Hit Parade

10

Keller, waiting for the traffic light to turn from red to green, wondered what had happened to the world. The traffic light wasn’t the problem. There’d been traffic lights for longer than he could remember, longer than he’d been alive. For almost as long as there had been automobiles, he supposed, although the automobile had clearly come first, and would in fact have necessitated the traffic light. At first they’d have made do without them, he supposed, and then, when there were enough cars around for them to start slamming into one another, someone would have figured out that some form of control was necessary, some device to stop east-west traffic while allowing north-south traffic to proceed, and then switching.

He could imagine an early motorist fulminating against the new regimen. Whole world’s going to hell. They’re taking our rights away one after another. Light turns red because some damn timer tells it to turn red, a man’s supposed to stop what he’s doing and hit the brakes. Don’t matter if there ain’t another car around for fifty miles, he’s gotta stop and stand there like a goddam fool until the light turns green and tells him he can go again. Who wants to live in a country like that? Who wants to bring children into a world where that kind of crap goes on?

A horn sounded, jarring Keller abruptly from the early days of the twentieth century to the early days of the twenty-first. The light, he noted, had turned from red to green, and the fellow in the SUV just behind him felt a need to bring this fact to Keller’s attention. Keller, without feeling much in the way of actual irritation or anger, allowed himself a moment of imagination in which he shifted into park, engaged the emergency brake, got out of the car, and walked back to the SUV, whose driver would already have begun to regret leaning on the horn. Even as the man (pig-faced and jowly in Keller’s fantasy) was reaching for the button to lock the door, Keller was opening the door, taking hold of the man (sweating now, fulminating, making simultaneous threats and excuses) by the shirtfront, yanking him out of the car, sending him sprawling on the pavement. Then, while the man’s child (no, make it his wife, a fat shrew with dyed hair and rheumy eyes) watched in horror, Keller bent from the waist and dispatched the man with a movement learned from the Burmese master U Minh U, one in which the adept’s hands barely appeared to touch the subject, but death, while indescribably painful, was virtually instantaneous.

Keller, satisfied by the fantasy, drove on. Behind him, the driver of the SUV-an unaccompanied young woman, Keller now noted, her hair secured by a bandana, and a sack of groceries on the seat beside her-followed along for half a block, then turned off to the right, seemingly unaware of her close brush with death.

How you do go on, he thought.

It was all the damned driving. Before everything went to hell, he wouldn’t have had to drive clear across the country. He’d have taken a cab to JFK and caught a flight to Phoenix, where he’d have rented a car, driven it around for the day or two it would take to do the job, then turned it in and flown back to New York. In and out, case closed, and he could get on with his life.

And leave no traces behind, either. They made you show ID to get on the plane, they’d been doing that for a few years now, but it didn’t have to be terribly good ID. Now they all but fingerprinted you before they let you board, and they went through your checked baggage and gave your carry-on luggage a lethal dose of radiation. God help you if you had a nail clipper on your key ring.

He hadn’t flown at all since the new security procedures had gone into effect, and he didn’t know that he’d ever get on a plane again. Business travel was greatly reduced, he’d read, and he could understand why. A business traveler would rather hop in his car and drive five hundred miles than get to the airport two hours early and go through all the hassles the new system imposed. It was bad enough if your business consisted of meeting with groups of salesmen and giving them pep talks. If you were in Keller’s line of work, well, it was out of the question.

Keller rarely traveled other than for business, but sometimes he’d go somewhere for a stamp auction, or because it was the middle of a New York winter and he felt the urge to lie in the sun somewhere. He supposed he could still fly on such occasions, showing valid ID and clipping his nails before departure, but would he want to? Would it still be pleasure travel if you had to go through all that in order to get there?

He felt like that imagined motorist, griping about red lights. Hell, if that’s what they’re gonna make me do, I’ll just walk. Or I’ll stay home. That’ll show them!

It all changed, of course, on a September morning, when a pair of airliners flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Keller, who lived on First Avenue not far from the UN building, had not been home at the time. He was in Miami, where he had already spent a week, getting ready to kill a man named Rubén Olivares. Olivares was a Cuban, and an important figure in one of the Cuban exile groups, but Keller wasn’t sure that was why someone had been willing to spend a substantial amount of money to have him killed. It was possible, certainly, that he was a thorn in the side of the Castro government, and that someone had decided it would be safer and more cost-effective to hire the work done than to send a team of agents from Havana. It was also possible that Olivares had turned out to be a spy for Havana, and it was his fellow exiles who had it in for him.

Then, too, he might be sleeping with the wrong person’s wife, or muscling in on the wrong person’s drug trade. With a little investigative work, Keller might have managed to find out who wanted Olivares dead, and why, but he’d long since determined that such considerations were none of his business. What difference did it make? He had a job to do, and all he had to do was do it.

Monday night, he’d followed Olivares around, watched him eat dinner at a steak house in Coral Gables, then tagged along when Olivares and two of his dinner companions hit a couple of titty bars in Miami Beach. Olivares left with one of the dancers, and Keller tailed him to the woman’s apartment and waited for him to come out. After an hour and a half, Keller decided the man was spending the night. Keller, who’d watched lights go on and off in the apartment house, was reasonably certain he knew which apartment the couple was occupying, and didn’t think it would prove difficult to get into the building. He thought about going in and getting it over with. It was too late to catch a flight to New York, it was the middle of the night, but he could get the work done and stop at his motel to shower and collect his luggage, then go straight to the airport and try to get on the first flight home.

Or he could sleep late and fly home sometime in the early afternoon. Several airlines flew from New York to Florida, and there were flights all day long. Miami International was not his favorite airport-it was not anybody’s favorite airport-but he could skip it if he wanted, turning in his rental car at Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach and flying home from there.

No end of options, once the work was done.

But he’d have to kill the woman, the topless dancer.

He’d do that if he had to, but he didn’t like the idea of killing people just because they were in the way. A higher body count drew more police and media attention, but that wasn’t it, nor was the notion of slaughtering the innocent. How did he know the woman was innocent? For that matter, who was to say Olivares was guilty of anything?

Later, when he thought about it, it seemed to him that the deciding factor was purely physical. He’d slept poorly the night before, rising early and spending the whole day driving around unfamiliar streets. He was tired, and he didn’t much feel like forcing a door and climbing a flight of stairs and killing one person, let alone two. And suppose she had a roommate, and suppose the roommate had a boyfriend, and-

He went back to his motel, took a long hot shower, and went to bed.

When he woke up he didn’t turn on the TV but went across the street to the place where he’d been having his breakfast every morning. He walked in the door and saw that something was different. They had a television set on the back counter, and everybody was staring at it. He watched for a few minutes, then picked up a container of coffee and took it back to his room. He sat in front of his own TV and watched the same scenes, over and over and over.

If he’d done his work the night before, he realized, he might have been in the air when it happened. Or maybe not, because he’d probably have decided to get some sleep instead, so he’d be right where he was, in his motel room, watching the plane fly into the building. The only certain difference was that Rubén Olivares, who as things stood was probably watching the same footage everybody else in America was watching (except that he might well be watching it on a Spanish-language station)-well, Olivares wouldn’t be watching TV. Nor would he be on it. A garden-variety Miami homicide wasn’t worth airtime on a day like this, not even if the deceased was of some importance in the Cuban exile community, not even if he’d been murdered in the apartment of a topless dancer, with her own death a part of the package. A newsworthy item any other day, but not on this day. There was only one sort of news today, one topic with endless permutations, and Keller watched it all day long.

It was Wednesday before it even occurred to him to call Dot, and late Thursday before he finally got a call through to her in White Plains. “I’ve been wondering about you, Keller,” she said. “There are all these planes on the ground in Newfoundland, they were in the air when it happened and got rerouted there, and God knows when they’re gonna let them come home. I had the feeling you might be there.”

“In Newfoundland?”

“The local people are taking the stranded passengers into their homes,” she said. “Making them welcome, giving them cups of beef bouillon and ostrich sandwiches, and-”

“Ostrich sandwiches?”

“Whatever. I just pictured you there, Keller, making the best of a bad situation, which I guess is what you’re doing in Miami. God knows when they’re going to let you fly home. Have you got a car?”

“A rental.”

“Well, hang on to it,” she said. “Don’t give it back, because the car rental agencies are emptied out, with so many people stranded and trying to drive home. Maybe that’s what you ought to do.”

“I was thinking about it,” he said. “But I was also thinking about, you know. The guy.”

“Oh, him.”

“I don’t want to say his name, but-”

“No, don’t.”

“The thing is, he’s still, uh…”

“Doing what he always did.”

“Right.”

“Instead of doing like John Brown.”

“Huh?”

“Or John Brown’s body,” Dot said. “Moldering in the grave, as I recall.”

“Whatever moldering means.”

“We can probably guess, Keller, if we put our minds to it. You’re wondering is it still on, right?”

“It seems ridiculous even thinking about it,” he said. “But on the other hand-”

“On the other hand,” she said, “they sent half the money. I’d just as soon not have to give it back.”

“No.”

“In fact,” she said, “I’d just as soon have them send the other half. If they’re the ones to call it off, we keep what they sent. And if they say it’s still on, well, you’re already in Miami, aren’t you? Sit tight, Keller, while I make a phone call.”

Whoever had wanted Olivares dead had not changed his mind as a result of several thousand deaths fifteen hundred miles away. Keller, thinking about it, couldn’t see why he should be any less sanguine about the prospect of killing Olivares than he had been Monday night. On the television news, there was a certain amount of talk about the possible positive effects of the tragedy. New Yorkers, someone suggested, would be brought closer together, aware as never before of the bonds created by their common humanity.

Did Keller feel a bond with Rubén Olivares of which he’d been previously unaware? He thought about it and decided he did not. If anything, he was faintly aware of a grudging resentment against the man. If Olivares had spent less time over dinner and hurried through the foreplay of the titty bar, if he’d gone directly to the topless dancer’s apartment and left the premises in the throes of postcoital bliss, Keller could have taken him out in time to catch the last flight back to the city. He might have been in his own apartment when the attack came.

And what earthly difference would that have made? None, he had to concede. He’d have watched the hideous drama unfold on his own television set, just as he’d watched on the motel’s unit, and he’d have been no more capable of influencing events whatever set he watched.

Olivares, with his steak dinners and topless dancers, made a poor surrogate for the heroic cops and firemen, the doomed office workers. He was, Keller conceded, a fellow member of the human race. If all men were brothers, a possibility Keller, an only child, was willing to entertain, well, brothers had been killing each other for a good deal longer than Keller had been on the job. If Olivares was Abel, Keller was willing to be Cain.

If nothing else, he was grateful for something to do.

And Olivares made it easy. All over America, people were writing checks and inundating blood banks, trying to do something for the victims in New York. Cops and firemen and ordinary citizens were piling into cars and heading north and east, eager to join in the rescue efforts. Olivares, on the other hand, went on leading his life of self-indulgence, going to an office in the morning, making a circuit of bars and restaurants in the afternoon and early evening, and finishing up with rum drinks in a room full of bare breasts.

Keller tagged him for three days and three nights, and by the third night he’d decided not to be squeamish about the topless dancer. He waited outside the titty bar until a call of nature led him into the bar, past Olivares’s table (where the man was chatting up three silicone-enhanced young ladies), and on to the men’s room. Standing at the urinal, Keller wondered what he’d do if the Cuban took all three of them home.

He washed his hands, left the restroom, and saw Olivares counting out bills to settle his tab. All three women were still at the table, and playing up to him, one clutching his arm and leaning her breasts against it, the others just as coquettish. Keller, who’d been ready to sacrifice one bystander, found himself drawing the line at three.

