He pauses at the intersection, looking in the direction the Transit van went. He sees nothing but a few cars and a UPS truck. Billy trots across the street, head lowered, helpless not to think of Route 10 in Fallujah, also known as IED Alley.
He turns onto Pearson, jogs one final block, and there’s his building. He has to cross the street to get to it, and he feels an insane itching on his right shoulderblade, as if someone – it would be Dana, of course – is zeroing the sight of a silenced pistol in on it. The near-constant wind that blows across the rubble-strewn vacant lot sends a coupon fold-in sheet from the local newspaper against one of his ankles and Billy gives a little skip of surprise.
He hurries along the frost-heaved walk of 658, then up the steps. He looks over his shoulder for the Transit van, sure he’ll see it, but the street is deserted. The sirens are all behind him, like the rest of his David Lockridge life. He tries one key and it’s wrong. He tries another and that one is wrong, too. He thinks of the phone he could have lost and the laptop he could have lost, the way he lost the baby shoe.
Easy, he thinks. Those are your Evergreen Street keys, you never took them off your keyring, so chill out. You’re almost home free.
The next one opens the foyer door. He steps inside and closes it. He looks out through a ragged mesh of lace curtain, maybe Beverly Jensen’s work. He sees nothing, sees nothing, sees a crow land on some of the jagged rubble across the street, sees the crow take off, sees nothing, sees a kid on a trike with his mother walking patiently beside him, sees another sheet of newspaper go cartwheeling across the patched pavement, has time to think the patched pavement of Pearson Street, and then he sees the Transit van, going slow. Billy holds perfectly still. He can see through the mesh, but Reggie in the passenger seat can’t see in. He might notice a sudden movement behind the lace curtain, though. Billy thinks the other one certainly would.
The Transit van moves on. Billy waits for its brake lights to flash. They don’t, and then it’s out of sight. He’s not sure he’s safe, but he thinks he is. Hopes. He goes downstairs and lets himself into the apartment. Not home, just a place to hide, but for the time being that’s good enough.
CHAPTER 11
1
The basement apartment’s one window is covered by a length of burgundy cloth. Billy pushes it aside on its rod and sits down, thinking again that the apartment is like a submarine and this window is his periscope. He stays on the couch for fifteen minutes, arms folded across his chest, waiting for the Transit van to come back. It may even stop if Dana, who is no fool, decides the place might be worth checking out. Unlikely, when there are several rundown neighborhoods ringing the central city, but not impossible.
Billy has become more and more sure if they find him they mean to kill him.
Billy has no handgun, although it would have been simple enough to get one. There are gun sales in the area almost every day of the week, it seems. Not that he would have set foot in the building where the sale was being held when he could have bought a reliable piece in the parking lot for cash, no questions asked. Something simple, a .32 or .38 that could be easily concealed. It wasn’t forgetfulness in that case, he just hadn’t foreseen a situation where he might need one.
Although, he thinks, if you changed the plan without telling Nick, you must have foreseen something.
If they do come back – paranoid, but within the realm of possibility – what could Billy do about it? Not much. There’s a butcher knife in the kitchen. And a meat fork. He could use the meat fork on the first one in, and he knows that would be Reggie. The easy one. Then Dana would do him.
When fifteen minutes have passed and the bogus DPW truck hasn’t returned, Billy decides they have either moved on to another part of the city, maybe to check out the house on Evergreen Street, or have gone back to the McMansion to await further orders from Nick. He closes the curtain, shutting out the view, and looks at his watch. It’s twenty to eleven. How the time flies when you’re having fun, he thinks.
Channels 2 and 4 are broadcasting the usual morning drivel, but with crawls about the shooting and the explosions running across the bottom of the screen. The real motherlode is Channel 6, where they have trashed their morning shows to go live at the scene. They’ve got the goods to do that because someone in their news department dispatched a crew to the courthouse to cover Allen’s arraignment, and didn’t send them to Cody when the warehouse fire broke out. It might have been neglect or outright laziness, you didn’t wind up as the head of news in a small border south city like Red Bluff because you were Walter Cronkite, but whoever was in charge is going to look mighty wise in retrospect.