Billy Summers полностью

‘I don’t …’ Whoop! ‘… remember it.’

‘If you go down to the woods today …’ He raises his hands and wiggles his fingers in a come-on gesture.

‘If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. Did you get some stuff?’

‘I did.’

‘Pork chops?’

‘Yes. At first I thought you were gone.’

‘Well I’m not. I don’t suppose you got any Scrubbies, did you? Because this is the last one from upstairs, and it’s pretty well done-in.’

‘Scrubbies weren’t on the list. I didn’t know you were going on a cleaning binge in the rain.’

She closes the lid on the barbecue and looks at him with a hopeful expression. ‘Want to watch some more Blacklist?’

‘Yes,’ he says, so that’s what they do. Three more episodes. Between the second and third, she goes to the window and says, ‘It’s stopping. The sun’s almost out. I think we can barbecue tonight. Did you remember the salad?’

This is going to work, Billy thinks. It shouldn’t, it’s crazy, but it’s going to work for as long as it has to.

7

The sun comes out that afternoon, but slowly, as if it doesn’t really want to. Alice grills the chops, and although they’re a little burned outside and a little pink in the middle (‘I’m not much of a cook, sorry,’ she says), Billy eats all of his and then gnaws the bone. It’s good, but the salad is better. He doesn’t realize how starved he’s been for greens until he starts in on them.

They go upstairs and watch some more Blacklist, but she’s restless, moving from the couch to the seat-sprung easy chair that must be Don Jensen’s roost when he’s home, then back to the couch again. Billy reminds himself that she’s seen all these episodes before, probably with her mother and sister. He’s getting a little bored with it himself now that he’s figured out Red Reddington’s schtick.

‘You ought to leave some money,’ she says when they turn the TV off and get ready to go back downstairs. ‘For the Netflix.’

Billy says he will, although he guesses that thanks to their windfall, Don and Bev don’t exactly need financial help.

She tells him it’s his turn for the bed, and after a night on the couch he doesn’t argue the point. He’s asleep almost at once, but some deep part of his brain must have already trained itself to listen for her panic attacks, because he comes wide awake at quarter past two, hearing her whoop for breath.

He’s left the door ajar in case of this. He reaches it, then stops with his hand on the knob. She’s singing, very softly.

‘If you go down to the woods today …’

She goes through the first verse twice. Her gasps for breath come further apart, then stop. Billy goes back to bed.

8

Neither of them knows – no one does – that a rogue virus is going to shut down America and most of the world in half a year, but by their fourth day in the basement apartment, Billy and Alice are getting a preview of what sheltering in place will be like. On that fourth morning, a day before Billy has decided to set sail into the golden west, he is doing his sprints up to the third floor and back. Alice has neatened up the apartment, which hardly needed it since neither of them is particularly messy. With that done she subsided to the couch. When Billy comes in, out of breath from half a dozen stair-sprints, she’s watching a cooking show on TV.

‘Rotisserie chicken,’ he says. ‘Looks good.’

‘Why make it at home when you can buy one just as good at the supermarket?’ Alice turns off the TV. ‘I wish I had something to read. Could you download a book for me? Maybe a detective story? On one of the cheap laptops, not yours.’

Billy doesn’t answer. An idea, audacious and frightening, has come into his head.

She misreads his expression. ‘I didn’t look or anything, I just know it’s yours because the case is scratched. The others look brand new.’

Billy isn’t thinking she tried to snoop in his computer. She’d never get past the password prompt, anyway. He’s thinking of the M151 spotter scope, and how he didn’t explain its purpose because what he was writing was only for himself. No one else would ever read it. Only now there is someone, and what harm can it do, considering what she knows about him already?

But it could do harm, of course. To him. If she didn’t like it. If she said it was boring and asked for something more interesting.

‘What’s going on with you?’ she asks. ‘You look weird.’

‘Nothing. I mean … I’ve been writing something. Kind of a life story. I don’t suppose you’d want to—’

‘Yes.’

9

He can’t bear to watch her sitting with his Mac Pro on her lap, reading the words he wrote here and in Gerard Tower, so he goes upstairs to the Jensens’ to spritz Daphne and Walter. He puts a twenty on the kitchen table, with a note that says For Netflix, and then just walks around. Paces around, actually, like an expectant father in an old cartoon. He looks at the Ruger in the drawer of Don’s nightstand, picks it up, puts it back, closes the drawer.