I showed it to him and said I thought it had saved my life.
‘You keep that thing safe, brah,’ Taco said. ‘And keep it with you.’
I did. Until the Funhouse, that November. I looked for it just as we started to clear that house in the Industrial Sector and it was gone.
8
Billy finally shuts down and stands at the periscope window of his landlocked submarine, looking out across the little patch of lawn, to the street, to the vacant lot on the other side where the train station once stood. He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing here. Maybe quite awhile. His brain feels blasted, as if he’s just finished taking the world’s longest and most complicated test.
How many words did he write today? He could check the counter on his document – now Billy’s story instead of Benjy’s – but he’s not that OCD. It was a lot, leave it at that, and he’s still got a long way to go. There was the April assault that started less than a week after he killed Jassim, followed by the pullback when the politicians got cold feet. Then the final nightmare that was Operation Phantom Fury. Forty-six days of hell. He won’t put it that way （if he even gets that far） because it’s a cliché, but hell is what it was. Culminating in the Funhouse, which seemed to summarize all the rest. He might skim through some of it but not the Funhouse, because the Funhouse was the point of Fallujah. And what exactly was the point? That it was pointless. Just another house that had to be cleared, but the price they paid.
A few people walk by on Pearson Street. A few cars drive by. One is a police car, but it doesn’t concern Billy. It’s moving leisurely, heading nowhere special and in no hurry to get there. He is still amazed that this part of the city, which is so close to downtown, feels so deserted. On Pearson Street, rush hour is hush hour. He supposes that most people who work in the city’s center haul ass to the suburbs when the workday is done – nicer places like Bentonville, Sherwood Heights, Plateau, Midwood. Even Cody, where he won a little girl a stuffed toy. The neighborhood of which he is now a part doesn’t even have a name, at least that he knows of.
He needs to catch up. Billy flips on Channel 8, the NBC affiliate, wanting to stay away from 6, which will still be running the footage of Allen being shot. 8 comes on with a BREAKING NEWS logo and a soundtrack of ominous violins and thumping drums. Billy doubts that there’s any serious news breaking with the assassin still at large. The assassin has spent the day writing a story that is in grave danger of becoming a book.
It turns out there have been developments, but nothing Billy hasn’t expected and not anything that warrants the disaster soundtrack. One of the anchors says that local businessman Kenneth Hoff has been implicated in ‘the widening assassination conspiracy.’ The other anchor says that Kenneth Hoff’s apparent suicide may have been murder. Holmes, your deductions astound me, Billy thinks.
The anchors hand it over to a correspondent standing across the street from Hoff’s home, an expensive crib that is still several rungs below Nick’s rented McMansion on the grandiosity ladder. The correspondent is a leggy blonde who looks like she might have gotten out of journalism school the week before. She explains that Kenneth Hoff has been ‘positively linked’ to the Remington 700 rifle that was used to kill Joel Allen. This is in addition to plenty of other links to the presumed assassin, who has now been ‘positively identified’ as William Summers, a Marine veteran of the Iraq war and winner of several medals.
Bronze Star and Silver Star, Billy thinks. Also a Purple Heart with a star on the ribbon, indicating not just one wound suffered in battle but two. He can understand them not wanting to do that particular rundown. He’s the villain of the piece, so why muddle things up with a heroic background? Muddling things up is for novels, not news reports.
There are side-by-side pictures. One is the photo Irv Dean took of him at the Gerard Tower security stand on his first day as the building’s resident writer. The other shows him as a new recruit, looking both solemn and goofy in his jarhead haircut. It was taken on Photo Day. In it he looks even younger than the blonde correspondent. Probably he was. They must have gotten it from some Marine archive, because Billy had no family to give a copy to on Family Day.
Local police believe that Summers may have fled the city, the correspondent says, and because he may also have fled the state, the FBI is now on the case. With that the blonde sends it back to the studio, where the anchors next display a picture of Giorgio Piglielli, and yes, they give his mob nickname, as if Georgie Pigs is an alias he might be traveling under. He’s been linked to organized crime operations in Las Vegas, Reno, Los Angeles, and San Diego, but hasn’t yet been apprehended. The subtext is that if you see a middle-aged Italian guy who goes 370, possibly wearing alligator shoes and drinking a milkshake, get in touch with your local law enforcement.