Billy Summers

by Stephen King

  “Because of that man’s mother. Marge.”

  “Yes, Marge. I knew she’d head for the main gate, I had to believe she knew the code to open it, and I left the gate guard—”

  “Sal.”

  “Right, him. I left him with his shotgun. So I only had time for the abridged version.”

  “Then tell me that.”

  “Klerke was old. Not old old, but old for his age and with a host of medical problems. He needed to name a successor—to keep his board happy, I guess—and most people expected it would be Patrick, the elder son. But Patrick was a heavy drug user and a party animal who used to get through his yearly stipend before the end of April and come to daddy on the first of May, begging for more.”

  Alice smiles. “He maybe should have gone to his mother. They can be a softer touch.”

  “Patrick’s mother died of an overdose. Pills. Or maybe it was suicide. Maybe even murder. Klerke’s divorced from the younger son’s mother. That’s Devin.”

  “I think he was on TV, too. Made a statement or something.”

  Billy nods. “What Nick told me reminded me of the story of the grasshopper and the ant, with the addition of a father smart enough to tell the difference. Patrick was the grasshopper. Devin, his younger brother by four years, was the ant. Industrious and smart. Nose to the grindstone. Shoulder to the wheel. Klerke called his sons together and told them his decision. Patrick was furious. As far as he was concerned, he was the one with the brilliant ideas to move WWE forward and his brother was nothing but an office drone.”

  Billy thinks of the mean little eyes in the photograph and imagines Klerke saying something delicate like You picked up most of your brilliant ideas from your libtard hip-hop wannabe friends while you were snorting dope. However he put it, he’d driven his older son into a rage. In most cases it would have been an impotent rage, but Roger Klerke had an Achilles heel, and Patrick either knew about it then or found out shortly thereafter.

  “I don’t know how he knew about it, Nick didn’t tell me. Maybe he didn’t know, either. Maybe Patrick got a clue from someone in his lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-foolish circle of friends. Maybe he overheard something. But he wasn’t entirely dumb, because he was able to follow the dots to a certain small house outside of Tijuana.”

  “A whorehouse.”

  “Not exactly. It was privately funded by Klerke himself, Nick said, for his exclusive use. He paid tribute money, a lot of it, each year to the Félix brothers, who basically run the Tijuana Cartel. There may have been certain other inducements, as well. Money laundering would be my guess. It doesn’t matter. Nick said Klerke never brought friends, because word gets around.”

  “Was Patrick doing business with the cartels?” Alice asks. “Moving dope for them? There’s a word for it.”

  “Muling,” Billy says. “He might have been.”

  “He could have heard about it from one of them. That might have been his loose end.”

  Billy pats her shoulder. “That’s good. We’ll never know for sure, but it makes more sense than the hearing-it-from-a-friend idea.”

  She smiles at the compliment, but only a little. She knows where this is going, Billy thinks. A girl a little less intelligent might not, a girl who hadn’t been recently raped might not, but this girl checks both boxes.

  “Klerke has a taste for young girls.”

  “How young?” she asks.

  “Nick said thirteen or fourteen.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It gets worse. Do you want to hear?”

  “No, but tell me anyway.”

  “There was at least one occasion—he told Nick it was only one, for what that’s worth—when there was a girl who was a lot younger.”

  “Twelve?” Her face says that no matter how much of a shit that jowly old lizard may be, she wants to believe that’s the limit of his depravity.

  “According to Klerke she was no more than ten, and Patrick had the pictures to prove it. What Roger Klerke told Nick at their meeting on that island was that he was ‘pretty drunk and just wanted to see what it was like.’ ”

  “Dear God.”

  “The rest of it is as simple as dominos falling over. Patrick had the pictures on a thumb drive. Swore they existed nowhere else, that the man who took them was dead and buried in the desert. He told his father that he wanted to be CEO. He also wanted a transfer of most of his father’s voting stock, which would render meaningless any objections the board might have to the new direction he wanted to take WWE in. He wanted his brother—‘my asshole brother’ is what he called him, according to Nick—transferred to the Chicago offices, which I guess in the media business is like Siberia. He wanted those changes effective as of January 1, 2019, and he wanted it all in writing. Then and only then would he turn over the flash drive with the pictures.”

