by Sam Jones
“Delgado was with me the whole ride, ace. I had a partner.”
“And she fouled up by not putting you in check. That’s what partners are for. She should have shut you down on more than one occasion. Hell, if she had taken the reins, if she had taken the lead on this case, I’m inclined to believe that it wouldn’t have all ended as fatally as it did.”
A beat.
Billy had nothing.
“You’re just a hardheaded asshole, Reese,” Dizzy finished. “You’re the walking, talking, breathing example of how not to live.”
The words were like a sucker punch to Billy’s gut. He wanted to vault across the table. He wanted to tear Dizzy apart.
But he knew he couldn’t.
“You let this happen,” Billy said. “You could have intervened at any point. When your people told me to back off, that’s not what you really wanted. You fed me information to keep going. You wanted me to go after Kruger, and then you guys could just sweep in after the fact.”
A beat.
Dizzy said, “Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re dim-witted, slick.”
Billy wanted to hit the guy.
Really, really badly.
Dizzy then said, “Do you have a hold on what’s happening here gentleman? Do we understand each other?”
Billy took a moment before saying, “I understand.”
“Excellent,” Dizzy said as he stood up, “then we’re done here.”
Billy turned in his chair as Dizzy and the raven-haired man headed for the door.
“Hey,” he called out.
Dizzy stopped and looked back.
“Just tell me what Sykes was taking into Bogotá,” Billy said. “I never found that out. Just give me something.”
“That’s the part you don’t seem to get, Reese,” Dizzy said.
“And what might that be?”
“That you’re going to walk out of this room not having all the answers you were looking for. Kruger is ours, Maria Delgado is dead, you’ve been cleared, and Analena Rodriguez has been safely returned to her family for the duration. This situation is the very essence of life playing itself out here.”
A beat.
Billy sat back in his chair.
And he took it.
What else was there to do?
“Gentleman,” Dizzy bid them as he left the room with the raven-haired man in tow.
And that was it.
They were gone.
For a moment Billy just sat there, thinking and wondering and absorbing. Brogan then stood up, moved toward the door, and opened it. “Check in with Ferris,” he said to Billy, never once looking back him, his tone neutral and uncaring. “Get back to work.”
He closed the door behind him as Billy sat in his chair, the static of the room his only companion as he adjusted to his new reality and breathed.
That’s it.
Game over.
For now.
67
BILLY WAS BACK at his home in LA the following evening after squaring things off with Ferris (who apparently had her own sidebar with Dizzy and Brogan).
Same spiel. Same negative feelings lingering afterward.
Billy’s neighborhood was quiet upon his return. You wouldn’t have thought that he had engaged in a shootout with a van and a bunch of armed men a few weeks before.
Birds chirped. The wind blew. Everything was back to a somewhat manageable state of normal as Billy settled in, turned on the TV for the background noise, and tried his best to wrap his brain over the events that had played out in the past four weeks.
Kruger was gone.
The CIA had won.
Maria was dead.
A young girl had lived.
Those were the facts. That was the situation. The elements that were up in the air would remain that way, the rules and outcome having been dictated by forces bigger and more powerful than Billy, eating at him and frustrating him to no avail as the hours ticked by and the days marched on.
Around day two of his sabbatical, while Billy was halfway through watching Mean Streets, Ferris rang him up, relaying to him an itinerary of prerequisites he would have to accomplish in order to stay on board with the FBI.
“Such as?” Billy asked.
“Two-week suspension. Weekly tox screenings. A lot more checking in. More records of your whereabouts.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
“As well as a monthly psych eval. Forgot to mention that.”
Billy sighed.
Discouraged.
“Fantastic,” he said.
“It might be good for you, you know,” she said.
“Seeing a shrink?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you figure?”
“Oh, come on. You’re trying to shine on the wrong person, Billy. You’ve got something eating at your heart. Wouldn’t hurt to blow off that steam somewhere where it doesn’t get people killed.”
Billy fell silent.
Weak...
It only took Ferris a couple of seconds of silence to catch on to the negative connotations of what she had said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for it to come off that way—”
“It’s fine. Really.”
“Still…”
More silence.
More time passed.
Ferris said, “You’ve got a couple of weeks off. Use them. Rest up. Don’t think about anything else, all right? You’ve been blessed here, Billy. You should be in jail. You should be in bigger trouble with bigger consequences than you got. So be grateful.”
Billy was still quiet.
The more Ferris spoke, the more her words began to hit home like a nail to the heart.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said before he hung up the phone and began wandering about the kitchen.
He came to a stop against the edge of the sink. He placed his hands on the counter and braced himself as he stared out the window that looked out to the next-door neighbor. The window was fogged up, in desperate need of cleaning, nothing visible and everything beyond it diluted and unclear.
She’s right, he thought. Ferris is absolutely right.
