This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473557055
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books 2018
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © James Patterson 2018
Extract from Fifty Fifty © James Patterson 2017
James Patterson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Arrow Books in 2018
Arrow Books
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Arrow Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781787460799
Two true-crime cases from the hit TV series Murder is Forever
MURDER, INTERRUPTED. Rich, cheating financier Frank Howard wants his wife dead, and he’s willing to pay Billie Earl Johnson whatever it takes. But when the bullet misses the mark, Billie Earl and Frank will turn on each other in a fight for their lives …
MOTHER OF ALL MURDERS. Dee Dee Blancharde is a local celebrity. Television reports praise her as a single mother who tirelessly cares for her wheelchair-bound, chronically ill daughter. But when Gypsy Rose realises she isn’t actually sick and Dee Dee has lied all these years, the daughter exacts her revenge …
JAMES PATTERSON is one of the best-known and biggest-selling writers of all time. His books have sold in excess of 365 million copies worldwide. He is the author of some of the most popular series of the past two decades – the Alex Cross, Women’s Murder Club, Detective Michael Bennett and Private novels – and he has written many other number one bestsellers including romance novels and stand-alone thrillers.
James is passionate about encouraging children to read. Inspired by his own son who was a reluctant reader, he also writes a range of books for young readers including the Middle School, I Funny, Treasure Hunters, House of Robots, Confessions and Maximum Ride series. James has donated millions in grants to independent bookshops and he has been the most borrowed author in UK libraries for the past ten years in a row. He lives in Florida with his wife and son.
MURDER IS FOREVER TRUE CRIME
Home Sweet Murder (with Andrew Bourelle and Scott Slaven)
Murder Beyond the Grave (with Andrew Bourelle and Christopher Charles)
A list of more titles by James Patterson can be found at the back of this book
Dear Reader,
Above all else I’m a storyteller. I craft stories for insatiable readers. And though my books may seem over-the-top to some, I find that I am most often inspired by real life. After all, truth is stranger than fiction.
The crimes in this book are 100% real. Certain elements of the stories, some scenes and dialogue, locations, names, and characters have been fictionalized, but these stories are about real people committing real crimes, with real, horrifying consequences.
And as terrifying and visceral as it is to read about these crimes gone wrong, there’s something to remember: the bad guy always gets caught.
If you can’t get enough of these true crimes, please watch the pulse-racing new television series Murder Is Forever, where you’ll see these shocking crimes come to life.
I hope you’re as haunted by these accounts as I am. They’ll remind you that though humans have the capacity for incredible kindness, we also have the capacity for unspeakable violence and depravity.
THE .380-CALIBER BULLET ripped through her left eye and down through the roof of her mouth on its way to her lung, where it lodged, hard up against her rib cage.
Spinning, she fell to the floor.
There was so much blood. So much blackness.
She slumped and a minute went by. Then, an honest-to-goodness miracle happened: The woman came to her senses and heard God’s own voice, lifting and pulling her through.
“Get up,” the voice said. “Get up, Nancy. Get up!”
Even though she was in shock and grievously wounded, she suddenly knew where she was: lying on the concrete floor of a garage. The garage of a house—her own home—on Bluebonnet Way, in a posh Dallas suburb where only the paranoid locked their front doors and all of her neighbors treated each other’s kids as their own.
The woman knew who she was: Nancy Howard, aged fifty-three.
A loving wife. A churchgoer. Above all, a doting mother.
She had to live, for the sake of her kids.
Nancy knew it was August: The concrete felt heavy and warm. And although the floor was slippery with her blood, she started crawling.
“How could this happen?” she said to herself. “Sweet Jesus, how is this happening? And why is it happening to me?”
She needed her phone now to call 911. But her phone was in the purse taken by the man who had shot her.
Left for dead, she was still breathing, although with each breath it got harder and harder. And so she crawled, and as she crawled she thought, My car is here, in the garage.
The car has OnStar.
The OnStar operator can call 911.
Somehow, she managed to open the door. But without her key, which was in her stolen purse, OnStar would not turn on.