But wait-Olivares was on his feet, his body language suggesting he was excusing himself for a moment. And yes, he was on his way to the men’s room, clearly aware of the disadvantage of attempting a night of love on a full bladder.

Keller slipped into the room ahead of him, ducked into an empty stall. There was an elderly gentleman at the urinal, talking soothingly in Spanish to himself, or perhaps to his prostate. Olivares entered the room, stood at the adjoining urinal, and began chattering in Spanish to the older man, who spoke slow sad sentences in response.

Shortly after arriving in Miami, Keller had gotten hold of a gun, a.22-caliber revolver. It was a small gun with a short barrel, and fit easily in his pocket. He took it out now, wondering if the noise would carry.

If the older gentleman left first, Keller might not need the gun. But if Olivares finished first, Keller couldn’t let him leave, and would have to do them both, and that would mean using the gun, and a minimum of two shots. He watched them over the top of the stall, wishing that something would happen before some other drunken voyeur felt a need to pee. Then the older man finished up, tucked himself in, and headed for the door.

And paused at the threshold, returning to wash his hands, and saying something to Olivares, who laughed heartily at it, whatever it was. Keller, who’d returned the gun to his pocket, took it out again, and replaced it a moment later when the older gentleman left. Olivares waited until the door closed after him, then produced a little blue glass bottle and a tiny spoon. He treated each of his cavernous nostrils to two quick hits of what Keller could only presume to be cocaine, then returned the bottle and spoon to his pocket and turned to face the sink.

Keller burst out of the stall. Olivares, washing his hands, evidently couldn’t hear him with the water running; in any event he didn’t react before Keller reached him, one hand cupping his jowly chin, the other taking hold of his greasy mop of hair. Keller had never studied the martial arts, not even from a Burmese with an improbable name, but he’d been doing this sort of thing long enough to have learned a trick or two. He broke Olivares’s neck and was dragging him across the floor to the stall he’d just vacated when, damn it to hell, the door burst open and a little man in shirtsleeves got halfway to the urinal before he suddenly realized what he’d just seen. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and Keller got him before he could make a sound.

The little man’s bladder, unable to relieve itself in life, could not be denied in death. Olivares, having emptied his bladder in his last moments of life, voided his bowels. The men’s room, no garden spot to begin with, stank to the heavens. Keller stuffed both bodies into one stall and got out of there in a hurry, before some other son of a bitch could rush in and join the party.

Half an hour later he was heading north on I-95. Somewhere north of Stuart he stopped for gas, and in the men’s room-empty, spotless, smelling of nothing but pine-scented disinfectant-he put his hands against the smooth white tiles and vomited. Hours later, at a rest area just across the Georgia line, he did so again.

He couldn’t blame it on the killing. It had been a bad idea, lurking in the men’s room. The traffic was too heavy, with all those drinkers and cocaine sniffers. The stench of the corpses he’d left there, on top of the reek that had permeated the room to start with, could well have turned his stomach, but it would have done so then, not a hundred miles away when it no longer existed outside of his memory.

Some members of his profession, he knew, typically threw up after a piece of work, just as some veteran actors never failed to vomit before a performance. Keller had known a man once, a cheerfully cold-blooded little murderer with dainty little-girl wrists and a way of holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. The man would chatter about his work, excuse himself, throw up discreetly into a basin, and resume his conversation in midsentence.

A shrink would probably argue that the body was expressing a revulsion that the mind was unwilling to acknowledge, and that sounded about right to Keller. But it didn’t apply to him, because he’d never been one for puking. Even early on, when he was new to the game and hadn’t found ways to deal with it, his stomach had remained serene.

This particular incident had been unpleasant, even chaotic, but he could if pressed recall others that had been worse.

But there was a more conclusive argument, it seemed to him. Yes, he’d thrown up outside of Stuart, and again in Georgia, and he’d very likely do so a few more times before he reached New York. But it hadn’t begun with the killings.

He’d thrown up every couple of hours ever since he sat in front of his television set and watched the towers fall.

11

A week or so after he got back, there was a message on his answering machine. Dot, wanting him to call. He checked his watch, decided it was too early. He made himself a cup of coffee, and when he’d finished it he dialed the number in White Plains.

“Keller,” she said. “When you didn’t call back, I figured you were out late. And now you’re up early.”

“Well,” he said.

“Why don’t you get on a train, Keller? My eyes are sore, and I figure you’re a sight for them.”

“What’s the matter with your eyes?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I was trying to express myself in an original fashion, and it’s a mistake I won’t make again in a hurry. Come see me, why don’t you?”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“I’m beat,” he said. “I was up all night, I need to get to sleep.”

“What were you…never mind, I don’t need to know. All right, I’ll tell you what. Sleep all you want and come out for dinner. I’ll order something from the Chinese. Keller? You’re not answering me.”

“I’ll come out sometime this afternoon,” he said.

He went to bed, and early that afternoon he caught a train to White Plains and a cab from the station. She was on the porch of the big old Victorian on Taunton Place, with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the tin-topped table. “Look,” she said, pointing to the lawn. “I swear the trees are dropping their leaves earlier than usual this year. What’s it like in New York?”

“I haven’t really been paying attention.”

“There was a kid who used to come around to rake them, but I guess he must have gone to college or something. What happens if you don’t rake the leaves, Keller? You happen to know?”

He didn’t.

“And you’re not hugely interested, I can see that. There’s something different about you, Keller, and I’ve got a horrible feeling I know what it is. You’re not in love, are you?”

“In love?”

“Well, are you? Out all night, and then when you get home all you can do is sleep. Who’s the lucky girl, Keller?”

He shook his head. “No girl,” he said. “I’ve been working nights.”

“Working? What the hell do you mean, working?”

He let her drag it out of him. A day or two after he got back to the city and turned in his rental car, he’d heard something on the news and went to one of the Hudson River piers, where they were enlisting volunteers to serve food for the rescue workers at Ground Zero. Around ten every evening they’d all get together at the pier, then sail down the river and board another ship anchored near the site. Top chefs supplied the food, and Keller and his fellows dished it out to men who’d worked up prodigious appetites laboring at the smoldering wreckage.

“My God,” Dot said. “Keller, I’m trying to picture this. You stand there with a big spoon and fill their plates for them? Do you wear an apron?”

“Everybody wears an apron.”

“I bet you look cute in yours. I don’t mean to make fun, Keller. What you’re doing’s a good thing, and of course you’d wear an apron. You wouldn’t want to get marinara sauce all over your shirt. But it seems strange to me, that’s all.”

“It’s something to do,” he said.

“It’s heroic.”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing heroic about it. It’s like working in a diner, dishing out food. The men we feed, they work long shifts doing hard physical work and breathing in all that smoke. That’s heroic, if anything is. Though I’m not sure there’s any point to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they call them rescue workers,” he said, “but they’re not rescuing anybody, because there’s nobody to rescue. Everybody’s dead.”

She said something in response but he didn’t hear it. “It’s the same as with the blood,” he said. “The first day, everybody mobbed the hospitals, donating blood for the wounded. But it turned out there weren’t any wounded. People either got out of the buildings or they didn’t. If they got out, they were okay. If they didn’t, they’re dead. All that blood people donated? They’ve been throwing it out.”

“It seems like a waste.”

“It’s all a waste,” he said and frowned. “Anyway, that’s what I do every night. I dish out food, and they try to rescue dead people. That way we all keep busy.”

“The longer I know you,” Dot said, “the more I realize I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Know you, Keller. You never cease to amaze me. Somehow I never pictured you as Florence Nightingale.”

“I’m not nursing anybody. All I do is feed them.”

“Betty Crocker, then. Either way, it seems like a strange role for a sociopath.”

“You think I’m a sociopath?”

“Well, isn’t that part of the job description, Keller? You’re a hit man, a contract killer. You leave town and kill strangers and get paid for it. How can you do that without being a sociopath?”

He thought about it.

“Look,” she said, “I didn’t mean to bring it up. It’s just a word, and who even knows what it means? Let’s talk about something else, like why I called you and got you to come out here.”

“Okay.”

“Actually,” she said, “there’s two reasons. First of all, you’ve got money coming. Miami, remember?”

“Oh, right.”

She handed him an envelope. “I thought you’d want this,” she said, “although it couldn’t have been weighing on your mind, because you never asked about it.”

“I hardly thought about it.”

“Well, why would you want to think about blood money while you were busy doing good works? But you can probably find a use for it.”

“No question.”

“You can always buy stamps with it. For your collection.”

“Sure.”

“It must be quite a collection by now.”

“It’s coming along.”

“I’ll bet it is. The other reason I called, Keller, is somebody called me.”

“Oh?”

She poured herself some more iced tea, took a sip. “There’s work,” she said. “If you want it. In Portland, something to do with labor unions.”

“Which Portland?”

“You know,” she said, “I keep forgetting there’s one in Maine, but there is, and I suppose they’ve got their share of labor problems there, too. But this is Portland, Oregon. As a matter of fact, it’s Beaverton, but I think it’s a suburb. The area code’s the same as Portland.”

“Clear across the country,” he said.

“Just a few hours in a plane.”

They looked at each other. “I can remember,” he said, “when all you did was step up to the counter and tell them where you wanted to go. You counted out bills, and they were perfectly happy to be paid in cash. You had to give them a name, but you could make it up on the spot, and the only way they asked for identification was if you tried to pay them by check.”

“The world’s a different place now, Keller.”

“They didn’t even have metal detectors,” he remembered, “or scanners. Then they brought in metal detectors, but the early ones didn’t work all the way down to the ground. I knew a man who used to stick a gun into his sock and walk right onto the plane with it. If they ever caught him at it, I never heard about it.”

“I suppose you could take a train.”

“Or a clipper ship,” he said. “Around the Horn.”

“What’s the matter with the Panama Canal? Metal detectors?” She finished the tea in her glass, heaved a sigh. “I think you answered my question. I’ll tell Portland we have to pass.”

After dinner she gave him a lift to the station and joined him on the platform to wait for his train. He broke the silence to ask her if she really thought he was a sociopath.

“Keller,” she said, “it was just an idle remark, and I didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, I’m no psychologist. I’m not even sure what the word means.”

“Someone who lacks a sense of right and wrong,” he said. “He understands the difference but doesn’t see how it applies to him personally. He lacks empathy, doesn’t have any feeling for other people.”

She considered the matter. “It doesn’t sound like you,” she said, “except when you’re working. Is it possible to be a part-time sociopath?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve done some reading on the subject. Case histories, that sort of thing. The sociopaths they write about, almost all of them have the same three things in their childhood background. Setting fires, torturing animals, and wetting the bed.”

“You know, I heard that somewhere. Some TV program about FBI profilers and serial killers. Do you remember your childhood, Keller?”

“Most of it,” he said. “I knew a woman once who claimed she could remember being born. I don’t go back that far, and some of it’s spotty, but I remember it pretty well. And I didn’t do any of those three things. Torture animals? God, I loved animals. I told you about the dog I had.”

“Nelson. No, sorry, that was the one you had a couple of years ago. You told me the name of the other one, but I can’t remember it.”

“Soldier.”

“Soldier, right.”

“I loved that dog,” he said. “And I had other pets from time to time, the way kids do. Goldfish, baby turtles. They all died.”

“They always do, don’t they?”

“I suppose so. I used to cry.”

“When they died.”

“When I was little. When I got older I took it more in stride, but it still made me sad. But torture them?”

“How about fires?”

“You know,” he said, “when you talked about the leaves, and what happens if you don’t rake them, I remembered raking leaves when I was a kid. It was one of the things I did to make money.”

“You want to make twenty bucks here and now, there’s a rake in the garage.”

