Hit List

Eighteen

The airport in Orange County was named after John Wayne. Keller got off the plane with a tune running through his head, and he was halfway to the baggage claim before he worked out what it was. The theme from The High and the Mighty.

Funny how the mind did things like that.

There were half a dozen men standing alongside the baggage claim, some in chauffeur’s livery, all of them holding hand-lettered signs. Keller walked past them without a glance. No one was meeting him-that was policy, now that the mysterious Roger was out there somewhere. Anyway, no one would be expecting him to fly to Orange County, because his assignment was all the way down in La Jolla. La Jolla was a suburb of San Diego, and San Diego had a perfectly good airport of its own, larger and busier than Orange County ’s, and not named after anyone.

“Unless you count St. James,” Dot had said. When he looked blank, she told him that San Diego was Spanish for St. James. “Or Santiago,” she said. “ San Diego, Santiago. Same guy.”

“Then why do they have two names for him?”

“Maybe one’s the equivalent of James,” she said, “and the other’s more like Jimmy. What’s the difference? You’re not flying there.”

Instead he’d flown to Orange County, just in case Roger might be lurking in San Diego. He didn’t really think there was much likelihood of this. They hadn’t heard a peep out of Roger since he’d killed a man in Boston, a man who’d stolen Keller’s green trench coat and paid dearly for his crime. That was when he and Dot had figured out who Roger was and what he was trying to do.

At the time, Keller had found the whole business extremely upsetting. The idea that there was someone out there, hell-bent on being the impersonal instrument of his death, had him constantly looking over his shoulder. He’d never had to do that before, and he didn’t much like it.

But you got used to it. Keller supposed it was a little like having a heart condition. You worried about it at first, and then you stopped worrying. You took sensible precautions, you didn’t take the stairs two at a time, you paid a kid to shovel out your driveway in the winter, but you didn’t think about it all the time. You got used to it.

And he had gotten used to Roger. There was a man out there, a man who didn’t know his name and might or might not recognize him by sight, a man who shared Keller’s profession and wanted to thin the ranks of the competition. You quit letting clients meet you at the airport, you covered your tracks, but you didn’t have to hide under the bed. You went about your business.

Flying into a less convenient airport came under the heading of sensible precautions. Keller saw it as a bonus that the airport was named for John Wayne. Approaching the Avis counter, he felt a few inches taller, a little broader in the shoulders.

The clerk-Keller wanted to call him Pilgrim, but suppressed the urge-checked the license and credit card Keller showed him and was halfway through the paperwork when something pulled him up short. Keller asked him if something was wrong.

“Your reservation,” the man said. “It seems it’s been canceled.”

“Must be a mistake.”

“I can reinstate it, no problem. I mean, we have cars available, and you’re here.”

“Right.”

“So I’ll just… oh, there’s a note here. You’re supposed to call your office.”

“My office.”

“That’s what it says. Shall I go ahead with this?”

Keller told him to wait. From a pay phone, he called his own apartment in New York. While it rang he had the eerie feeling that the call would be answered, and that the voice he heard would be his own, talking to him. He shook his head, amused at the workings of his own mind, and then he did in fact hear his own voice, inviting him to leave a message. It was his answering machine, of course, but it took him a split second to realize as much, and he almost dropped the phone.

There were no messages.

He broke the connection and called Dot in White Plains, and she picked up halfway through the first ring. “Good,” she said. “It worked. I thought of having you paged. ‘Mr. Keller, Mr. John Keller, please pick up the white courtesy phone.’ But do we really want your name booming out over a loudspeaker?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“And would you even hear it? He’ll be through the airport like a shot, I thought. He won’t have to stop at the baggage claim, and as soon as he picks up his rental car he’s out of there. Bingo, I thought.”

“So you called Avis.”

“I called everybody. I remembered the name on that license and credit card of yours, but suppose you were using something else? Anyway, Avis had your reservation, and they said they’d see that you got the message, and they were as good as their word. So it worked.”

“Not entirely,” he said. “While they were at it, they canceled my reservation.”

“I canceled your reservation, Keller. You don’t need a car because you’re not going anywhere, aside from the next plane back to New York.”

“Oh?”

“Three hours ago, while you were over what? Illinois? Iowa?”

“Whatever.”

