Billy thinks it’s as honest a confession as Nick will ever give anyone. ‘Tell him I’m going to keep it business. Joel Allen is water under the bridge.’
‘When should I tell him to expect your call?’
‘Not tonight, maybe not for awhile. When’s the transplant scheduled?’
‘It’s not, and won’t be until December at least. Pigs has got to drink a lot of protein shakes and eat a lot of kale between now and then.’
‘All right.’ Billy tucks the cell number into his Dalton Smith wallet, behind his Dalton Smith credit cards. ‘Take care of yourself, Nick.’
‘Wait.’
Billy waits, curious about what else Nick has to say.
‘It was never because K didn’t want to pay you the million-five. That’s pocket change to him. It was because he insisted you be hit once the job was done. Said he wasn’t going to make the same mistake he made with Allen. You get that, right?’
‘Yes.’ And Nick went along with it. He gets that, too.
‘Does your Edward Woodley name still work? The account in Barbados?’
‘Yes.’ Although it’s been dormant except for token deposits and withdrawals since 2014 or 2015.
‘Check it tomorrow. Thank God you didn’t kill Mark Abromowitz. He ain’t great and he ain’t made, but he’s what I got since Pigs went to SA. All I can transfer right now and be safe is three hundred thousand, but I’ll put in more when I can. You’ll eventually get your million-five.’
For once in your life be honorable, Billy told him when he gave Nick back his life, and damned if the man isn’t trying, in the only way he knows how. Money.
‘You’re not going to say thank you and I don’t need you to,’ Nick says. ‘You’re a good workman, Billy. You did the job.’
Billy pushes END CALL without saying goodbye.
8
He cleans himself up with the wipes and baby oil as well as he can, then showers until the brown water running down the drain is mostly clear. But he still gets more smeg on the two bath towels he uses to dry off.
Alice asked him if he’d be able to sleep and he said yes, but for a long time he can’t. The time he spent at Promontory Point – probably only an hour, maybe even less, but it seemed like five – keeps running through his mind. Especially going for Edison. The flying splinters. The flushing toilet.
I thought four made guys was pretty serious, Nick said, but Sal the gate guard never got the Mossie off his shoulder, Frank never turned around, and Reggie wasn’t carrying, had to go for the boss’s hideout gun instead. Only Dana Edison was serious; he took his gun into the crapper with him. And Marge, of course. She was very serious, and she had seen through his disguise almost immediately.
Leave a good tip for the housekeeper, he thinks. Leave a twenty.
He rolls over and is on the edge of sleep when something comes to him that he doesn’t like and he rolls on his back again, staring up into the darkness. No, he doesn’t like it at all. He left Shan’s picture of Freddy the Flamingo – aka Dave the Flamingo – taped to the dash of that old truck. He had time to take it but it never even crossed his mind. All he wanted right then was to get the fuck gone.
Forget it, he tells himself. It means nothing.
This may be true, but it doesn’t help. Because it is – was, he guesses that’s the correct tense now – pink like the baby shoe in Fallujah. The one he didn’t have when they were ambushed in the Funhouse. He has lost another good luck charm. He can tell himself that’s nothing but superstition, no different than folks believing there were ghosts in that old hotel in Sidewinder that burned, but it makes him feel bad. All else aside, that picture was made for him out of love.
Go to sleep, asshole, Billy thinks.
He finally does but wakes up in the dead ditch of the morning, mouth dry, hands clenched. The dream was so vivid that at first he’s not sure if he’s in a Ramada Inn or his Gerard Tower office. He was working on his story and it must have been early days, because he was still writing in his dumb self persona. There came a knock at the door. He answered it, expecting Ken Hoff or Phil Stanhope, more likely Hoff. But it was neither of them. It was Marge, in the big blue dress she was wearing when he approached the Promontory Point service entrance. Only instead of a sombrero she had a Vegas Golden Knights gimme cap jammed down over her hair and instead of a trowel she’d got Sal’s Mossberg.
‘You forgot the flamingo, you fucking fuck,’ she said, and raised the shotgun. The barrel looked as big as the entrance to the Eisenhower Tunnel.
I pulled out of the dream before she could fire, Billy thinks as he walks to the bathroom. While he pees he thinks of Rudy Bell, aka Taco Bell. Bad dreams were common currency in Iraq, especially during the battle for Fallujah, and Taco believed (or said he believed) that if you died in a nightmare, you could actually die in your rack.
‘Frightened to death, my man,’ Tac said. ‘What a way to go, huh?’
But I got out of this one before she could pull the trigger, Billy thinks as he trudges back to bed. She was a piece of work, though. Made Dana Edison with his prissy little manbun look like a street-corner hood.
The room is cold, but he doesn’t bother turning on the heater because it will probably rattle – motel wall units always rattle. He snuggles under the blankets and goes to sleep almost at once. There are no more dreams.
9
Alice votes for fried egg sandwiches from a drive-thru instead of a sitdown breakfast because she wants to get on the road right away. ‘I want to see the mountains again. I really love them, even though I had to gasp for air until I got used to the altitude.’
Billy smiles and says, ‘Okay, let’s go.’
Shortly after they cross the Colorado line, Billy hears his laptop give a single ding-dong chime for the first time in … he can’t remember how long. Maybe years. He pulls over at the next turnout, gets it out of the back seat, and opens it. The ding-dong means he’s gotten an email from one of his several blind accounts, this one woodyed667@gmail.com. The message is from Travertine Enterprises. It’s an outfit he’s never heard of, but he has no doubt who’s behind it. He double-clicks and reads.
‘What?’ Alice asks.
He shows her. Travertine Enterprises has put three hundred thousand dollars in the account of Edward Woodley at the Royal Bank of Barbados. The only notation is ‘For services rendered.’
‘Did that come from who I think it came from?’ Alice asks.
‘No doubt,’ Billy says. They get rolling again. It’s a beautiful day.
10
They get to Bucky’s place around five in the afternoon. Billy has called ahead from Rifle with an ETA along with a head-ups about their new ride, and Bucky’s standing in the dooryard waiting for them. He’s dressed in jeans and a fleece jacket, looking nothing at all like the man who used to live and work in New York. Maybe he’s his better self out here, Billy thinks. He knows that Alice is.
She’s out of the car almost before Billy can come to a stop. Bucky holds his arms wide and shouts ‘Hey, Cookie!’ She runs into them, laughing as he enfolds her.
Look at that, Billy thinks. Would you look at that.
CHAPTER 22
1
They stay with Bucky at his mountain retreat long enough to get snowed in (for a day) by an early season blizzard. The ferocity of the storm amazes, delights, and terrifies Alice all at the same time. Yes, she says, she’s seen snow in Rhode Island, plenty of it, but never snow like this with drifts higher than her head. When it stops, she and Bucky go out and make snow angels in the backyard. After extended pleading, the hired assassin joins them. Two days later the temperatures are back in the sixties and the snow is melting. The woods are full of birdsong and the sound of meltwater.