Hit Man

2 Keller on Horseback

A t the airportnewsstand, Keller picked up a paperback western. The cover was pretty much generic, showing a standard-issue Marlboro man, long and lean, walking down the dusty streets of a western town with a gun riding his hip. Neither the title nor the author’s name meant anything to Keller. What drew him was a line that seemed to leap out from the cover.

“He rode a thousand miles,” Keller read, “to kill a man he never met.”

Keller paid for the book and tucked it into his carry-on bag. When the plane was in the air he dug it out and looked at the cover, wondering why he’d bought it. He didn’t read much, and when he did he never chose westerns.

Maybe he wasn’t supposed to read this book. Maybe he was supposed to keep it as a talisman.

All for that one sentence. Imagine riding a thousand miles on a horse for any purpose, let alone the killing of a stranger. How long would it take, a thousand-mile journey on horseback? A thoroughbred got around a racecourse in something like two minutes, but it couldn’t go all day at that pace any more than a human being could string together twenty-six four-minute miles and call it a marathon.

What could you manage on a horse, fifty miles a day? A hundred miles in two days, a thousand miles in twenty? Three weeks, say, at the conclusion of which a man would probably be eager to kill anybody, stranger or blood kin.

Was Ol’ Sweat ’n’ Leather getting paid for his thousand miles? Was he in the trade? Keller turned the book over in his hands, read the paragraph on the back cover. It did not sound promising. Something about a drifter in the Arizona territory, a saddle tramp, looking to avenge an old Civil War grievance.

Forgive and forget, Keller advised him.

Keller, riding substantially more than a thousand miles, albeit on a plane instead of a horse, was similarly charged with killing a man as yet unmet. And he was drifting into the Old West to do it, first to Denver, then to Casper, Wyoming, and finally to a town called Martingale. That had been reason enough to pick up the book, but was it reason enough to read it?

He gave it a try. He read a few pages before they came down the aisle with the drink cart, read a couple more while he sipped his V-8 and ate the salted nuts. Then he evidently dozed off, because the next thing he knew the stewardess was waking him to apologize for not having the fruit plate he’d ordered. He told her it didn’t matter, he’d have the regular dinner.

“Or there’s a Hindu meal that’s going begging,” she said.

His mind filled with a vision of an airline tray wrapped in one of those saffron-colored robes, extending itself beseechingly and demanding alms. He had the regular dinner instead and ate most of it, except for the mystery meat. He dozed off afterward and didn’t wake up until they were making their descent into Stapleton Airport.

Earlier, he’d tucked the book into the seat pocket in front of him, and he’d intended to let it ride off into the sunset wedged between the air-sickness bag and the plastic card with the emergency exit diagrams. At the last minute he changed his mind and brought the book along.

He spent an hour on the ground in Denver, another hour in the air flying to Casper. The cheerful young man at the Avis counter had a car reserved for Dale Whitlock. Keller showed him a Connecticut driver’s license and an American Express card and the young man gave him a set of keys and told him to have a nice day.

The keys fit a white Chevy Caprice. Cruising north on the interstate, Keller decided he liked everything about the car but its name. There was nothing capricious about his mission. Riding a thousand miles to kill a man you hadn’t met was not something one undertook on a whim.

Ideally, he thought, he’d be bouncing along on a rutted two-lane blacktop in a Mustang, say, or maybe a Bronco. Even a Pinto sounded like a better match for a rawboned, leathery desperado like Dale Whitlock than a Caprice.

It was comfortable, though, and he liked the way it handled. And the color was okay. But forget white. As far as he was concerned, the car was a palomino.

It took about an hour to drive to Martingale, a town of around ten thousand midway between Casper and Sheridan on I-25. Just looking around, you knew right away that you’d left the East Coast far behind. Mountains in the distance, a great expanse of sky overhead. And, right in front of you, frame buildings that could have been false fronts in a Randolph Scott film. A feed store, a western wear emporium, a rundown hotel where you’d expect to find Wild Bill Hickok holding aces and eights at a table in the saloon, or Doc Holliday coughing his lungs out in a bedroom on the second floor.

Of course there were also a couple of supermarkets and gas stations, a two-screen movie house and a Toyota dealership, a Pizza Hut and a Taco John’s, so it wasn’t too hard to keep track of what century you were in. He saw a man walk out of the Taco John’s looking a lot like the young Randolph Scott, from his boots to his Stetson, but he spoiled the illusion by climbing into a pickup truck.

The hotel that inspired Hickok-Holliday fantasies was the Martingale, located right in the center of things on the wide main street. Keller imagined himself walking in, slapping a credit card on the counter. Then the desk clerk-Henry Jones always played him in the movie-would say that they didn’t take plastic. “Or p-p-paper either,” he’d say, eyes darting, looking for a place to duck when the shooting started.

And Keller would set a silver dollar spinning on the counter. “I’ll be here a few days,” he’d announce. “If I have any change coming, buy yourself a new pair of suspenders.”

And Henry Jones would glance down at his suspenders, to see what was wrong with them.

