by Stephen King
“Scrubbies weren’t on the list. I didn’t know you were going on a cleaning binge in the rain.”
She closes the lid on the barbecue and looks at him with a hopeful expression. “Want to watch some more Blacklist?”
“Yes,” he says, so that’s what they do. Three more episodes. Between the second and third, she goes to the window and says, “It’s stopping. The sun’s almost out. I think we can barbecue tonight. Did you remember the salad?”
This is going to work, Billy thinks. It shouldn’t, it’s crazy, but it’s going to work for as long as it has to.
7
The sun comes out that afternoon, but slowly, as if it doesn’t really want to. Alice grills the chops, and although they’re a little burned outside and a little pink in the middle (“I’m not much of a cook, sorry,” she says), Billy eats all of his and then gnaws the bone. It’s good, but the salad is better. He doesn’t realize how starved he’s been for greens until he starts in on them.
They go upstairs and watch some more Blacklist, but she’s restless, moving from the couch to the seat-sprung easy chair that must be Don Jensen’s roost when he’s home, then back to the couch again. Billy reminds himself that she’s seen all these episodes before, probably with her mother and sister. He’s getting a little bored with it himself now that he’s figured out Red Reddington’s schtick.
“You ought to leave some money,” she says when they turn the TV off and get ready to go back downstairs. “For the Netflix.”
Billy says he will, although he guesses that thanks to their windfall, Don and Bev don’t exactly need financial help.
She tells him it’s his turn for the bed, and after a night on the couch he doesn’t argue the point. He’s asleep almost at once, but some deep part of his brain must have already trained itself to listen for her panic attacks, because he comes wide awake at quarter past two, hearing her whoop for breath.
He’s left the door ajar in case of this. He reaches it, then stops with his hand on the knob. She’s singing, very softly.
“If you go down to the woods today…”
She goes through the first verse twice. Her gasps for breath come further apart, then stop. Billy goes back to bed.
8
Neither of them knows—no one does—that a rogue virus is going to shut down America and most of the world in half a year, but by their fourth day in the basement apartment, Billy and Alice are getting a preview of what sheltering in place will be like. On that fourth morning, a day before Billy has decided to set sail into the golden west, he is doing his sprints up to the third floor and back. Alice has neatened up the apartment, which hardly needed it since neither of them is particularly messy. With that done she subsided to the couch. When Billy comes in, out of breath from half a dozen stair-sprints, she’s watching a cooking show on TV.
“Rotisserie chicken,” he says. “Looks good.”
“Why make it at home when you can buy one just as good at the supermarket?” Alice turns off the TV. “I wish I had something to read. Could you download a book for me? Maybe a detective story? On one of the cheap laptops, not yours.”
Billy doesn’t answer. An idea, audacious and frightening, has come into his head.
She misreads his expression. “I didn’t look or anything, I just know it’s yours because the case is scratched. The others look brand new.”
Billy isn’t thinking she tried to snoop in his computer. She’d never get past the password prompt, anyway. He’s thinking of the M151 spotter scope, and how he didn’t explain its purpose because what he was writing was only for himself. No one else would ever read it. Only now there is someone, and what harm can it do, considering what she knows about him already?
But it could do harm, of course. To him. If she didn’t like it. If she said it was boring and asked for something more interesting.
“What’s going on with you?” she asks. “You look weird.”
“Nothing. I mean… I’ve been writing something. Kind of a life story. I don’t suppose you’d want to—”
“Yes.”
9
He can’t bear to watch her sitting with his Mac Pro on her lap, reading the words he wrote here and in Gerard Tower, so he goes upstairs to the Jensens’ to spritz Daphne and Walter. He puts a twenty on the kitchen table, with a note that says For Netflix, and then just walks around. Paces around, actually, like an expectant father in an old cartoon. He looks at the Ruger in the drawer of Don’s nightstand, picks it up, puts it back, closes the drawer.
It’s ridiculous to be nervous, she’s a business school student, not a literary critic. She probably sleepwalked through her high school English courses, happy with Bs and Cs, and very likely the only thing she knows about Shakespeare is that his name rhymes with kick in the rear. Billy understands he’s downplaying her intelligence to protect his ego in case she doesn’t like it, and he understands that’s stupid because her opinion shouldn’t matter, the story itself shouldn’t matter, he’s got more important things to deal with. But it does.
Finally he goes back downstairs. She’s still reading, but when she looks up from the screen he’s alarmed to see her eyes are red, the lids puffy.
“What’s wrong?”
