Hit Me

Fourteen

It was pretty impressive,” he told Dot. “He just assumed command.”

“I guess he must be used to it. Comes with the job, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose so, but I got the feeling he’s been like that all his life. I can picture him as a ten-year-old in the schoolyard, settling disputes in kickball games.”

“I always wanted to play kickball,” Dot said, “but at my school it was boys only. I’ll bet it’s different now.”

He’d bought another prepaid phone, with a chip good for one hundred minutes or one call to 911, whichever came first. His first call was to Julia; he told her how it felt to be in New York, and how the auction was shaping up, and she filled him in on Jenny’s day, and passed on some gossip about a couple two doors down the street. He hadn’t told her anything specific about his assignment, and didn’t talk about it now.

To Dot he said, “I’m not sure I accomplished anything with that call I made.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Keller. You got a look at him, didn’t you?”

“It’s not as though I hadn’t seen enough pictures of him.”

“But seeing him in person’s a little different. You got a sense of the person.”

“I guess.”

“And you established for certain that he’s in residence there. You’d assumed as much, but now you know it for a fact.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You don’t sound convinced, Keller. What’s the matter?”

“The phone.”

“Why’d you toss it? I know they log 911 calls, but I thought your phone’s untraceable.”

“They can’t tie it to me,” he said, “but they can tell what numbers I call with that phone. Then all they have to do is walk back the cat.”

“To Sedona,” she said, “and to New Orleans. No, you wouldn’t want them to do that. So what’s the problem? You bought a disposable phone and then you disposed of it.”

“I paid seventy bucks for that phone,” he said, “and I made one useless call with it, and now it’s floating in the New York sewer system.”

“I doubt it’s floating, Keller. It probably sank like a stone.”

“Well.”

“And landed on the bottom,” she said, “unless an alligator ate it. Remember Tick-Tock the alligator? In Peter Pan?”

“Wasn’t that a crocodile?”

“Keller, I know there’s a difference between alligators and crocodiles, but is it one we have to care about? Tick-Tock swallowed a clock once, and that’s why you could always hear him coming.”

“Probably how he got his name, too.”

“Odds are. You know, I always wondered how come it didn’t run down. You figure it was like a self-winding watch? Just swimming around was enough to keep it going?”

“Dot—”

“So here’s your phone,” she said, “and this alligator swallows it, and now what happens if somebody calls you?”

How did he get into conversations like this? “Nobody has the number,” he said.

“Is that a fact?”

“Besides, I turned the phone off after I made the call. So it wouldn’t ring.”

“That was wise of you, Keller. Because all you need is an alligator in the sewer with a phone ringing inside his belly.”

“And anyway it’s a myth. There aren’t really any alligators in the New York sewers.”

She sighed heavily. “Keller,” she said, “you know what you are? A genuine killjoy. You got any inside information about Santa Claus, kindly keep it to yourself. And I wouldn’t worry too much about the seventy dollars. It’s not gonna keep you from buying any stamps, is it?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go. How’s New York?”

“It’s okay.”

“You comfortable there?”

“Pretty much. At first I was worried someone would recognize me, but nobody did, so I stopped worrying.”

“I guess so, if you actually started a conversation with a cop.”

“Until this moment,” he said, “it never occurred to me that I was doing anything risky.”

“Maybe you weren’t, Keller. The world has a short memory, and I have to say that’s just as well. Look, you’ll figure out a way to get the job done. You always do.”

Keller had Thai food for lunch. You could get perfectly decent Thai food, and almost everything else, in New Orleans, but there was a Thai restaurant two blocks from his old apartment that he remembered fondly. He walked over there, and the hostess put him at a table for two on the left wall, about halfway between the front door and the kitchen.

He was studying the menu when the waitress brought him a glass of Thai iced tea before he could ask for it. How did she know that was what he wanted? He reached for it, and she said, “Papaya salad? Shrimp pad thai, very spicy?”

Was the young woman psychic? No, of course not. She remembered him.

And so had the hostess. Because, he realized, this was the table where he’d always sat years ago, and the meal was the one he’d almost invariably ordered.

Now what? He’d always paid cash, so they wouldn’t know his name. Still, they would certainly have seen his photograph, in the papers or on the TV news. But would it have registered out of context?