“What we used to do,” he remembered, “was rake them into a pile at the curb, and then burn them. It’s illegal nowadays, because of fire laws and air pollution, but back then it’s what you were supposed to do.”

“It was nice, the smell of burning leaves on the autumn air.”

“And it was satisfying,” he said. “You raked them up and put a match to them and they were gone. Those were the only fires I remember setting.”

“I’d say you’re oh-for-two. How’d you do at wetting the bed?”

“I never did, as far as I can recall.”

“Oh-for-three. Keller, you’re about as much of a sociopath as Albert Schweitzer. But if that’s the case, how come you do what you do? Never mind, here’s your train. Have fun dishing out the lasagna tonight. And don’t torture any animals, you hear?”

12

Two weeks later he picked up the phone on his own and told her not to turn down jobs automatically. “Now you tell me,” she said. “You at home? Don’t go anywhere, I’ll make a call and get back to you.” He sat by the phone, and picked it up when it rang. “I was afraid they’d found somebody by now,” she said, “but we’re in luck, if you want to call it that. They’re sending us something by Airborne Express, which always sounds to me like paratroopers ready for battle. They swear I’ll have it by nine tomorrow morning, but you’ll just be getting home around then, won’t you? Do you figure you can make the 2:04 from Grand Central? I’ll pick you up at the station.”

“There’s a 10:08,” he said. “Gets to White Plains a few minutes before eleven. If you’re not there, I’ll figure you had to wait for the paratroopers, and I’ll get a cab.”

It was a cold, dreary day, with enough rain so that she needed to use the windshield wipers but not enough to keep the blades from squeaking. She put him at the kitchen table, poured him a cup of coffee, and let him read the notes she’d made and study the Polaroids that had come in the Airborne Express envelope, along with the initial payment in cash. He held up one of the pictures, which showed a man in his seventies, with a round face and a small white mustache, holding up a golf club as if in the hope that someone would take it from him.

He said the fellow didn’t look much like a labor leader, and Dot shook her head. “That was Portland,” she said. “This is Phoenix. Well, Scottsdale, and I bet it’s nicer there today than it is here. Nicer than Portland, too, because I understand it always rains there. In Portland, I mean. It never rains in Scottsdale. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I’m starting to sound like the Weather Channel. You could fly, you know. Not all the way, but to Denver, say.”

“Maybe.”

She tapped the photo with her fingernail. “Now according to them,” she said, “the man’s not expecting anything, and not taking any security precautions. Other hand, his life is a security precaution. He lives in a gated community.”

“Sundowner Estates, it says here.”

“There’s an eighteen-hole golf course, with individual homes ranged around it. And each of them has a state-of-the-art home security system, but the only thing that ever triggers an alarm is when some clown hooks his tee shot through your living room picture window, because the only way into the compound is past a guard. No metal detector, and they don’t confiscate your nail clippers, but you have to belong there for him to let you in.”

“Does Mr. Egmont ever leave the property?”

“He plays golf every day. Unless it rains, and we’ve already established that it never does. He generally eats lunch at the clubhouse, they’ve got their own restaurant. He has a housekeeper who comes in a couple of times a week-they know her at the guard shack, I guess. Aside from that, he’s all alone in his house. He probably gets invited out to dinner a lot. He’s unattached, and there’s always six women for every man in those Geezer Leisure communities. You’re staring at his picture, and I bet I know why. He looks familiar, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, and I can’t think why.”

“You ever play Monopoly?”

“By God, that’s it,” he said. “He looks like the drawing of the banker in Monopoly.”

“It’s the mustache,” she said, “and the round face. Don’t forget to pass Go, Keller. And collect two hundred dollars.”

She drove him back to the train station, and because of the rain they waited in her car instead of on the platform. He said he’d pretty much stopped working on the food ship. She said she hadn’t figured it was something he’d be doing for the rest of his life.

“They changed it,” he said. “The Red Cross took it over. They do this all the time, their specialty’s disaster relief, and they’re pros at it, but it transformed the whole thing from a spontaneous New York affair into something impersonal. I mean, when we started we had name chefs knocking themselves out to feed these guys something they’d enjoy eating, and then the Red Cross took over, and we were filling their plates with macaroni and cheese and chipped beef on toast. Overnight we went from Bobby Flay to Chef Boyardee.”

“Took the joy out of it, did it?”

“Well, would you like to spend ten hours shifting scrap metal and collecting body parts and then tuck into something you’d expect to find in an army chow line? I got so I couldn’t look them in the eye when I ladled the slop onto their plates. I skipped a night and felt guilty about it, and I went in the next night and felt worse, and I haven’t been back since.”

“You were probably ready to give it up, Keller.”

“I don’t know. I still felt good doing it, until the Red Cross showed up.”

“But that’s why you were there,” she said. “To feel good.”

“To help out.”

She shook her head. “You felt good because you were helping out,” she said, “but you kept going back and doing it because it made you feel good.”

“Well, I suppose so.”

“I’m not impugning your motive, Keller. You’re still a hero, as far as I’m concerned. All I’m saying is that volunteerism only goes so far. When it stops feeling good, it tends to run out of steam. That’s when you need the professionals. They do their job because it’s their job, and it doesn’t matter whether they feel good about it or not. They buckle down and get it done. It may be macaroni and cheese, and the cheese may be Velveeta, but nobody winds up holding an empty plate. You see what I mean?”

“I guess so,” Keller said.

Back in the city, he called one of the airlines, thinking he’d take Dot’s suggestion and fly to Denver. He worked his way through their automated answering system, pressing numbers when prompted, and wound up on hold, because all of their agents were busy serving other customers. The music they played to pass the time was bad enough all by itself, but they kept interrupting it every fifteen seconds to tell him how much better off he’d be using their website. After a few minutes of this he called Hertz, and the phone was answered right away by a human being.

He picked up a Ford Taurus first thing the next morning and beat the rush hour traffic through the tunnel and onto the New Jersey Turnpike. He’d rented the car under his own name, showing his own driver’s license and using his own American Express card, but he had a cloned card in another name that Dot had provided, and he used it in the motels where he stopped along the way.

It took him four long days to drive to Tucson. He would drive until he was hungry, or the car needed gas, or he needed a restroom, then get behind the wheel again and drive some more. When he got tired he’d find a motel and register under the name on his fake credit card, take a shower, watch a little TV, and go to bed. He’d sleep until he woke up, and then he’d take another shower and get dressed and look for someplace to have breakfast. And so on.

While he drove he played the radio until he couldn’t stand it, then turned it off until he couldn’t stand the silence. By the third day the solitude was getting to him, and he couldn’t figure out why. He was used to being alone, he lived his whole life alone, and he certainly never had or wanted company while he was working. He seemed to want it now, though, and at one point turned the car’s radio to a talk show on a clear-channel station in Omaha. People called in and disagreed with the host, or a previous caller, or some schoolteacher who’d given them a hard time in the fifth grade. Gun control was the announced topic for the day, but the real theme, as far as Keller could tell, was resentment, and there was plenty of it to go around.

Keller listened, fascinated at first, and before very long he reached the point where he couldn’t stand another minute of it. If he’d had a gun handy, he might have put a bullet in the radio, but all he did was switch it off.

The last thing he wanted, it turned out, was someone talking to him. He had the thought, and realized a moment later that he’d not only thought it but had actually spoken the words aloud. He was talking to himself, and wondered-wondered in silence, thank God-if this was something new. It was like snoring, he thought. If you slept alone, how would you know if you did it? You wouldn’t, not unless you snored so loudly that you woke yourself up.

He started to reach for the radio, stopped himself before he could turn it on again. He checked the speedometer, saw that the cruise control was keeping the car at three miles an hour over the posted speed limit. Without cruise control you found yourself going faster or slower than you wanted to, wasting time or risking a ticket. With it, you didn’t have to think about how fast you were going. The car did the thinking for you.

The next step, he thought, would be steering control. You got in the car, keyed the ignition, set the controls, and leaned back and closed your eyes. The car followed the turns in the road, and a system of sensors worked the brake when another car loomed in front of you, swung out to pass when such action was warranted, and knew to take the next exit when the gas gauge dropped below a certain level.

It sounded like science fiction, but no less so in Keller’s boyhood than cruise control, or auto-response telephone answering systems, or a good 95 percent of the things he nowadays took for granted. Keller didn’t doubt for a minute that right this instant some bright young man in Detroit or Osaka or Bremen was working on steering control. There’d be some spectacular head-on collisions before they got the bugs out of the system, but before long every car would have it, and the accident rate would plummet and the state troopers wouldn’t have anybody to give tickets to, and everybody would be crazy about technology’s newest breakthrough, except for a handful of cranks in England who were convinced you had more control and got better mileage the old-fashioned way.

Meanwhile, Keller kept both hands on the steering wheel.

13

Sundowner Estates, home of William Wallis Egmont, was in Scottsdale, an upscale suburb of Phoenix. Tucson, a couple hundred miles to the east, was as close as Keller wanted to bring the Taurus. He followed the signs to the airport and left the car in long-term parking. Over the years he’d left other cars in long-term parking, but they’d been other men’s cars, with their owners stuffed in the trunk, and Keller, having no need to find the cars again, had gotten rid of the claim checks at the first opportunity. This time was different, and he found a place in his wallet for the check the gate attendant had supplied, and noted the lot section and the number of the parking space.

He went into the terminal, found the car rental counters, and picked up a Toyota Camry from Avis, using his fake credit card and a matching Pennsylvania driver’s license. It took him a few minutes to figure out the cruise control. That was the trouble with renting cars, you had to learn a new system with every car, from lights and windshield wipers to cruise control and seat adjustment. Maybe he should have gone to the Hertz counter and picked up another Taurus. Was there an advantage in driving the same model car throughout? Was there a disadvantage that offset it, and was some intuitive recognition of that disadvantage what had led him to the Avis counter?

“You’re thinking too much,” he said and realized he’d spoken the words aloud. He shook his head, not so much annoyed as amused, and a few miles down the road realized that what he wanted, what he’d been wanting all along, was not someone to talk to him but someone to listen.

A little ways past an exit ramp, a kid with a duffel bag had his thumb out, trying to hitch a ride. For the first time that he could recall, Keller had the impulse to stop for him. It was just a passing thought; if he’d had his foot on the gas, he’d have barely begun to ease up on the gas pedal before he’d overruled the thought and sped onward. Since he was running on cruise control, his foot didn’t even move, and the hitchhiker slipped out of sight in the rearview mirror, unaware what a narrow escape he’d just had.

Because the only reason to pick him up was for someone to talk to, and Keller would have told him everything. And, once he’d done that, what choice would he have?

Keller could picture the kid, listening wide-eyed to everything Keller had to tell him. He pictured himself, his soul unburdened, grateful to the youth for listening, but compelled by circumstance to cover his tracks. He imagined the car gliding to a stop, imagined the brief struggle, imagined the body left in a roadside ditch, the Camry heading west at a thoughtful three miles an hour above the speed limit.

The motel Keller picked was an independent mom-and-pop operation in Tempe, which was another suburb of Phoenix. He counted out cash and paid a week in advance, plus a twenty-dollar deposit for phone calls. He didn’t plan to make any calls, but if he needed to use the phone he wanted it to work.

He registered as David Miller of San Francisco and fabricated an address and zip code. You were supposed to include your license plate number, and he mixed up a couple of digits and put CA for the state instead of AZ. It was hardly worth the trouble, nobody was going to look at the registration card, but there were certain things he did out of habit, and this was one of them.