“Oh, Jesus, help me,” she said. “Jesus, just give me the strength to stand up!”
CHRISTMASTIME WAS APPROACHING in Carrollton, Texas, and Nancy Howard’s husband, Frank, was putting up the Christmas lights.
The two-story brick house was the sort of house Frank and Nancy had dreamed about since the day they were married, twenty-eight years ago now, in Frank’s daddy’s church. The house where their three grown-up children always came back to for the holidays.
Nancy missed Ashley, Jay, and Brianna so much it was like part of her own body had gone missing. But the truth was that she also looked forward to her years as an empty nester. Frank was a hardworking man. At home he’d been a devoted father, with all the time in the world for their kids. Nancy loved and admired those qualities. But Frank’s work, the kids, and all of the hours that Nancy and Frank had spent with their church—that meant less alone time for them. Hard as it was to see her children leave home, Nancy looked for a silver lining and found one: In all of the months and years to come, she’d have more of Frank to herself.
At least, that’s what Nancy had thought.
The Howards had seen each other through some hard times. Ashley, their oldest, had barely survived her first days in the hospital. That had tested Frank and Nancy’s faith. So had Frank’s prostate cancer and Nancy’s fibromyalgia—a chronic condition that disturbed her sleep and her moods and made her muscles ache constantly. But in the end, those trials had only strengthened their bond.
Then, in 2009, Frank’s two-man accounting firm had taken on a new client.
At first, it had seemed like a windfall. The client was a defense contractor named Richard Raley—a man with significant interests in the Middle East. What Raley did specifically was ship ice, military hardware, and other equipment to American troops in Iraq. What he’d engaged Frank to do, after the death of his previous accountant, was to help him manage tens of millions of dollars he’d made in Kuwait.
Officially, Frank was to be paid $10,000 a month to advise Raley’s firm on issues relating to investments and taxes.
Frank had his questions about the operation, and about Richard Raley, but he kept them to himself, and Raley ended up making Frank his chief financial officer.
The job came with significant perks: new office space, the use of Raley’s own private jet. Frank bought himself a Lexus and began flying to the West Coast, Europe, and the Middle East on business. Left behind in Carrollton, Nancy felt lonely and abandoned. But what made it worse was that the Frank who came back from these trips seemed less and less like the man she had married.
Distant. Furtive. Angry.
For two years now, those were the words Nancy had tried to avoid when she thought of her husband.
For two years, those same words kept coming to mind.
Nancy blamed Richard Raley and the long hours that Frank had been putting in, ever since Raley had made him his CFO. Frank himself had told her that the job was wearing him out. But Nancy wondered if there was more to it than that. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. Something that was nagging at Frank and pulling him further and further away from their marriage.
Now she watched from the kitchen as Frank dug around in a big bin of old holiday decorations.
After a minute, he pulled out something that looked a lot like a strongbox.
Furtively, he carried the box out into the yard.
Outside, Frank darted behind a bush and dropped the strongbox into a small hole he’d dug there. In the time that it took Nancy to follow him into the yard, he’d made it back up the ladder.
“Frank? Frank?”
Jesus, Frank thought, what is it now?
“These are all wrong,” Nancy said, pointing at the Christmas lights he’d already strung up. “You’re going to do this side over.”
Looking down from the ladder, Frank smiled. But underneath he was seething. As far as he was concerned, Nancy nagged him and nagged him, always over the smallest details. But the big picture was completely beyond her. She simply couldn’t see how hard Frank had worked for their family. She couldn’t understand the sacrifices he’d made, all his traveling, his long hours. And when he got home, there she was—always nagging and egging him on.
Who cared if the Christmas lights were crooked?
Frank barely swallowed his fury.
“Well, if you say so!” he said as he adjusted the lights.
FRANK HOWARD HAD always been proud that he was born and raised a preacher’s kid. He met Nancy in his father’s church in San Marcos—when they got married in that same church, Frank’s father performed the ceremony himself—and here in Carrollton, their Baptist church was the center of their social life. Frank and Nancy took part in the church’s community outreach programs. They prayed for international missionaries and for poor people closer to home. They sang in First Baptist’s choir. And they gave very freely to the church.
