I wasn’t buying it; this had nothing to do with Cloud.
The tall one asked where she’d learned to shoot pool like that.
“My grandmother. She met my grandfather that way. Hustled him.”
The tall one raised his bottle in salute.
“You want to break?” Billie asked.
“You think I need the advantage?” The tall one looked over at his pal, and I knew the look that passed between them: Was the short one okay to partner up with me, since the tall one had already chosen Billie?
“You okay with me taking this one?” Billie asked me. I didn’t know if she meant the game or the guy. She must have seen me try to parse what she’d asked because she turned to rack up the balls.
Billie took the break, landed a ball, and didn’t miss a single shot after that.
The game, if you could call it that, went so fast that I was spared the job of making conversation with the short one. The tall one took his loss well.
The cover band had started up just before Billie’s win. The tall one put his drink down and took Billie’s hand. The song the band played for their dance was Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me Now?!” Not the easiest to dance to, but rousing. I made my excuses to the short one, citing a sudden pulled muscle, and he looked relieved. We slid into a booth and watched his pal and Billie on the dance floor instead.
A couple of couples were attempting a sort of line dance. It was just them and Billie and the tall one on the floor, so we had no trouble holding them in our sights. Everyone knows that a man who can dance walks onto a dance floor unlike a man who cannot. The way the tall one led Billie onto the floor conveyed ownership. That was something to see — Billie allowing herself to be led by a man. She had the confidence to be submissive; it cost her nothing.
To my surprise, Billie could not keep up with the tall one. He led her around the floor in a two-step, but she stepped wrong and laughed. Drawing him to her, she set the pace for the next part of the dance. Slow and suggestive, even when the band finished, and then started in on Miranda Lambert’s “White Liar.” Nicely timed — I sang along in my head, The truth comes out a little at a time.
I let the short one buy me another beer.
Billie and the tall one joined us in the booth when the song ended. The tall one kept his arm around her, until Billie shook it off. His arm went back up to her shoulder, and Billie turned on him: “What do you think you’re doing?” I could see that he thought she was kidding. They had just been dry-humping on the dance floor.
The short one said, “I’m out of here.” He nodded a good-bye to me, then looked expectantly at his friend. It struck me that even he sensed something was off.
The tall one, however, was another matter. He was into her and said, “Play you for another dance.”
“We’ve got to leave. Morgan?”
I grabbed my purse and stood up to go. Billie was already heading to the door. She asked me to drive and tossed me the keys.
As I was starting the car, the tall one knocked on my window and said to Billie, “Get your ass back in there.”
“My boyfriend is waiting for me,” Billie called out.
“Oh, your boyfriend is waiting.” The tall one’s face colored. “What, you come up from the city to fuck with the locals? That your idea of a good time?”
“Remember that girl at the bar? Blonde. Drinking alone. Ask her what song makes her cry but she’s ashamed to admit it.” Billie looked at me when she said the words. I thought it was a look of scorn, but then I felt certain it was impatience — she had had to hand it to me.
Billie said to the tall one, “You come tell me her answer and I’ll go back inside with you.” He strode off. “God love him, men are so predictable.”
She had thought this through. She had picked her moment. She had gotten rid of the men and gotten me into her car in an empty parking lot.
I grabbed the door handle but Billie stopped me. She was holding a gun. “Just drive.”
“Where are we going?”
“Head south for now.”
I considered crashing the car, but feared the gun would go off, so I did what she told me to do. Feelings of stupidity nearly trumped fear. My hands were steady on the wheel; physically, I was surprisingly calm.
“What’s today, Friday?” Billie asked. “By tomorrow night, guests at the Omni King Edward in Toronto will start complaining to the front desk about the taste of the water.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I looked down at the gun. The safety was off.
“A body in water, as in a water tower, decomposes about twice as fast as a dry one. It takes about forty-eight hours for a body in water to release enough gases to be detected.”
“Who’s in the water tower?” I knew who was in the water tower. I knew Samantha had paid for the room at the Omni. I changed lanes so that I might sideswipe the barrier on the passenger side. But at sixty miles an hour, could I control the car when it hit?
“You tell me.”
I was strategizing desperately. What was in my best interest — playing dumb, or tipping my hand? “How would I know?”
“Process of elimination.”
“I can guess who, but I can’t guess why.”
“That would interest you. What interests me is why you think you’re not in the water tower.”
I held the car at a steady sixty. Billie’s question was not rhetorical. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
“Causality is overrated,” Billie said, seeming to reverse her stance. “I mean, shit happens.”
Coming up was a split on the parkway — south to New York City or west to New Jersey. “Which lane?”
“Head into the city.”
I did, and I did something else as well. I leaned on the horn. She wasn’t going to shoot me at this speed. But she did — shoot, that is. She aimed at the roof and fired.
I screamed.
“If this doesn’t bring help, honking sure won’t. Oh, come on, let’s talk. I’ve had no one to talk to since Bennett died.”
“Was he the intended victim that morning?”
“There is no right or wrong answer to that.”
But I knew that there was. I knew they had an assignation in my bed that morning.
Billie opened the glove compartment and removed a pack of gum. “Want a piece? It’s sugarless.”
I took one hand off the wheel and held it open. Billie used her free hand to remove the wrapper before placing the gum in my palm.
“Samantha wasn’t a challenge. You told her yourself he was dead. And I came along and said, ‘I’m alive.’ You know who she believed. All I had to do was get her to Toronto.”
“Samantha killed herself?” So Billie had gone to Toronto, not the Caribbean.
“Samantha couldn’t swim. Ask me about Susan.”
“Did Bennett know what you were planning?”
“Susan became tiresome. So earnest: the homeless, the homeless. I told Bennett to stop seeing her. He wouldn’t, so I took over and it felt right. So you see, it was really Bennett’s fault. Though isn’t blame boring? Where does it get us?”
The gas gauge was nearing empty. I pointed this out to Billie and she said we were almost there.
“Interested in Pat?” she asked.
“That was you in the bushes.”
“Who doesn’t have a bathroom in their studio? I didn’t care for her or her work, did you?” Billie didn’t wait for an answer. “Though Bennett did. He kept up with it. He thought the nude self-portraits with pig hearts showed a bravery he hadn’t seen before he left her. He wanted me to buy one, said it was a good investment. But when I saw the work in the studio that night, it only confirmed my opinion. It wasn’t brave, I mean it wasn’t a human heart. I think of what I did as collaboration.”