‘Will you come back here before you go there?’
‘No, but I’ll stay in touch.’
‘Are we staying in these rooms tonight?’
‘I don’t know. It depends on how things go.’
She asks if he’s sure he wants to do this. Billy says he is, and it’s the truth.
‘Maybe it’s a bad idea.’
It might be, but Billy means to go through with it anyway, if he can. Those men owe.
‘Tell me no and I’ll back off.’
Instead of doing that, Alice takes one of his hands and squeezes. Hers is cold. ‘Be safe.’
He gets halfway down the hall, then turns back. There’s another question he forgot to ask. He knocks and she opens the door.
‘What does Tripp look like?’
She takes out her phone and shows him a picture. ‘I took this the night we went to the movies.’
The man who drugged her drink and raped her and, along with his two friends, tossed her out of the old van like a piece of trash, is holding up a bag of popcorn and smiling. His eyes sparkle. His teeth are white and even. Billy thinks he looks like an actor in a toothpaste ad.
‘Okay. What about the other two?’
‘One was short and had freckles. The other was much taller, with an olive complexion. I don’t remember which one was Jack and which one was Hank.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
7
The Airport Mall is just up the road from the motel. It’s anchored by a Walmart even bigger than the one in Midwood. Billy locks his car, mindful of the gun under the driver’s seat, and does his shopping. The mask is easy. Halloween is still weeks away, but the stores always put out their holiday shit well ahead of time. He also picks up a cheap pair of binoculars, a package of heavy-duty zip-ties, a pair of thin gloves, a Magic Wand hand mixer, and a can of Easy-Off oven cleaner. Outside, a couple of cops – real ones, not Wally World security guards – are drinking coffee and discussing outboard motors. Billy gives them a nod. ‘Afternoon, officers.’
They nod back and go on with their conversation. Billy walks fat until he’s well into the parking lot, then hurries to the Fusion. He transfers the gun and his purchases to his laptop case and drives the mile and a half to Landview Estates. It’s pretty upscale, the perfect place for swinging singles, but not upscale enough for a security booth manned by a rent-a-cop, and at this time of day the parking lot in front of Building C is fairly empty.
Billy pulls into a spot facing the door, takes off the fake stomach, and waits. After twenty minutes or so a sporty Kia Stinger pulls in and two young women get out with shopping bags. Billy raises the binoculars. They go to the door and push some buttons on the keypad, but one of them is in the way and Billy gets nothing. The next arrival, twenty minutes later, is a man … but not one Billy is looking for. This guy is in his fifties. He also stands between Billy and the pad, rendering the binocs useless.
This isn’t going to work, he thinks.
He could try going in with a legitimate resident （‘Would you hold the door a second? Thanks!’）， but that probably just works in the movies. Also, this is a slack time of day. Only two people have entered in forty minutes, and no one at all has come out.
Billy shoulders his computer bag and walks around to the back of the building. The first thing he sees in the smaller auxiliary parking lot is the van. Now he can read the bumper sticker: DEAD-HEADS SUCK. Unless the van’s broken down, always a possibility, at least one of these fuckwits is home.
There are two big garbage dumpsters on the left of what must be a service door. On the right is a lawn chair and a rusty little table with an ashtray on it. The door is propped open a few inches with a brick, because this is the kind of door that locks as soon as you shut it, and whoever comes out here to smoke doesn’t want to bother unlocking it each time he goes back in.
Billy goes to the door and peeks through the gap. He sees a dim hallway, no one in it. There’s music, Axl Rose wailing ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ Thirty feet or so along are open doors on the left and right. The music is coming from the one on the right. Billy enters and walks briskly down the hall. When you’re in a place where you don’t belong, you have to act like you do. The room on the left is a laundry, with a few coin-op washers and driers inside. The one on the right goes down to the basement.
Someone is down there, singing along with the music. And not just singing. Billy can’t see him but he can see his shadow, and the shadow is dancing. Someone, probably the building super, has taken a pause in whatever chore he came down to do – re-setting a breaker, hunting out a can of touch-up paint – to fantasize that he’s on Dancing with the Stars.