He sighed, shook his head, and drove to the Holiday Inn near the interstate exit. They had plenty of rooms, and gave him what he asked for, a nonsmoking room on the third floor in the rear. The desk clerk was a woman, very young, very blond, very perky, with nothing about her to remind you of Henry Jones. She said, “Enjoy your stay with us, Mr. Whitlock.” Not stammering, eyes steady.

He unpacked, showered, and went to the window to look at the sunset. It was the sort of sunset a hero would ride off into, leaving a slender blonde to bite back tears while calling after him, “I hope you enjoyed your stay with us, Mr. Whitlock.”

Stop it, he told himself. Stay with reality. You’ve flown a couple of thousand miles to kill a man you never met. Just get it done. The sunset can wait.

He hadn’t met the man, but he knew his name. Even if he wasn’t sure how to pronounce it.

The man in White Plains had handed Keller an index card with two lines of block capitals hand-printed.

“Lyman Crowder,” he read, as if it rhymed withlouder. “Or should that be Crowder?” As if it rhymed withloader.

A shrug in response.

“Martingale, WY,” Keller went on. “Why indeed? And where, besides Wyoming? Is Martingale near anything?”

Another shrug, accompanied by a photograph. Or a part of one; it had apparently been cropped from a larger photo, and showed the upper half of a middle-aged man who looked to have spent a lot of time outdoors. A big man, too. Keller wasn’t sure how he knew that. You couldn’t see the man’s legs and there was nothing else in the photo to give you an idea of scale. But somehow he could tell.

“What did he do?”

Again a shrug, but one that conveyed information to Keller. If the other man didn’t know what Crowder had done, he had evidently done it to somebody else. Which meant the man in White Plains had no personal interest in the matter. It was strictly business.

“So who’s the client?”

A shake of the head. Meaning that he didn’t know who was picking up the tab, or that he knew but wasn’t saying? Hard to tell. The man in White Plains was a man of few words and master of none.

“What’s the time frame?”

“The time frame,” the man said, evidently enjoying the phrase. “No big hurry. One week, two weeks.” He leaned forward, patted Keller on the knee. “Take your time,” he said. “Enjoy yourself.”

On the way out he’d shown the index card to Dot. He said, “How would you pronounce this? As incrow or as incrowd?”

Dot shrugged.

“Jesus,” he said, “you’re as bad as he is.”

“Nobody’s as bad as he is,” Dot said. “Keller, what difference does it make how Lyman pronounces his last name?”

“I just wondered.”

“Well, stick around for the funeral,” she suggested. “See what the minister says.”

“You’re a big help,” Keller said.

There was only one Crowder listed in the Martingale phone book. Lyman Crowder, with a telephone number but no address. About a third of the book’s listings were like that. Keller wondered why. Did these people assume everybody knew where they lived in a town this size? Or were they saddle tramps with cellular phones and no fixed abode?

Probably rural, he decided. Lived out of town on some unnamed road, picked up their mail at the post office, so why list an address in the phone book?

Great. His quarry lived in the boondocks outside of a town that wasn’t big enough to have boondocks, and Keller didn’t even have an address for him. He had a phone number, but what good was that? What was he supposed to do, call him up and ask directions? “Hi, this here’s Dale Whitlock, we haven’t met, but I just rode a thousand miles and-”

Scratch that.

He drove around and ate at a downtown café called the Singletree. It was housed in a weathered frame building just down the street from the Martingale Hotel. The café’s name was spelled out in rope nailed to the vertical clapboards. For Keller the name brought a vision of a solitary pine or oak set out in the middle of vast grasslands, a landmark for herdsmen, a rare bit of shade from the relentless sun.

From the menu, he learned that a singletree was some kind of apparatus used in hitching up a horse, or a team of horses. It was a little unclear to him just what it was or how it functioned, but it certainly didn’t spread its branches in the middle of the prairie.

Keller had the special, a chicken-fried steak and some French fries that came smothered in gravy. He was hungry enough to eat everything in spite of the way it tasted.

You don’t want to live here, he told himself.

It was a relief to know this. Driving around Martingale, Keller had found himself reminded of Roseburg, Oregon. Roseburg was larger, with none of the Old West feel of Martingale, but they were both small western towns of a sort Keller rarely got to. In Roseburg Keller had allowed his imagination to get away from him for a little while, and he wouldn’t want to let that happen again.

Still, crossing the threshold of the Singletree, he had been unable to avoid remembering the little Mexican place in Roseburg. If the food and service here turned out to be on that level-

Forget it. He was safe.

After his meal Keller strode out through the bat-wing doors and walked up one side of the street and down the other. It seemed to him that there was something unusual about the way he was walking, that his gait was that of a man who had just climbed down from a horse.

Keller had been on a horse once in his life, and he couldn’t remember how he’d walked after he got off of it. So this walk he was doing now wasn’t coming from his own past. It must have been something he’d learned unconsciously from movies and TV, a synthesis of all those riders of the purple sage and the silver screen.

No need to worry about yearning to settle here, he knew now. Because his fantasy now was not of someone settling in but passing through, the saddle tramp, the shootist, the flint-eyed loner who does his business and moves on.

That was a good fantasy, he decided. You wouldn’t get into any trouble with a fantasy like that.