He always traveled light, never took along more than a small carry-on bag with a shirt or two and a couple changes of socks and underwear. That made sense when you were flying, and less sense when you had a car with an empty trunk and backseat at your disposal. By the time he got to Phoenix, he’d run through his socks and underwear. He picked up two three-packs of briefs and a six-pack of socks at a strip mall, and was looking for a trash bin for his dirty clothes when he spotted a Goodwill Industries collection box. He felt good dropping his soiled socks and underwear in the box, though not quite as good as he’d felt dishing out designer food to the smoke-stained rescue workers at Ground Zero.

Back at his motel, he called Dot on the prepaid cell phone he’d picked up on Twenty-third Street. He’d paid cash for it, and hadn’t even been asked his name, so as far as he could tell it was completely untraceable. At best someone could identify calls made from it as originating with a phone manufactured in Finland and sold at Radio Shack. Even if they managed to pin down the specific Radio Shack outlet, so what? There was nothing to tie it to Keller, or to Phoenix.

On the other hand, cell phone communications were about as secure as shouting. Any number of listening devices could pick up your conversation, and whatever you said was very likely being heard by half a dozen people on their car radios and one old fart who was catching every word on the fillings in his teeth. That didn’t bother Keller, who figured every phone was tapped, and acted accordingly.

He phoned Dot, and the phone rang seven or eight times, and he broke the connection. She was probably out, he decided, or in the shower. Or had he misdialed? Always a chance, he thought, and pressed Redial, then caught himself and realized that, if he had in fact misdialed, redialing would just repeat the mistake. He broke the connection again in midring and punched in the number afresh, and this time he got a busy signal.

He redialed, got another busy signal, frowned, waited, and tried again. It had barely begun to ring when she picked up, barking “Yes?” into the phone, and somehow fitting a full measure of irritation into the single syllable.

“It’s me,” he said.

“What a surprise.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I had somebody at the door,” she said, “and the teakettle was whistling, and I finally got to the phone and picked it up in time to listen to the dial tone.”

“I let it ring a long time.”

“That’s nice. So I put it down and turned away, and it rang again, and I picked it up in the middle of the first ring, and I was just in time to hear you hang up.”

He explained about pressing Redial, and realizing that wouldn’t work.

“Except it worked just fine,” she said, “since you hadn’t misdialed in the first place. I figured it had to be you, so I pressed star sixty-nine. But whatever phone you’re on, star sixty-nine doesn’t work. I got one of those weird tones and a canned message saying return calls to your number were blocked.”

“It’s a cell phone.”

“Say no more. Hello? Where’d you go?”

“I’m here. You said Say no more, and…”

“It’s an expression. Tell me it’s all wrapped up and you’re heading for home.”

“I just got here.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. How’s the weather?”

“Hot.”

“Not here. They say it might snow, but then again it might not. You’re just calling to check in, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, it’s good to hear your voice, and I’d love to chat, but you’re on a cell phone.”

“Right.”

“Call anytime,” she said. “It’s always a treat to hear from you.”

Keller didn’t know the population or acreage of Sundowner Estates, although he had a hunch neither figure would be hard to come by. But what good would the information do him? The compound was large enough to contain a full-size eighteen-hole golf course, and enough homes adjacent to it to support the operation.

And there was a ten-foot adobe wall encircling the entire affair. Keller supposed it was easier to sell homes if you called it Sundowner Estates, but Fort Apache would have better conveyed the stockadelike feel of the place.

He drove around the compound a couple of times, establishing that there were in fact two gates, one at the east and the other not quite opposite, at the southwest corner. He parked where he could keep an eye on the southwest gate, and couldn’t tell much beyond the fact that every vehicle entering or leaving the compound had to stop for some sort of exchange with the uniformed guard. Maybe you flashed a pass at him, maybe he called to make sure you were expected, maybe they wanted a thumbprint and a semen sample. No way to tell, not from where Keller was watching, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t just drive up and bluff his way through. People who willingly lived behind a thick wall almost twice their own height probably expected a high level of security, and a guard who failed to provide that would be looking for a new job.

He drove back to his motel, sat in front of the TV, and watched a special on the Discovery Channel about scuba diving at Australia ’s Great Barrier Reef. Keller didn’t think it looked like something he wanted to do. He’d tried snorkeling once, on a vacation in Aruba, and kept having to stop because he was getting water in his snorkel, and under his mask. And he hadn’t been able to see much of anything, anyhow.

The divers on the Discovery Channel were having much better luck, and there were plenty of colorful fish for them (and Keller) to look at. After fifteen minutes, though, he’d seen as much as he wanted to and was ready to change the channel. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go through, flying all the way to Australia, then getting in the water with a mask and fins. Couldn’t you get pretty much the same effect staring into a fish tank at a pet shop or a Chinese restaurant?

“I’ll tell you this,” the woman said. “If you do make a decision to buy at Sundowner, you won’t regret it. Nobody ever has.”

“That’s quite a recommendation,” Keller said.

“Well, it’s quite an operation, Mr. Miller. I don’t suppose I have to ask if you play golf.”

“It’s somewhere between a pastime and an addiction,” he said.

“I hope you brought your clubs. Sundowner’s a championship course, you know. Robert Walker Wilson designed it, and Clay Bunis was a consultant. We’re in the middle of the desert, but you wouldn’t know it inside the walls at Sundowner. The course is as green as a pasture in the Irish midlands.”

Her name, Keller learned, was Michelle Prentice, but everyone called her Mitzi. And what about him? Did he prefer Dave or David?

That was a stumper, and Keller realized he was taking too long to answer it. “It depends,” he said, finally. “I answer to either one.”

“I’ll bet business associates call you Dave,” she said, “and really close friends call you David.”

“How on earth did you know that?”

She smiled broadly, delighted to be right. “Just a guess,” she said. “Just a lucky guess, David.”

So they were going to be close friends, he thought. Toward that end she proceeded to tell him a few things about herself, and by the time they reached the guard shack at the east gate of Sundowner Estates, he learned that she was thirty-nine years old, that she’d divorced her rat bastard of a husband three years ago and moved out here from Frankfort, Kentucky, which happened to be the state capital, although most people would guess it was Louisville. She’d sold houses in Frankfort, so she’d picked up an Arizona realtor’s license first chance she got, and it was a lot better selling houses here than it had ever been in Kentucky, because they just about sold themselves. The entire Phoenix area was growing like a house on fire, she assured him, and she was just plain excited to be a part of it all.

At the east gate she moved her sunglasses up onto her forehead and gave the guard a big smile. “Hi, Harry,” she said. “Mitzi Prentice, and this here’s Mr. Miller, come for a look at the Lattimore house on Saguaro Circle.”

“Miz Prentice,” he said, returning her smile and nodding at Keller. He consulted a clipboard, then slipped into the shack and picked up a telephone. After a moment he emerged and told Mitzi she could go ahead. “I guess you know how to get there,” he said.

“I guess I ought to,” she told Keller, after they’d driven away from the entrance. “I showed the house two days ago, and he was there to let me by. But he’s got his job to do, and they take it seriously, let me tell you. I know not to joke with him, or with any of them, because they won’t joke back. They can’t, because it might not look good on camera.”

“There are security cameras running?”

“Twenty-four hours a day. You don’t get in unless your name’s on the list, and the camera’s got a record of when you came and went, and what car you were driving, license plate number and all.”

“Really.”

“There are some very affluent people at Sundowner,” she said, “and some of them are getting along in years. That’s not to say you won’t find plenty of people your age here, especially on the golf course and around the pool, but you do get some older folks, too, and they tend to be a little more concerned about security. Now just look, David. Isn’t that a beautiful sight?”

She pointed out her window at the golf course, and it looked like a golf course to him. He agreed it sure looked gorgeous.

The living room of the Lattimore house had a cathedral ceiling and a walk-in fireplace. Keller thought the fireplace looked nice, but he didn’t quite get it. A walk-in closet was one thing, you could walk into it and pick what you wanted to wear, but why would anybody want to walk into a fireplace?

For that matter, who’d want to hold a prayer service in the living room?

He thought of raising the point with Mitzi. She might find either question provocative, but would it fit the Serious Buyer image he was trying to project? So he asked instead what he figured were more typical questions, about heating and cooling systems and financing, good basic home-buyer questions.

There was, predictably enough, a big picture window in the living room, and it afforded the predictable view of the golf course, overlooking what Mitzi told him were the fifth green and the sixth tee. There was a man taking practice swings who might have been W. W. Egmont himself, although from this distance and angle it was hard to say one way or the other. But if the guy turned a little to his left, and if Keller could look at him not with his naked eye but through a pair of binoculars-

Or, he thought, a telescopic sight. That would be quick and easy, wouldn’t it? All he had to do was buy the place and set up in the living room with a high-powered rifle, and Egmont’s state-of-the-art home burglar alarm wouldn’t do him a bit of good. Keller could just perch there like a vulture, and sooner or later Egmont would finish up the fifth hole by four-putting for a triple bogey, and Keller could take him right there and save the poor duffer a stroke, or wait until he came even closer and teed up his ball for the sixth hole (525 yards, par five). Keller was no great shakes as a marksman, but how hard could it be to center the crosshairs on a target and squeeze the trigger?

“I bet you’re picturing yourself on that golf course right now,” Mitzi said, and he grinned and told her she got that one right.

From the bedroom window in the back of the house, you could look out at a desert garden, with cacti and succulents growing in sand. The plantings, like the bright green lawn in front, were all the responsibility of the Sundowner Estates association, who took care of all maintenance. They kept it beautiful year-round, she told him, and you never had to lift a finger.

“A lot of people think they want to garden when they retire,” she said, “and then they find out how much work it can be. And what happens when you want to take off for a couple of weeks in Maui? At Sundowner, you can walk out the door and know everything’s going to be beautiful when you come back.”

He said he could see how that would be a comfort. “I can’t see the fence from here,” he said. “I was wondering about that, if you’d feel like you were walled in. I mean, it’s nice-looking, being adobe and earth-colored and all, but it’s a pretty high fence.”

“Close to twelve feet,” she said.

Even higher than he’d thought. He said he wondered what it would be like living next to it, and she said none of the houses were close enough to the fence for it to be a factor.

“The design was very well thought out,” she said. “There’s the twelve-foot fence, and then there’s a big space, anywhere from ten to twenty yards, and then there’s an inner fence, also of adobe, that stands about five feet tall, and there’s cactus and vines in front of it for landscaping, so it looks nice and decorative.”

“That’s a great idea,” he said. And he liked it; all he had to do was clear the first fence and follow the stretch of no-man’s-land around to wherever he felt like vaulting the shorter wall. “About the taller fence, though. I mean, it’s not really terribly secure, is it?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess it’s because I’m used to the Northeast, where security’s pretty up front and obvious, but it’s just a plain old mud fence, isn’t it? No razor wire on top, no electrified fencing. It looks as though all a person would have to do is lean a long ladder up against it and he’d be over the top in a matter of seconds.”

She laid a hand on his arm. “David,” she said, “you asked that very casually, but I have the sense that security’s a real concern of yours.”

“I have a stamp collection,” he said. “It’s not worth a fortune, and collections are hard to sell, but the point is I’ve been collecting since I was a kid and I’d hate to lose it.”

“I can understand that.”

“So security’s a consideration, yes. And the fellow at the gate’s enough to put anybody’s mind at rest, but if any jerk with a ladder can just pop right over the fence-”

It was, she told him, a little more complicated than that. There was no razor or concertina wire, because that made a place look like a concentration camp, but there were sensors that set up some kind of force field, and no one could begin to climb the fence without setting off all kinds of alarms. Nor were you home free once you cleared the fence, because there were dogs that patrolled the belt of no-man’s-land, Dobermans, swift and silent.

