‘Giorgio?’ Alice asks.
‘Yes.’
‘What does it say?’
Billy hands her his phone.
GRusso: He wants her. November 4, 8 PM 775 Montauk Highway. Text me thumbs up or down.
‘Are you sure you want to do this? Your call, Alice.’
She finds 
and sends it.
CHAPTER 23
We left Lincoln early and drove east on 1-80. For the first hour or so we didn’t talk much. Alice had my lappie open and was reading everything I’d written in the summerhouse. On the outskirts of Council Bluffs a car blipped past us with a clown and a ballerina looking at us from the back seat. The clown waved. I waved back.
‘Alice!’ I said. ‘Do you know what today is?’
‘Thursday?’ She didn’t look up from the screen. It made me think of Derek Ackerman and his friend Danny Fazio back on Evergreen Street, hypnotized by whatever they were looking at on their phones.
‘Not just any Thursday. It’s Halloween.’
‘Okay.’ Still not looking up.
‘What did you go as? Your favorite, I mean.’
‘Mmm … once I was Princess Leia.’ Still not looking up from what she was reading. ‘My sister took me around the neighborhood.’
‘In Kingston, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Get much swag?’
She finally looked up. ‘Let me read, Billy, I’m almost done.’
So I let her read and we rolled deeper into lowa. No big changes there, just miles of flatland. At last she closed the laptop. I asked her if she’d read it all.
‘Just to where I came into the story. The part where I threw up and almost choked. That was hard to read about, so I stopped. By the way, you forgot to change my name.’
‘I’ll make a note.’
‘The rest I knew.’ She smiles. ‘Remember The Blacklist on Netflix? And how we watered the plants?’
‘Daphne and Walter.’
‘Do you think they lived?’
‘I’m sure they did.’
‘Bullshit. You don’t know if they did or not.’
I admitted that was true.
‘And neither do I. But we can believe they did if we want to, can’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We can.’
‘That’s the advantage of not knowing.’ Alice was staring out the window at miles of cornfields, all brown now and waiting for winter. ‘People can choose to believe any old thing they want. I choose to believe that we’ll get to Montauk Point, and do what we came to do, and get away with it, and live happily ever after.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll choose to believe that, too.’
‘After all, you’ve never been caught yet. All those killings, and you got away with them all.’
‘I’m sorry you had to read about that. But you said I should write down everything.’
She shrugged. ‘They were bad people. They all had that in common. You didn’t shoot any priests or doctors or … or crossing guards.’
That made me laugh and Alice smiled a little, but I could tell she was thinking. I let her do it. The miles rolled by.
‘I’m going back to the mountains,’ she said at last. ‘I might even live with Bucky for awhile. What do you think of that?’
‘I think he’d like it.’
‘Just to get started. Until I can find work and get my own place and start saving up money to go back to school. Because you can start college whenever you want. Sometimes people don’t start college until they’re in their forties or even their sixties, right?’
‘I saw a thing on TV about a man who started when he was seventy-five and got his diploma when he was eighty. My Spidey sense tells me it’s not business school you’re thinking about.’
‘No, regular school. Maybe even the University of Colorado. I could live in Boulder. I liked that town.’
‘Any idea what you’d want to study?’
She hesitated, as if something had occurred to her and she’d changed her mind. ‘History, I think. Or sociology. Maybe even theater arts.’ Then, as if I had objected to the idea: ‘Not for acting, I wouldn’t want to do that, but the other stuff – sets and lighting and all that. There’s so much I’m curious about.’
I said that was good.
‘What about you, Billy? What’s your happily ever after?’
I didn’t have to think about it. ‘Since we’re dreaming, I’d like to write books.’ I tapped the laptop, which she was still holding. ‘Until I wrote that I didn’t know if I could. Now I do.’
‘What about this story? You could fix it up, turn it into fiction …’
I shook my head. ‘No one but you is ever going to see it, and that’s all right. It did its job. It opened the door. And I don’t have to give you an alias.’
Alice was quiet for awhile. Then she said, ‘This is Iowa, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Boring.’
I laughed. ‘I bet the lowans don’t think so.’
‘I bet they do. Especially the kids.’
I couldn’t argue with her there.
‘Tell me something.’
‘I will if I can.’
‘Why would a man in his sixties want to be with a girl as young as Rosalie is supposed to be? I don’t get that. It seems … I don’t know … grotesque.’
‘Insecurity? Or maybe trying to connect with the vitality he’s lost? Reaching back to his own youth and trying to connect with it?’
Alice considered these ideas, but only briefly. ‘Sounds like bullshit to me.’
It did to me too, actually.
‘I mean, think about it. What would Klerke talk about to a sixteen-year-old girl? Politics? World events? His TV stations? And what would she talk about to him? Cheerleading and her Facebook friends?’
‘I don’t think he’s looking for a long-term relationship. The deal was eight thousand for one hour.’
‘So it’s fucking for the sake of fucking. Taking for the sake of taking. That seems so hollow to me. So empty. And that little girl in Mexico …’
She fell silent and watched Iowa roll by. Then she said something, but so low I couldn’t make it out.
‘What?’
‘Monster.’ She was still looking out at the miles of dead corn. ‘I said monster.’
*
We spent Halloween night in South Bend, Indiana, and the first of November in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. As we checked in, my phone binged with a text from Giorgio.
GRusso: Petersen, RK’s assistant, wants a picture of Darren Byrne’s cousin, for identification purposes. Send it to judyb14455@aol.com. She will pass it on at no charge. She’d be happy if RK ran into some bad luck.
Petersen wanting a photo was worrisome but not surprising. He was Klerke’s on-site security as well as his assistant, after all.
Alice told me not to worry. She said she would cut and re-style the black wig I’d worn to Promontory Point. (‘Sometimes it’s good to have a sister who’s a hairdresser,’ she said.) We went to Walmart. Alice found a pair of aviator-style glasses and some cold cream that she said would give me an Irish pallor. Also a small clip-on gold earring, not too ostentatious, for my left ear. Back in the motel she combed the black wig back from my forehead and told me to prop the aviators on it.
‘Like you think you’re a movie star,’ she said. ‘Put on the shirt with the high collar. And remember that as far as Klerke and this guy Petersen know, Billy Summers is dead.’
She took the picture against a neutral background (the brick wall of the Best Western where we were staying) and we examined it together, and closely.
‘Is it good enough?’ Alice asked. ‘I mean, you don’t look like you to me, especially with that snarky grin, but I wish we had Bucky to help us.’
‘I think it is. As you said, it helps that they think I’m buried in the Pauite Foothills.’
‘This is quite a little conspiracy we’ve got going,’ Alice said as we went back inside. ‘Bucky, your make-believe literary agent, and now some big shot Vegas madam.’