  “How could Klerke be sure there weren’t more pictures?”

  Billy shrugged. “Maybe there were. In any case, what choice did he have? And Patrick must have been at least bright enough to know that if the pictures came out, the company stock would tank no matter who was CEO.”

  Alice thinks that over and says, “Like mutually assured destruction. In a way.”

  “I guess. What I know from Nick is that Klerke agreed, and once his lawyer had a letter announcing his intentions to basically retire and turn the company over to his older son, and once that letter was published in the board minutes, Patrick gave the thumb drive to his father. Who destroyed it. Patrick never foresaw his father going to Nick Majarian and hiring a man to kill him. His imagination just didn’t stretch that far.”

  “It isn’t the grasshopper and the ant. More like a Shakespeare play. One of the bloody ones.”

  “With Patrick dead, when Klerke steps down—given his health it won’t be long—Devin will take over.”

  He pulls into a service area, because the Mitsubishi needs gas and because his throat is dry and he wants a cold drink. Alice checks out the Quik-Pik shelves and uses the restroom while he pays. When she gets back into the car she’s crying.

  “I’m sorry.” Her purchases are in a little white bag. She takes out a pack of Kleenex, wipes her nose, and tries on a smile. “But while I was in the bathroom I made us a reservation at the Ramada Inn in Wendover. It’s supposed to be nice.”

  “Good. And you don’t have to be sorry.”

  “I keep thinking about that horrible man with a child. He deserves to die.”

  Billy thinks, That’s the plan.

  4

  By the time he finishes—again weaving what he knows from Nick into what he deduced on his drive back from Promontory Point—some of the cars on the highway are showing headlights.

  “Klerke told Nick he wanted the best man for the job, a guy who’d do it and get away clean and not talk about it afterward. Nick said he knew a guy—”

  “You?”

  “He said he thought of me first, but never even went to Bucky with it. He said he was pretty sure I wouldn’t do it because Patrick Klerke was maybe not bad enough to fit my scruples. He put it to Allen as an ordinary cleaning job.”

  “That’s what he called it? Cleaning?”

  “Yes. The figure they settled on was eighty thousand dollars, twenty before and the rest after. Basically the same method of payment I was promised, but on a smaller scale.”

  Alice is nodding. “He didn’t want Allen to know what a big deal this was. How much was involved.”

  “Sure. Nick felt okay about it, because Allen was what I always pretended to be, just your basic mechanic who fixed problems with a gun instead of socket wrenches and a timing computer. He gave Allen photos of Patrick’s apartment building, photos of the apartment itself, the code to the service entrance, the car exchange after the job was done, anything he might need to do the job clean and quick.” Billy pauses. “Nick didn’t tell me all that, but I’ve worked for him before. I knew the drill. What he didn’t tell Allen was why and Allen didn’t ask.”

  “But he asked Pa
trick, didn’t he? Before he killed him.”

  Billy thinks that over. “It’s possible, but it seems unlikely for a guy like Joel Allen. He’d be a lot more likely to just do the job. No conversation, just point and shoot.”

  “Maybe Patrick offered him the thumb drive in exchange for…” Alice stops. “Except he couldn’t, could he? He didn’t have it. Thought he was home free once his appointment was announced to the board.”

  “Nick doesn’t know what happened, and Allen can’t tell us how he found out about Roger Klerke and the kid in Tijuana, but I have an idea. Allen was told to make it look like a robbery, maybe committed by some fellow user who met Patrick along the Los Angeles drug trail. He was told to take any money or jewelry he found. He was supposed to toss the jewelry, watches and gold chains and shit like that, but he could keep the money as a little bonus. So after he killed Patrick he searched the place and might have found a picture, maybe more than one, that Patrick kept in reserve. At least one that showed his father’s face nice and clear while he was… doing what he was doing. Does that make sense?”