“While you were experiencing slight turbulence at thirty-five thousand feet,” she said, “a couple of uniforms were making vain efforts to revive Heck Palmieri, who had put his belt around his neck, closed the closet door around the free end of the belt, and kicked over the chair he was standing on. Guess what happened to him?”

“He died?”

“For our sins,” Dot said, “or for his own, more likely. Either way, it leaves you with nothing to do out there. Other hand, who says you have to make a U-turn? I’ll bet you can find somebody to rent you a car.”

“They were all set to reinstate the reservation.”

“Well, reinstate it, if you want. Have some lunch, see the sights. You’re where, Orange County? Go look at some Republicans.”

“Well,” Keller said. “I guess I’ll come home.”

“It’s a good way to miss jet lag,” Keller said, “because I was back where I started before it could draw a bead on me.”

“How were your flights?”

“All right, I guess. Pointless, but otherwise all right.”

They were on the open front porch of the big house on Taunton Place, sitting in lawn chairs with a pitcher of iced tea on the table between them. It was a warm day, warmer than it had been in Southern California. Of course he’d never really felt the temperature there, because he’d never stepped outside of the air-conditioned airport.

“Not entirely pointless,” Dot said. “They paid half in advance, and we get to keep that.”

“I should hope so.”

“They called here,” she said, “to call it off, but of course your flight to California was already in the air by then. They said something about a refund, and I said something about they should live so long.”

“A refund!”

“They were just trying it on, Keller. They backed down right away.”

“They should pay the whole thing,” he said.

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, the guy’s dead, isn’t he?”

“By his own hand, Keller. His own belt, anyway. What did you have to do with it?”

“What did I have to do with Klinger? Or Petrosian?”

“May they rest in peace,” Dot said, “but they’re our little secret, remember? Far as the clients were concerned, you showed them the door, sent them on their way. With Palmieri, you were up in the air when he decided to check out the tensile strength of a one-inch strip of split cowhide. Don’t look at me like that, Keller. I don’t really know what kind of belt he used. The point is you were nowhere around, so how are they going to figure it was your doing?”

“Something you said last time,” he said. “About how my thoughts are powerful.”

“Oh, right, I’ll quick pick up the phone and sell that to the client. ‘My guy closed his eyes and thought real hard,’ I’ll tell him, ‘and that’s why your guy decided to hang himself. It’s a suicide, but we get an assist.’ How can they possibly say no?”

“They cut the deal,” Keller said doggedly, “and next thing you know the guy’s dead.”

“Probably because he knew somebody was coming for him and he didn’t want to wait.” She leaned back in her chair. “For your information,” she said, “I tried on something similar. ‘You wanted him dead and he’s dead,’ I said. ‘So we should get paid in full.’ But it was just a negotiating technique, a counter for them asking for their initial payment back. They laughed at me, and I laughed at them, and we left it where we knew we were going to leave it.”

“With us getting half.”

“Right. Keller, you didn’t really expect the whole thing, did you?”

“No, not really.”

“And does it make a difference? I mean, are you stretched financially? It seems to me you’ve had a batch of decent paydays not too far apart, but maybe it’s been going out faster than it’s been coming in. Is that it?”

“No.”

“Or maybe there’s some stamp you were counting on buying with the Palmieri proceeds, and now you can’t. Is it anything like that?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t leave a girl hanging, Keller. What is it?”

He thought for a moment. “It’s not the money,” he said.

“I hope you’re not going to tell me it’s the principle of the thing.”

“No,” he said. “Dot, remember when I was talking about retiring?”

“Vividly. You had enough money, and I told you you’d go nuts, that you needed a hobby. So you started collecting stamps.”

“Right.”

“And all of a sudden you couldn’t afford to retire anymore, because you spent all your money on stamps. So we were back in business.”

That was a simplification, he thought, but it was close enough. “Even without the stamps,” he said, “I couldn’t have retired. Well, I could have, but I couldn’t have stayed retired.”

“You’re saying you need the work.”

“I guess so, yes.”

“You need to do what you do.”

“Evidently.”

“Some inner need.”

“I suppose. I don’t get a kick out of it, you know.”

“I never thought you did.”

