Billy lets it go. He drops into sleep and dreams of the desert. Not the one in the suck, though, where everything smells of gunpowder, goats, oil, and exhaust. The one in Australia. There’s a huge rock out there, Ayers Rock it’s called but its real name is Uluru, a word that’s spooky even to say, one that sounds like wind around the eaves. A holy place for the aboriginal people who saw it first. Saw it, worshipped it, but never presumed to think they owned it. They understand that if there’s a God, it’s God’s rock. Billy has never been there, but he’s seen pictures of it in movies like A Cry in the Dark and magazines like National Geographic and Travel. He would like to go there, has even daydreamed about moving to Alice Springs, which is only a four-hour drive from Uluru, where the Rock raises its improbable head. Living there quietly. Writing, maybe, in a room filled with sunshine and a little garden outside.
His two phones are on the night table beside the bed. He has turned them off, but when he wakes up around three A.M., needing to empty his bladder, Billy touches the power button on each of them to see if anything’s come in. There’s nothing from Giorgio on the burner, which doesn’t surprise him. He doesn’t expect to hear from the fat man again, although he supposes that in a world where a conman can get elected president anything is possible. There is a message on the Dalton Smith phone, though. It’s a news push from the local paper. Prominent Businessman Commits Suicide.
Billy uses the bathroom, then sits on the bed and reads the story. It’s brief. The prominent businessman is, of course, Kenneth P. Hoff. One of his Green Hills neighbors was jogging by and heard a gunshot that seemed to have come from Hoff’s garage. This was around seven P.M. The neighbor called 911. The police arrived and found Hoff dead behind the wheel of his car, which was running. There was a bullet hole in his head and a revolver in his lap.
There will be a longer, more detailed story later today or maybe tomorrow. It will recap Hoff’s business career. There will be the usual shocked quotes from his friends and business associates. There will be references to ‘current financial troubles’ but no details, because other local movers and shakers, still very much alive, wouldn’t care for that. His ex-wives will say nicer things about him than they surely told their divorce lawyers, and at the funeral they’ll show up in black and dab their eyes with tissues – carefully, to protect their mascara. Billy doesn’t know if the paper will say the car he was found in was a red Mustang convertible, but he’s sure it was.
Hoff’s connection to the Allen shooting, surely the motive for his suicide, will come later.
The story won’t report the coroner’s likely supposition, that the depressed man decided to kill himself by inhaling carbon monoxide, got impatient, and blew his brains out instead. Billy knows that isn’t how it went down. The only thing he doesn’t know is which of Nick’s hardballs administered the killshot. It could have been Frank or Paulie or Reggie or someone he hasn’t even met, possibly an import from Florida or Atlanta, but it’s hard for Billy to see anyone but Dana Edison with his bright blue eyes and dark red manbun.
Did he march Hoff into the garage at gunpoint? Maybe he didn’t need to, maybe he just told Hoff they were going to sit in his car and talk about how the situation was going to be resolved, and to Hoff’s benefit. A self-involved optimist and designated patsy might buy that. He sits behind the wheel. Dana sits in the passenger bucket. Ken says what’s the plan. Dana says it’s this and shoots him. Then he turns on the engine, leaves through the back door, and rides away, silently, in a golf cart. Because that’s what Green Hills is, a golf course with condos.
Maybe it didn’t go down exactly that way, and maybe it wasn’t Edison, but Billy’s pretty sure he’s got the picture in broad strokes. Which leaves Giorgio, the last piece of unfinished business.
Well, no, Billy thinks. There’s me.
He lies down again, but this time sleep eludes him. Some of it is the way the old three-story house creaks. The wind has picked up, and without the railway station to block it, that wind blows straight through the vacant lot and across Pearson Street. Every time Billy starts to drift, the wind hoots around the eaves, saying Uluru, Uluru. Or there’s another creak that sounds like a footstep on a loose board.
Billy tells himself a little insomnia doesn’t matter, he can sleep the whole day away tomorrow if he so chooses, he won’t be going anywhere for awhile, but the early morning hours are such long hours. There’s too much to imagine, none of it good.
He thinks he will get up and read. He has no actual books except for Thérèse Raquin, but he can download something to his laptop and read in bed until he gets sleepy.
Then he has another idea. Maybe not a good idea, but he’ll be able to sleep. He’s sure of it. Billy gets up and takes Shan’s drawing out of his pants pocket. He unfolds it. He looks at the smiling girl with the red ribbons in her hair. He looks at the hearts rising from the flamingo’s head. He remembers Shan going to sleep next to him in the seventh inning of that playoff game. Her head on his arm. Billy puts the picture on the night table with his two phones and is soon asleep himself.
CHAPTER 12
1
Billy wakes up disoriented. The room is completely dark, not even a shred of light leaking in from around the shade of the window facing his backyard. For a moment he just lies there, still half asleep, then remembers there is no window, not in this room. The only window here is the one in his new living room. The one he calls his periscope. This isn’t his large second-floor bedroom on Evergreen Street but the much smaller basement bedroom on Pearson Street. Billy remembers he’s a fugitive.
He gets orange juice from the fridge, just a swallow or two to make it last, then showers off the sweat from yesterday. He dresses, pours milk over a bowl of Alpha-Bits, and turns on the six A.M. news.
The first thing he sees is Giorgio Piglielli. Not a photograph but an Identikit drawing that might as well be a photo, because it’s amazingly good. Billy knows right away who worked with the police artist. Irv Dean, the Gerard Tower security guy, is an ex-cop, and it seems his observational skills are still intact, at least when he’s not reading Motor Trend or examining breasts and butts in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. There’s nothing in the lead report about Ken Hoff. If the police have connected him to the Allen shooting, they haven’t shared it with the news people. At least not yet.
The perky blonde weather girl gives a quick update, talking about how it’s going to be unusually cold for this time of year. She promises a more detailed forecast later, then turns it over to the perky blonde traffic reporter, who warns commuters to expect a slow ride this morning ‘because of a heightened police presence.’
That means roadblocks. The cops are assuming the shooter is still in the city, which is correct. They are also assuming that the fat man calling himself George Russo is also in the city. This, Billy knows, is incorrect. His former literary agent is in Nevada, possibly underground with his considerable bulk already beginning to decay.
After an ad for Chevy trucks, the anchors return with a retired police detective. He is asked to speculate on the possible reasons why Joel Allen was killed. The retired detective says, ‘There’s only one I can see. Someone wanted to shut him up before he could trade information for a reduced sentence.’