  Alice nods hard enough to make her hair bounce. “I bet it happened just that way. Even if the picture or pictures were in a safe, Allen could have been given the combination with the rest of his background info. Would he really have recognized the man in the picture?”

  Based on what he knows about Joel Allen, Billy doesn’t see him as the sort of guy who watched the WWE business channel or read the Bloomberg report. “Probably not at first, but it wouldn’t have taken him long to find out. A few Google searches would have shown him that he’d killed the son of a billionaire who also happened to be a pedophile.”

  Alice’s eyes are intent. She’s totally into this now. Billy thinks again that a rinky-dink business school in Red Bluff would have wasted a lot of potential. And hairdressing school? Forget it.

  “So this paid killer, this mechanic, this cleaner, had two things worth money—that the father was almost certainly the one who paid to have the son killed, and the father also raped a child. Because he ‘just wanted to see what it was like.’ ” Some of the light goes out of her eyes when she says that.

  “I doubt if he tried to turn what he knew into cash, although he might have down the line. He would’ve known that blackmailing someone as rich and powerful as Roger Klerke would be a tremendous risk. I think he kept it as a hole card. Which he eventually had to play not for money but because of his own stupidity.”

  Double stupidity, Billy thinks, if you count in the lady writer.

  “Almost like he wanted to be caught,” Alice says. “Some repeat killers do.” She rewinds what she’s said and puts a hand on his wrist. “Ones without a moral code, I mean.”

  Is that what you call it? Billy wonders.

  “I doubt if Allen wanted to get caught. And if he was able to figure out what made that picture such a valuable commodity, I guess he wasn’t completely stupid, either.”

  “If he wasn’t completely stupid, why kill that man over a poker game? And why attack that woman in LA?”

  Well, Billy thinks, Allen believed the poker game guy was cheating. And the lady writer pepper-sprayed him. But neither of those things goes to the heart of Alice’s question.

  “My guess? Simple arrogance. Do you want to stop somewhere for dinner?”

  She shakes her head. “Let’s drive straight through and eat when we get there. I want to hear the rest.”

  5

  Billy feels surer about this part even though it’s still mostly guesswork. After Allen was arrested for assault and attempted rape in LA, he must have known he’d be connected almost immediately with the murder and attempted murder back east in Red Bluff. There was a lively trade in cell phones in the county lockup, most of them burners. Allen could have gotten hold of one, called Nick, and said that if he had to go back to Red Bluff and stand trial for murder in a death penalty state, a very rich man, initials RK, was probably going to spend the rest of his life in jail, possibly getting buggered by Harvey Weinstein. And if anything happened to Allen in LA lockup, RK was going to be very, very sorry.

  “Nick got in touch with Roger Klerke. Klerke—almost certainly through an intermediary—hired an expensive lawyer to fight extradition. Nick and Klerke had another meeting at that island and laid out any number of possible scenarios. I imagine they had the expensive legal talent on speed-dial. If so, he would have told them what Nick probably knew already, that he could draw out the extradition fight for quite awhile, but in the end Allen was going to be put on a plane and sent back to face trial. Because first-degree murder trumps aggravated assault.”

  “That’s when Majarian hired you.”

  “Around then, yes. To get me placed where I could eventually take the shot. By then Allen was out of gen-pop because he’d been attacked. By arrangement, I’d guess. Maybe his idea, probably his lawyer’s. Either way he wound up having his own private accommodation while the extradition fight was ongoing. He met regularly with the expensive lawyer, who told him everything was under control. Or would be, once he was back east. Either an escape would be arranged, along with a completely new identity, or certain wheels would be greased, certain witnesses would be bribed, certain key evidence would disappear, and Allen would walk free as himself.”

  “And he had no reason to doubt it.”

  Billy shakes his head. “Guys like Allen doubt everything. But he had no choice.”

  “What about the picture? Or pictures? His hole card?”

  “I think both Nick and Klerke had people looking for that all the time the extradition fight was going on. That was one reason why the extradition fight was going on. And I think they eventually found it, or them. All I know for sure is that no federal marshals have turned up to arrest Roger Klerke.”