Back in his room, Keller tried the book again but couldn’t keep his mind on what he was reading. He turned on the TV and worked his way through the channels, using the remote control bolted to the nightstand. Westerns, he decided, were like cops and cabs, never around when you wanted them. It seemed to him that he never made a trip around the cable circuit without running into John Wayne or Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea or a rerun ofGunsmoke orRawhide or one of those spaghetti westerns with Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef. Or the great villains-Jack Elam, Strother Martin, the young Lee Marvin inThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

It probably said something about you, Keller thought, when your favorite actor was Jack Elam.

He switched off the set and looked up Lyman Crowder’s phone number. He could dial it, and when someone picked up and said, “Crowder residence,” he’d know how the name was pronounced. “Just checking,” he could say, cradling the phone and giving them something to think about.

Of course he wouldn’t say that, he’d mutter something harmless about a wrong number, but was even that much contact a good idea? Maybe it would put Crowder on his guard. Maybe Crowder was already on his guard, as far as that went. That was the trouble with going in blind like this, knowing nothing about either the target or the client.

If he called Crowder’s house from the motel, there might be a record of the call, a link between Lyman Crowder and Dale Whitlock. That wouldn’t matter much to Keller, who would shed the Whitlock identity on his way out of town, but there was no reason to create more grief for the real Dale Whitlock.

Because there was a real Dale Whitlock, and Keller was giving him grief enough without making him a murder suspect.

It was pretty slick the way the man in White Plains worked it. He knew a man who had a machine with which he could make flawless American Express cards. He knew someone else who could obtain the names and account numbers of bona fide American Express cardholders. Then he had cards made that were essentially duplicates of existing cards. You didn’t have to worry that the cardholder had reported his card as stolen, because it hadn’t been stolen, it was still sitting in his wallet. You were off somewhere charging the earth, and he didn’t have a clue until the charges turned up on his monthly statement.

The driver’s license was real, too. Well, technically it was a counterfeit, of course, and the photograph on it showed Keller, not Whitlock. But someone had managed to access the Connecticut Bureau of Motor Vehicles computer, and thus the counterfeit license showed the same number as Whitlock’s, and gave the same address.

In the old days, Keller thought, it had been a lot more straightforward. You didn’t need a license to ride a horse or a credit card to rent one. You bought or stole one, and when you rode into town on it nobody asked to see your ID. They might not even come right out and ask your name, and if they did they wouldn’t expect a detailed reply. “Call me Tex,” you’d say, and that’s what they’d call you as you rode off into the sunset.

“Goodbye, Tex,” the blonde would call out. “I hope you enjoyed your stay with us.”

The lounge downstairs turned out to be the hot spot in Martingale. Restless, Keller had gone downstairs to have a quiet drink. He walked into a thickly carpeted room with soft lighting and a good sound system. There were fifteen or twenty people in the place, all of them either having a good time or looking for one.

Keller ordered a Coors at the bar. On the jukebox, Barbara Mandrell sang a song about cheating. When she was done, a duo he didn’t recognize sang a song about cheating. Then came Hank Williams’s oldie, “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

A subtle pattern was beginning to emerge.

“I love this song,” the blonde said.

A different blonde, not the perky young thing from the front desk. This woman was taller, older, and fuller-figured. She wore a skirt and a sort of cowgirl blouse with piping and embroidery on it.

“Old Hank,” Keller said, to say something.

“I’m June.”

“Call me Tex. ”

“ Tex!” Her laughter came in a sort of yelp. “When did anybody ever call you Tex, tell me that?”

“Well, nobody has,” he admitted, “but that’s not to say they never will.”

“Where are you from, Tex? No, I’m sorry, I can’t call you that, it sticks in my throat. If you want me to call you Tex you’re going to have to start wearing boots.”

“You see by my outfit that I’m not a cowboy.”

“Your outfit, your accent, your haircut. If you’re not an easterner, then I’m a virgin.”

“I’m from Connecticut.”

“I knew it.”

“My name’s Dale.”

“Well, you could keep that. If you were fixing to be a cowboy, I mean. You’d have to change the way you dress and talk and comb your hair, but you could hang on to Dale. There another name that goes with it?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. “Whitlock,” he said.

“Dale Whitlock. Shoot, that’s pretty close to perfect. You tell ’em a name like that, you got credit down at the Agway in a New York minute. Wouldn’t even have to fill out a form. You married, Dale?”

What was the right answer? She was wearing a ring herself, and the jukebox was now playing yet another cheating song.

“Not in Martingale,” he said.

“Oh, I like that,” she said, eyes sparkling. “I like the whole idea of regional marriage. Iam married in Martingale, but we’re notin Martingale. The town line’s Front Street.”

“In that case,” he said, “maybe I could buy you a drink.”

“You easterners,” she said. “You’re just so damn fast.”

There had to be a catch.

Keller didn’t do too badly with women. He got lucky once in a while. But he didn’t have the sort of looks that made heads turn, nor had he made seduction his life’s work. Some years ago he’d read a book calledHow to Pick Up Girls, filled with opening lines that were guaranteed to work. Keller thought they were silly. He was willing to believe they would work, but he was not able to believe they would work for him.