A few days before Christmas, the Howards’ minister pulled them aside after choir rehearsal to thank them for the truly remarkable donation they had just made.
“Well,” Frank told the minister, “the Lord’s blessed me with so many incredible opportunities.”
“It wouldn’t be right not to share our good fortune with others,” Nancy added.
Moments like these made Nancy thankful for Frank’s job. Giving to others reminded her of how much she herself had been given. Blushing slightly, she thought of the good things that the past few years had brought their family. Nancy knew that for Frank, gaining Raley as a client had been the start of a whole new life.
In point of fact, it had been the beginning of two new lives. A richer, more rewarding life here in Texas. And a life on the West Coast that Nancy knew nothing about and would have been shocked to discover.
But what Nancy didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her—at least not today, as she smiled at the minister and all of the nice things the minister said.
“You know, I’m still just a preacher’s kid from downstate,” Frank said as the minister wrapped up his song of praise and gratitude. Turning to the minster’s wife, he added, “Who knows, if things hadn’t turned out differently in my life, I could have ended up with a church of my own. But Nancy and I love it here at First Baptist. We’re so happy to give back. And, truly, it’s no big thing. Just the way my daddy raised me.”
The four of them stood there silently. Maybe even a bit awkwardly. Then the minister’s wife turned to Nancy.
“Won’t it be nice,” the wife said, “to have all your chicks coming back to their nest?”
“Heaven!” said Nancy. “You know, it’ll be like paradise, right here on Earth.”
She was beaming now as Frank took her hand and stood, smiling, beside her.
ON CHRISTMAS EVE the whole Howard family—Frank and Nancy, Ashley, Jay, and their youngest, Brianna—gathered in front of the fire. It was a family tradition, and this was a special year. Their family was about to get bigger. Brianna had brought her fiancé, Jed, along, and Nancy couldn’t stop oohing and aahing over the engagement ring that Jed had bought for her daughter.
“How did you and Frank meet?” Jed asked.
Nancy loved to tell this story: Frank’s daddy’s church in San Marcos. Falling in love with the minister’s kid. It had made perfect sense at the time—Nancy herself was the daughter of a church pianist in Driftwood—and Nancy still remembered how handsome Frank looked, with that crooked smile of his and his thick shock of black hair. She loved to talk about how they fell in love across the pews and tied the knot in that very same church.
She’d just gotten to the part about the pews when Frank’s phone started to ring.
“Work,” he whispered.
“On Christmas Eve?” Nancy whispered back.
“I have to take it,” Frank said, loudly enough to catch Ashley’s attention.
“What’s happening?” she asked. “Daddy, what is it?”
“Nothing, sweetie. I’ll be back in a moment.”
With Frank gone, Nancy tried to pick the thread of her story back up: Frank’s father’s church. Falling in love across the pews. But all the emotions that she’d felt rising up in her just a moment ago fell as flat as a collapsed soufflé. She stumbled on her own words. And when Frank returned, he broke the bad news to the whole room at once: The call was from his boss, who needed a new account set up and needed it done before New Year’s.
It was important work. Work that would not wait.
“No!” Nancy said. “Flying out on Christmas? Just say no, Frank! Who works on Christmas Day, anyway? Don’t you have any backbone at all?”
Frank made the usual appeals. First, he played the part of the patriot: “Those boys in Iraq that we work for—they don’t take Christmas off. They’re laying down their lives for us every day, making the hard sacrifices.”
Then Frank played the part of the victim. Brought up the sacrifices he’d made—sacrifices that he continued to make—for the troops, for Nancy, for the kids: “You think I want to be traveling on Christmas? My whole life is here, in front of this fireplace. Who else would I even be doing this for?”
