It was Billie’s idea to have this meeting today. He wasn’t far from Carrollton, anyway, killing time at Bass Pro Shops, a cavernous hunting and fishing store outside of Dallas.
With its in-house shooting gallery, archery range, and brewpub, BPS could almost be an amusement park, and Billie had been looking forward to getting some quality R&R in—trying a few rifles out, maybe a crossbow. Stacey had come along for the ride and had invited her son, Dustin, and Billie’s nephew, Michael, to go with them to meet Mr. John.
Billie had mixed feelings about these youngsters he had in tow.
Up to this point, he’d been happy to spread Mr. John’s money around. But Billie’d been stringing Mr. John along for so long now, sooner or later the well was bound to run dry. Billie’d burned through so much of the money already that he was starting to feel like he really ought to be looking out for himself at this point.
On the other hand, Billie knew that he’d begun to run out of excuses, so if Mr. John did threaten to call it quits, he could always shift the blame over to Dustin and Speck.
All in all, it might not be the worst thing to have them along. And as things turned out, Speck was the one who ended up doing most of the talking while Billie nursed his beer.
By the end of the meeting, he’d hatched a whole new plot with Mr. John.
What it amounted to was this: Nancy Howard had been planning a trip to San Marcos—the Texas town where she and Frank Howard had first met. Speck would follow her, shoot her there, and take a cell-phone photograph of her corpse, which he would show to Mr. John in person back up in Carrollton.
Once he’d seen it, Mr. John would give Billie, Stacey, Dustin, and Speck $100,000, drawn on Nancy’s life insurance policy, which they would split between them.
Then he’d pay them $5,000 a week—money that they would split too—for the rest of their lives.
Billie did the math in his head: That was a quarter million dollars a year, give or take. And if Mr. John changed his mind about paying, Stacey had enough dirt on the man to blackmail him into paying whatever he had left. Either way, they were going to get their hands on every last cent of Mr. John’s money.
For the first time, the thought of actually killing Nancy Howard—instead of just stringing Mr. John along, and along, and along—seemed like the best way to go.