by Stephen King
It’s a good disguise, not overdone, but he still breathes a sigh of relief when he closes the foyer door of 658 behind him. He goes downstairs, turns off the overhead light, and pushes back the curtain of his periscope window. No one is out there. The street is deserted. Of course if he’s been spotted, they (it’s Reggie and Dana he’s thinking of, not Frankie and Paulie or the police) could be moving in from the back, but there’s no sense worrying about what you can’t control. Doing that is a good way to go crazy.
Billy closes the narrow curtain, turns the light back on, and sits in the room’s single easy chair. It’s ugly, but like many ugly things in life, it’s also comfortable. He puts the phone on the coffee table and looks at it, wondering if he’s thinking straight or just indulging in paranoia. In many ways paranoia would be better. Time to find out.
He frees the phone from its box, puts in the battery, and plugs it into the wall to charge. Unlike his previous burner, it’s a flip phone. Kind of old-school, but Billy likes it. With a flip phone if you don’t like what somebody is saying, you can actually hang up on them. Childish, maybe, but strangely satisfying. Charging doesn’t take long. Thanks to Steve Jobs, who got pissed when he couldn’t use a device the second he took it out of the box, off-the-rack devices like this come with a fifty per cent charge already cooking inside.
The phone wants to know what language he prefers. Billy tells it English. It asks if he wants to join a wireless network. Billy says no. He plugs in the minutes he paid for, making the necessary call to FastPhone HQ to finish the transaction. His minutes are good for the next three months. Billy hopes by then he’s on a beach somewhere and the only phone in his possession is the one that goes with his Dalton Smith credit cards.
Home and dry. That would be nice.
He tosses the phone from hand to hand, thinking about the day Frank Macintosh and Paul Logan took him to the house in Midwood, a trip he now wishes he had never taken. Nick was there to greet him, but not outside. Billy thinks of his first visit to the rented McMansion, Nick once more there to greet him with open arms, but again not outside. Next he thinks of the night Nick told him about the flashpots and pitched his getaway plan—Just get in the back of the van, Billy, relax and take a ride to Wisconsin. There had been Champagne to start and Baked Alaska to finish. A service couple, probably local and maybe married, cooked the meal and served it. Those two had seen Nick, but as far as they knew, he was a businessman from New York who was down here to do some kind of deal. He gave the woman some money and they were on their way.
Back and forth goes the burner phone. Right hand to left, left hand to right.
I asked Nick if Hoff was going to plant the flashpots, Billy thinks, and what did he say? What did he call him? A grande figlio di puttana, wasn’t it? Which meant son of a bitch, or son of a whore, or maybe motherfucker. One of those, and the exact translation hardly mattered. What did matter was what Nick said next: I’d be sad if that was your opinion of me.
Because the grande figlio di puttana was the designated patsy. It was Hoff who owned the building the shot came from. Hoff who procured the gun and now the police had it and they’d already be trying to trace it back to the point of sale. And if they got there—make that when they got there—what would they find? Probably an alias if Hoff had any sense at all, but if the cops showed the seller Hoff’s picture, there goes your ballgame. Ken winds up in a hot little interrogation room, willing to make a deal, eager to make a deal, because he believes that’s what he does best.
Except Billy’s betting that Ken Hoff is never going to get to the little room. He’s never going to talk about Nikolai Majarian because he’s going to be dead.
Billy got that far weeks ago, but the six o’clock news has taken him to a conclusion he should have reached sooner, and might have if he’d spent a little less time playing Monopoly with the Evergreen Street kids and taking care of his lawn and eating Corinne’s cookies and schmoozing with his neighbors. Even now what he’s thinking seems impossible, but the logic is undeniable.
Ken Hoff and David Lockridge weren’t the only ones who were out front.
Were they?
7
Billy texts Giorgio Piglielli, aka Georgie Pigs, aka George Russo, the big literary agent. He uses an alias he knows Giorgio will recognize.
Trilby: Text me back.
He waits. There’s no response, and that’s fucked up because there are two things Giorgio always keeps close at hand: his phone and something to eat. Billy tries again.
Trilby: I need to talk to you right away. Billy considers, then adds: The contract specified payment on publication day, right?
No dots to say Giorgio is reading his texts or composing a reply. Nothing.
Trilby: Text me.
Nothing.
Billy flips the phone closed and puts it on the coffee table. The worst thing about Giorgio’s silence is that Billy’s not surprised. There really is a dumb self, it seems, and what it hasn’t realized until the job has been done and it’s too late to go back is that Giorgio has been out front right along with Ken Hoff. Giorgio was with Hoff when they entered the Gerard Tower to show Billy his writer’s studio on the fifth floor. And it wasn’t Giorgio’s first visit to the building, either. This is George Russo, you met him last week, Hoff had said to Irv Dean, the security guy.
