Once the stores are open, he and Alice go to the nearest Ulta Beauty. This time he’s the one who needs makeup, but he lets Alice do the buying. After that she wants to go to a casino. It’s a bad idea, but she looks so excited and hopeful that he can’t say no. ‘But not the big hotels and not the Strip,’ he says.
Alice consults her phone and directs them to Big Tommy’s Hotel and Gambling Hall in East Las Vegas. She’s carded before she’s allowed in and flashes her new Elizabeth Anderson DL with aplomb. As she wanders around, gawking at the roulette, craps, blackjack, and the ever-spinning Money Wheel, Billy checks around him for guys with a certain look. He doesn’t see any. Most of them out here in the boonies are moms and pops that could stand to lose a few.
He reflects again that Alice is a different girl from the one he brought in out of the pouring rain. On the way to being a better girl, and if what he’s planning goes wrong and she’s damaged more than she has been already, that’s on him. He thinks, I should just quit this shit and take her back to Colorado. Then he remembers Nick pitching him on the so-called ‘safe house,’ all the time knowing the ride to Wisconsin was going to last about six miles until Dana Edison put a bullet in his head. Nick needs to pay. And he needs to meet the real Billy Summers.
‘It’s so noisy!’ Alice says. Her cheeks are bright and her eyes are trying to look everywhere at once. ‘What should I do?’
After checking out the roulette table, Billy guides her there and buys her fifty dollars’ worth of chips, all the while telling himself bad idea, bad idea. Her beginner’s luck is phenomenal. In ten minutes she’s up two hundred dollars and people are cheering her on. Billy doesn’t care for that, so he guides her to a bank of five-dollar slots where she spends half an hour and wins another thirty bucks. Then she turns to him and says, ‘Push the button and look, push the button and look, rinse and repeat. It’s kinda stupid, isn’t it?’
Billy shrugs but can’t help smiling. He remembers Robin Maguire saying it’s only a grin when your teeth show, and then it’s nothing else.
‘You said it, not me,’ he says. And shows his teeth.
7
After the casino they go to the Century 16 and see not one movie but two, a comedy and an action flick. When they come out of that one, it’s almost dark.
‘How about something to eat?’ Alice asks.
‘Happy to stop somewhere if you want, but I’m full of popcorn and Sour Patch Kids.’
‘Maybe just a sandwich. Want to hear something nice about my mom?’
‘Sure.’
‘Every now and then, if I was good, we’d have what she called a special day. I could have pancakes with chocolate chips for breakfast and then do almost anything I wanted, like have an egg cream at the Green Line Apothecary, or get a stuffed animal – if it was cheap – or ride the bus to the end of the line, which I liked to do. Stupid kid, huh?’
‘No,’ Billy says.
She takes his hand, natural as anything, and swings it back and forth as they walk to the truck. ‘This day has been like that. Special.’
‘Good.’
Alice turns to him. ‘You better not get killed.’ She sounds absolutely fierce. ‘You just better not.’
‘I won’t,’ Billy says. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she agrees. ‘All okay.’
8
But that night she isn’t. Billy is sleeping just below the surface of wakefulness, or he never would have heard Alice’s knock. It’s light and tentative, almost not there at all. For a moment or two he thinks it’s part of the dream he’s having, something about Shanice Ackerman, then he’s back to the motel room on the outskirts of Vegas. He gets up, goes to the door, and looks through the peephole. She’s standing there in the baggy blue pajamas she bought on her shopping trip with Bucky. Her feet are bare and her hand is at her throat and he can hear her gasping. The gasping is louder than her knock was.
He opens up, takes her by the hand that’s not clasping her throat, and leads her into the room. As he closes the door he sings, ‘If you go down to the woods today … sing it with me, Alice.’
She shakes her head and tears in another breath. ‘—can’t—’
‘Yes you can. If you go down to the woods today …’
‘You better go …’ Whoop. ‘… in dis … dis …’ Whoop!
She’s swaying on her feet, close to fainting. Billy thinks it’s a wonder she didn’t pass out in the hall.