Frank teared up a bit, thinking about all he’d done for his family. His voice broke, twice, as he talked, and Nancy’s heart broke to hear him. Duly chastised, she dried her own tears, apologized, and felt bad for feeling so selfish—for wanting Frank all to herself—when all he wanted to do was take care of them. Looking at him now, she really did understand how hard Frank had been working. How tiring all of this traveling must be. How much he’d given up for his family. All those late nights at the office. All of those trips out of town.
By the time Frank was done talking, she’d fallen in love with him all over again.
IT WAS CHRISTMAS day in Santa Cruz, California, and Suzanne Leontieff had been waiting—forever, it seemed—for her lover to walk to her door, take her in his arms, and … and what?
Standing there in her lace nightgown, Suzanne blushed just thinking about it.
She was middle-aged now but more attractive than most women half her age. A true born-and-bred California girl, blond as the best of them, smart, self-assured. She had a good, solid job as a dental hygienist. Daughters as beautiful as she had been when she was their age. And Suzanne’s lover was attractive too. Wealthy, and with a full head of hair that had only just begun to go gray at the temples.
Suzanne thought it made him look dignified rather than old.
The two of them had met a few years previously, at a softball tournament in Tahoe. Both of Suzanne’s daughters played softball at the tournament level. She was forever ferrying them to tournaments. But in Tahoe she’d decided to take some time for herself. After another long day out in the bleachers, she’d wandered into a lakeside casino. There, at one of the tables, she’d met the man she would fall for—a man who would sweep her away.
They gambled together for a night, flirted, and, finally, parted. But the attraction was undeniable.
“It’s too bad you’re married …,” Suzanne said, and stared at him meaningfully.
A part of her had to have known that once she said it out loud, there’d be no going back.
That part of her had been right.
They met the next day, and the day after that. Suzanne was separated from her own husband. Now the man she’d suddenly fallen for told her that his own marriage had taken a turn for the worse.
It wasn’t long until the man, who was now her lover, was paying for tournament trips. He paid the college tuition for one of Suzanne’s daughters. He bought Suzanne a new house in Santa Cruz—the house she was pacing around in now as she waited for him to arrive. The house had cost close to a million dollars. But her lover had paid in cash, then bought another home—a luxury condominium that they could share in Tahoe.
Suzanne’s lover took her to exclusive restaurants, bought tickets to sold-out sporting events, flew her and the girls to the West Indies for a vacation.
He’d even started an IRA in Suzanne’s name, depositing $700,000 of his own money.
This was not why she had fallen in love with the man. But, to be brutally honest, none of it had hurt his chances.
And now here he was. Ringing her doorbell. Holding an expensive bouquet and beaming.
THE FLIGHT FROM Texas had hollowed Frank out. The man sitting next to him in the fifth row was wearing an LSU sweatshirt, snakeskin shoes, and just about the amount of cologne it would take to drown a mama cat and all of her kittens.
It was a blessing that the good old boy hadn’t talked all that much.
Frank no longer liked to fly commercial. The talk from other passengers made his head spin; the food made his bowels hurt; the stewardesses treated him (or so he felt) like a baby. When he was lucky enough to drift off, he dreamed of driving through the very same landscape—that long drive from Texas to California, with pit stops in Santa Fe, Tucson, Los Angeles. But there never was time enough for the drive, and Richard Raley’s private plane was a luxury, not a day-to-day thing he could use whenever Suzanne sank into one of her moods.
“Frank,” she would say. “You said you would leave her. But here we all are!”
The way Frank figured it, he’d spent millions of dollars on the woman. The least she could do was be grateful. But, of course, some part of Frank knew she was grateful. She missed him was all, and was lonely for him. And when she opened the door in that lace nightgown that Frank had bought her, Frank was grateful too.
Together, they moved through the house. It was as if they were dancing. From the entryway to the living room. From the living room to the staircase. Then up the stairs to the bedroom, with Suzanne whispering in his ear the whole way.
“Frank,” she said, in that low, sultry voice she used when she was feeling seductive. “Oh, Frank, the things that I’m going to do to you.”
