Billy Summers (26 page)

She starts to slide. He gets the shirt off just in time to catch her and keep her from falling onto the floor. Her plain white cotton bra is askew, one breast covered and one out because the strap that's supposed to go over her left shoulder is broken. He shoves the bra down, turns it around, and manages to get it unhooked.

Once her top half is undressed, he's able to lie her back down. He pulls off her soaked denim skirt and throws it on the floor with the rest of her clothes. Now she's naked except for one earring, the other gone God knows where. She's all over gooseflesh, still shivering. It's because she's cold, but it's also shock. He saw shivering like that in Fallujah, and saw it turn into convulsions. Of course she hasn't suffered multiple bullet wounds in the legs like poor old Johnny Capps, but there
is
blood on her, and now he sees three bruises on one of the girl's small breasts as well. Narrow bruises. Somebody grabbed her there and squeezed. Really hard. There are two more finger-shaped bruises on the left side of her neck and Billy thinks of her saying
No, don't choke
.

Mindful that she may not be done vomiting, Billy turns her on her side and then pushes her front-first to the back of the couch so she hopefully won't fall off. She's snoring again, the sound harsh but regular. And her teeth are chattering. She's one fucked-up American.

He hurries into the bathroom and gets one of his two bath towels. He kneels in front of the couch and rubs her back, her butt, her thighs and calves. He does it briskly, relieved to see a little faint color rise into her pallid skin. He takes one of her shoulders (another bruise there, but smaller), rolls her onto her back, and begins again: feet, legs, stomach, breasts, chest, shoulders. When he does her face she raises her hands in a weak warding-off gesture, then drops them as if it's too much work, just too much. He makes an effort to dry her hair but he's not going to get far with that because there's a lot of it, and the rainwater from the gutter soaked it to the scalp.

Billy thinks, I'm fucked. No matter how this goes, I'm fucked.

He drops the towel and reaches for her, planning to roll her back onto her side so that she won't choke if she throws up again, then re-thinks. He takes her right leg and lowers it so her heel is on the floor and her vagina is revealed. The labia are enflamed bright red and split in several places, one of the splits still beading up fresh blood. The flesh between her vagina and her rectum—he knows the word for that part but can't think of it in this stressed-out moment—is torn worse than her labia, and God knows what damage there might be inside. He can see several dried splats of semen as well, most of it on her lower stomach and in her pubic hair.

The guy pulled out, Billy thinks, then remembers that there were three shapes in the van, and judging from the sound of their laughter, all male. One of them did, anyway.

This thought makes him aware of his own situation. Considering what has happened to the girl on his couch, it's not without irony: she's out cold with her legs open and both of them as naked as the day they were born. What would his Evergreen Street neighbors
think if they could see this tableau? Not even Corrie Ackerman, kind heart that she is, would continue to defend him. He can see the headline in the
Red Bluff News
: COURTHOUSE ASSASSIN ALSO RAPED TEENAGER!

Fucked, he thinks. Fucked to the sky and back down to the ground.

Billy wants to get her into bed, but he has something else to attend to first. Now that things have settled down, he realizes his feet hurt like blue fuck. There's a lot of stuff he didn't buy when he stocked this place, and that includes tweezers, but there are Band-Aids and some leftover hydrogen peroxide in the bathroom from the last tenant. The disinfectant is probably long past the sell-by date, but beggars can't be choosers.

Walking on the sides of his feet as best he can, Billy gets a paring knife from the kitchen, then the bathroom stuff. The Band-Aids are decorated with
Toy Story
characters. He sits on the floor beside the snoring, shivering girl and uses the knife to lift the splinters enough so he can pull them out. There are five in all, including two big boys. He douses the bleeding wounds with peroxide. The sting makes him think the stuff may actually do some good. He covers the two biggest wounds with Band-Aids that probably won't stick very long. He guesses they're pretty old, maybe from two or even three tenants back.

