Free Billy Summers by Stephen King Page B

when he started killing her. Or maybe it happened right away when he swatted her with that cast upside her head and she flew into the wall. Out like a light anyway but maybe still alive only then he started kicking her with these boots he always wore that my ma called motorhuckle boots.
    Stop it your killing her I said but he didn’t stop until I said stop it you son of a bitch bully chickenshit fucker STOP HURTING MY SISTER. So then I went to tackle him and he push me down
    Billy gets up and goes to the window of the office that is now—he supposes—his writing room. People are coming and going on the courthouse steps, but he doesn’t see them. He goes into the little kitchenette for a drink of water. He spills a bit of it because his hands are trembling. They don’t tremble when he’s going to take a shot, they are always stone-steady then, but they are now. Not a lot, but enough to spill some water. His mouth and throat are dry and he drinks down the whole glass.
    It has all come back to him and it all makes him ashamed. He will leave what he has written about trying to tackle Bob Raines, because it puts a layer of heroic fiction over the truth, which is close to unbearable. He didn’t tackle Bob Raines while Bob Raines was kicking his sister and stepping on her and crushing her fragile chest on which no breasts would ever appear. Billy was supposed to take care of her. Take care of your sister was the last thing Ma always saidwhen she left for her job at the laundry. But he didn’t take care of her. He ran. He ran for his life.
    But it was in my mind even then, he thinks as he goes back to the table and the laptop. It must have been, because it wasn’t our room I ran for.
    â€œI ran for theirs,” Billy says, and picks up where he left off.
    So then I went to tackle him and he push me down and I got up and ran down the trailer to their room at the end and slam the door behind me. He started pounding on it right away, calling me every name in the book and said if you don’t open this door right now Benjy you are going to be one sorry-ass motherfucker. Only I knew it didn’t matter if I opened the door or not because he’d do me like he did Cassie. Because she was dead, even a kid of 11 could see that.
    Ma’s boyfriend use to be in the army and he kept his footlocker at the end of the bed with a blanket over it. I pushed the blanket off and open the footlocker. He had a padlock for it but hardly ever used it, maybe never. If he had’ve I wouldn’t be writing this because I would be dead. And if that gun of his hadn’t been loaded I would be dead but I knew it was because he kept it loaded in case of what he called burg-gurg-gurglers.
    Burg-gurg-gurglers, Billy thinks. Christ, how it all comes back.
    He bust in the door like I was pretty sure he would
    Not pretty sure, Billy thinks, I knew. Because it was nothing but fiberboard. Cathy and I used to hear them going at it just about every night. In the afternoon, if Ma came home early. But that was another fiction he would leave.
    and when he come in I was sitting with my back against the foot of the bed with his gun pointing at him. It was an M9X19 that took 15 Parabellum rounds. I didn’t know that then of course but I knew it was heavy and I held it in both hands against my chest. He said give that to me you useless piece of shit don’t you know kids ain’t supposed to play with guns.
    Then I shot him, dead center mass. He just stood there in thedoorway like nothing happen but I knew it did because I saw the blood fly out of his back. The M9 recoiled against my chest
    Billy remembers making an uh sound. And burping. And later on he had a bruise there above his sternum.
    and he fell down. I went over to him and said to myself that I might have to shoot him again. If I had to I would. He was my mother’s boyfriend but he was wrong. He was a bad guy!
    â€œExcept he was dead,” Billy says.