He gets to Gerard Tower at twenty past six. This street dead-ending at the courthouse will be a hive full of worker bees later on, but now it’s a graveyard. The only person he sees is a sleepy-eyed woman putting out the breakfast specials signboard in front of the Sunspot Café. Billy wonders if the flashpot is already in place behind it, then dismisses the thought. The flashpots are not his problem, nor is the fire Ken Hoff promised out in Cody. Billy will take the shot no matter what. It’s his job, and with his bridges burning one by one behind him, he means to do it. There’s no other choice.
Irv Dean isn’t at the security stand, and won’t be until seven, maybe seven-thirty, but one of the building’s two janitors is buffing the lobby floor. He looks up as Billy goes to the card reader to record his entry, just like a good boy should.
‘Hey, Tommy,’ Billy says, heading for the elevators.
‘What’re you doing here so early, Dave? God isn’t even up.’
‘I’ve got a deadline,’ Billy tells him, thinking what an apt word that is for today’s business. ‘I’ll probably be here until God goes back to bed.’
That makes Tommy laugh. ‘Go get em, tiger.’
‘That’s the plan,’ Billy says.
3
He takes the two paper bags down to the fifth-floor men’s room. He stows his Colin White disguise, not neglecting the wig of long black hair (maybe the most important part), in the trash basket by the washbasins, then covers it with paper towels. The sign and the padlock go on the door. The key goes in his pocket, along with Dalton’s phone and the Benjy Compson flash drive.
Halfway back to his office, he has a nasty thought. There were a few moments on his way here when he lost focus, his mind on Shan’s drawing instead of staying where it belonged, on this morning’s preparations. Has he dropped the Dalton Smith phone into a sewer instead of one of the others? The idea is so terrible that in that moment he’s positive that’s just what he did, that when he reaches in his pocket he’ll find the Billy-phone, or the Dave-phone, or that useless burner. If so, he can replace it, his Dalton Smith credit cards are all good, but what if Don or Beverly Jensen should call on the day or two before FedEx can deliver a new one to 658 Pearson? They’ll wonder why he’s out of touch. It might not matter, but it might. Good neighbors, grateful neighbors, might even call the police and ask them to check his basement apartment to make sure he’s okay.
He grasps the phone, and for a moment just holds it, feeling like a roulette player afraid to look at the wheel and see which color the little ball has landed on. The worst thing – worse than the inconvenience, even worse than the potential danger – is knowing he was careless. He let his thoughts slip to the life that’s now behind him.
He brings the phone out of his pocket and breathes a sigh of relief. It’s the one that belongs to Dalton. He’s gotten away with one potential mistake. He can’t make another. The fates are unforgiving.
4
Quarter of seven. Billy goes to the local paper on his Dalton Smith phone and uses a Dalton Smith credit card to get behind the paywall. The front page headline has to do with the upcoming state elections, but near the bottom of the page, what would have been below the fold in the old days of actual newspapers, there’s a headline reading ALLEN TO BE ARRAIGNED, CHARGED WITH HOUGHTON MURDER. The story begins, ‘After a protracted extradition fight, Joel Allen will finally have the first of many days in court. Prosecutors plan to charge him with first-degree murder in the slaying of James Houghton, 43, and assault with intent to kill in the near-fatal shooting of …’
Billy doesn’t bother with the rest, but he sets his phone to receive news alerts from the paper. He sits at the desk in the outer office and prints a note on a page torn from one of the Staples pads that have otherwise never been used. WORKING UNDER DEADLINE, PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB, it reads. He tapes it to the door and locks the door from the inside.
He takes the pieces of the Remington 700 from the overhead cabinet and lays them out on the table where he’s done his writing. Seeing them there, like an exploded schematic in a firearms manual, brings back Fallujah. He pushes the memories away. That’s another life that’s behind him.
‘No more mistakes,’ he says, and puts the rifle together. Barrel, bolt, the extractor and ejector spring, the butt plate and butt plate spacer, all the rest. His hands move swiftly and almost of their own accord. He thinks briefly of that poem by Henry Reed, the one that begins Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, we had daily cleaning. He pushes that away, too. No more thinking of little girls’ pictures this morning and no poetry. Later, maybe. And maybe later he will write. Now he has to keep his mind on his business and his eyes on the prize. That he no longer cares much about the prize doesn’t matter.
The scope comes last, and once again he uses the sighting app to make sure it remains accurate. True-down, they used to say. He runs the bolt three times, adds a drop or two of oil, and runs it again. There’s no need of this when he only intends to fire once, but it’s how he was taught. Last, he loads the magazine and cycles the bolt to move the killing round into the chamber. He lays the weapon with care (but no reverence, not anymore) on the table.
He uses a thumbtack, a length of string, and a Sharpie to trace a circle two inches in diameter on the window. He crisscrosses it with masking tape, then starts in with the glass cutter. His phone chimes softly while he’s going round and round, but Billy doesn’t even pause. It takes him awhile because the glass is thick, but in the end the circlet of glass comes out as neatly as the cork from a wine bottle. A breath of cool morning breeze slips in through the hole.
He checks his phone and sees he’s gotten a text alert from the newspaper. Warehouse fire in Cody, a four-alarm job. Looking out the window, Billy can see a pillar of black smoke. He doesn’t know where Ken Hoff got his information, but it was bang on the money.
It’s now seven-thirty, and he is as ready as he can be. As ready as he needs to be, he hopes. He sits down in the chair where he has done his writing, hands clasped loosely in his lap, and waits. As he waited in Fallujah, high up and across the river from the Internet café run by the Arab who tattled on the Blackwater contractors and set off a firestorm. As he did on a dozen rooftops, listening to gunfire and garbage bags rattling in palm trees. His heartbeat is slow and regular. There are no nerves. He watches the traffic pick up on Court Street. Soon all the parking spaces will be full. He watches customers enter the Sunspot Café. A few sit outside, where Billy sat months ago with Ken Hoff. A Channel 6 news truck comes lumbering up the street, but it’s the only one. Either the warehouse fire has drawn away the others, or Joel Allen isn’t a big priority. Probably both, Billy thinks. He waits. The time passes. It always does.
5
The Business Solutions crew starts arriving at ten to eight, some carrying go-cups. They’ll be hard at it by eight-fifteen, dunning folks who are over their heads in debt, translucent shades dropped over the big windows to discourage them from looking away from their work for even a few seconds. Some stop on their way to the lobby doors to stare at the pillar of black smoke rising over the courthouse from out Cody way. Colin White is among them. No coffee in a go-cup for him; he’s got a can of Red Bull. Today he’s wearing tie-dyed bellbottoms and a blaze orange T-shirt. Nothing like the outfit Billy’s hidden away, but in the confusion it shouldn’t matter.