He gets to his feet, rolls his shoulders to loosen them, then picks up the girl. Without the adrenaline to boost him, he guesses her weight at one-fifteen. Maybe one-twenty. Not much of a match for three men. Did they all rape her? Billy guesses that if they were together and one did, they all did. He will ask her when she comes around, for all the good it will do. He doubts if she'll be able to remember and what she'll want to know is why he didn't call the police or take her to the nearest ER.

She's sinking into a
U
shape again and Billy ends up dropping her onto the bed instead of putting her down on it gently, as he
intended. She opens her eyes a bit, then closes them again and resumes snoring. He doesn't want to wrestle with her anymore, but he also doesn't want her lying there naked. She's going to be freaked out enough when she wakes up. He gets a T-shirt from the bureau, sits beside her, lifts her with his left arm and gets the shirt over her head with his right hand. Her fuzzy sounds of protest fade back into snores when he gets it past her face and over her shoulders.

“Help me now.” He lifts one of her arms and after a couple of failures manages to poke it through the short sleeve. “Little help, okay?”

Some part of her must hear him because she raises her other arm and finally wavers it into the sleeve. He lays her back down, blows out a breath, and arms sweat from his forehead. The shirt is bunched above her breasts. He pulls it down in front, lifts her, pulls it down in back. She's shivering again and whimpering a little. Billy puts an arm under her knees, lifts her, and yanks the hem of the shirt down over her buttocks and thighs.

God, like dressing a baby, Billy thinks.

He hopes she won't piss the bed—he's only got this one set of sheets and the nearest laundromat is three blocks away—but he knows there's a good chance she will. At least most of the bleeding has stopped. He supposes it could have been worse. They could have torn her wide open, even killed her. That might even have been what they meant to do, dumping her the way they did, but Billy doubts it. He thinks they were all just really drunk. Or high on something mean, like crystal. The assholes probably thought she'd come around and walk home, sadder but wiser.

He stands, wipes his brow again, and pulls up the blanket. She clutches it at once, pulls it to her chin, and turns on her side. That's good because she might vomit again. He can't believe she has anything left to bring up, considering all she puked out in the foyer, but there's no way to tell.

Even with the blanket, she's shivering.

What am I supposed to do with you? Billy thinks. Just what the fuck am I supposed to do with you, tell me that.

It's a question he can't answer. All he knows is that he's in the mother of all messes.

He gets a fresh pair of boxers from the bureau, leaving just one. He goes out to the living room and lies down on the couch. He doubts he'll sleep, but if he does it will be thin and he'll hear her if she gets up and tries to leave the apartment. And do what? Stop her, of course, if only because it's cold and raining and damn near blowing a gale, from the sound. But that's tonight. When she wakes up in the morning, hungover and disoriented and in a stranger's apartment, clothes gone—

Her clothes. Still on the floor, in a sodden heap.

Billy gets off the couch and takes them into the bathroom. On the way he stops to look at his uninvited guest. She's stopped snoring but she's still shivering. A sodden clot of hair lies against one of her cheeks. He bends and pushes it away.

“Please, I don't want to,” she says.

Billy freezes, but when there's nothing more he goes into the bathroom. There's a hook on the door. He hangs the cheap jacket on it. There's a shower-tub combo of the sort found in cut-rate motels. He wrings out her shirt and skirt in the tub and drapes them over the shower curtain rod to dry. The jacket has three zip-style pockets, a little one above the left breast and two bigger diagonal ones on the side. There's nothing in the breast pocket. There's a man's wallet in one of the side pockets and a phone in the other.

He removes the SIM card and puts the phone back in the pocket it came from for the time being. He opens the wallet. The first thing he finds is her driver's license. Her name is Alice Maxwell and she's
from Kingston, Rhode Island. She's twenty years old. No, check that, just turned twenty-one. DMV photographs are awful as a rule, something you're even embarrassed to show the cop who stops you for speeding, but hers is pretty good. Or maybe Billy only thinks that because he's seen her looking far worse than any DL photo. Her eyes are wide and blue. There's a little smile on her lips.

First license, he thinks. She hasn't even had it renewed yet, because it's still got the one AM restriction for teenagers.