This woman, though, had hit on him before he’d had time to become aware of her presence. This sort of thing happened, especially when you were dealing with a married woman in a bar where all they played were cheating songs. Everybody knew what everybody else was there for, and nobody had time to dawdle. So this sort of thing happened, but it never seemed to happen to him, and he didn’t trust it.

Something would go wrong. She’d call home and find out her kid was running a fever. Her husband would walk in the door just as the jukebox gave out with “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille.” She’d be overcome by conscience, or rendered unconscious by the drink Keller had just bought her.

“I’d say my place or yours,” she said, “but we both know the answer to that one. What’s your room number?” Keller told her. “You go on up,” she said. “I won’t be a minute. Don’t start without me.”

He brushed his teeth, splashed on a little aftershave. She wouldn’t show, he told himself. Or she’d expect to be paid, which would take a little of the frost off the pumpkin. Or her husband would turn up and they’d try to work some variation of the badger game.

Or she’d be sloppy drunk, or he’d be impotent. Or something.

“Whew,” she said. “I don’t guess you need boots after all. I’ll call you Tex or Slim or any damn thing you want me to, just so you come when you’re called. How long are you in town for, Dale?”

“I’m not sure. A few days.”

“Business, I suppose. What sort of business are you in?”

“I work for a big corporation,” he said. “They fly me over to look into situations.”

“Sounds like you can’t talk about it.”

“Well, we do a lot of government work,” he said. “So I’m really not supposed to.”

“Say no more,” she said. “Oh, Lord, look at the time!”

While she showered, he picked up the paperback and rewrote the blurb. He killed a thousand miles, he thought, to ride a woman he never met. Well, sometimes you got lucky. The stars were in the right place, the forces that ruled the universe decided you deserved a present. There didn’t always have to be a catch to it, did there?

She turned off the shower, and he heard the last line of the song she’d been singing. “ ‘And Celia’s at the Jackson Park Inn,’ ” she sang, and moments later she emerged from the bathroom and began dressing.

“What’s this?” she said. “ ‘He rode a thousand miles to kill a man he never met.’ You know, that’s funny, because I just had the darnedest thought while I was running the soap over my pink and tender flesh.”

“Oh?”

“I just said that last to remind you what’s under this here skirt and blouse. Oh, the thought I had? Well, something you said, government work. I thought maybe this man’s CIA, maybe he’s some old soldier of fortune, maybe he’s the answer to this maiden’s prayers.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that it was already a real fine evening, Dale, but it would be heaven on earth if what you came to Martingale for was to kill my damn husband.”

Christ. Wasshe the client? Was the pickup downstairs a cute way for them to meet? Could she actually be that stupid, coming on in a public place to a man she was hiring to kill her husband?

For that matter, how had she recognized him? Only Dot and the man in White Plains had known the name he was using. They’d have kept it to themselves. And she’d made her move before she knew his name. Had she been able to recognize him? I see by your outfit that you are a hit man? Something along those lines?

“Yarnell,” she was saying. “Hobart Lee Yarnell, and what he’d like is for people to call him Bart, and what everybody calls him is Hobie. Now what does that tell you about the man?”

That he’s not the man I came here to kill, Keller thought. This was comforting to realize, but left her waiting for an answer to her question. “That’s he’s not used to getting his own way,” Keller said.

She laughed. “He’s not,” she said, “but it’s not for lack of trying. You know, I like you, Dale. You’re a nice fellow. But if it wasn’t you tonight it would have been somebody else.”

“And here I thought it was my aftershave.”

“I’ll just bet you did. No, the kind of marriage I got, I come around here a lot. I’ve put a lot of quarters in that jukebox the last year or so.”

“And played a lot of cheating songs?”

“And done a fair amount of cheating. But it doesn’t really work. I still wake up the next day married to that bastard.”

“Why don’t you divorce him?”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

“I was brought up not to believe in it,” she said. “But I don’t guess that’s it. I wasn’t raised to believe in cheating, either.” She frowned. “Money’s part of it,” she admitted. “I won’t bore you with the details, but I’d get gored pretty bad in a divorce.”

“That’s a problem.”

“I guess, except what do I care about money anyway? Enough’s as much as a person needs, and my daddy’s got pots of money. He’s not about to let me starve.”

“Well, then-”

“But he thinks the world of Hobie,” she said, glaring at Keller as if it were his fault. “Hunts elk with him, goes after trout and salmon with him, thinks he’s just the best thing ever came over the pass. And he doesn’t even want to hear the worddivorce. You know that Tammy Wynette song where she spells it out a letter at a time? I swear he’d leave the room before you got pastR. I say it’d about break Lyman Crowder’s heart if his little girl ever got herself divorced.”

Well, it was true. If you kept your mouth shut and your ears open, you learned things. What he had learned was that Crowder rhymed with powder.

Now what?

After her departure, after his own shower, he paced back and forth trying to sort it all out. In the few hours since his arrival in Martingale, he’d slept with a woman who turned out to be the loving daughter of the target and, in all likelihood, the unloving wife of the client.

