Around three-thirty someone comes to the door. Billy stands behind it after first looking at Martinez with a finger to the lips of the Melania mask. Martinez nods. It’s got to be Tripp Donovan because it’s too early for Hank. The key rattles in the lock. Donovan is whistling. Billy holds the Ruger by the barrel and raises it to the side of his face.
Donovan comes in, still whistling. He’s looking very young-man-about-town in his designer jeans and short leather coat, the picture finished off to perfection by the monogrammed briefcase in his hand and the scally cap perched jauntily on his dark hair. He sees Martinez in the bungalow chair with his hands bound together and stops whistling. Billy steps forward and clubs him with the butt of the gun. Not too hard.
Donovan stumbles forward but doesn’t go down like the guys on TV do when they get pistol-whipped. He turns around, eyes wide, hand to the back of his head. Now Billy is pointing the business end of the gun at him. Donovan looks at his hand. There’s a smear of blood on it.
‘You hit me!’
‘Better than what I got,’ Martinez says in a grumbly tone that’s almost funny.
‘Why are you wearing that mask?’
‘Put your hands together. Wrist to wrist.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ll shoot you if you don’t.’
Donovan puts his hands together wrist to wrist with no further argument. Billy tucks the Ruger into his belt at the front. Donovan rushes at him, which Billy expected. He steps aside and aids Donovan’s forward motion with a hearty push into the closed door. Donovan cries out. Billy grabs him by the collar of his trendy leather coat – perhaps purchased at Joseph A. Bank – and pulls him backward, tripping Tripp over one outstretched leg. He falls on his back. His nose is bleeding.
Billy kneels beside him, first putting Don Jensen’s gun in his belt at the back so Donovan can’t make a grab for it, then holding out one of the ties. ‘Put your hands together, wrist to wrist.’
‘No!’
‘Your nose is bleeding but not broken. Put your hands together or I’ll fix that.’
Donovan puts his hands together. Billy binds his wrists and then calls Alice to tell her two down and one to go. He doesn’t put Donovan on the phone because Donovan doesn’t seem like he’s ready to apologize. At least not yet.
10
Tripp Donovan, sitting on the love-seat, keeps trying to engage Billy in conversation. He says he knows why Billy is here, but whatever that girl Alice told him is total self-protecting bullshit. She was horny, she wanted it, she got it, everyone parted friends, end of story.
Billy nods agreeably. ‘You took her home.’
‘That’s right, we took her home.’
‘In Hank’s van.’
Donovan’s eyes shift at that. He’s got that magic mixture of charm and bullshit, it’s worked for him his whole life and he even expects it to work on the home invader in the Melania Trump mask, but he doesn’t like that question. It’s a knowing question.
‘No, the Love Machine’s broken down in the back parking lot.’
Billy says nothing. Martinez says nothing, and Donovan doesn’t see his roomie’s you fucked up look. Donovan is concentrating on Billy.
‘That a Pro?’ Nodding at the computer bag on the floor. ‘Sweet cruncher, man.’
Billy says nothing. He’s sweating inside the plastic shell of the mask and he can’t wait to get it off. He can’t wait to finish his business and get out of this swinging bachelor pad.
At quarter to five another key rattles in the lock and in comes the third little pig, a small and dapper porker in a black three-piece suit set off by a tie as red as the blood on Alice Maxwell’s thighs. Hank makes no trouble. He sees the blood on Donovan’s face and Martinez’s swollen eyes and when Billy tells him to hold out his hands he does so with only token protest and allows Billy to zip-tie his wrists. Billy leads him to the round table.
‘Here we are,’ Billy says. ‘All in our places with bright shiny faces.’
‘There’s money in my desk,’ Donovan says. ‘In my room. Also some dope. World-class coke, man. An eightball.’
‘I’ve got some cash, too,’ Hank says. ‘Only fifty, but …’ He gives a what-can-you-do shrug. Billy can almost like this one. Stupid considering what he did but true. The flesh under his eyes and around his mouth is white with terror, but he’s behaving and putting up a good front.
‘Oh, you know this isn’t about money.’