There's one credit card, which she has signed Alice Reagan Maxwell with painstaking clarity. There's an ID card from Clarendon Business College here in the city, an AMC gift card (Billy can't remember if those were the late Ken Hoff's theaters or not), an insurance card which includes her blood type (O), and some pictures of a much younger Alice Maxwell with her high school friends, her dog, and a woman who's probably her mother. There's also a picture of a smiling teenage boy with his shirt off, maybe a high school boyfriend.

In the billfold he finds two tens, two ones, and a newspaper clipping. It's the obituary of one Henry Maxwell, services at Christ Baptist Church in Kingston, in lieu of flowers send contributions to the American Cancer Society. The picture shows a man in mid to late middle age. He has jowls and thinning hair painstakingly combed across his otherwise bald dome. He looks like anyone you would pass on the street without noticing, but Billy can see the family resemblance even in the grainy photo, and Alice Reagan Maxwell loved him enough to carry his wallet, with his obituary inside it. Billy has to like her for that.

If she's going to school here, and her father was buried there, her mother, almost certainly back in Kingston, won't wonder where she is, at least not immediately. Billy puts the wallet back in her jacket but takes the phone and puts it in the top drawer of his bureau, under his own supply of T-shirts.

He wonders if he should clean up her vomit in the foyer before it
dries and decides against it. If she wakes up thinking he's the reason her female works feel like they're on fire, he'd like to have at least some evidence that he brought her in from the outside. Of course that won't convince her that he didn't help himself later, once he was reasonably sure she wasn't going to spew on him or wake up and fight while he was humping her.

She's still shivering. That's got to be shock, doesn't it? Or maybe a reaction to whatever those men put in her drink? Billy has heard about roofies but has no idea what the aftereffects might be.

He starts to leave. The girl—Alice—moans. She sounds desolate, bereft.

Well shit, Billy thinks. This is probably the worst idea ever, but what the hell.

He gets in bed with her. Her back is to him. He puts an arm around her and pulls her close. “Snuggle up, kiddo. You're okay. Snuggle the fuck up, get warm, stop shaking. You'll feel better in the morning. We'll figure this out in the morning.”

I'm fucked, he thinks again.

Maybe the comfort is what she needed, or the extra heat from his body, or maybe all that shivering would have stopped on its own. Billy doesn't know and doesn't care. He's only glad when the shakes become intermittent, then finally quit. The snoring has quit, too. Now he can hear the rain pelting the building. It's an old structure, and when the wind gusts, its joints creak. The sound is oddly comforting.

I'll get up in a minute or two, he thinks. Just as soon as I'm sure she's not going to snap awake and start screaming bloody murder. In just a minute or two.

He falls asleep instead and dreams there's smoke in the kitchen. He can smell burned cookies. He needs to warn Cathy, tell her she needs to take them out of the oven before their mother's boyfriend comes home, but he can't speak. This is the past and he's only a spectator.

Billy jerks awake in the dark some time later, convinced he's overslept his appointment with Joel Allen and screwed up the job he's spent months waiting to do. Then he hears the girl breathing next to him—breathing, not snoring—and he remembers where he is. Her butt is socked into his basket and he realizes he has an erection, which is totally inappropriate under the circumstances. Downright grotesque, in fact, but so many times the body doesn't care about the circumstances. It just wants what it wants.

He gets out of bed in the dark and feels his way to the bathroom with one hand cupped over the front of his tented shorts, not wanting to whang his distended cock into the bureau and make this shit carnival of a night complete. The girl, meanwhile, doesn't stir. Her slow breathing suggests that she's gone deep, and that's good.

By the time he's in the bathroom with the door shut, his erection has deflated and he can piss. The toilet is noisy and has a tendency to keep running if you don't flap the handle a few times, so he just lowers the lid, turns off the light, and feels his way across back to the bureau, where he fumbles until he feels the elastic waistband of his one pair of workout shorts.

He closes the door to the bedroom and makes his way across the living room with a little more confidence, because the curtain across the periscope window is still pushed back and the nearby streetlight casts enough glow to see by.