“Sometimes, you know, it’s tricky, and there’s the satisfaction that comes from solving a problem. Like a crossword puzzle. You fill in the last square and the thing’s complete.”

“Stands to reason.”

“But that’s only some of the time. Mostly all it is is work. You go someplace, you do the job, you come home.”

“And you get paid.”

“Right. And I don’t mind long layoffs between jobs. I find ways to keep busy, and that was true even before I started with the stamps.”

“But all of a sudden something’s different.”

“Roger’s got something to do with it,” he said. “The idea that somebody’s out there, you know? Lurking in the shadows, waiting to make his move. Doesn’t even know who I am and he wants to kill me anyway.”

“Stress,” Dot said.

“Well, I suppose. And, you know, once we figured out what he was doing and why, the bastard disappeared.”

“We stopped giving him opportunities,” she pointed out. “Once you started flying to less obvious airports and we stopped letting the client send somebody to meet you, we shut Roger out. I’d have to call that a good thing, Keller. You’re still breathing, right?”

“Right.”

“And the last three jobs, well, even if he was lurking on the scene, he still couldn’t get a look at you, could he? Because you didn’t do anything.”

“I would have,” he said. “If I’d had any kind of a chance.”

“But you didn’t, and if Roger was around all he could do was stand there with his thumb up his nose, and you came home and got paid. I don’t see a major problem here, Keller.”

“It’s being teased like this,” he said. “Packing my bag, going someplace, figuring out what I’ll do and how I’ll do it, and the rug’s pulled out from under me. I don’t like it, that’s all.”

“I can understand that.”

He lowered his eyes, sorted out his thoughts. Then he said, “Dot, I almost killed somebody.”

“Except you couldn’t, because he killed himself first.”

“No, forget that. Here.”

“Here?”

“Not here,” he said, gesturing. “Not right here in White Plains. In New York. And not for business.”

She looked at him sharply. “What’s that leave, Keller? For pleasure?”

“Dot, for God’s sake.”

“Well, what else is there?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Oh, right,” she said, relaxing. “Don’t take it personally, Keller, but sometimes I forget you have a personal life.”

“There’s this woman I was seeing,” he said.

“Dresses in black.”

“That’s the one.”

“Wants to keep it superficial, won’t have dinner with you or let you buy her anything.”

“Right.”

“And you wanted to kill her?”

“I didn’t exactly want to,” he said, “but I almost did.”

“No kidding,” Dot said. “What did she do to piss you off, if you don’t mind my asking? Was she sleeping with somebody else?”

“No,” he said, and then thought about it. “Or maybe she was, for all I know. I never gave it much thought.”

“I guess you’re not the jealous type. So it must have been something serious, like eating crackers in bed.”

“I wasn’t angry.”

“If I just sit here quietly,” Dot said, “you’ll explain.”

When he’d finished, Dot took the empty pitcher inside and came back with a full one. “This weather,” she said, “I drink gallons of this stuff. You suppose it’s possible to drink too much iced tea?”

“No idea.”

“I guess everything’s bad for you if you take in enough of it.”

“I guess.”

“Keller,” she said, “the woman’s a loose end. Getting the impulse to tie her off doesn’t make you a homicidal maniac.”

“I never said-“

“I know what you never said. You think you’re frustrated because you keep going out on jobs and fate won’t let you pull the trigger. And maybe you are, but that’s not why the hair stood up on the back of your neck when your girlfriend said what she did.”

“It was more that I got a tingling in my hands.”

“Thanks for clearing that up, Keller. I repeat, she’s a loose end. You’d have had the same impulse if you’d just come back from depopulating Kosovo. And it wouldn’t have just been a passing thought, either. You’d have closed the sale.”

“She didn’t do anything, Dot.”

“And you’d have made sure she never did.”

He thought about it. “Maybe,” he acknowledged. “But I didn’t, and I never heard anything from her. By now she’s probably been in and out of half a dozen other superficial relationships. Odds are she never even thinks of me.”

“You’re probably right,” Dot said. “Let’s hope so.”

Six weeks later, Keller got a phone call, made another trip to White Plains. He was back in his apartment around one in the afternoon, and two hours later he was at JFK, waiting to board a TWA flight to St. Louis.