“And there’s an unmarked patrol car that circles the perimeter at regular intervals twenty-four hours a day,” she said, “so if they spotted you on your way to the fence with a ladder under your arm-”

“It wouldn’t be me,” he assured her. “I like dogs okay, but I’d just as soon not meet those Dobermans you just mentioned.”

It was, he decided, a good thing he’d asked. Earlier, he’d found a place to buy an aluminum extension ladder. He could have been over the fence in a matter of seconds, just in time to keep a date with Mr. Swift and Mr. Silent.

In the Lattimore kitchen, they sat across a table topped with butcher block while Mitzi went over the fine points with him. The furniture was all included, she told him, and as he could see it was in excellent condition. He might want to make some changes, of course, as a matter of personal taste, but the place was in turnkey condition. He could buy it today and move in tomorrow.

“In a manner of speaking,” she said, and touched his arm again. “Financing takes a little time, and even if you were to pay cash it would take a few days to push the paperwork through. Were you thinking in terms of cash?”

“It’s always simpler,” he said.

“It is, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have trouble with a mortgage. The banks love to write mortgages on Sundowner properties, because the prices only go up.” Her fingers encircled his wrist. “I’m not sure I should tell you this, David, but now’s a particularly good time to make an offer.”

“Mr. Lattimore’s eager to sell?”

“Mr. Lattimore couldn’t care less,” she said. “About selling or anything else. It’s his daughter who’d like to sell. She had an offer of ten percent under the asking price, but she’d just listed the property and she turned it down, thinking the buyer’d boost it a little, but instead the buyer went and bought something else, and that woman’s been kicking herself ever since. What I would do, I’d offer fifteen percent under what she’s asking. You might not get it for that, but the worst you’d do is get it for ten percent under, and that’s a bargain in this market.”

He nodded thoughtfully, and asked what happened to Lattimore. “It was very sad,” she said, “although in another sense it wasn’t, because he died doing what he loved.”

“Playing golf,” Keller guessed.

“He hit a very nice tee shot on the thirteenth hole,” she said, “which is a par four with a dogleg to the right. ‘That’s a sweet shot,’ his partner said, and Mr. Lattimore said, ‘Well, I guess I can still hit one now and then, can’t I?’ And then he just went and dropped dead.”

“If you’ve got to go…”

“That’s what everyone said, David. The body was cremated, and then they had a nice nondenominational service in the clubhouse, and afterward his daughter and son-in-law rode golf carts to the sixteenth hole and put his ashes in the water hazard.” She laughed involuntarily, and let go of his wrist to cover her mouth with her hand. “Pardon me for laughing, but I was thinking what somebody said. How his balls were already there, and now he could go look for them.”

Her hand returned to his wrist. He looked at her, and her eyes were looking back at him. “Well,” he said. “My car’s at your office, so you’d better run me back there. And then I’ll want to get back to where I’m staying and freshen up, but after that I’d love to take you to dinner.”

“Oh, I wish,” she said.

“You have plans?”

“My daughter lives with me,” she said, “and I like to be home with her on school nights, and especially tonight because there’s a program on television we never miss.”

“I see.”

“So you’re on your own for dinner,” she said, “but what do you and I care about dinner, David? Why don’t you just take me into old Mr. Lattimore’s bedroom and fuck me senseless?”

14

She had a nice body and used it eagerly and imaginatively. Keller, his mind on his work, had been only vaguely aware of the sexual possibilities, and had in fact surprised himself by asking her to dinner. In the Lattimore bedroom he surprised himself further.

Afterward she said, “Well, I had high expectations, but I have to say they were exceeded. Isn’t it a good thing I’m busy tonight? Otherwise it’d be a couple of hours before we even got to the restaurant, and ages before we got to bed. I mean, why waste all that time?”

He tried to think of something to say, but she didn’t seem to require comment. “For all those years,” she said, “I was the most faithful wife since Penelope. And it’s not like nobody was interested. Men used to hit on me all the time. David, I even had girls hitting on me.”

“Really.”

“But I was never interested, and if I was, if I felt a little itch, a little tickle, well, I just pushed it away and put it out of my mind. Because of a little thing called marriage. I’d made some vows, and I took them seriously.

“And then I found out the son of a bitch was cheating on me, and it turned out it was nothing new. On our wedding day? It was years before I knew it, but that son of a bitch got lucky with one of my bridesmaids. And over the years he was catting around all the time. Not just my friends, but my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“Well, my half-sister, really. My daddy died when I was little, and my mama remarried, and that’s where she came from.” She told him more than he needed to know about her childhood, and he lay there with his eyes closed and let the words wash over him. He hoped there wasn’t going to be a test, because he wasn’t paying close attention…

“So I decided to make up for lost time,” she said.

He’d dozed off, and after she woke him they’d showered in separate bathrooms. Now they were dressed again, and he’d followed her into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and seemed surprised to find it empty.

She closed it and turned to him and said, “When I meet someone I feel like sleeping with, well, I go ahead and do it. I mean, why wait?”

“Works for me,” he said.

“The only thing I don’t like to do,” she said, “is mix business and pleasure. So I made sure not to commit myself until I knew you weren’t going to buy this place. And you’re not, are you?”

“How did you know?”

“A feeling I got, when I said how you should make an offer. Instead of trying to think how much to offer, you were looking for a way out-or at least that was what I picked up. Which was okay with me, because by then I was more interested in getting laid than in selling a house. I didn’t have to tell you about a whole lot of tax advantages, and how easy it is to rent the place out during the time you spend somewhere else. It’s all pretty persuasive, and I could give you that whole rap now, but you don’t really want to hear it, do you?”

“I might be in the market in a little while,” he said, “but you’re right, I’m nowhere near ready to make an offer at the present time. I suppose it was wrong of me to drag you out here and waste your time, but-”

“Do you hear me complaining, David?”

“Well, I just wanted to see the place,” he said. “So I exaggerated my interest somewhat. Whether or not I’ll be serious about settling in here depends on the outcome of a couple of business matters, and it’ll be a while before I know how they’re going to turn out.”

“Sounds very mysterious,” she said.

“I wish I could talk about it, but you know how it is.”

“You could tell me,” she said, “but then you’d have to kill me. In that case, don’t you say a word.”

He ate dinner by himself in a Mexican restaurant that reminded him of another Mexican restaurant. He was lingering over a second cup of café con leche before he figured it out. Years ago work had taken him to Roseburg, Oregon, and before he got out of there he’d picked out a real estate agent and spent an afternoon driving around looking at houses for sale.

He hadn’t gone to bed with the Oregon realtor, or even considered it, nor had he used her as a way to get information on an approach to his quarry. That man, whom the Witness Protection Program had imperfectly protected, had been all too easy to find, but Keller, who ordinarily knew well enough to keep his business and personal life separate, had somehow let himself befriend the poor bastard. Before he knew it he was having fantasies about moving to Roseburg himself, buying a house, getting a dog, settling down.

He’d looked at houses, but that was as far as he’d let it go. The night came when he got a grip on himself, and the next thing he got a grip on was the man who’d brought him there. He used a garrote, and what he got a grip on was the guy’s throat, and then it was time to go back to New York.

He remembered the Mexican café in Roseburg now. The food had been good, though he didn’t suppose it was all that special, and he’d had a mild crush on the waitress, about as realistic as the whole idea of moving there. He thought of the man he’d killed, an accountant who’d become the proprietor of a quick-print shop.

You could learn the business in a couple of hours, the man had said of his new career. You could buy the place and move in the same day, Mitzi had said of the Lattimore house.

Patterns…

You could tell me, she’d said, thinking she was joking, but then you’d have to kill me. Oddly, in the languor that followed their lovemaking, he’d had the impulse to confide in her, to tell her what had brought him to Scottsdale.

Yeah, right.

He drove around for a while, then found his way back to his motel and surfed the TV channels without finding anything that caught his interest. He turned off the set and sat there in the dark.

He thought of calling Dot. There were things he could talk about with her, but others he couldn’t, and anyway he didn’t want to do any talking on a cell phone, not even an untraceable one.

He found himself thinking about the guy in Roseburg. He tried to picture him and couldn’t. Early on he’d worked out a way to keep people from the past from flooding the present with their faces. You worked with their images in your mind, leached the color out of them, made the features grow dimmer, shrank the picture as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. You made them grow smaller and darker and hazier until they disappeared, and if you did it correctly you forgot everything but the barest of facts about them. There was no emotional charge, no weight to them, and they became more and more difficult to recall to mind.

But now he’d bridged a gap and closed a circuit, and the man’s face was there in his memory, the face of an aging chipmunk. Jesus, Keller thought, get out of my memory, will you? You’ve been dead for years. Leave me the hell alone.

If you were here, he told the face, I could talk to you. And you’d listen, because what the hell else could you do? You couldn’t talk back, you couldn’t judge me, you couldn’t tell me to shut up. You’re dead, so you couldn’t say a goddam word.

He went outside, walked around for a while, came back in and sat on the edge of the bed. Very deliberately he set about getting rid of the man’s face, washing it of color, pushing it farther and farther away, making it disappear. The process was more difficult than it had been in years, but it worked, finally, and the little man was gone to wherever the washed-out faces of dead people went. Wherever it was, Keller prayed he’d stay there.

He took a long hot shower and went to bed.

In the morning he found someplace new to have breakfast. He read the paper and had a second cup of coffee, then drove pointlessly around the perimeter of Sundowner Estates.

Back at the motel, he called Dot on his cell phone. “Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with,” he said. “I park where I can watch the entrance. Then, when some resident drives out, I follow them.”

“Them?”

“Well, him or her, depending which it is. Or them, if there’s more than one in the car. Sooner or later, they stop somewhere and get out of the car.”

“And you take them out, and you keep doing this, and sooner or later it’s the right guy.”

“They get out of the car,” he said, “and I hang around until nobody’s watching, and I get in the trunk.”

“The trunk of their car.”

“If I wanted to get in the trunk of my own car,” he said, “I could go do that right now. Yes, the trunk of their car.”

“I get it,” she said. “Their car morphs into the Trojan Chrysler. They sail back into the walled city, and you’re in there, and hoping they’ll open the trunk eventually and let you out.”

“Car trunks have a release mechanism built in these days,” he said. “So kidnap victims can escape.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “The automakers added something for the benefit of the eight people a year who get stuffed into car trunks?”

“I think it’s probably more than eight a year,” he said, “and then there are the people, kids mostly, who get locked in accidentally. Anyway, it’s no problem getting out.”

“How about getting in? You real clever with auto locks?”

“That might be a problem,” he admitted. “Does everybody lock their car nowadays?”

“I bet the ones who live in gated communities do. Not when they’re home safe, but when they’re out and about in a dangerous place like the suburbs of Phoenix. How crazy are you about this plan, Keller?”

“Not too,” he admitted.

“Because how would you even know they were going back? Your luck, they’re on their way to spend two weeks in Las Vegas.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Of course you’d know right away,” she said, “when you tried to get in the trunk and it was full of suitcases and copies of Beat the Dealer.”

“It’s not a great plan,” he allowed, “but you wouldn’t believe the security. The only other thing I can think of is to buy a place.”

“Buy a house there, you mean. I don’t think the budget would cover it.”

“I could keep it as an investment,” he said, “and rent it out when I wasn’t using it.”

“Which would be what, fifty-two weeks a year?”

“But if I could afford to do all that,” he said, “I could also afford to tell the client to go roll his hoop, which I’m thinking I might have to go and do anyway.”

“Because it’s looking difficult.”

“It’s looking impossible,” he said, “and then on top of everything else…”

“Yes? Keller? Where’d you go? Hello?”

