, just as she’s about to give up, is a rumbling Peterbilt with a green Jesus stuck to the dashboard. She’s scared, thinks the man behind the wheel will probably either laugh at her or give her a you’re crazy look, but Billy is in pain and she’ll do anything for him.

  She steps up and knocks. The window rolls down. It’s a Scandahoovian-looking dude with straw-blond hair and a big old jelly-belly. His eyes are ice blue. He looks at her with no expression. “If you’re looking for help, honey, call Triple-A.”

  She tells him about the back spasms and the long drive and says she can pay if it’s not too much.

  “How do I know you’re not a cop?”

  The question is so unexpected she laughs, and that’s the convincer. They dicker. She ends up parting with five hundred of the eight hundred dollars for ten ten-milligram Oxys, one eighty (what Billy called a greenie), and a dozen orange Adderall tabs. She’s pretty sure he jacked her up most righteously, but Alice doesn’t care. She runs back to the Mitsubishi with a smile. Part of it is relief. Part of it is a sense of accomplishment: her first drug deal. Maybe she really is turning outlaw.

  Billy’s dozing with his head back and his chin pointing at the windshield. His face has thinned out. Some of the stubble on his cheeks is gray. He opens his eyes when she knocks on the window and leans over to unlock the doors, wincing as he does it. He has to push on the steering wheel to get straight in his seat again and she thinks he won’t be able to drive them two miles, let alone across New York and New Jersey in heavy traffic.

  “Did you score?” he asks as she slides in behind the wheel.

  She opens the handkerchief into which she folded the pills. He looks and says it’s good, she did well. It makes her happy.

  “Did you have to show the gun?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Didn’t think you would.” He takes the greenie. “I’ll save the rest for later.”

  “Won’t that knock you out?”

  “No. People who use it to get high get sleepy. I’m not using it for that.”

  “Will you actually be able to drive? Because I can try—”

  “Give me ten minutes, then we’ll see.”

  It’s fifteen. Then he opens the passenger door and says, “Switch places with me.”

  He walks around the car without limping too much and gets behind the wheel without wincing at all. “Johnny Capps was right, the stuff is magic. Of course that’s what makes it so dangerous.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Good to go,” Billy says. “For awhile, anyway.”

  He swings out of the back lot where the big trucks sleep and merges smoothly onto the LIE, slotting neatly behind a pickup hauling a boat trailer and ahead of a dump truck. Alice thinks she would have hesitated for minutes with exit traffic backing up behind her, honking like crazy, and when she finally pulled out she would have gotten slammed from behind. Soon they’re up to sixty-five, Billy moving in and out of slower traffic with no hesitation. She waits for the drug to start messing with his timing. It doesn’t happen.

  “Get some news on the radio,” he says. “Try 1010 WINS on the AM.”

  She finds WINS. There’s a story about a pipeline leak in North Dakota, a plane crash in Texas, and a school shooting in Santa Clara. There’s nothing about the murder of a media mogul at his estate on Montauk Point.

  “That’s good,” Billy says. “We need all the running room we can get.”

  Outlaws for sure, she thinks.

  By the time the New York skyline is on the horizon, he’s sweating again, but his driving remains firm and confident. They take the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey. With Alice calling out directions from her GPS, Billy gets to I-80. He doesn’t make it all the way to the Pennsylvania state line but pulls off at a tiny rest area in Netcong Borough.

  “All I can do,” he says. “Your turn. Take an Adderall now, and probably another two around four o’clock, when you start to fade. Then keep driving as long as you can. Try to make it until ten o’clock. By then we’ll have put almost eight hundred miles behind us.”

  Alice looks at the orange pill. “What’s it going to do to me?”

  Billy smiles. “You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

  She swallows the pill. Billy slides slowly from behind the wheel, makes it halfway around the hood of the Mitsubishi, then staggers and has to hold on. Alice gets out in a hurry and steadies him.

  “How bad?”

  “Not bad,” he says, but her eyes are on him and he says, “Actually pretty bad. I’m going to get in back and stretch out as much as I can. Give me two of those ten-milligram Oxys. Maybe I can sleep.”

  She supports him to the back door as best she can and helps him in. She wants to p
ull up his shirt and look at the area around the Band-Aid, but he won’t let her and she doesn’t press him, partly because she knows he wants her to get going and partly because she knows she wouldn’t like what she’d see.

  The pill is working. At first she thinks it’s her imagination, but the way her heartbeat is ramping up isn’t imagination, and neither is the way her vision seems to be clarifying. There’s grass around the rest area’s little brick comfort station and she can see the shadow thrown by each blade. A fluttering potato chip bag looks, there’s no other word for it, delicious. She discovers that she wants to drive now, wants to watch as the Mitsubishi swallows up the miles.

  Billy either reads her mind or knows from experience how the Adderall is hitting a girl who’s never taken a stimulant stronger than her morning coffee. “Sixty-five,” he says. “Seventy if you have to pass a semi. We don’t want any flashing blue lights, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s roll.”

  5

  “We rolled, all right,” Alice says. “My mouth got dry and I finished both my Diet Coke and his Sprite, but I didn’t have to pee for the longest time. It was like I left my bladder at Happy Jack’s Truck Stop.”

  “Speed does that,” Bucky says. “You probably didn’t want to eat, either.”

  “I didn’t, but knew I had to. I stopped around three o’clock for sandwiches. Billy stayed in back. He was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him.”

  Bucky doubts very much if Billy was sleeping, not with internal bleeding and a spreading infection, but he keeps quiet on that score.

  “I took two more of the pills and kept driving. We stopped for the night at a no-tell motel—our specialty—outside Gary, Indiana. Billy was awake by then, but he made me check in. I had to help him to the room. He could barely walk. I told him to take more of the OxyContin and he said he had to save them for tomorrow. I got him on the bed and looked at the wound. He didn’t want me to, but by then he was too weak to stop me.”

  Alice’s voice remains steady through all of this, but she wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater again and again.