During the flight, Keller read the SkyMall catalog. There were articles he wanted to buy, and he knew he wouldn’t have given them a second thought under other circumstances. This happened all the time when he flew, and once he was on the ground the urge to order the supervalue luggage or the handy Pocket Planner vanished forever, or at least until his next flight. Maybe it was the altitude, he thought. Maybe it undercut your sales resistance.

No one was supposed to meet him at the airport, and no one did. Keller took a slip of paper from his wallet. He’d already committed the name and address to memory, but he read them again, just to be certain. Then he went outside and got a cab.

The target was a man named Elwood Murray. He lived in Florissant, a suburb north of the city, and had an office on Olive, halfway between City Hall and the city’s trademark arch.

Keller had the cab drop him at a lunch counter a block from Murray ’s office. A sign in the window said the daily special was Three-Alarm Chili, and that sounded good to Keller. If it was as good as it sounded, he could come back for more. There was no rush on this one, Dot had told him. He could take his time.

But instead he went directly to Murray ’s office building. It was six stories tall and a few years past its prime. Murray ’s name was listed on the board in the lobby: Murray, Elwood, #604. The self-service elevator was one of the slowest Keller had encountered, and he found himself urging it upward. If he’d known it was going to be this slow he’d have taken the stairs.

Murray had his name painted on the frosted glass of his office door, along with some initials that didn’t mean anything to Keller. There was a light on, and Keller turned the knob, opened the door. A man a few years older than Keller sat behind a big oak desk. He was in shirtsleeves, and his suit jacket was hanging from a peg on the side wall.

“Elwood Murray?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll just need a minute of your time,” Keller said, and closed the door. That would keep them from being observed by anyone passing in the hall, but the act was enough to alert Murray, and one look at Murray ’s face was enough to put Keller in motion. Murray moved first, his hand darting into the desk’s center drawer, and Keller threw himself forward, hurling himself against Murray ’s desk and shoving it all the way to the wall, pinning Murray and his chair, jamming the drawer shut on his hand.

Murray couldn’t open the drawer, couldn’t get his hand out, couldn’t move. Keller could move, though, and did, and got his hands on the man.

“Oh, good,” Dot said. “You got the message.”

“What message?”

“On your machine. You didn’t get it? Then why are you calling?”

“ Mission accomplished,” he said.

There was a pause. Then she said, “I suppose that means what I think it means.”

“There aren’t too many different things it could mean,” he said. “Remember the errand you asked me to run this morning? Well, I ran it.”

“You’re not still in New York, then.”

“No, of course not. I’m in… well, I can see the Arch from here.”

“And I don’t suppose it’s the McDonald’s across the street, is it? And you already did what you went there to do.”

“Or I wouldn’t be calling. Dot, what the hell’s the matter?”

“They called it off,” she said.

“They…”

“Called it off. Changed their minds. Canceled the contract.”

“Oh.”

“But you didn’t know that.”

“How would I know?”

“You wouldn’t, not unless you happened to check your machine, and why would you do that? Well, what’s your plan now, Keller?”

“I thought I’d come home.”

“You’re not going to visit some stamp dealers? Spend a few days, find a nice Mexican restaurant?”

“Not this time.”

“Probably just as well,” she said. “Come home, come see me, and we’ll get this sorted out.”

“On the way out,” he said, “I had the urge to buy a Pocket Planner. Coming home, it was a set of college courses on video. The country’s best lecturers, the ad said.”

“Would you watch them?”

“Of course not,” Keller said. “Any more than I’d use the Pocket Planner. What do I want to plan? It’s funny how it works. You stow your carry-on in the overhead compartment, you make sure your seat belt’s securely fastened, and you start wanting things you never wanted before. They have these in-flight phones, and you can call and order this stuff at no charge.” He frowned. “No charge for the phone call, that is.”

“What did you buy?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I never do, but I always think about it.”

“Keller…”

“Why’d they call it off?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “because I don’t know why they called it on in the first place. Who was he, anyway?”

“He had an office,” Keller said, “all by himself, and he had some initials after his name, but I don’t remember what they were. I guess he was some kind of businessman, and I got the impression he wasn’t doing too well at it.”

“Well, maybe he owed money, and maybe he paid up after all. Which is more than they’re going to do.”

“The client, you mean.”

“Right.”

“Paid half in front, and doesn’t want to pay the balance.”