“Never mind,” he said. “I just figured out how to do it.”

“As you can see,” Mitzi Prentice said, “the view’s nowhere near as nice as the Lattimore house. And there’s just two bedrooms instead of three, and the furnishing’s a little on the generic side. But compared to spending the next two weeks in a motel-”

“It’s a whole lot more comfortable,” he said.

“And more secure,” she said, “just in case you’ve got your stamp collection with you.”

“I don’t,” he said, “but a little security never hurt anybody. I’d like to take it.”

“I don’t blame you, it’s a real good deal, and nice income for Mr. and Mrs. Sundstrom, who’re in the Galapagos Islands looking at blue-footed boobies. That’s where all the crap on their walls comes from. Not the Galapagos, but other places they go to on their travels.”

“I was wondering.”

“Well, they could tell you about each precious piece, but they’re not here, and if they were then their place wouldn’t be available, would it? We’ll go to the office and fill out the paperwork, and then you can give me a check and I’ll give you a set of keys and some ID to get you past the guard at the gate. And a pass to the clubhouse, and information on greens fees and all. I hope you’ll have some time for golf.”

“Oh, I should be able to fit in a few rounds.”

“No telling what you’ll be able to fit in,” she said. “Speaking of which, let’s fit in a quick stop at the Lattimore house before we start filling out lease agreements. And no, silly, I’m not trying to get you to buy that place. I just want you to take me into that bedroom again. I mean, you don’t expect me to do it in Cynthia Sundstrom’s bed, do you? With all those weird masks on the wall? It’d give me the jimjams for sure. I’d feel like primitive tribes were watching me.”

The Sundstrom house was a good deal more comfortable than his motel, and he found he didn’t mind being surrounded by souvenirs of the couple’s travels. The second bedroom, which evidently served as Harvey Sundstrom’s den, had a collection of edged weapons hanging on the walls, knives and daggers and what he supposed were battle-axes, and there was no end of carved masks and tapestries in the other rooms. Some of the masks looked god-awful, he supposed, but they weren’t the sort of things to give him the jimjams, whatever the jimjams might be, and he got in the habit of acknowledging one of them, a West African mask with teeth like tombstones and a lot of rope fringe for hair. He found himself giving it a nod when he passed it, even raising a hand in a salute.

Pretty soon, he thought, he’d be talking to it.

Because it was becoming clear to him that he felt the need to talk to someone. It was, he supposed, a need he’d had all his life, but for years he’d led an existence that didn’t much lend itself to sharing confidences. He’d spent virtually all his adult life as a paid assassin, and it was no line of work for a man given to telling his business to strangers-or to friends, for that matter. You did what they paid you to do and you kept your mouth shut, and that was about it. You didn’t talk about your work, and it got so you didn’t talk about much of anything else, either. You could go to a sports bar and discuss the game with the fellow on the next barstool, you could gripe about the weather to the woman standing alongside you at the bus stop, you could complain about the mayor to the waitress at the corner coffee shop, but if you wanted a conversation with a little more substance to it, well, you were pretty much out of luck.

Once, a few years ago, he’d let someone talk him into going to a psychotherapist. He’d taken what struck him as reasonable precautions, paying cash, furnishing a false name and address, and essentially limiting disclosures to his childhood. It was productive, too, and he developed some useful insights, but in the end it went bad, with the therapist drawing some unwelcome inferences and eventually following Keller, and learning things he wasn’t supposed to know about him. The man wanted to become a client himself, and of course Keller couldn’t allow that, and made him a quarry instead. So much for therapy. So much for shared confidences.

Then, for some months after the therapist’s exit, he’d had a dog. Not Soldier, the dog of his boyhood years, but Nelson, a fine Australian cattle dog. Nelson had turned out to be not only the perfect companion but also the perfect confidant. You could tell him anything, secure in the knowledge that he’d keep it to himself, and it wasn’t like talking to yourself or talking to the wall, because the dog was real and alive and gave every indication of paying close attention. There were times when he could swear Nelson understood every word.

He wasn’t judgmental, either. You could tell him anything and he didn’t love you any the less for it.

If only it had stayed that way, he thought. But it hadn’t, and he supposed it was his own fault. He’d found someone to take care of Nelson when work took him out of town, and that was better than putting him in a kennel, but then he wound up falling for the dog walker, and she moved in, and he only really got to talk to Nelson when Andria was somewhere else. That wasn’t too bad, and she was fun to have around, but then one day it was time for her to move on, and on she moved. He’d bought her no end of earrings during their time together, and she took the earrings along with her when she left, which was okay. But she also took Nelson, and there he was, right back where he’d started.

Another man might have gone right out and got himself another dog-and then, like as not, gone looking for a woman to walk it for him. Keller figured enough was enough. He hadn’t replaced the therapist, and he hadn’t replaced the dog, and, although women drifted in and out of his life, he hadn’t replaced the girlfriend. He had, after all, lived alone for years, and it worked for him.

Most of the time, anyway.

15

“Now this is nice,” Keller said. “The suburbs go on for a ways, but once you get past them you’re out in the desert, and as long as you stay off the interstate you’ve pretty much got the whole place to yourself. It’s pleasant, isn’t it?”

There was no answer from the passenger seat.

“I paid cash for the Sundstrom house,” he went on. “Two weeks, a thousand dollars a week. That’s more than a motel, but I can cook my own meals and save on restaurant charges. Except I like to go out for my meals. But I didn’t drag you all the way out here to listen to me talk about stuff like that.”

Again, his passenger made no response, but then he hadn’t expected one.

“There’s a lot I have to figure out,” he said. “Like what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, for starters. I don’t see how I can keep on doing what I’ve been doing all these years. If you think of it as killing people, taking lives, well, how could a person go on doing it year after year after year?

“But the thing is, see, you don’t have to dwell on that aspect of the work. I mean, face it, that’s what it is. These people are walking around, doing what they do, and then I come along, and whatever it is they’ve been doing, they don’t get to do it anymore. Because they’re dead, because I killed them.”

He glanced over, looking for a reaction. Yeah, right.

“What happens,” he said, “is you wind up thinking of each subject not as a person to be killed but as a problem to be solved. Here’s this piece of work you have to do, and how do you get it done? How do you carry out the contract as expediently as possible, with the least stress all around?

“Now there are guys doing this,” he went on, “who cope with it by making it personal. They find a reason to hate the guy they have to kill. They’re mad at him, they’re angry with him, because it’s his fault that they’ve got to do this bad thing. If it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t be committing this sin. He’s going to be the cause of them going to hell, the son of a bitch, so of course they’re mad at him, of course they hate him, and that makes it easier for them to kill him, which is what they made up their minds to do in the first place.

“But that always struck me as silly. I don’t know what’s a sin and what isn’t, or if one person deserves to go on living and another deserves to have his life ended. Sometimes I think about stuff like that, but as far as working it all out in my mind, well, I never seem to get anywhere.

“I could go on like this, but the thing is I’m okay with the moral aspects of it, if you want to call it that. I just think I’m getting a little old to be still at it, that’s part of it, and the other’s that the business has changed. It’s the same in that there are still people who are willing to pay to have other people killed. You never have to worry about running out of clients. Sometimes business drops off for a while, but it always comes back again. Whether it’s a guy like that Cuban in Miami, who must have had a hundred guys with a reason to want him dead, or this Egmont with his potbelly and his golf clubs, who you’d think would be unlikely to inspire strong feelings in anybody. All kinds of subjects, and all kinds of clients, and you never run out of either one.”

The road curved, and he took the curve a little too fast and had to reach over with his right hand to reposition his silent companion.

“You should be wearing your seat belt,” he said. “Where was I? Oh, the way the business is changing. It’s the world, really. Airport security, having to show ID everywhere you go. And gated communities, and all the rest of it. You think of Daniel Boone, who knew it was time to head west when he couldn’t cut down a tree without giving some thought to which direction it was going to fall.

“I don’t know, it seems to me that I’m just running off at the mouth, not making any sense. Well, that’s okay. What do you care? Just so long as I take it easy on the curves so you don’t wind up on the floor, you’ll be perfectly willing to sit there and listen as long as I want to talk. Won’t you?”

No response.

“If I played golf,” he said, “I’d be out on the course every day, and I wouldn’t have to burn up a tankful of gas driving around the desert. I’d spend all my time within the Sundowner walls, and I wouldn’t have been walking around the mall, wouldn’t have seen you in the display next to the cash register. A batch of different breeds on sale, and I’m not sure what you’re supposed to be, but I guess you’re some kind of terrier. They’re good dogs, terriers. Feisty, lots of personality.

“I used to have an Australian cattle dog. I called him Nelson. Well, that was his name before I got him, and I didn’t see any reason to change it. I don’t think I’ll give you a name. I mean, it’s nutty enough, buying a stuffed animal, taking it for a ride and having a conversation with it. It’s not as if you’re going to answer to a name, or as if I’ll relate to you on a deeper level if I hang a name on you. I mean, I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. I realize I’m talking to polyester and foam rubber, or whatever the hell you’re made out of. Made in China, it says on the tag. That’s another thing, everything’s made in China or Indonesia or the Philippines, nothing’s made in America anymore. It’s not that I’m paranoid about it, it’s not that I’m worried about all the jobs going overseas. What do I care, anyway? It’s not affecting my work. As far as I know, nobody’s flying in hired killers from Thailand and Korea to take jobs away from good homegrown American hit men.

“It’s just that you have to wonder what people in this country are doing. If they’re not making anything, if everything’s imported from someplace else, what the hell do Americans do when they get to the office?”

He talked for a while more, then drove around some in silence, then resumed the one-sided conversation. Eventually he found his way back to Sundowner Estates, circling the compound and entering by the southwestern gate.

Hi, Mr. Miller. Hello, Harry. Hey, whatcha got there? Cute little fella, isn’t he? A present for my sister’s little girl, my niece. I’ll ship it to her tomorrow.

The hell with that. Before he got to the guard shack, he reached into the backseat for a newspaper and spread it over the stuffed dog in the passenger seat.

16

In the clubhouse bar, Keller listened sympathetically as a fellow named Monty went over his round of golf, stroke by stroke. “What kills me,” Monty said, “is that I just can’t put it all together. Like on the seventh hole this afternoon, my drive’s smack down the middle of the fairway, and my second shot with a three iron is hole high and just off the edge of the green on the right. I’m not in the bunker, I’m past it, and I’ve got a good lie maybe ten, twelve feet from the edge of the green.”

“Nice,” Keller said, his voice carefully neutral. If it wasn’t nice, Monty could assume he was being ironic.

“Very nice,” Monty agreed, “and I’m lying two, and all I have to do is run it up reasonably close and sink the putt for a par. I could use a wedge, but why screw around? It’s easier to take this little chipping iron I carry and run it up close.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So I run it up close, all right, and it doesn’t miss the cup by more than two inches, but I played it too strong, and it picks up speed and rolls past the pin and all the way off the green, and I wind up farther from the cup than when I started.”

“Hell of a thing.”

“So I chip again, and pass the hole again, though not quite as badly. And by the time I’m done hacking away with my goddam putter I’m three strokes over par with a seven. Takes me two strokes to cover four hundred and forty yards and five more strokes to manage the last fifty feet.”

“Well, that’s golf,” Keller said.

“By God, you said a mouthful,” Monty said. “That’s golf, all right. How about another round of these, Dave, and then we’ll get ourselves some dinner? There’re a couple of guys you ought to meet.”

