To pass the time, he tells Alice how he got into the business from which he now considers himself retired. Johnny Capps was the first link in the chain that ends – so far, there’s at least one more link still to be forged – on Interstate 70 heading west.
‘He’s the one who got shot in the legs in that house. The one they left alive to try and lure the rest of you in.’
‘Yes. Clay Briggs – Pillroller – got him stabilized and he was airlifted out. Johnny spent a long time in a shitty VA hospital and got hooked on dope while they were trying to rehab what couldn’t be rehabbed. Eventually Uncle Sam sent him back to Queens in his wheelchair, hooked through the bag.’
‘That’s so sad.’
Well, Billy tells her, at least the dope addict part of Johnny’s story had a happy ending. His cousin Joey reached out to him, a guy who’d kept the Italian family name of Cappizano, although he was of course called Joey Capps. With permission from one of the larger New York organizations – and of course the Sinaloa Cartel, who controlled the dope business – Joey Capps ran his own little organization, one so modest it was really more of a posse. Joey offered his wounded warrior cousin a job as an accountant, but only if he could get clean.
‘And he did?’
‘Yes. I got the whole story from him when we reconnected. He went into a rehab – his cousin paid – and then went to NA meetings three and four times a week until he died a few years ago. Lung cancer got him.’
Alice is frowning. ‘He went to NA meetings to get off dope, but his day job was pushing dope?’
‘Not pushing it, counting and washing the money from the trade. But yeah, it comes to the same thing, and once I pointed that out to him. You know what he said? That there are recovered alcoholics tending bar all over the world. He sponsored people, he said, and some of them got clean and resumed their lives. That’s how he put it, they resumed their lives.’
‘God, talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.’
Billy tells her that he almost signed up for another tour in the suck, decided he’d be crazy to do it – suicidal-crazy – and took off the uniform. Kicked around, trying to decide what came next for a guy whose job for a lot of years had been shooting other guys in the T-box. That was when Johnny got in touch.
There was a Jersey guy, he said, who liked to pick up women in bars and then beat them up. He probably had some kind of childhood trauma he was trying to work out, Johnny said, but fuck a bunch of childhood trauma, this was a very bad guy. He put the last woman in a coma, and this woman happened to be a Cappizano. Only a second cousin or maybe a third, but still a Cappizano. The only problem was this guy, this beater of women, was part of a larger and more powerful organization headquartered across the river in Hoboken.
Joey took Johnny Capps along for a sit-down with the head of this organization, and it turned out the New Jersey guys didn’t have much use for this shitpoke, either. He was trouble, a nasty stronzo madre with rings on the fingers of both hands, the better to beat the living crap out of women instead of taking them home to fuck them as any natural man would want to do, or even fottimi nel culo, which some men liked and even some women. But no woman likes getting her face beat off.
The upshot was that the capo couldn’t give Joey Capps permission to off the stronzo madre, because there would have to be retribution. But if an outsider did it, and if both outfits – the Hoboken organization and the much smaller Queens crew – paid for it, the thorn could be pulled. Call it mob diplomacy.
‘So Johnny Capps called you.’
‘He did.’
‘Because you were the best?’
‘The best he knew, anyway. And he knew my history.’
‘The man who killed your little sister.’
‘That, yes. I looked into the guy before I agreed to take the job, got a little of his history. Even went to see the woman he put into a coma. She was on life-support machinery, and you could tell she was never coming back. The monitor …’ Billy draws a straight line above the steering wheel. ‘So I did him. It really wasn’t much different from what I did in Iraq.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘No.’ Billy says it with no hesitation. ‘Not in the sand and not back here. Never.’
‘Johnny’s cousin got you other jobs?’
‘Two more, and there was one I turned down because the guy … I don’t know …’
‘Didn’t seem bad enough?’
‘Something like that. Then Joey introduced me to Bucky, and Bucky introduced me to Nick, and that’s where we are.’
‘I’m guessing there’s quite a lot more to it.’
She’s guessing right, but Billy doesn’t want to say any more, let alone go into the details of the jobs he did for Nick and for others. He has never said any of this, not to anyone, and he’s appalled to hear that part of his life told out loud. It’s sordid and stupid. Alice Maxwell, business school student and rape survivor, is sitting in an old truck with a man who killed people for a living. It was his fucking job. And is he going to kill Nick Majarian? If he gets the chance, very likely. So, a question: is killing for honor better than killing for money? Probably not, but that won’t stop him.
Alice is silent for a bit, thinking it over. Then she says, ‘You told me that because you think you might never get a chance to write it down. Isn’t that right?’
It is, but he doesn’t want to say so out loud.
‘Billy?’
‘I told you because you wanted to know,’ he says finally, and turns on the radio.
5
They register at another off-brand motel. There are a lot of them in a rough ring around the outskirts of Vegas. While Billy registers them as Dalton Smith and Elizabeth Anderson, Alice plugs four dollars in one of the lobby slots. On the fifth, ten fake cartwheels drop into the trough with a clatter and she squeals like a kid. The desk clerk offers her a choice: ten bucks or motel credit in that amount.
‘How’s the restaurant here?’ Alice asks.
‘Buffet’s pretty good.’ Then he lowers his voice and says, ‘Take the money, honey.’
Alice takes the money and they get to-go at the Sirloin Super Burger down the road. She insists that it be her treat and Billy doesn’t argue.
Back in Billy’s room, she sits at the window and watches the endless traffic streaming toward downtown, and the lights of the hotels and casinos coming on. ‘Sin City,’ she marvels, ‘and here I am in a motel room with a good-looking guy who happens to be twice my age. My mother would just shit.’
Billy throws back his head and laughs. ‘And your sister?’
‘Wouldn’t believe it.’ She points. ‘Are those the Paiute Mountains?’
‘If that’s north, those are them. I think they’re actually called foothills. If it matters.’
She turns to him, no longer smiling. ‘Tell me what you’re going to do.’
He does, and not just because he needs her help with the prep. She listens carefully. ‘It sounds awfully dangerous.’
‘If it looks hinky, I’ll back off and reconsider.’
‘Will you know if it’s hinky? The way your friend Taco knew outside that house in Fallujah?’
‘You remember that, huh?’
‘Will you?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘But you’ll probably go in anyway. The way you went into the Funhouse and look what happened there.’
Billy says nothing. There’s nothing to say.