Billy hits the rack and lies staring up into the dark with his hands under the pillow. He’s starting to understand why Nick was attracted to Ken Hoff and why Ken Hoff was attracted to Nick. Nick can be charming （that million-dollar grin）， and he’s smarter than the average bear, but when you get right down to it, he’s a hyena and what hyenas are good at is sizing up the passing herd and picking out the one that’s limping. The one that will soon fall behind. Ken Hoff is the patsy. Not for the killing, he’ll have a cast-iron alibi for that, but when the cops start looking for the guy who ordered the killing, they won’t find Nick. They’ll find Ken. Billy decides that’s okay with him.
He’s used up the reservoir of cool under the pillow, so he rolls over on his right side and goes to sleep almost at once.
Being a good neighbor is tiring.
CHAPTER 4
1
The next day Billy hooks up his new MacBook in the office on the fifth floor and downloads a solitaire app. There are a dozen different versions. He opts for Canfield and rigs the computer to leave a five-second pause before each move. If Nick or Giorgio should choose to look in and monitor his activities （or maybe Frankie Elvis would be given that task）， they will have no idea the computer is playing solo.
Billy goes to the window and looks out. Both sides of Court Street are lined with parked cars, many of them police cruisers. The umbrella-shaded tables outside the Sunspot Café are filled with people eating doughnuts and Danish. A few people are descending the wide courthouse steps, but a lot more are on their way up. Some trot, showing off their aerobic fitness. Others plod. Most of the plodders are lawyers, identifiable by their huge, boxy briefcases. Court will soon be in session.
As if to underline this, a small bus – once red, now wash pink – trundles slowly down the choked street, passes the steps, and stops outside the smaller door at the righthand end of the big stone building. The door of the bus folds open. A cop gets out, then a conga-line of prisoners in orange jumpsuits, then another cop. The jumpsuits perp-walk around the bus’s snub nose. The door of the employees’ entrance opens and the men in the jumpsuits go inside, where they’ll wait to be arraigned. Interesting, and worth filing away, but Billy believes Nick is right: when Allen comes, he’ll be escorted up the steps to the main entrance. Not that it matters. The shot will be almost the same either way. What’s important is that Court Street is a busy place during the working week. There may be fewer people out and about in the afternoons, but most arraignments take place in the morning.
You’ve always been fucking Houdini when it comes to disappearing after the hit, Nick said. By the time things start to settle, you’ll be long gone.
He’d better be, because disappearing is part of what they’re paying him for. A large part. Nick surely knows that using Billy has certain advantages if he botches the disappearance. He has no friends or relatives that can pressure him – or be used to pressure him – into giving up the name of his employer. And while Nick might consider Billy far from the brightest bulb in the chandelier, he knows his hired gun is smart enough to realize he can’t trade a name for a reduction to homicide in the second or manslaughter. When you shoot a man with a sniper rifle from the fifth floor of a building where you’ve been set up for weeks or months, there could be no argument about the charge. That’s premeditation in big red letters and only murder in the first would do.
Yet if Billy were caught there’s one offer the prosecution could make, and Nick would know that, too. This is a death penalty state. A smart DA might well offer Billy a shot at life in Rincon Correctional instead of the needle. If he talked. Billy supposes that if it came to that, he actually could still keep Nick out of it. He could name Ken Hoff, because Hoff wouldn’t live long if the cops grabbed Billy Summers coming out of Gerard Tower. Hoff might not live long in any case. When dealing with Nick Majarian’s ilk, patsies rarely did.
Billy might not live long even so, because safe is always better than sorry. He might fall down a flight of prison stairs with his hands cuffed behind his back. He might be stabbed in the shower with a sharpened toothbrush or have a bar of soap stuffed down his throat. He could hold his own against one guy, maybe even two, but faced with a posse of 88s or three or four widebodies from People Nation? No. And does he want to spend life in prison in any case? Also no. Better dead than caged. He guesses Nick knows that, too.
None of it will be an issue if he isn’t caught. He never has been, seventeen times he’s gotten away clean, but he’s never been faced with a situation like this one. It’s not like shooting from an alley with a car nearby to carry you away, the best route out of town carefully marked.