Well, maybe not. Lyman Crowder was a rich man, lived north of town on a good-sized ranch that he ran pretty much as a hobby. He’d made his real money in oil, and nobody ever made a small amount of money that way. You either went broke or got rich. Rich men had enemies. People they’d crossed in business, people who stood to profit from their death.

But it figured that Yarnell was the client. There was a kind of poetic inevitability about it. She picks him up in the lounge, it’s not enough that she’s the target’s daughter. She also ought to be the client’s wife. Round things out, tie up all the loose ends.

The thing to do… well, he knew the thing to do. The thing to do was get a few hours’ sleep and then, bright and early, reverse the usual order of affairs by riding off into the sunrise. Get on a plane, get off in New York, and write off Martingale as a happy little romantic adventure. Men, after all, had been known to travel farther than that in the hope of getting laid.

He’d tell the man in White Plains to find somebody else. Sometimes you had to do that. No blame attached, as long as you didn’t make a habit of it. He’d say he was blown.

Which, come to think of it, he was. Quite expertly, as a matter of fact.

In the morning he got up and packed his carry-on. He’d call White Plains from the airport, or wait until he was back in New York. He didn’t want to phone from the room. When the real Dale Whitlock had a fit and called American Express, they’d look over things like the Holiday Inn statement. No sense leaving anything that led anywhere.

He thought about June, and the memory made him playful. He checked the time. Eight o’clock, two hours later in the East, not an uncivil time to call.

He called Whitlock’s home in Rowayton, Connecticut. A woman answered. He identified himself as a representative of a political polling organization, using a name she would recognize. By asking questions that encouraged lengthy responses, he had no trouble keeping her on the phone. “Well, thank you very much,” he said at length. “And have a nice day.”

Now let Whitlock explain that one to American Express. He finished packing and was almost out the door when his eye caught the paperback western. Take it along? Leave it for the maid? What?

He picked it up, read the cover line, sighed. Was this what Randolph Scott would do? Or John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood? How about Jack Elam?

No, of course not.

Because then there’d be no movie. A man rides into town, starts to have a look at the situation, meets a woman, gets it on with her, then just backs out and rides off? You put something like that on the screen, it wouldn’t even play in the art houses.

Still, this wasn’t a movie.

Still…

He looked at the book and wanted to heave it across the room. But all he heaved was a sigh. Then he unpacked.

He was having a cup of coffee in town when a pickup pulled up across the street and two men got out of it. One of them was Lyman Crowder. The other, not quite as tall, was twenty pounds lighter and twenty years younger. Crowder’s son, by the looks of him.

His son-in-law, as it turned out. Keller followed the two men into a store where the fellow behind the counter greeted them as Lyman and Hobie. Crowder had a lengthy shopping list composed largely of items Keller would have been hard put to find a use for.

While the owner filled the order, Keller had a look at the display of hand-tooled boots. The pointed toes would be handy in New York, he thought, for killing cockroaches in corners. The heels would add better than an inch to his height. He wondered if he’d feel awkward in the boots, like a teenager in her first pair of high heels. Lyman and Hobie looked comfortable enough in their boots, as pointy in the toes and as elevated in the heels as any on display, but they also looked comfortable in their string ties and ten-gallon hats, and Keller was sure he’d feel ridiculous dressed like that.

They were a pair, he thought. They looked alike, they talked alike, they dressed alike, and they seemed uncommonly fond of one another.

Back in his room, Keller stood at the window and looked down at the parking lot, then across the way at a pair of mountains. A few years ago his work had taken him to Miami, where he’d met a Cuban who’d cautioned him against ever taking a hotel room above the second floor. “Suppose you got to leave in a hurry?” the man said. “Ground floor, no problem. Second floor, no problem. Third floor, break your fockeen leg.”

The logic of this had impressed Keller, and for a while he had made a point of taking the man’s advice. Then he happened to learn that the Cuban not only shunned the higher floors of hotels but also refused to enter an elevator or fly in an airplane. What had looked like tradecraft now appeared to be nothing more than phobia.

It struck Keller that he had never in his life had to leave a hotel room, or any other sort of room, by the window. This was not to say that it would never happen, but he’d decided it was a risk he was prepared to run. He liked high floors. Maybe he even liked running risks.

He picked up the phone, made a call. When she answered he said, “This is Tex. Would you believe my business appointment canceled? Left me with the whole afternoon to myself.”

“Are you where I left you?”

“I’ve barely moved since then.”

“Well, don’t move now,” she said. “I’ll be right on over.”

Around nine that night Keller wanted a drink, but he didn’t want to have it in the company of adulterers and their favorite music. He drove around in his palomino Caprice until he found a place on the edge of town that looked promising. It called itself Joe’s Bar. Outside it was nondescript. Inside it smelled of stale beer and casual plumbing. The lights were low. There was sawdust on the floor and the heads of dead animals on the walls. The clientele was exclusively male, and for a moment this gave Keller pause. There were gay bars in New York that tried hard to look like this place, though it was hard for Keller to imagine why. But Joe’s, he realized, was not a gay bar, not in any sense of the word.

He sat on a wobbly stool and ordered a beer. The other drinkers left him alone, even as they left each other alone. The jukebox played intermittently, with men dropping in quarters when they could no longer bear the silence.