She wipes her nose with the heel of her hand, a childish gesture, oddly winning. “Did that really happen to your sister? Did that man really… stomp her to death? You didn’t make that up?”
“No. It happened.” Suddenly he feels like crying himself, although he didn’t cry when he wrote it.
“Is that why you saved me? Because of her?”
I saved you because if I’d left you in the street the cops would have eventually come here, he thinks. Except that’s probably not all the truth. Do we ever tell ourselves all of it?
“I don’t know.”
“I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Alice begins to cry. “I thought what happened to me was bad, but—”
“What happened to you was bad.”
“—but what happened to her is worse. Did you really shoot him?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good! And you got put in a home?”
“Yes. You can stop if it’s upsetting you.” But he doesn’t want her to stop and he’s not sorry for upsetting her. He’s glad. He reached her.
She grips the laptop as if afraid he might pull it away. “I want to read the rest.” Then, almost accusingly: “Why haven’t you been doing this instead of watching a stupid TV show upstairs?”
“Self-conscious.”
“All right. I get that, I feel the same, so stop looking at me. Let me read.”
He wants to thank her for crying, but that would be weird. Instead he asks what her sizes are.
“My sizes? Why?”
“There’s a Goodwill store close to Harps. I could get you a couple of pairs of pants and some shirts. Maybe a pair of sneakers. You don’t want me to watch you reading and I don’t want to watch you do it. And you have to be tired of that skirt.”
She gives him an impish grin and it makes her pretty. Or would, if not for the bruises. “Not afraid to go out without the umbrella?”
“I’ll take the car. Just remember if the cops come back instead of me, you were afraid to leave. I said I’d find you and hurt you.”
“You’ll come back,” Alice says, and writes down her sizes.
He takes his time in the Goodwill, wanting to give her time. He sees no one he knows, and no one pays particular attention to him. When he gets back, she’s finished. What took him months to write has taken her less than two hours to read. She has questions. None are about the spotter scope; they’re about the people, especially Ronnie and Glen and “that poor little one-eyed girl” in the House of Everlasting Paint. She says she likes how he wrote like a kid when he was a kid but changed it up when he got older. She says he should keep writing. She says she’ll go upstairs while he does it, watch TV and then take a nap. “I’m tired all the time. It’s crazy.”
“It’s not. Your body
is still working to get over what those fucks did to it.”
Alice stands in the doorway. “Dalton?” It’s what she calls him, even though she knows his real name. “Did your friend Taco die?”
“A lot of people did before it was over.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and closes the door behind her.
10
He writes. Her reaction lifts him. He doesn’t spill many words on the slack time between April and November of 2004, when they were supposed to be winning hearts and minds and won neither. He gives it a few more paragraphs, then goes to the part that still hurts.
They were pulled back for a couple of days after Albie’s death because there was talk of a ceasefire, and when the Hot Nine (now the Hot Eight, each of them with ALBIE S. written on his helmet) got back to base, Billy looked everywhere for the baby shoe, thinking he might have left it there. The others also looked, but it was nowhere to be found and then they went back in, back to the job of clearing houses, and the first three were okay, two empty and one inhabited only by a boy of twelve or fourteen who raised his hands and screamed No gun Americans, no gun love New York Yankees no shoot!
The fourth house was the Funhouse.
Billy stops there for exercise. He thinks maybe he and Alice will stay on Pearson Street a little longer, maybe three more days. Until he finishes with the Funhouse and what happened there. He wants to write that losing the baby shoe made no difference one way or the other, of course it didn’t. He also wants to write that his heart still doesn’t believe it.
He does a few stretches before running up and down the stairs, because he can’t go to a walk-in clinic if he pops a hamstring. He hears no TV behind the Jensens’ door, so Alice is probably sleeping. And healing, he hopes, although Billy doubts that any woman ever heals completely after being raped. It leaves a scar and he guesses that on some days the scar aches. He guesses that even ten years later—twenty, thirty—it still aches. Maybe it’s like that, maybe it’s like something else. Maybe the only men who can know for sure are men who have been raped themselves.
As he runs the stairs, he thinks about the men who did it to her, and they are men. She said that Tripp Donovan is twenty-four, and Billy guesses Jack and Hank, Donovan’s rapin’ roomies, must be about the same age. Men, not boys. Bad ones.
He comes back into the basement apartment out of breath, but feeling loose and warm, ready to get back at it for another hour or maybe even two. Before he can get going, his laptop bings with a text message. It’s from Bucky Hanson, now hunkered down in the Great Wherever. No money has been transferred. Don’t think it’s going to happen. What are you going to do?
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.”