Although it never stopped you doing biz with him, Billy thinks. Or her. ‘Okay. I’m going to call you back.’
‘I’ll be here. I have no place to go and don’t want to. I hated it at first but now I love it. Like alcoholics love sobriety once they get a hold on it, I guess.’
‘How much weight have you lost?’
‘A hundred and ten pounds,’ Giorgio says with perhaps justifiable pride. ‘I got another ninety to go.’
‘You sound good. Not so wheezy. Maybe if you lose the weight you can skip the operation.’
‘Nope. My liver’s shot and it’s not coming back. They’ve scheduled the op for two days after feliz navidad, so you better finish whatever business you have with me before then. The doc down here is so honest it’s brutal. He’s saying my odds are sixty-forty against coming through.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’ But I won’t bother praying for you, Billy thinks.
‘I hope you get that child-molesting perv.’
Who you worked for, Billy thinks again.
He doesn’t have to say it because Giorgio says it for him. ‘Sure, I carried his water. It was a lot of money, and I wanted to live.’
‘Understood.’ Billy thinks, But hell will still be waiting for you, Georgie. And if there is such a place, I’ll probably meet you there. We’ll have a drink. Brimstone on the rocks.
‘I always had an idea that stupid act of yours was a shuck.’
Billy says, ‘We’ll talk soon.’
‘Just don’t wait too long,’ Giorgio says.
3
It’s time to fill Alice in on what he has in mind, and Bucky deserves to be a part of the conversation. He tells them at the kitchen table, over coffee. When he finishes, he advises her to think about it. Alice says she doesn’t need to, she’s in.
Bucky gives Billy a reproachful look that says you turned her to the dark side after all, but he doesn’t say anything.
‘You said you got carded in bars, didn’t you?’ Billy asks her.
‘Yes, but I’ve only been in a couple. I only turned twenty-one the month before you … you know, met me.’
‘Never had a fake ID?’
‘Wouldn’t have worked,’ Bucky says. ‘I mean, look at her.’
They both look at her. Alice blushes and casts her eyes down.
‘How old would you say?’ Billy asks Bucky. ‘I mean, if you didn’t know?’
Bucky considers. ‘Eighteen. Nineteen at a stretch. Probably not twenty.’
Billy says to her, ‘How young could you make yourself look? If you really tried?’
The question interests her enough to forget she’s being studied – face and body – by two men. Of course the question interests her. At twenty-one she has undoubtedly considered how she might make herself look older and more sophisticated, but younger? Why would she?
‘I could get an elastic binder to make my boobs smaller, I guess. The kind that trans men wear.’ The flush returns. ‘I know they’re not that big anyway, but a binder would make me look, you know, almost flat. Isn’t that what Klerke likes? And my hair …’ She clasps it in one hand. ‘I could cut it. Not pixie short, but enough to put it in a little ponytail. Like a high school girl.’
‘Clothes?’
‘I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. No makeup, or not much. Maybe some pink bubblegummy lipstick …’
Billy says, ‘Do you think you could get down to fifteen?’
‘No way,’ Bucky says. ‘Seventeen, maybe.’
‘I might be able to do better than seventeen,’ Alice says, getting up. ‘Excuse me, I need a mirror.’
When she’s gone, Bucky leans across the table and speaks very quietly. ‘Don’t get her killed.’
‘I’m not planning on it.’
‘Plans go wrong.’
4
The next day Billy calls Giorgio again from the chilly summerhouse. It has occurred to him that he might not have to use Alice at all. He’s a sniper, after all, long-distance delivery his specialty. He keeps his eyes on the picture as they talk, half-expecting the hedge animals to move. They don’t.
He begins by asking Giorgio if he could put his sniper skills to work in the matter of Roger Klerke.
‘Not a chance. His place on Montauk Point is a forty-acre estate. Makes Nick’s place in Nevada look like a tenement.’
Billy is disappointed but not surprised. ‘That’s where he is now?’