Get it, Billy texts back.
11
That night he sits beside Alice on the couch. She looks good in her black pants and striped shirt. When he turns off the TV and says he wants to talk to her she looks frightened.
‘Is it something bad?’
Billy shrugs. ‘You tell me.’
She listens to him carefully, her wide eyes steady on his. When he finishes, she says, ‘You would do that?’
‘Yes. They need a payback for what they did to you, but that’s not the only reason. What men like that have done once they’ll do again. Maybe you’re not even the first.’
‘You’d be taking a risk. It could be dangerous.’
He thinks of the gun in Don Jensen’s nightstand and says, ‘Probably not very.’
‘You can’t kill them. I don’t want that. Tell me you won’t kill them.’
The idea hasn’t even crossed Billy’s mind. They need to pay, but they also need to learn, and those who are obliterated are beyond lessons. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No killing.’
‘And I really don’t care about Jack and Hank. They weren’t the ones who pretended to like me and got me to come to that apartment.’
Billy says nothing, but he does care about Jack and Hank, assuming they participated, and based on what he saw when she was undressed, he’s sure that at least one of them did. Probably both.
‘But I care about Tripp,’ she says, and puts a hand on his arm. ‘If he was hurt that would make me happy. I suppose that makes me a bad person.’
‘It makes you human,’ Billy says. ‘Bad people need to pay a price. And the price should be high.’
CHAPTER 16
1
We could hear heavy small-arms fire and explosions in other parts of the city, but until the shit hit the fan, our area in the Jolan was relatively quiet. We cleared the first three houses in our section, Block Lima, with no trouble. Two were empty. There was a kid in the third one, not armed and not wired up to explode. We made him take off his shirt to be sure. We sent him to the police station with a couple of army guys who were headed that way with their own prisoners. We knew that kid would probably be back on the street by nightfall, because the cop shop was basically a turnstile. He was lucky to be alive at all, because we were still red-assed about losing Albie Stark. Din-Din actually raised his gun, but Big Klew pushed the barrel down and said to leave the kid alone.
‘The next time we see him he’ll have an AK,’ George said. ‘We ought to just kill them all. Fucking roaches.’
The fourth house was the biggest on the block, a regular estate. It had a domed roof and a courtyard with palms on the inside to give it shade. Some rich Ba’athist’s crib, no doubt. The whole thing was surrounded by a high concrete wall painted with a mural of children playing ball and skipping rope and running around while several women looked on. Probably with approval, but it was hard to tell because they were so bundled up in their abayahs. There was also a man standing off to the side. Our terp, Fareed, said he was the mutawaeen. The women watched the children, Fareed said, and the mutawaeen watched the women to make sure they did nothing that might incite lust.
We all got a kick out of Fareed, because his accent made him sound like a Yooper from Traverse City. Lots of the terps sounded like Michiganders, who knows why. ‘Dat picture means dis house, the al’atfal, da kiddies, can come und play.’
‘So it’s a funhouse,’ Donk said.
‘No, dey don’t allow fun in da house,’ Fareed said. ‘Just in da yard.’
Donk rolled his eyes and snickered, but no one laughed outright. We were still thinking of Albie, and how it could have been any one of us.
‘Come on, you guys,’ Taco said. ‘Let’s get some.’ He handed Fareed the bullhorn that had GOOD MORNING VIETNAM printed on the side in Sharpie and told him
2
Billy is snapped back from Fallujah by the sound of Alice running down the stairs. She bursts into the apartment, hair flying out behind her. ‘Someone’s coming! I was spritzing the plants and saw the car turn into the driveway!’
One look at her face tells Billy not to waste time asking if she’s sure. He gets up and goes to the periscope window.
‘Is it them, do you think? The Jensens coming back early? I turned off the TV but I had coffee, the place smells of it, and there’s a plate on the counter! Crumbs! They’ll know somebody’s been—’
Billy pushes the curtain back a few inches. He couldn’t see the new car if it was able to pull all the way up, the angle is wrong, but because his leased Fusion is in the driveway, he can. It’s a blue SUV with a scratch running down the side. For a moment he doesn’t know where he’s seen it before, but it comes to him even before the driver gets out. It’s Merton Richter, the real estate agent who rented him the apartment.
‘Did you lock the door?’ Billy jerks his chin upward.
Alice shakes her head, her eyes big and scared, but maybe that’s okay. It might be even if Richter tries the door and peeks in when there’s no answer to his knock. The Jensens asked him to water their plants, after all. But he may be coming here, and Billy isn’t wearing the wig, let alone the fake stomach. He’s in a T-shirt and his workout shorts.
The front door opens and they hear Richter step inside. The puke has been cleaned up, but will he detect the smell? It’s not like they opened the door to air out the foyer.
Billy wants to wait and see if Richter goes up to the Jensens’ but knows he can’t afford to. ‘Turn on the computers.’ He sweeps his hand around, indicating the AllTechs. And Christ, Richter isn’t going up there, he’s coming down here. ‘You’re my niece.’
It’s all he has time for. He slams down the lid of the Mac Pro, runs for the bedroom, and shuts the door. As he crosses to the bathroom, where the fake belly is hanging on the back of the door, he hears Richter knock. She’ll have to open it because he’ll know from the car in the driveway that someone is home. When she does he’ll see a young woman half Billy’s age, bruised and still flushed from her run down the stairs. Only that’s not the exercise Richter will think of first. This is bad.
Billy puts the belly in the small of his back so he can cinch the strap, but he misses the buckle and the belly falls to the floor. He picks it up and tries again. This time he gets the strap in the buckle, but he pulls it too tight and can’t turn the belly to his front even when he sucks in his gut. When he loosens the strap, the fucking thing falls down again. Billy bumps his head on the washbasin, picks up the appliance, tells himself to calm down, and buckles the strap. He rotates the belly into position.
Back in the bedroom, Billy can hear the murmur of voices. Alice giggles. It sounds nervous rather than amused. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He yanks on chinos and then the sweatshirt, both because it’s quicker than a button-up and because Alice was right, fat guys think baggy clothes make them look less fat. The blond wig is on the bureau. He grabs it and jams it on over his black hair. In the living room Alice laughs again. He reminds himself not to say her name because for all Billy knows, she’s given their visitor a false one.
He takes two big breaths to calm himself, puts on a smile that he hopes will look embarrassed – as if he’s been caught doing the necessary – and opens the door. ‘We have company, I see.’
‘Yes,’ Alice says. She turns to him with a smile on her lips and an expression of naked relief in her eyes. ‘He says he rented you the apartment.’