It was dark and they were naked and spent, drinking champagne in the bedroom, when Frank reached over, stuck his hand deep in the pocket of his black Burberry coat, and pulled out a baby-blue jewel box.
The box was small and wrapped with a ribbon, just the right size for a ring.
Suzanne squealed when she saw it. She tore off the ribbon. And then her face dropped.
“Baby, they’re diamonds,” Frank said. “You don’t like ’em?”
“They’re perfect,” Suzanne said, and managed a smile.
“You were expecting a ring?”
“Years, Frank. It’s been years. How much longer am I supposed to wait?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? Here, on Christmas, in the house that I bought for you. Can’t you just wait a bit longer?”
He flashed the same smile that got to her back in Tahoe and she couldn’t help but smile back. It really was Christmas. He really was here, and not back in Texas with her.
“Yes,” Suzanne said.
“Promise?”
“I’m yours. And don’t ever forget it.”
The next day they drive to a casino. Suzanne forgets herself there, flirts with two men at the blackjack table, and ignores Frank until the moment her chips are all gone, at which point she asks him for another $10,000.
Frank nods to the floor manager. A moment later, new stacks of chips appear in front of Suzanne. But Frank’s smile is as tight as it was in Texas, when Nancy was nagging him about those Christmas lights that he should have paid someone else to hang—and as he walks away from the table, that smile turns into something twisted.
Outside the casino, Frank pulls out a disposable cell phone—a burner—and punches out a short text.
Need to see you, he writes. SOON. Next week. I’ll drive out to your town.
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.
ONE YEAR EARLIER—thirteen months to be exact—Frank Howard was taking his own sweet time trying on cowboy hats at Sheplers Western wear store in Mesquite, Texas.
Mesquite was an hour west of Ben Wheeler, and Frank had spent the time it would have taken to drive half that distance admiring himself in the mirror, twisting this way and that, pulling the hats low over his eyes, tipping them high up above his forehead. He had just about decided to buy a black, broad-brimmed, Stetson Bozeman hat when he saw Billie Earl Johnson standing a few yards away from him, watching.
Although Billie had been standing there for some time now, he didn’t feel like he’d been looking at much.
Billie had spent a third of his forty-nine years behind bars. He knew a criminal when he met a criminal. But in Frank—or “Mr. John”—Billie felt as though he’d made something more useful than another casual, criminal acquaintance.
He felt as if he’d made out an easy mark.
For months now, Billie had been taking Mr. John’s money. Tens of thousands of dollars at a time—sometimes much more. The first time, it was $60,000 in cash. They’d been sitting in Mr. John’s Lexus at the time. The money sat between them in a paper bag that also contained a photo of the woman Mr. John wanted killed.
On that occasion, Mr. John had told him to make the death look like an accident.
Billie had said, “Sure,” adding only that “these things, done professionally, take some time.”
What had happened after that was, basically, nothing—except insofar as Billie had turned himself into the big man in town, handing $100 bills out to all the folks he’d grown up with in Ben Wheeler. He’d bought motorcycles, four-wheelers, and a big four-door pickup for himself. He’d bought a Firebird for his daughter. He’d also bought thousands of dollars’ worth of meth and shacked up with Stacey, partying and screwing for days on end. One day in town, the cops had picked him up for possession. But that was no big deal in the greater scheme of things. When he bonded out a few days later, he just called Mr. John and casually asked for more money.
The pattern had long since established itself, with Billie telling Mr. John he’d do the job, then coming up with some excuse or another that prevented him from doing the job. The one constant was that he’d always ask for more money.
The other constant was, he’d always get it.
Billie was surprised. He’d always been a good liar. A great liar, in fact. In some other life, he believed, he could have been one of the country’s great con men. And his excuses were always believable because they were always close to the truth. If Billie had to tell Mr. John that he’d have to delay the job on account of illness, it was because he really had been sick. If the cause was that Billie had found himself behind bars and needed to be bonded out, it was because he really had gotten himself into trouble again.
And Billie was always getting into trouble.
