“Jesus,” Mr. John was saying. “Okay, okay. You’ll have more by the end of the day. But I need your word, man, ’cause this has got to get done already!”
Billie and Stacey had spent the morning getting as high as hot-air balloons and the afternoon flipping through brochures for a new four-door truck. At this late stage in Billie’s long relationship with four-wheeled vehicles, it had become easier to just buy new ones than fix up the ones that he’d crashed—which was something that he did quite often, and with no small degree of satisfaction.
“You don’t understand,” he’d been saying to Stacey. “I didn’t have an accident. I crashed that sucker on purpose; nothing accidental about it.”
Then Mr. John had burst in with his phone call, interrupting the lecture that Billie was about to give.
“Yes,” Billie said, once the man had finally stopped his talking. “Yes, it’s got to happen soon. And, for the hundredth time, yes—I got the address.”
At first, Mr. John had wanted to make Nancy’s death look like an accident. Billie would run her car off the road or push her off the balcony of the hotel rooms she booked for getaway weekends with friends from the church. But Billie had had his excuses for every occasion: He’d followed Nancy for days, but the perfect occasion had never presented itself.
He’d booked the hotel room next to Nancy’s several times, only to find that, each time, Nancy would invite one of her friends to share the room.
Then there were Billie’s medical excuses: seizures he suffered from. Dizzy spells. Blackouts. What it all led up to, Billie had said, was brain tumors.
Mr. John had swallowed all of those excuses—swallowed them down like syrup. But as time went by, his ideas about what to do with Nancy Howard got more fantastic, violent, and wild:
—Have her beaten to death with a baseball bat while scrapbooking with neighbors.
—Have her beaten to death with a tire iron at her book club.
—Have her shot with an assault rifle while having lunch with her church friends. (To cover his tracks, Mr. John had told him, Billie could spray the whole restaurant with gunfire.)
Christ, Billie had thought. What did this woman ever do to him?
But here Billie was, swearing yet again that he would take care of the whole sorry business.
If all went well, Mr. John told him in parting, there might be another target in the works. A job that would be even easier to pull off and would pay even more.