He wound up at a table with four other fellows. Monty and a man named Felix were residents of Sundowner Estates, while the other two men were Felix’s guests, seasonal residents of Scottsdale who belonged to one of the other local country clubs. Felix told a long joke, involving a hapless golfer driven to suicide by a bad round of golf. For the punch line, Felix held his wrists together and said, “What time?” and everybody roared. They all ordered steaks and drank beer and talked about golf and politics and how screwed-up the stock market was these days, and Keller managed to keep up his end of the conversation without anybody seeming to notice that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

“So how’d you do out there today?” someone asked him, and Keller had his reply all ready.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s a hell of a thing. You can hack away like a man trying to beat a ball to death with a stick, and then you hit one shot that’s so sweet and true that it makes you feel good about the whole day.”

He couldn’t even remember when or where he’d heard that, but it evidently rang true with his dinner companions. They all nodded solemnly, and then someone changed the subject and said something disparaging about Democrats, and it was Keller’s turn to nod in agreement.

Nothing to it.

“So we’ll go out tomorrow morning,” Monty said to Felix. “Dave, if you want to join us…”

Keller pressed his wrists together, said, “What time?” When the laughter died down he said, “I wish I could, Monty. I’m afraid tomorrow’s out. Another time, though.”

“You could take a lesson,” Dot said. “Isn’t there a club pro? Doesn’t he give lessons?”

“There is,” he said, “and I suppose he does, but why would I want to take one?”

“So you could get out there and play golf. Protective coloration and all.”

“If anyone sees me swinging a golf club,” he said, “with or without a lesson, they’ll wonder what the hell I’m doing here. But this way they just figure I fit in a round earlier in the day. Anyway, I don’t want to spend too much time around the clubhouse. Mostly I get the hell out of here and go for drives.”

“On the driving range?”

“Out in the desert,” he said.

“You just ride around and look at the cactus.”

“There’s a lot of it to look at,” he said, “although they have a problem with poachers.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” he said, and explained how the cacti were protected, but criminals dug them up and sold them to florists.

“Cactus rustlers,” Dot said. “That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of. I guess they have to be careful of the spines.”

“I suppose so.”

“Serve them right if they get stuck. You just drive around, huh?”

“And think things out.”

“Well, that’s nice. But you don’t want to lose sight of the reason you moved in there in the first place.”

“I won’t.”

“Besides,” she said, “I miss you. I got this phone call.”

“Oh?”

“It was sort of weird. Well, atypical, anyway. I don’t know who it was from, or why he called.”

“Maybe it was a wrong number.”

“No, it wasn’t that. The hell with it. If you were here we could talk about it, but not over the phone.”

He stayed away from the clubhouse the next day, and the day after. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, he got in his car and drove around, staying within the friendly confines of Sundowner. He passed the Lattimore house and wondered if Mitzi Prentice had shown it to anyone lately. He drove past William Egmont’s house, which looked to be pretty much the same model as the Sundstrom place. Egmont’s Cadillac was parked in the carport, but the man owned his own golf cart, and Keller couldn’t see it there. He’d probably motored over to the first tee on his cart, and might be out there now, taking big divots, slicing balls deep into the rough.

Keller went home, parked his Toyota in the Sundstrom carport. He’d worried, after taking the house for two weeks, that Mitzi would call all the time, or, worse, start turning up without calling first. But in fact he hadn’t heard a word from her, for which he’d been deeply grateful, and now he found himself thinking about calling her, at work or at home, and figuring out a place to meet. Not at his place, because of the masks, and not at her place, because of her daughter, and-

That settled it. If he was starting to think like that, well, it was time he got on with it. Or the next thing you knew he’d be taking golf lessons, and buying the Lattimore house, and trading in the stuffed dog for a real one.

He went outside. The afternoon had already begun fading into early evening, and it seemed to Keller that the darkness came quicker here than it did in New York. That stood to reason, it was a good deal closer to the equator, and that would account for it. Someone had explained why to him once, and he’d understood it at the time, but now all that remained was the fact: the farther you were from the equator, the more extended twilight became.

In any event, the golfers were through for the day. He took a walk along the edge of the golf course, and passed Egmont’s house. The car was still there, and the golf cart was not. He walked on for a while, then turned around and headed toward the house again, coming from the other direction, and saw someone gliding along on a motorized golf cart. Was it Egmont, on his way home? No, as the cart came closer he saw that the rider was thinner than Keller’s quarry, and had a fuller head of hair. And the cart turned off before it reached Egmont’s house, which pretty much cinched things.

Besides, he was soon to discover, Egmont had already returned. His cart was parked in the carport, alongside his car, and the bag of golf clubs was slung over the back of the cart. Something about that last touch reminded Keller of a song, though he couldn’t pin down the song or figure out how it hooked up to the golf cart. Something mournful, something with bagpipes, but Keller couldn’t put his finger on it.

There were lights on in Egmont’s house. Was he alone? Had he brought someone home with him?

One easy way to find out. He walked up the path to the front door, poked the doorbell. He heard it ring, then didn’t hear anything and considered ringing it again. First he tried the door, and found it locked, which was no great surprise, and then he heard footsteps, but just barely, as if someone was walking lightly on deep carpet. And then the door opened a few inches until the chain stopped it, and William Wallis Egmont looked out at him, a puzzled expression on his face.

“Mr. Egmont?”

“Yes?”

“My name’s Miller,” he said. “David Miller. I’m staying just over the hill, I’m renting the Sundstrom house for a couple of weeks…”

“Oh, of course,” Egmont said, visibly relaxing. “Of course, Mr. Miller. Someone was mentioning you just the other day. And I do believe I’ve seen you around the club. And out on the course, if I’m not mistaken.”

It was a mistake Keller saw no need to correct. “You probably have,” he said. “I’m out there every chance I get.”

“As am I, sir. I played today, and I expect to play tomorrow.”

Keller pressed his wrists together, said, “What time?”

“Oh, very good,” Egmont said. “‘What time?’ That’s a golfer for you, isn’t it? Now how can I help you?”

“It’s delicate,” Keller said. “Do you suppose I could come in for a moment?”

“Well, I don’t see why not,” Egmont said, and slipped the chain lock to let him in.

17

The keypad for the burglar alarm was mounted on the wall, just to the right of the front door. Immediately adjacent to it was a sheet of paper headed HOW TO SET THE BURGLAR ALARM with the instructions printed by hand in block capitals large enough to be read easily by elderly eyes. Keller read the directions, followed them, and let himself out of Egmont’s house. A few minutes later he was back in his own house-the Sundstrom house. He made himself a cup of coffee in the Sundstrom kitchen and sat with it in the Sundstrom living room, and while it cooled he let himself remember the last moments of William Wallis Egmont.

He practiced the exercises that were automatic for him by now, turning the images that came to mind from color to black and white, then watching them fade to gray, willing them farther and farther away so that they grew smaller and smaller until they were vanishing pinpoints, gray dots on a gray field, disappearing into the distance, swallowed up by the past.

When his coffee cup was empty he went into the Sundstrom bedroom and undressed, then showered in the Sundstrom bathroom, only to dry off with a Sundstrom towel. He went into the den, Harvey Sundstrom’s den, and took a Fijian battle-ax from the wall. It was fashioned of black wood, and heavier than it looked, and its elaborate geometric shape suggested it would be of more use as wall decoration than weapon. But Keller worked out how to grip it and swing it, and took a few experimental whiffs with it, and he could see how the islanders would have found it useful.

He could have taken it with him to Egmont’s house, and he let himself imagine it now, saw himself clutching the device in both hands and swinging around in a 360-degree arc, whipping the business end of the ax into Egmont’s skull. He shook his head, returned the battle-ax to the wall, and resumed where he’d left off earlier, summoning up Egmont’s image, reviewing the last moments of Egmont’s life, and making it all gray and blurry, making it all smaller and smaller, making it all go away.

In the morning he went out for breakfast, returning in time to see an ambulance leaving Sundowner Estates through the east gate. The guard recognized Keller and waved him through, but he braked and rolled down the window to inquire about the ambulance. The guard shook his head soberly and reported the sad news.

He went home and called Dot. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’ve decided you can’t do it.”

“It’s done.”

“It’s amazing how I can just sense these things,” she said. “You figure it’s psychic powers or old-fashioned feminine intuition? That was a rhetorical question, Keller. You don’t have to answer it. I’d say I’ll see you tomorrow, but I won’t, will I?”

“It’ll take me a while to get home.”

“Well, no rush,” she said. “Take your time, see the sights. You’ve got your clubs, haven’t you?”

“My clubs?”

“Stop along the way, play a little golf. Enjoy yourself, Keller. You deserve it.”

The day before his two-week rental was up, he walked over to the clubhouse, settled his account, and turned in his keys and ID card. He walked back to the Sundstrom house, where he put his suitcase in the trunk and the little stuffed dog in the passenger seat. Then he got behind the wheel and drove slowly around the golf course, leaving the compound by the east gate.

“It’s a nice place,” he told the dog. “I can see why people like it. Not just the golf and the weather and the security. You get the feeling nothing really bad could happen to you there. Even if you die, it’s just part of the natural order of things.”

He set cruise control and pointed the car toward Tucson, lowering the visor against the morning sun. It was, he thought, good weather for cruise control. Just the other day, he’d had NPR on the car radio, and listened as a man with a professionally mellow voice cautioned against using cruise control in wet weather. If the car were to hydroplane on the slick pavement, cruise control would think the wheels weren’t turning fast enough, and would speed up the engine to compensate. And then, when the tires got their grip again, wham!

Keller couldn’t recall the annual cost in lives from this phenomenon, but it was higher than you’d think. At the time all he did was resolve to make sure he took the car out of cruise control whenever he switched on the windshield wipers. Now, cruising east across the Arizona desert, he found himself wondering if there might be any practical application for this new knowledge. Accidental death was a useful tool, it had most recently claimed the life of William Wallis Egmont, but Keller couldn’t see how cruise control in inclement weather could become part of his bag of tricks. Still, you never knew, and he let himself think about it.

In Tucson he stuck the dog in his suitcase before he turned in the car, then walked out into the heat and managed to locate his original car in long-term parking. He tossed his suitcase in the backseat and stuck the key in the ignition, wondering if the car would start. No problem if it wouldn’t, all he’d have to do was talk to somebody at the Hertz counter, but suppose they’d just spotted him at the Avis counter, turning in another car. Would they notice something like that? You wouldn’t think so, but airports were different these days. There were people standing around noticing everything.

He turned the key, and the engine turned over right away. The woman at the gate figured out what he owed and sounded apologetic when she named the figure. He found himself imagining what the charges would have added up to on other cars he’d left in long-term lots, cars he’d never returned to claim, cars with bodies in their trunks. Probably a lot of money, he decided, and nobody to pay it. He figured he could afford to pick up the tab for a change. He paid cash, took the receipt, and got back on the interstate.

As he drove, he found himself figuring out just how he’d have handled it if the car hadn’t started. “For God’s sake,” he said, “look at yourself, will you? Something could have happened but didn’t, it’s over and done with, and you’re figuring out what you would have done, developing a coping strategy when there’s nothing to cope with. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

He thought about it. Then he said, “You want to know what’s the matter with you? You’re talking to yourself, that’s what’s the matter with you.”

He stopped doing it. Twenty minutes down the road he pulled into a rest area, leaned over the seat back, opened his suitcase, and returned the dog to its position in the passenger seat.

“And away we go,” he said.

In New Mexico he got off the interstate and followed the signs to an Indian pueblo. A plump woman, her hair braided and her face expressionless, sat in a room with pots she had made herself. Keller picked out a little black pot with scalloped edges. She wrapped it carefully for him, using sheets of newspaper, and put the wrapped pot in a brown paper bag, and the paper bag into a plastic bag. Keller tucked the whole thing away in his suitcase and got back behind the wheel.

“Don’t ask,” he told the dog.

