Billy Summers [en]

But Billy feels it’s a risk worth taking, because they’ll certainly believe he’s in hiding by now. They may even think he’s left the city. And if they should happen to cruise by him, the Dalton Smith rig should work. Or so he hopes.

He’s decided he needs a burner phone after all, and he doesn’t beat himself up for having thrown away a perfectly good one that morning. Only God can foresee everything, and it’s not on a level of stupidity like almost leaving that alley wearing his Colin White gear. In work like Billy’s – wetwork, not to put too fine a point on it – you make your plan and hope the stuff you don’t foresee won’t show up to bite you in the ass. Or put you in a little green room with an IV in your arm.

I can’t get nailed, he thinks. If I do, those fucking plants are going to die.

Everything in the sad little strip mall is closed except for the Zoney’s convenience store, and Hot Nails is never going to re-open at all. The windows are soaped over and there’s a legal notice of bankruptcy taped to the door.

Two Hispanic dudes checking out the Beer Cave are the only other customers. There’s a stack of boxed FastPhones between the display of energy shots and the one holding fifty different varieties of snackin’ cakes. Billy grabs a phone and takes it to the checkout. The woman who got stuck up, Wanda something, isn’t behind the counter. It’s a Middle Eastern-looking dude instead.

‘That it?’

‘That’s it.’ As Dalton Smith, he tries to speak in a slightly higher register. It’s another way of reminding himself of who he’s supposed to be.

The clerk rings him up. It comes to just under eighty-four dollars, with a hundred and twenty minutes thrown in. It would have been as much as thirty bucks cheaper at Walmart, but beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, in Wally World you have to worry about face recognition. It’s everywhere now. This place has video cams, but Billy’s betting they recycle every twelve or twenty-four hours. He pays cash. When you’re on the run – or in hiding – cash is king. The clerk wishes him a nice night. Billy wishes him the same.

It’s now dark enough that the few cars he meets are running with headlights, so he can’t see who’s behind them. There’s an urge, or maybe it’s an instinct, to drop his head each time one approaches, but that would look furtive. He can’t pull down the brim of the gimme cap, either, because he’s not wearing it. He wants the blond wig to do its thing. He’s not Billy Summers, the man both the police and Nick’s hardballs are looking for. He’s Dalton Smith, a small-time computer geek who lives on the po’ side of town and has to keep pushing his hornrims up on his nose. He’s overweight from eating Doritos and Little Debbies in front of a computer screen and if he puts on another twenty or thirty pounds, his walk will become a waddle.

It’s a good disguise, not overdone, but he still breathes a sigh of relief when he closes the foyer door of 658 behind him. He goes downstairs, turns off the overhead light, and pushes back the curtain of his periscope window. No one is out there. The street is deserted. Of course if he’s been spotted, they (it’s Reggie and Dana he’s thinking of, not Frankie and Paulie or the police) could be moving in from the back, but there’s no sense worrying about what you can’t control. Doing that is a good way to go crazy.

Billy closes the narrow curtain, turns the light back on, and sits in the room’s single easy chair. It’s ugly, but like many ugly things in life, it’s also comfortable. He puts the phone on the coffee table and looks at it, wondering if he’s thinking straight or just indulging in paranoia. In many ways paranoia would be better. Time to find out.

He frees the phone from its box, puts in the battery, and plugs it into the wall to charge. Unlike his previous burner, it’s a flip phone. Kind of old-school, but Billy likes it. With a flip phone if you don’t like what somebody is saying, you can actually hang up on them. Childish, maybe, but strangely satisfying. Charging doesn’t take long. Thanks to Steve Jobs, who got pissed when he couldn’t use a device the second he took it out of the box, off-the-rack devices like this come with a fifty per cent charge already cooking inside.

The phone wants to know what language he prefers. Billy tells it English. It asks if he wants to join a wireless network. Billy says no. He plugs in the minutes he paid for, making the necessary call to FastPhone HQ to finish the transaction. His minutes are good for the next three months. Billy hopes by then he’s on a beach somewhere and the only phone in his possession is the one that goes with his Dalton Smith credit cards.

Home and dry. That would be nice.

He tosses the phone from hand to hand, thinking about the day Frank Macintosh and Paul Logan took him to the house in Midwood, a trip he now wishes he had never taken. Nick was there to greet him, but not outside. Billy thinks of his first visit to the rented McMansion, Nick once more there to greet him with open arms, but again not outside. Next he thinks of the night Nick told him about the flashpots and pitched his getaway plan – Just get in the back of the van, Billy, relax and take a ride to Wisconsin. There had been Champagne to start and Baked Alaska to finish. A service couple, probably local and maybe married, cooked the meal and served it. Those two had seen Nick, but as far as they knew, he was a businessman from New York who was down here to do some kind of deal. He gave the woman some money and they were on their way.