  “Maybe we’ll turn up first,” Alice says.

  Billy hates that pronoun, but he doesn’t correct it. He only has a ghost of a plan, and when it comes more into focus, maybe he can leave Alice out of it. He remembers what Bucky said: She’s in love with you and she’ll follow you as long as you let her and if you let her you’ll ruin her.

  6

  “Ohhh, look—it’s a palace!” So says Alice when they pull into the Wendover Ramada Inn at quarter of nine that Sunday night. “I mean, compared to the last three motels.”

  Their adjoining rooms are far from palatial, but they’re nice, and the hallway carpet looks as if it’s been vacuumed recently.

  “Will you be able to sleep?” she asks.

  “Yes.” He doesn’t actually know if that’s true.

  Her eyes are fixed on his. “I’ll sleep with you, if you want.”

  Billy thinks of Roger Klerke’s taste for the young ones—on at least one pestiferous occasion a very young one—and shakes his head. “It’s a kind offer and much appreciated, but better not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Still looking directly at him, and is he tempted? Of course he is.

  “Thank you, Alice, but no. Will you be able to sleep?”

  “Will we be back at Bucky’s tomorrow?”

  “Should be.”

  “Then I’ll be able to sleep. I like him. He’s, you know, safe.”

  Billy isn’t sure she’d feel that way if she knew even half the deals Elmer “Bucky” Hanson has been involved in over the years, but he knows what she means and thinks she’s right. She and Bucky have made a connection.

  “Goodnight.” He kisses her for the first time, on the corner of the mouth.

  “Goodnight. Oh, and here.” She hands him the white Quik-Pik bag. “Baby oil and Handi Wipes. Clean off as much of that goop as you can, then get in the shower. You won’t get it all, but you can get most of it.” She goes to the door, uses her keycard, then turns back. “And leave a good tip, because more of it will come off on the sheets.”

  “Okay.” He wouldn’t have thought of that himself, although he probably would have tomorrow, when he looked at the bed.

  She starts to go in, then loo
ks at him over her shoulder. Her face is solemn but calm. “I love you.”

  Billy doesn’t even think of lying. He tells her he loves her, too, then goes into his room.

  7

  He calls Nick. He’s not sure Nick will answer, but he does.

  “Who’s this?” And then, without waiting for a reply: “Is it you?”

  “It’s me. Are you getting things right there?”

  “They will be by tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t cool anybody that I didn’t have to.”

  A long pause with just the sound of breathing. Then Nick says, “I know.”

  “What’s up with Frank?”

  “In the hospital. His mother called my pet medic. Doc Rivers sent a private ambulance. She went with him.”

  “That’s a hard woman.”

  “Marge?” Nick gives a short laugh. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  I believe I do, Billy thinks. If I’d hit her in the back of the head with that Glock instead of Frank, it probably would have bounced right off.

  “Is our fat friend still in the land of the living?”

  “He was as of an hour ago when I called to tell him about what happened. He said I should have taken you more seriously. I said I thought four made guys—plus Marge—was pretty serious. Why do you ask?”

  “Did he procure for Mr. K when he came to Vegas? It seems like the kind of job you’d delegate to him.”

  “You are a lot smarter than I thought,” Nick says, as if talking to himself. “Smarter than anybody thought. Except maybe for Pigs.”

  “Did he or didn’t he?”

  “Well, yeah. Kinda. Pigs’d get with Judy Blatner when he knew K was coming. They’d go over her picture books, try to find one he’d like. Ten, twelve years ago he woulda wanted two, but his stamina’s declined. He ain’t what you’d call a gentleman, but he does prefer blonds.”

  “And they have to be young.”

  “Well duh,” Nick says. “But the girls he went with in Vegas were never under eighteen. Judy’s been around a long time and runs a legal escort service. That means she can’t say the girls are for sex, but she doesn’t have to. Everyone knows. She steers clear of jailbait, though. Like it was poison. Which it is.”