“Right again.”

“I don’t see why. I did what I was supposed to do.”

“But by the time you did it,” she said, “you weren’t supposed to do it.”

“Not my fault.”

“I agree with you, Keller.”

“They didn’t say go out there and await further instructions. They said do the job, and I did the job. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is they hate paying for a job they tried to cancel. As a matter of fact, they wanted their advance back.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Exactly what I told them.”

“I did the job,” he said. “I should get paid in full.”

“I told them that, too.”

“And?”

“You could call it a Mexican standoff,” she said, “if you’re prepared to run the risk of being politically incorrect.”

“We keep what they already paid us.”

“You got it.”

“And they keep what they owe us.”

“If you want to call it that.”

“I don’t know what else to call it,” he said. “Why a Mexican standoff, do you happen to know? What’s Mexican about it?”

“You’re the stamp collector, Keller. Is there a Mexican stamp with a famous standoff pictured on it?”

“A famous standoff? What’s a famous standoff?”

“I don’t know. The Alamo, maybe.”

“The Alamo wasn’t a standoff. It was a massacre, everybody got killed.”

“If you say so.”

“And the Mexicans wouldn’t put it on a stamp. It’s the Texans who made a shrine out of the place.”

“The ones who got massacred.”

“Well, not the same ones, but other Texans. The Mexicans would just as soon forget the whole thing.”

“All right,” she said. “Forget the Alamo. Forget the Maine, too, while you’re at it. If you want to know why they call it a Mexican standoff, I’m sure you can look it up. Spend an afternoon at the library, ask the lady at the research desk to help you out. That’s what she’s there for, Keller.”

“Dot…”

“Keller, it’s an expression. Who cares where it came from?”

“It won’t keep me up nights.”

“And who cares about the money? You don’t. It’s not about the money, is it?”

He thought about it. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

“It’s about being right. They don’t pay you, they’re saying you’re wrong. You settle for half, you’re admitting you’re wrong.”

“But I did what I was supposed to do, Dot! They didn’t say go there and wait for instructions. They didn’t say find the guy and count to ten. They said-“

“I know what they said, Keller.”

“Well.”

“You were in a hurry,” she said, “because of the way things have been going lately, and because there’s always the shadow of Roger lurking in the wings. On the one hand you’re absolutely right, you did what you were supposed to do, but there’s something else to think about that’s got nothing to do with the client.”

“What’s that?”

“Normally you take your time,” she said. “A couple of days, anyway. Sometimes a week, sometimes longer.”

“So?”

“Why, Keller?”

“Why was I in a hurry? You just told me why I was in a hurry.”

She shook her head. “Why do you take your time? I’ll tell you, Keller, sometimes it’s frustrating for the folks on the home front. You don’t just take your time. You dawdle.”

“I dawdle?”

“You probably don’t, but it seems that way from a distance. And it’s not just because there’s a good place for breakfast, or the motel television set gets HBO. You take your time so you can make sure you do the job right.”

She went on talking and he found himself nodding. He got the point. Because he’d been in such a rush, Murray had seen it coming, had been reaching for a gun when Keller got to him. If the desk drawer had been open to begin with, if Murray had been a little bit faster or Keller a little bit slower…

“I’m not saying it’s anything to worry about,” Dot said. “It’s over and you came out of it okay. But you might want to think about it.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, “whether I want to or not.”

“I suppose you will. Keller?”

“What?”

“You’re fussing with your thumb.”

“I am?”

“The funny one. I forget what you called it.”

“Murderer’s thumb.”

“Rubbing it, hiding it behind your fingers.”

“Just a nervous habit,” he said.

“I suppose twiddling it would be worse. Look, lighten up, huh? Nothing went wrong, you went out and came back the same day, and on an hourly basis I’d say you made out like a bandit.”

“I guess.”

“But?”

“I was thinking about Elwood Murray.”

“Never think about them, Keller.”

“I hardly ever do. Murray, though, he got killed for no reason.”

She was shaking her head. “There’s always a reason,” she said. “He pissed somebody off. Then he straightened it out, but how long would it stay that way? How long before he pissed somebody else off big-time, and somebody picked up a phone?”

“He did look like the kind of guy who would piss people off.”

“There you go,” she said.