The songs, Keller noted, ran to type. There were the tryin’-to-drink-that-woman-off-of-my-mind songs and the if-it-wasn’t-for-bad-luck-I-wouldn’t-have-no-luck-at-all songs. Nothing about Celia in the Jackson Park Inn, nothing about heaven being just a sin away.

These songs were for drinking and feeling really rotten about it.

“ ’Nother damn day,” said a voice at Keller’s elbow.

He knew who it was without turning. He supposed he might have recognized the voice, but he didn’t think that was it. No, it was more a recognition of the inevitability of it all. Of course it would be Yarnell, making conversation with him in this bar where no one made conversation with anyone. Who else could it be?

“ ’Nother damn day,” Keller agreed.

“Don’t believe I’ve seen you around.”

“I’m just passing through.”

“Well, you got the right idea,” Yarnell said. “Name’s Bart.”

In for a pound, in for a ton. “Dale,” Keller said.

“Good to know you, Dale.”

“Same here, Bart.”

The bartender loomed before them. “Hey, Hobie,” he said. “The usual?”

Yarnell nodded. “And another of those for Dale here.” The bartender poured Yarnell’s usual, which turned out to be bourbon with water back, and uncapped another beer for Keller. Somebody broke down and fed the jukebox a quarter and played “There Stands the Glass.”

Yarnell said, “You hear what he called me?”

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Called me Hobie,” Yarnell said. “Everybody does. You’ll be doing the same, won’t be able to help yourself.”

“The world is a terrible place,” Keller said.

“By God, you got that right,” Yarnell said. “No one ever said it better. You a married man, Dale?”

“Not at the moment.”

“ ‘Not at the moment.’ I swear I’d give a lot if I could say the same.”

“Troubles?”

“Married to one woman and in love with another one. I guess you could call that trouble.”

“I guess you could.”

“Sweetest, gentlest, darlingest, lovingest creature God ever made,” Yarnell said. “When she whispers ‘Bart’ it don’t matter if the whole rest of the world shouts ‘Hobie.’ ”

“This isn’t your wife you’re talking about,” Keller guessed.

“God, no! My wife’s a round-heeled, mean-spirited, hard-hearted tramp. I hate my damn wife. I love my girlfriend.” They were silent for a moment, and so was the whole room. Then someone played “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.”

“They don’t write songs like that anymore,” Yarnell said.

The hell they didn’t. “I’m sure I’m not the first person to suggest this,” Keller said, “but have you thought about-”

“Leaving June,” Yarnell said. “Running off with Edith. Getting a divorce.”

“Something like that.”

“Never an hour that I don’t think about it, Dale. Night and goddam day I think about it. I think about it and I drink about it, but the one thing I can’t do is do it.”

“Why’s that?”

“There is a man,” Yarnell said, “who is a father and a best friend to me all rolled into one. Finest man I ever met in my life, and the only wrong thing he ever did in his life was have a daughter, and the biggest mistake I ever made was marrying her. And if there’s one thing that man believes in it’s the sanctity of marriage. Why, he thinksdivorce is the dirtiest word in the language.”

So Yarnell couldn’t even let on to his father-in-law that his marriage was hell on earth, let alone take steps to end it. He had to keep his affair with Edith very much Back Street. The only person he could talk to was Edith, and she was out of town for the next week or so, which left him dying of loneliness and ready to pour out his heart to the first stranger he could find. For which he apologized, but-

“Hey, that’s all right, Bart,” Keller said. “A man can’t keep it all locked up inside.”

“Calling me Bart, I appreciate that. I truly do. Even Lyman calls me Hobie and he’s the best friend any man ever had. Hell, he can’t help it. Everybody calls me Hobie sooner or later.”

“Well,” Keller said. “I’ll hold out as long as I can.”

Alone, Keller reviewed his options.

He could kill Lyman Crowder. He’d be keeping it simple, carrying out the mission as it had been given to him. And it would solve everybody’s problems. June and Hobie could get the divorce they both so desperately wanted.

On the downside, they’d both be losing the man each regarded as the greatest thing since microwave popcorn.

He could toss a coin and take out either June or her husband, thus serving as a sort of divorce court of last resort. If it came up heads, June could spend the rest of her life cheating on a ghost. If it was tails, Yarnell could have his cake and Edith, too. Only a question of time until she stopped calling him Bart and took to calling him Hobie, of course, and next thing you knew she would turn up at the Holiday Inn, dropping her quarter in the slot to play “Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous.”

It struck Keller that there ought to be some sort of solution that didn’t involve lowering the population. But he knew he was the person least likely to come up with it.

If you had a medical problem, the treatment you got depended on the sort of person you went to. You didn’t expect a surgeon to manipulate your spine, or prescribe herbs and enemas, or kneel down and pray with you. Whatever the problem was, the first thing the surgeon would do was look around for something to cut. That’s how he’d been trained, that’s how he saw the world, that’s what he did.

Keller, too, was predisposed to a surgical approach. While others might push counseling or 12-step programs, Keller reached for a scalpel. But sometimes it was difficult to tell where to make the incision.