I should be in a courtroom somewhere.
I should be in bigger trouble than I am.
Maria should still be alive and well.
Billy had a hard time understanding. He couldn’t tell what his guilt was more reflective of: Maria’s passing or his lack of consequences.
I don’t know.
I just don’t know.
It would be a gradual process for him to fully understand the situation.
Until Dizzy Alvarao and the CIA came calling again.
Which they would.
But until that time, life would go on. The sun would set, rise again, set again, and rise again. Things would keep moving. Billy would keep living. For the next couple of weeks, he would lay low, lick his wounds, and try to bury his regrets deep down where the bad thoughts lived rent free.
On the third-to-last day of his sabbatical, Billy was in the shower, forehead pressed against the tile as the hot water ran and the DWP bill started to stack up. It was his fourth shower that day. He was still trying to clean off that invisible layer of grime on his body that he felt had clung onto him like a parasite not long after his meeting with Brogan and Dizzy. It was hard for him to explain.
He just felt…unlaundered.
His body was still relatively raw and stiff from the repeated abuse it had endured as the showerhead saturated his black-and-blue flesh. As the record player went about humming out Janis Joplin’s rendition of “Piece of My Heart” for the umpteenth time in the past few days, Billy had an inkling to call Heather and Tommy. The CIA would be listening in, most likely—I just have a hunch—but he would stay true to his word and not tell them anything he shouldn’t. He opened the door, did a quick pat down, and wrapped a towel around his waist, the water still running and the mirrors fogging as he moved into the living room and retrieved the phone.
He dialed, the phone rang twice, and Tommy answered from the other side.
“Sykes residence; Tommy Sykes speaking.”
“Hey, bud,” Billy said. “You staying out of trouble?”
“Uncle Billy! When are you coming to see us?”
“Soon, pal. Real soon. You doing okay?”
“Yeah, real good. Mom and I are going to visit grandma and grandpa this weekend.”
“That’s great. I’m sure you’ll have a blast.”
“Did you want to talk to mom?”
“Big time. Can you put her on?”
“Got it! One second!”
Billy could hear Tommy calling out for Heather. A few seconds later, Heather answered, her voice filled with a hectic quality unique to that of a frazzled parent.
“Billy,” she said.
“Hey, Heather,” he said. “Just wanted to give you guys a shout.”
“Never a good time, of course. Tommy’s bouncing off the walls today. How’s work?”
Billy smirked. “Well, I’m still here…”
He thought of what to say next. He wanted to tell her the truth. It was choked up in his throat, crying to be released.
But he couldn’t.
And he wouldn’t.
But he would give her just enough that it might help remedy his affliction…
“We got him, Heather,” Billy said. “We got the guy who killed Andy.”
A long pause.
Heather took a beat.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
Billy took a beat. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s dead.”
Another pause.
“Good,” Heather said. “Good…”
They waited on the phone, comfortably sharing the silence.
“I gotta go, Billy,” Heather finally said. “But stay in touch.”
“I will. I’ll talk to you soon.”
He went to hang up.
“Billy?” Heather called out.
“Yeah?”
Another pause.
“Thank you,” she said. “And I know Andy is up there somewhere saying it too.”
The sentiment drove a stake right into Billy’s heart.
He felt guilty, duplicitous, no better than the CIA stooges who orchestrated the whole affair to begin with. “I’ll call you soon,” he said, uncertain of what else to say.
“Good-bye, Billy.” Heather signed off.
“Good-bye, Heather,” Billy replied.
He held the phone in his hand for several minutes even as the dial tone droned on, disappointed at himself for lying to someone he cared about, who would in turn lie to someone else he cared about. That lie would live, and breathe, and help the Sykes family sleep at night, but that lie would also eat at Billy every day, every day until Dizzy and his twerps came out of hiding to resurrect that past, to call forth the sins that had been committed and the role that Billy played in shutting it all down.
Sykes will come back.
Somehow. Some way.
And Billy’s hunch—like most of them—would turn out to be true.
But until then, as before, life would go on. Billy had a two-day vacation ahead of him, and there was only one thing left that he needed to do before he tried to take a load off.
He placed the receiver in the cradle, turned around, ditched his towel, walked nude through the living room, and hopped back in the shower.
Still dirty.
68
BILLY HAD GOTTEN the scoop on the location of Maria’s grave from her people at Miami PD. A SoCal girl through and through, Maria’s body had been collected in Mexico, processed and cared for at a funeral home, and transported to her family’s home in the valley, a fifteen-minute drive from Billy’s house. A funeral was held, a memorial service followed, and Maria Delgado was buried in the serene and sprawling Forest Lawn cemetery. Billy wanted to attend Maria’s funeral, but the people above him wouldn’t let him.
Billy wasn’t too stoked to receive that news.
