Frank’s text from Tahoe caught Billie Earl Johnson passed out on the couch.
Billie’s girlfriend, Stacey, was passed out beside him, snoring loudly, stirring slightly with each snore. Off in the corner, a hound dog whimpered away.
All in all it was just another Christmas in Ben Wheeler, an East Texas town that was as methed out as Carrollton was manicured.
In Ben Wheeler, Christmas might as well have been any old day of the week.
At rest, Billie’s face was sunken and skull-like. Every crease was a physical record of years of hard living, hard drinking, and hard drugging. His slumped-over body was tattooed and sinewy.
Stacey’s was tattooed and plump.
But as soon as he woke up, Billie’s face took on a much harder edge.
The couch they had passed out on was tatty and stained. The wood-paneled walls were all bare. But on the floor all around them, fifty- and hundred-dollar bills lay scattered like crisp, new confetti. The flat-screen TV propped against the far wall was enormous and new. Billie would get around to hanging it up eventually. The assault rifle leaning against the couch cost about as much as a new Mustang.
By now, the hound dog was barking. Billie’s burner kept ringing. After sending three unanswered texts, Frank had taken to calling and calling and calling again.
Fully awakened by the third call, Billie jumped up from the couch.
“Mr. John,” he said, using the name he knew Frank by.
Frank spoke briefly, and Billie replied.
“Okay, then,” he said as he rubbed a bit of crust out of his sunken eye sockets. “Look, I am down for whatever. But listen here: If we’re going to go ’head with this, you’re going to have to pay the next installment. Then there’s some other expenses that we’ll talk about.”
Billie Earl Johnson knew full well that in East Texas, $750,000 was not the going rate for any job—even when that job was the murder of a nice churchgoing lady like Nancy Howard.
But if that’s what this man, Mr. John, was willing to pay, who was Billie to keep him from getting strung along and along? Especially when Billie was the one doing the stringing?
It had worked out so well for so long now that Billie and Stacey and all the folks they knew—even a few folks that Billie and Stacey didn’t like, in particular—had been swimming, practically doing the backstroke, in Mr. John’s money.
“Hell,” he said as he snapped the cell phone shut. “At this rate, no one’s even got to get killed.”
Most likely, Billie thought, no one was going to get killed—and, like Stacey also thought, he had good reason to think so.
After all, Billie Earl Johnson and Mr. John had been having this same conversation, with only the slightest variations, for over a year.