Kill ’em all, he thought savagely, and let God sort ’ em out. Or ride off into the sunset with your tail between your legs.

First thing in the morning. Keller drove to Sheridan and caught a plane to Salt Lake City. He paid cash for his ticket, and used the name John Richards. At the TWA counter in Salt Lake City he bought a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and again paid cash, this time using the name Alan Johnson.

At the Las Vegas airport he walked around the long-term parking lot as if looking for his car. He’d been doing this for five minutes or so when a balding man wearing a glen plaid sportcoat parked a two-year-old Plymouth and removed several large suitcases from its trunk, affixing them to one of those aluminum luggage carriers. Wherever he was headed, he’d packed enough to stay there for a while.

As soon as he was out of sight, Keller dropped to a knee and groped the undercarriage until he found the magnetized Hide-A-Key. He always looked before breaking into a car, and he got lucky about one time in five. As usual, he was elated. It was a good omen, finding a key. It boded well.

Keller had been to Vegas frequently over the years. He didn’t like the place, but he knew his way around. He drove to Caesars Palace and left his borrowed Plymouth for the attendant to park. He knocked on the door of an eighth-floor room until its occupant protested that she was trying to sleep.

He said, “It’s news from Martingale, Miss Bodine. For Christ’s sake, open the door.”

She opened the door a crack but kept the chain fastened. She was about the same age as June but looked older, her black hair a mess, her eyes bleary, her face still bearing traces of yesterday’s makeup.

“Crowder’s dead,” he said.

Keller could think of any number of things she might have said, ranging from “What happened?” to “Who cares?” This woman cut to the chase. “You idiot,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

Mistake.

“Let me in,” he said, and she did.

Another mistake.

The attendant brought Keller’s Plymouth and seemed happy with the tip Keller gave him. At the airport, someone else had left a Toyota Camry in the spot where the balding man had originally parked the Plymouth, and the best Keller could do was wedge it into a spot one aisle over and a dozen spaces off to the side. He figured the owner would find it, and hoped he wouldn’t worry that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Keller flew to Denver as Richard Hill, to Sheridan as David Edwards. En route he thought about Edith Bodine, who’d evidently slipped on a wet tile in the bathroom of her room at Caesars, cracking her skull on the side of the big tub. With theDO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob and the air conditioner at its highest setting, there was no telling how long she might remain undisturbed.

He’d figured she had to be the client. It wasn’t June or Hobie, both of whom thought the world revolved around Lyman Crowder, so who did that leave? Crowder himself, turned sneakily suicidal? Some old enemy, some business rival?

No, Edith was the best prospect. A client would either want to meet Keller-not obliquely, as both Yarnells had done, but by arrangement. Or the client would contrive to be demonstrably off the scene when it all happened. Thus the trip to Las Vegas.

Why? The Crowder fortune, of course. She had Hobie Yarnell crazy about her, but he wouldn’t leave June for fear of breaking Crowder’s heart, and even if he did he’d go empty-handed. Having June killed wouldn’t work either, because she didn’t have any real money of her own. But June would inherit if the old man died, and later on something could always happen to June.

Anyway, that’s how he figured it. If he’d wanted to know Edith’s exact reasoning he’d have had to ask her, and that had struck him as a waste of time. More to the point, the last thing he’d wanted was a chance to get to know her. That just screwed everything up, when you got to know these people.

If you were going to ride a thousand miles to kill a man you’d never met, you were really well advised to be the tight-lipped stranger every step of the way. No point in talking to anybody, not the target, not the client, and not anybody else, either. If you had anything to say, you could whisper it to your horse.

He got off the fourth plane of the day at Sheridan, picked up his Caprice-the name was seeming more appropriate with every passing hour-and drove back to Martingale. He kept it right around the speed limit, then slowed down along with everyone else five miles outside of Martingale. They were clearing a wreck out of the northbound lane. That shouldn’t have slowed things down in the southbound lane, but of course it did; everybody had to slow down to see what everyone else was slowing down to look at.

Back in his room, he had his bag packed before he realized that he couldn’t go anywhere. The client was dead, but that didn’t change anything; since he had no way of knowing that she was the client or that she was dead, his mission remained unchanged. He could go home and admit an inability to get the job done, waiting for the news to seep through that there was no longer any job to be done. That would get him off the hook after the fact, but he wouldn’t have covered himself with glory, nor would he get paid. The client had almost certainly paid in advance, and if there’d been a middleman between the client and the man in White Plains he had almost certainly passed the money on, and there was very little likelihood that the man in White Plains would even consider the notion of refunding a fee to a dead client, not that anyone would raise the subject. But neither would the man in White Plains pay Keller for work he’d failed to perform. The man in White Plains would just keep everything.

Keller thought about it. It looked to him as though his best course lay in playing a waiting game. How long could it take before a sneak thief or a chambermaid walked in on Edith Bodine? How long before news of her death found its way to White Plains?

The more he thought about it, the longer it seemed likely to take. If there were, as sometimes happened, a whole string of intermediaries involved, the message might very well never get to Garcia.

Maybe the simplest thing was to kill Crowder and be done with it.