A day after his phone call with Heather, Billy took a cab, inquired from one of the staff members at the cemetery as to the exact location of Maria’s burial plot, and took a long walk up a curving driveway that led to an oak tree with branches that cascaded and added shade to the polished plaque headstone, which read:
MARIA ANGELINA DELGADO 1952–1985
“Our daughter, our love, may you rest in the light up above.”
Billy stood there, hands in the pockets of his red-and-gray cardigan as he stared on at her headstone, the sun cooking his neck and wind rustling through the trees, an ideal and picturesque, low-seventies day in Southern California that Billy was having a hard time enjoying.
He kept his gaze on her tombstone.
It all felt so unreal.
He saw her die. He was looking right at her resting place.
He had done it before. Plenty of guys from the old unit.
But this all felt so unreal.
His heart was pounding, his stomach twisting, his eyes misting up and beginning to pool.
But he couldn’t help it. Everything over the past few weeks had caught up to Billy and hit him like a bus. All the backlogged animosity, and fear, and anger had brought him to his tipping point.
So he shed a tear.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly to Maria, her death still weighing on him, and most likely always would. “I’m so sorry.”
He thought back to Dizzy’s words back at the Hoover building.
Maybe he was right.
Maria was the best friend Billy ever truly had. He had come to care about her, and fate—or his own hotheadedness—had robbed her from him before anything real between them could be solidified. He could only speculate what could have been in store for both of them, but it no longer mattered. Maria was gone.
And there wasn’t jack shit he could to do change that.
Billy accepted it, wiped away the tear, and took a step toward her headstone. “Sorry about that,” he said, “I’m not crying over you. I just saw Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and it fuckin’ sucked.”
The sun glinted off her headstone like a wink.
Billy made a puttering noise with his lips as he took a look around. Maria’s marker sat high on a hill with a spectacular view, a view that anyone would be happy to have as their final resting place—peaceful, picturesque, and filled with greenery, blue skies, and billowy clouds.
He smirked.
Clichés…
“I’ll see you around,” he said as he turned around, walked down the hill, and headed off toward the horizon.
In that moment, Billy Reese felt his burden slightly lifted. He was easygoing, carefree, and ready for nothing more in his immediate future than an episode of Cheers and a breakfast burrito to go along with it.
But the respite only lasted a minute.
The memory of Maria’s death became a nagging thought. Unshakable. It represented something to Billy that he could not yet understand, something about his…flaws. It stuck with him. It haunted him. He was dwelling on these thoughts one day, prodding at the open wounds when Ferris called him up and said there was a dicey situation playing out in Beverly Hills, that Billy needed to hop in his car, get down there, and start doing what he did best.
It was a more than welcome reprieve.
He threw on his cardigan, scooped up his Colt, and hopped in his old man’s Plymouth Road Runner he had stored in the garage. A sweet little ride. Charcoal black. The outside looked like a somewhat nondescript family vehicle with hints of a muscle car. Understated, but also underestimated. Pretty good on speed, but built more for performance.
The little sucker could really take a beating and keep on ticking.
Had a shine that looked fresh off the lot. Sported a gigantic engine and a slapstick transmission, which meant when you put your foot on the gas, you had a stick shift without the clutch. Drove like a bat out of hell. It was old man Reese’s pride and joy, and when old man Reese finally was laid to rest, Billy was given the keys. If you knew
the family, you’d know it was a hell of an honor for old Norm to bestow. Kind of out of left field, really. For a while, most people thought he would rather junk it when he passed away rather than leave it to the kid who had taken it without permission and busted one of the rocker arms trying to outrun a yellow light.
But time heals all wounds.
And old man Norm always wanted the kid to have it anyway.
Billy cranked the key, and the engine of the Plymouth roared to life as he punched the radio and the DJ came over the airwaves with an auctioneer’s speed and shock jock’s swagger.
“Gooood morning, ladies and gentlemen! You’re listening to KPPX, home of rock, pop and a few things in-between. It’s a beautiful day here in Southern California, so let’s start it off with a bang.”
The Who. “Eminence Front.”
More than satisfied at the selection, Billy turned up the volume, slipped on his Wayfarers, and revved the engine as the sun outside danced along the lenses with a lethal glint. He didn’t know what the future held for him. He was even more uncertain of everything now than he was before. There were so many questions that had not yet been answered.
But his only option was just to keep on rambling.
Everything will sort itself out.
Eventually…
He gunned his little speed demon in the direction of Beverly Hills. He shimmied his way to the freeway, the music cranking and the wind blowing, and a glimmer of hope resting somewhere off the 134 as he set about his next assignment, the sun settling high in the sky, and the cretins of Los Angeles beginning to scramble about the closer the FBI’s most notorious bad boy closed in.
For Billy Reese, it was off to catch the next bad guy. It was off to the next near-death experience.
It was off to the next thing.