But even so, there had been so many excuses, stretched over so many months. Sometimes, Billie felt as though Mr. John was paying him not to kill Nancy Howard. Or if he was paying to not kill her just yet.
Sometimes, Billie wondered if Mr. John really did want this thing done. Sometimes he thought that the man was plain stupid. Stacey’s own theory was that, like all the men she’d run across, Mr. John didn’t know what he wanted. And what he’d been paying for was the luxury of not having to find out. In Stacey’s estimation, planning to have Nancy Howard knocked off made Mr. John feel free. But on some level, Mr. John had to know that doing the thing would make him feel terrible.
As far as Stacey was concerned, Mr. John paid Billie to talk—to make his fantasy about life without Nancy feel more real—and paying more and more stretched the fantasy out, while making it feel that much more real.
Stacey’s take on the situation sounded reasonable enough to Billie. As long as Mr. John kept paying, who was he to complain? And Mr. John did pay: twenty grand here, seventy there. Billie Earl burned through it all like a blowtorch through butter. As far as he even kept track, Billie figured he’d spent $750,000 or more just for coming up with a long line of excuses. Mr. John was not happy. He’d made that much clear. But for reasons that Billie could never quite fathom, that didn’t keep Mr. John from paying him. So, here they were at Sheplers, and Billie was sure that Mr. John would have a fat envelope full of cash on his person.
“Everything’s set,” Billie said, after the two men had exchanged a perfunctory greeting.
“Everything?” said Mr. John.
“Everything except the next installment,” said Billie. “I’m going to need that, if we’re to proceed.”
“Okay, then.”
In the store’s dressing room, Mr. John patted his pocket and took the envelope out.
“I want your assurance,” he said. “I want your word this is going to happen.”
Billie laughed as he grabbed the envelope out of Mr. John’s hand.
“You’ve got it, partner,” he said. “You’ve got it.”
FRANK DIDN’T LIKE it one bit, this Billie Earl Johnson business he’d gotten involved with. His alter ego, “Mr. John,” didn’t sit comfortably with Frank, either.
The whole sordid scheme was a far cry from the good thing he had going with Suzanne.
But Frank knew that the plans he’d hatched with Billie Earl were the flip side of that good thing. Frank could have divorced Nancy, sure. He’d been divorced when he’d met her. But Frank’s first marriage had not produced any children. He and his wife had been very young—that had made for an easy divorce. He was much older now, a pillar of the community, and a father. The children would make things especially hard. Frank’s kids knew what a good man he was. He’d never want them to see him in the wrong kind of light. Compared to the harm that would do, life without Nancy would only be a small mercy.
Then there was the secondary consideration: Given a few things he’d been up to in secret over at his accounting practice—given the millions of dollars he’d stolen from his boss, Richard Raley—Frank simply could not afford to have some divorce court judge go through his financials with a fine-toothed comb. As far as Frank was concerned, filing for divorce was the same as walking into his local police station and turning himself in for embezzlement. And that was not something Frank Howard was willing to do.
So the question was, was Billie Earl Johnson the man for the job?
Sometimes it seemed to Frank that he’d been dealing with an imbecile. Already, on several occasions, he’d had to bond Billie Earl out of jail. But the thing he’d paid Billie for, time and again, never got done. Suzanne was on his back every day now about leaving Nancy, and he really had run out of excuses, while Billie Earl was full of them. Excuses poured out of the man like brown water pouring out of a broken Ben Wheeler faucet.
If Frank had known what all to do about it, he’d have done it. But it was too late now that he’d doubled down, again and again, with the money. He had to get something back for his investment.
And yet, Billie Earl got up the nerve to count his money—money he’d done nothing to earn yet—right in front of Frank’s face.
“It’s not the kind of job you rush, Johnny.”
“I’m not telling you to rush it. I’m just saying it needs to happen soon. Sooner than soon, in fact.”
“Why’s that, Johnny? You gonna go to the Better Business Bureau? The Chamber of Commerce? Your local police? Come to think of it, maybe the police would like to learn more about you.”
This was not a turn that Frank wanted his conversation with Billie Earl to take.