No, he thought. He’d just made a side trip of, yes, more than a thousand miles-and at his own expense, yet-solely to keep from having to kill this legendary Man He Never Met. Damned if he was going to kill him now, after all that.

He’d wait a while, anyway. He didn’t want to drive anywhere now, and he couldn’t bear to look at another airplane, let alone get on board.

He stretched out on the bed, closed his eyes.

He had a frightful dream. In it he was walking at night out in the middle of the desert, lost, chilled, desperately alone. Then a horse came galloping out of nowhere, and on his back was a magnificent woman with a great mane of hair and eyes that flashed in the moonlight. She extended a hand and Keller leaped up on the horse and rode behind her. She was naked. So was Keller, although he had somehow failed to notice this before.

They fell in love. Wordless, they told each other everything, knew one another like twin souls. And then, gazing into her eyes, Keller realized who she was. She was Edith Bodine, and she was dead, he’d killed her earlier without knowing she’d turn out to be the girl of his dreams. It was done, it could never be undone, and his heart was broken for eternity.

Keller woke up shaking. For five minutes he paced the room, struggling to sort out what was a dream and what was real. He hadn’t been sleeping long. The sun was setting, it was still the same endless day.

God, what a hellish dream.

He couldn’t get caught up in TV, and he had no luck at all with the book. He put it down, picked up the phone, and dialed June’s number.

“It’s Dale,” he said. “I was sitting here and-”

“Oh, Dale,” she cut in, “you’re so thoughtful to call. Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it the most awful thing?”

“Uh,” he said.

“I can’t talk now,” she said. “I can’t even think straight. I’ve never been so upset in my life. Thank you, Dale, for being so thoughtful.”

She hung up and left him staring at the phone. Unless she was a better actress than he would have guessed, she sounded absolutely overcome. He was surprised that news of Edith Bodine’s death could have reached her so soon, but far more surprised that she could be taking it so hard. Was there more to all this than met the eye? Were Hobie’s wife and mistress actually close friends? Or were they-Jesus-more than just good friends?

Things were certainly a lot simpler for Randolph Scott.

The same bartender was on duty at Joe’s. “I don’t guess your friend Hobie’ll be coming around tonight,” he offered. “I suppose you heard the news.”

“Uh,” Keller said. Some Back Street affair, he thought, if the whole town was ready to comfort Hobie before the body was cold.

“Hell of a thing,” the man went on. “Terrible loss for this town. Martingale won’t be the same without him.”

“This news,” Keller said carefully. “I think maybe I missed it. What happened, anyway?”

He called the airlines from his motel room. The next flight out of Casper wasn’t until morning. Of course, if he wanted to drive to Denver -

He didn’t want to drive to Denver. He booked the first flight out in the morning, using the Whitlock name and the Whitlock credit card.

No need to stick around, not with Lyman Crowder stretched out somewhere getting pumped full of embalming fluid. Dead in a car crash on I-25 North, the very accident that had slowed Keller down on his way back from Sheridan.

He wouldn’t be around for the funeral, but should he send flowers? It was quite clear that he shouldn’t. Still, the impulse was there.

He dialed 1-800-FLOWERSand sent a dozen roses to Mrs. Dale Whitlock in Rowayton, charging them to Whitlock’s American Express account. He asked them to enclose a card reading “Just because I love you-Dale.”

He felt it was the least he could do.

Two days later he was on Taunton Place in White Plains, making his report. Accidents were always good, the man told him. Accidents and natural causes, always the best. Oh, sometimes you needed a noisy hit to send a message, but the rest of the time you couldn’t beat an accident.

“Good you could arrange it,” the man said.

Would have taken a hell of an arranger, Keller thought. First you’d have had to arrange for Lyman Crowder to be speeding north in his pickup. Then you’d have had to get an unemployed sheepherder named Danny Vasco good and drunk and send him hurtling toward Martingale, racing his own pickup-Jesus, didn’t they drive anything but pickups?-racing it at ninety-plus miles an hour, and proceeding southbound in the northbound lane. Arrange for a few near misses. Arrange for Vasco to brush a school bus and sideswipe a minivan, and then let him ram Crowder head-on.

Some arrangement.

If the man in White Plains had any idea that the client was dead as well, or even who the client was, he gave no sign to Keller. On the way out, Dot asked him how Crowder pronounced his name.

“Rhymes withchowder, ” he said.

“I knew you’d find out,” she said. “Keller, are you all right? You seem different.”

“Just awed by the workings of Fate,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “that’ll do it.”

On the train back to the city he thought about the workings of Fate. Earlier he’d tried to tell himself that his side trip to Las Vegas had been a waste of time and money and human life. All he’d had to do was wait a day for Danny Vasco to take the game off the boards.

Never would have happened.

Without his trip to Vegas, there would have been no wreck on the highway. One event had opened some channel that allowed the other to happen. He couldn’t explain this, couldn’t make sense out of it, but somehow he knew it was true.

Everything had happened exactly the way it had had to happen. Encountering June in the Meet ’n’ Cheat, running into Hobie at the Burnout Bar. He could no more have avoided those meetings than he could have kept himself from buying the paperback western novel that had set the tone for everything that followed.

He hoped Mrs. Whitlock liked the flowers.