Is Giorgio back in Nevada? And if so, is he chowing down and drinking milkshakes in Vegas or buried somewhere in the surrounding desert? God knows he wouldn’t be the first. Or the hundredth.
They’ll trace Giorgio back to Nick even if he’s dead, Billy thinks. The two of them have been a team since forever, Nick in charge and Georgie Pigs as his consigliere. Billy doesn’t know if that’s what they really call a guy like Georgie or just something the movies made up, but for sure that’s what the fat man has been to Nick: his go-to guy.
Only not since forever, because the first time Billy worked for Nick—it was the third time he assassinated a man for pay—was in 2008, and Giorgio wasn’t there. Nick handled that one by himself. He told Billy there was a rape-o working some of the smaller clubs and casinos on the edge of town. The rape-o liked older women, liked to hurt them, finally went overboard and killed one. Nick found out who he was and wanted a pro from out of town to take care of the guy. Billy, he’d said, had been recommended. Highly.
When Billy came to Vegas the second time, Giorgio was not only there, he did the deal. Nick came in while they were talking, gave Billy a manly hug and a few pats on the back, then sat in the corner sipping a drink and just listening. Until the very end, that was. That second job was less than a year after the first one, the rape-o. Giorgio said the target this time was an independent porno filmmaker named Karl Trilby. He showed Billy a picture of a man who looked eerily like Oral Roberts.
“Trilby like the hat,” Giorgio said, then explained when Billy pretended not to know what he was talking about.
“I don’t shoot people just because they make movies of people fucking,” Billy had said.
“What about people who make movies of guys fucking six-year-olds?” Nick had said, and Billy had done the job because Karl Trilby was a bad person.
Billy did three more jobs for Nick, five in all not counting Allen, almost a third of his total. Excluding the dozens of hajis in Iraq he had taken down, that is. Sometimes Nick was there when the offer was made and sometimes he wasn’t, but Giorgio always was, so him being on the scene for the Allen job at least part of the time hadn’t struck Billy as odd. It should have. Only now does he realize it was very odd.
Nick has deniability as long as Giorgio keeps quiet; Nick can say sure I know the guy, but if he did this it was his own deal. I knew nothing about it. Even if the cook and the woman server from that first dinner put him with Giorgio and Billy, which is unlikely, Nick can shrug and say he was there to talk to Giorgio on casino business, the license on the Double Domino was coming up for renewal. And the other guy? As far as Nick knows, just a pal of Giorgio’s. Or maybe a bodyguard.
Quiet guy. Said his name was Lockridge but otherwise didn’t say much at all.
When the cops ask where Nick was when Allen got hit, he can say he was in Vegas and produce plenty of witnesses to back his alibi. Plus casino security footage. That stuff doesn’t get recycled every twelve or twenty-four hours; that stuff gets archived for at least a year.
If Giorgio keeps quiet. But would he stick to that omertà shit if he was the one getting extradited? If he was the one facing the possibility of lethal injection as an accessory to first-degree murder?
Georgie Pigs can’t talk if he’s under five feet of desert, Billy thinks. It’s the great rule when it comes to things like this.
He stops tossing the phone from hand to hand and texts Giorgio one more time. Still no response. He could try texting or phoning Nick, but even if he reached him, could he trust anything Nick might say? No. The only thing Billy can trust is a million-five transferred to his offshore account, then transferred again, through electronic jiggery-pokery, to another one that Dalton Smith can access. Bucky would do that part when he gets to wherever he’s decided to go, but only if the money is there to transfer.
Tonight Billy can do nothing more, so he goes to bed. It isn’t even nine o’clock, but it’s been a long day.
8
He lies with his hands beneath the pillow in that ephemeral cool pocket, thinking it doesn’t make sense. No way does it.
Ken Hoff yes, okay. There’s a certain breed of fast-dealing small-city sharpie who believes that no matter how deep the shit, someone will always throw him a rope. These are the broad-smiling, firm-handshaking hustlers in Izod polos and Bally loafers who could have come with self-involved optimist stamped on their birth certificates. But Giorgio Piglielli is different. He’s eating himself to death, sure, but so far as Billy can tell, in most other ways he’s a hard-eyed realist. And yet he’s all over this thing. Why is that?
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 AM, 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 PM. 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 AM 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 Mo
tor 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 blond 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 blond 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.”
“What kind of sentence reduction could he possibly expect?” asks one of the anchors. She’s a perky brunette. How can they all be so perky so early? Is it drugs?
“Life instead of the needle,” the detective returns, not even having to pause for thought.
Billy is sure this is also correct. The only question is what Allen knew, and why the killing had to be so public. As a warning to others who might share Allen’s knowledge? Ordinarily Billy wouldn’t care. Ordinarily he’s just the mechanic. Only nothing about the situation in which he now finds himself is ordinary.