\n“A Garbage Man with a Gun”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The first time Billy Summers killed a man, he was barely twelve. By the time he\u2019s eighteen, he\u2019s a sniper with the Marines in Iraq, where he notches up another two dozen kills. Instead of re-upping, he tries to find work back in the States. One of his former Marine friends asks him to kill someone. Thus begins Billy\u2019s career as an elite hitman. His only condition is that his victims have to be demonstrably bad men. He\u2019s not a sociopath driven to kill — he’s just good with a gun. He can hit targets from an incredible distance and then vanish like Houdini without being identified or caught. Now, at the ripe old age of 44, he\u2019s looking to retire. One last job and he\u2019s done.<\/p>\n
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Billy knows all about the trope of the last heist going bad. Despite playing dumb around the people who hire him so they\u2019ll underestimate him, he is, in fact, very smart. He might carry around an Archie<\/em> comic digest as part of his cover, but by night he\u2019s grappling with Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Raquin<\/em> by Emile Zola. He\u2019s read all the greats — part of his ongoing effort to try to figure out what defines a good person or a bad one.<\/p>\nHis final gig is unusually complicated. It brings him to Red Bluff, a moderate-sized city in an unnamed red state just below the Mason-Dixon line, east of the Mississippi. The proposed payment is more than twenty times higher than anything he\u2019s ever made before — which sets off a few alarms in his mind — and he\u2019s going to have to spend a lot of time in Red Bluff. Maybe six weeks. Maybe six months. But his down payment of half a million shows up in his offshore bank account, so he goes along with the ride, all the while wondering: What\u2019s the catch?<\/p>\n
His intended target is indeed a very bad man, but he\u2019s currently in California fighting extradition. It\u2019s a delaying tactic. Eventually he\u2019ll lose and be brought back to town. That\u2019s when Billy will do what he does best and then move on to whatever retirement looks like for a former contract assassin. His clients set him up in a fully stocked suburban house, where he befriends the neighbors, and they also provide an interesting cover story to explain why he\u2019s in town for so long.<\/p>\n
Stephen King has written several books featuring protagonists who are writers, but most of them are already successful from the outset. Jack Torrance is an exception — he published a few stories but wasn\u2019t a full-time writer. The cover story they\u2019ve dreamed up for Billy is that he\u2019s a rookie writer with an interested publisher, but his agent has to sequester him in Red Bluff; otherwise, Billy (going by the name Dave Lockridge, one of several identities he’ll adopt in this book) likes to drink and carouse and do anything but write. He\u2019s going to spend his days in a rented office (that will ultimately become his shooter\u2019s nest) and grind out his novel. This section of the book reminds me of 11\/22\/63<\/em>, when Jake Epping had to pass time in Jodie, Texas waiting for the day of the assassination — only in this case Billy is playing the role of Oswald.<\/p>\nThe thing is, Billy has always wanted to write — he\u2019s just never gotten around to it. So he embraces this rather strange situation he finds himself in and begins to write his life story, starting with killing the man who murdered his nine-year-old sister. Because he\u2019s pretty sure the computer his clients supplied is bugged, Billy writes in the voice of his \u201cdumb self,\u201d which is perfectly suited to a story told from the point of view of an adolescent boy. Eventually he gets to write in his own voice, recounting his years in foster care, basic training and, later, Iraq. Large sections of his manuscript are reproduced in the novel.<\/p>\n
One aspect of Billy Summers<\/em> explores the zen of writing — how turning his mind toward incidents from the distant past allows Billy to remember things with remarkable clarity. However, he discovers that fiction isn\u2019t necessarily the truth by itself — it\u2019s the way to the truth. It\u2019s also a kind of war, \u201cone you fight with yourself,\u201d and it gets heavier every time he adds to it. Ultimately, he and his \u201cfirst reader\u201d come to realize that you can sit in front of a computer screen and change the world.<\/p>\nPeople familiar with the promotional synopsis of the novel might wonder if the entire plot is going to focus on the build-up to the day Billy gets the call saying his target is back in town. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and one of the book\u2019s great pleasures is the fact that it veers off in a completely unexpected direction after a couple of hundred pages. Although he is forced to act for self-preservation, Billy does something heroic. Is it enough to tip his moral scales from bad to good? That will be for readers to decide. I don\u2019t want to say too much about this particular plot development to avoid ruining the thrill of discovery.<\/p>\n
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