More to the point, what should he do now? Get up and make a run for it? Or, more discreetly, invent a pretext: “Uh-oh, forgot my wallet, I’ll be back in a minute.” And they’d never see him again.

But wouldn’t that create suspicion where it might well not already exist? And once he’d done that, they’d have reason to wonder what was the matter, and at that point one of them might link this old customer of theirs to a photo dimly recalled, and they could call 911 and it wouldn’t even cost them a $70 phone.

On the other hand, he’d be gone by then.

But the authorities, who’d had years to get used to the idea that Keller the Assassin had been liquidated by his employers, would have reason to believe he wasn’t dead after all. And there’d be a manhunt, and attention from the media, and what would happen to his life in New Orleans?

The papaya salad came. If he wanted to allay suspicion, he thought, then he ought to act like a man with nothing to hide. So he picked up his fork and dug in.

It was just as he remembered it.

So was the pad thai—the rice noodles nicely slippery on the tongue, the shrimp tender and flavorful, the whole thing fiercely hot. He’d lost his appetite when he realized he’d been recognized, but it returned in full measure once he started eating, and he cleaned both his plates. He might have ordered dessert, there was a baked coconut rice pudding he used to like, but he decided not to push it.

He scribbled in the air, and the hostess brought the check, took his money, and brought his change. He left a tip designed to be generous without being memorable, and on the way out the hostess said, “Long time we don’t see you.”

“I moved away.”

“Ah, that’s what I say! Somebody say maybe you don’t like us no more, but I say he move. Where you now, Upper West Side?”

“Montana.”

“Oh, so far! What city?”

The first thought that came to him was Cheyenne, but that was in Wyoming. “Billings,” he said, pretty sure it was in Montana.

“My brother’s in Helena,” she told him. “Big problem getting people there to try Thai food. So he put sushi on the menu. Sushi very big in Helena.”

“In Billings, too.”

“They come for sushi,” she said, “and then maybe they try something else. Smart guy, my brother. Almost went broke, thought of sushi, and now he’s making lots of money.”

“That’s great.”

“You get to Helena, you try Thai Pagoda. Nice place.” She frowned. “Cheap rent, too. Not like here. You come back when you in New York, okay?”

“I will.”

“You looking good,” she said. “Lost some weight!”

“A couple of pounds.”

“Almost didn’t recognize. Then it comes to me. Table seven! Thai iced tea! Papaya salad! Shrimp pad thai!”

“That’s me, all right.”

“Very spicy! Make sure very spicy!”

Keller, back in his hotel room, sat in front of the television set watching NY1, the twenty-four-hour local news channel. It was pointless, he knew; if somebody at Thai Garden did make the connection and felt compelled to rat him out to the law, the media wouldn’t be reporting it for at least a couple of hours. But he sat there for a half hour anyway, and learned more than he needed to know about the sports and weather, along with ongoing coverage of the bomb scare at Thessalonian House. Once again he got to hear the abbot thunder at the crowd, bidding them to disperse, and even spotted himself in the act of dispersal.

That gave him a turn, but he realized that no one could have identified him on the basis of what he’d just seen. He was part of a crowd shot, seen from a distance, and he had his back to the camera. If he hadn’t known he was there, he doubted he’d have recognized himself.

There was, of course, no bomb to be found. The beagle’s name turned out to be Ajax, which struck Keller as a pretty decent name for a dog, bomb-sniffing or otherwise. There was a brief interview with Ajax’s handler, a light-side-of-the-news piece that Keller found reasonably interesting, and then the announcer’s voice turned serious as she talked about the criminal nature of bomb threats, and the need to respond to each of them, and the high cost involved.

“Every call reporting a bomb is logged, and every caller identified,” she said. “If you make a false report, it’s just a question of time before the long arm of the law reaches out and takes hold of you.”

Well, maybe not, Keller thought. Not unless the long arm of the law could reach all the way down into the sewers, and yank his phone out of the alligator’s belly.

In the hotel’s business center, Keller logged on to the Peachpit site and checked the current status of the lots he was interested in. With one or two exceptions, the opening bids were unchanged. He noted the changes in his catalog and was ready to return to his room when he thought of something.

Google. Who could imagine life without Google?

He was on the computer for fifteen minutes more, and made a few more notes. Then he pulled down the History menu and deleted that day’s searches, his and everybody else’s.

Then back to his room.