Just over the Colorado state line it started to rain. He drove through the rain for ten or twenty miles before he remembered the guy on NPR. He tapped the brake, which made the cruise control cut out, but just to make sure he used the switch, too.

“Close one,” he told the dog.

In Kansas he took a state road north and visited a roadside attraction, a house that had once been a hideout of the Dalton boys. They were outlaws, he knew, contemporaries of Jesse James and the Youngers. The place was tricked out as a minimuseum, with memorabilia and news clippings, and there was an underground passage leading from the house to the barn in back, so that the brothers, when surprised by the law, could hurry through the tunnel and escape that way. He’d have liked to see the passage, but it was sealed off.

“Still,” he told the woman attendant, “it’s nice to know it’s there.”

If he was interested in the Daltons, she told him, there was another museum at the other end of the state. At Coffeyville, she said, where as he probably knew most of the Daltons were killed, trying to rob two banks in one day. He had in fact known that, but only because he’d just read it on the information card for one of the exhibits.

He stopped at a gas station, bought a state map, and figured out the route to Coffeyville. Halfway there he stopped for the night at a Red Roof Inn, had a pizza delivered, and ate it in front of the television set. He ran the cable channels until he found a western that looked promising, and damned if it didn’t turn out to be about the Dalton boys. Not just the Daltons -Frank and Jesse James were in it, too, and Cole Younger and his brothers.

They seemed like real nice fellows, too, the kind of guys you wouldn’t mind hanging out with. Not a sadist or pyromaniac in the lot, as far as he could tell. And did you think Jesse James wet the bed? Like hell he did.

In the morning he drove on to Coffeyville and paid the admission charge and took his time studying the exhibits. It was a pretty bold act, robbing two banks at once, but it might not have been the smartest move in the history of American crime. The local citizens were just waiting for them, and they riddled the brothers with bullets. Most of them were dead by the time the shooting stopped, or died of their wounds before long.

Emmett Dalton wound up with something like a dozen bullets in him, and went off to prison. But the story didn’t end there. He recovered, and eventually got released, and wound up in Los Angeles, where he wrote films for the young motion picture industry and made a small fortune in real estate.

Keller spent a long time taking that in, and it gave him a lot to think about.

Most of the time he was quiet, but now and then he talked to the dog.

“Take soldiers,” he said, on a stretch of I-80 east of Des Moines. “They get drafted into the army, they go through basic training, and before you know it they’re aiming at other soldiers and pulling the trigger. Maybe they have to force themselves the first couple of times, and maybe they have bad dreams early on, but then they get used to it, and before you know it they sort of enjoy it. It’s not a sex thing, they don’t get that kind of a thrill out of it, but it’s sort of like hunting. Except you just pull the trigger and leave it at that. You don’t have to track wounded soldiers to make sure they don’t suffer. You don’t have to dress your kill and pack it back to camp. You just pull the trigger and get on with your life.

“And these are ordinary kids,” he went on. “Eighteen-year-old boys, drafted fresh out of high school. Or I guess it’s volunteers now, they don’t draft them anymore, but it amounts to the same thing. They’re just ordinary American boys. They didn’t grow up torturing animals or starting fires. Or wetting the bed.

“You know something? I still don’t see what wetting the bed has to do with it.”

Coming into New York on the George Washington Bridge, he said, “Well, they’re not there.”

The towers, he meant. And of course they weren’t there, they were gone, and he knew that. He’d been down to the site enough times to know it wasn’t trick photography, that the twin towers were in fact gone. But somehow he’d half expected to see them, half expected the whole thing to turn out to have been a dream. You couldn’t make part of the skyline disappear, for God’s sake.

He drove to the Hertz place, returned the car. He was walking away from the office with his suitcase in hand when an attendant rushed up, brandishing the little stuffed dog. “You forgot somethin’,” the man said, smiling broadly.

“Oh, right,” Keller said. “You got any kids?”

“Me?”

“Give it to your kid,” Keller told him. “Or some other kid.”

“You don’t want him?”

He shook his head, kept walking. When he got home he showered and shaved and looked out the window. His window faced east, not south, and had never afforded a view of the towers, so it was the same as it had always been. And that’s why he’d looked, to assure himself that everything was still there, that nothing had been taken away.

It looked okay to him. He picked up the phone and called Dot.

18

She was waiting for him on the porch, with the usual pitcher of iced tea. “You had me going,” she said. “You didn’t call and you didn’t call and you didn’t call. It took you the better part of a month to get home. What did you do, walk?”

“I didn’t leave right away,” he said. “I’d paid for two weeks.”

“And you wanted to make sure you got your money’s worth.”

“I thought it’d be suspicious, leaving early. ‘Oh, I remember that guy, he left four days early, right after Mr. Egmont died.’”

“And you thought it’d be safer to hang around the scene of a homicide?”

“Except it wasn’t a homicide,” he said. “The man came home after an afternoon at the golf course, locked his door, set the burglar alarm, got undressed, and drew a hot bath. He got into the tub and lost consciousness and drowned.”

“Most accidents happen in the home,” Dot said. “Isn’t that what they say? What did he do, hit his head?”

“He may have smacked it on the tile on the way down, after he lost his balance. Or maybe he had a little stroke. Hard to say.”

“You undressed him and everything?”

He nodded. “Put him in the tub. He came to in the water, but I picked up his feet and held them in the air, and his head went under, and, well, that was that.”

“Water in the lungs.”

“Right.”

“Death by drowning.”

He nodded.

“You okay, Keller?”

“Me? Sure, I’m fine. Anyway, I figured I’d wait the four days, leave when my time was up.”

“Just like Egmont.”

“Huh?”

“He left when his time was up,” she said. “Still, how long does it take to drive home from Phoenix? Four, five days?”

“I got sidetracked,” he said, and told her about the Dalton Boys.

“Two museums,” she said. “Most people have never been to one Dalton Boys museum, and you’ve been to two.”

“Well, they robbed two banks at once.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. You ever hear of Nashville, Indiana?”

“I’ve heard of Nashville,” she said, “and I’ve heard of Indiana, but I guess the answer to your question is no. What have they got in Nashville, Indiana? The Grand Ole Hoosier Opry?”

“There’s a John Dillinger museum there.”

“Jesus, Keller. What were you taking, an outlaw’s tour of the Midwest?”

“There was a flyer for the place in the museum in Coffeyville, and it wasn’t that far out of my way. It was interesting. They had the fake gun he used to break out of prison. Or it may have been a replica. Either way, it was pretty interesting.”

“I’ll bet.”

“They were folk heroes,” he said. “Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson.”

“And Bonnie and Clyde. Have those two got a museum?”

“Probably. They were heroes the same as the Daltons and Youngers and Jameses, but they weren’t brothers. Back in the nineteenth century it was a family thing, but then that tradition died out.”

“Kids today,” Dot said. “What about Ma Barker? Wasn’t that around the same time as Dillinger? And didn’t she have a whole houseful of bank-robbing brats? Or was that just in the movies?”

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I forgot about Ma Barker.”

“Well, let’s forget her all over again, so you can get to the point.”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure there is one. I just took my time getting back, that’s all. I had some thinking to do.”

“And?”

He reached for the pitcher, poured himself more iced tea. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the thing. I can’t do this anymore.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I was going to retire a while ago,” he said. “Remember?”

“Vividly.”

“At the time,” he said, “I figured I could afford it. I had money put aside. Not a ton, but enough for a little bungalow somewhere in Florida.”

“And you could get to Denny’s in time for the early bird special, which helps keep food costs down.”

“You said I needed a hobby, and that got me interested in stamp collecting again. And before I knew it I was spending serious money on stamps.”

“And that was the end of your retirement fund.”

“It cut into it,” he agreed. “And it’s kept me from saving money ever since then, because any extra money just goes into stamps.”

She frowned. “I think I see where this is going,” she said. “You can’t keep on doing what you’ve been doing, but you can’t retire, either.”

“So I tried to think what else I could do,” he said. “Emmett Dalton wound up in Hollywood, writing movies and dealing in real estate.”

“You working on a script, Keller? Boning up for the realtor’s exam?”

“I couldn’t think of a single thing I could do,” he said. “Oh, I suppose I could get some kind of minimum-wage job. But I’m used to living a certain way, and I’m used to not having to work many hours. Can you see me clerking in a 7-Eleven?”

“I couldn’t even see you sticking up a 7-Eleven, Keller.”

“It might be different if I were younger.”

“I guess armed robbery is a young man’s job.”

“If I were just starting out,” he said, “I could take some entry-level job and work my way up. But I’m too old for that now. Nobody would hire me in the first place, and the jobs I’m qualified for, well, I wouldn’t want them.”

“‘Do you want fries with that?’ You’re right, Keller. Somehow it just doesn’t sound like you.”

“I started at the bottom once. I started coming around, and the old man found things for me to do. ‘Richie’s gotta see a man, so why don’t you ride along with him, keep him company.’ Or go see this guy, tell him we’re not happy with the way he’s been acting. Or he used to send me to the store to pick up candy bars for him. What was that candy bar he used to like?”

“Mars bars.”

“No, he switched to those, but early on it was something else. They were hard to find, only a few stores had them. I think he was the only person I ever met who liked them. What the hell was the name of them? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“Hell of a place for a candy bar.”

“Powerhouse,” he said. “Powerhouse candy bars.”

“The dentist’s best friend,” she said. “I remember them now. I wonder if they still make them.”

“‘Do me a favor, kid, see if they got any of my candy bars downtown.’ Then one day it was do me a favor, here’s a gun, go see this guy and give him two in the head. Out of the blue, more or less, except by then he probably knew I’d do it. And you know something? It never occurred to me not to. ‘Here’s a gun, do me a favor.’ So I took the gun and did him a favor.”

“Just like that?”

“Pretty much. I was used to doing what he told me, and I just did. And that let him know I was somebody who could do that kind of thing. Because not everybody can.”

“But it didn’t bother you.”

“I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. “Reflecting, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t let it bother me.”

“That thing you do, fading the color out of the image and pushing it off in the distance…”

“It was later that I taught myself to do that,” he said. “Earlier, well, I guess you’d just call it denial. I told myself it didn’t bother me and made myself believe it. And then there was this sense of accomplishment. Look what I did, see what a man I am. Bang, and he’s dead and you’re not, there’s a certain amount of exhilaration that comes with it.”

“Still?”

He shook his head. “There’s the feeling that you’ve got the job done, that’s all. If it was difficult, well, you’ve accomplished something. If there are other things you’d rather be doing, well, now you can go home and do them.”

“Buy stamps, see a movie.”

“Right.”

“You just pretended it didn’t bother you,” she said, “and then one day it didn’t.”

“And it was easy to pretend, because it never bothered me all that much. But yes, I just kept on doing it, and then I didn’t have to pretend. This place where I stayed in Scottsdale, there were all these masks on the walls. Tribal stuff, I guess they were. And I thought about how I started out wearing a mask, and before long it wasn’t a mask, it was my own face.”

“I guess I follow you.”

“It’s just a way of looking at it,” he said. “Anyway, how I got here’s not the point. Where do I go from here? That’s the question.”

“You had a lot of time to think up an answer.”

“Too much time.”

“I guess, with all the stops in Nashville and Coffee Pot.”

“ Coffeyville.”

“Whatever. What did you come up with, Keller?”

“Well,” he said, and drew a breath. “One, I’m ready to stop doing this. The business is different, with the airline security and people living behind stockade fences. And I’m different. I’m older, and I’ve been doing this for too many years.”

“Okay.”

“Two, I can’t retire. I need the money, and I don’t have any other way to earn what I need to live on.”

“I hope there’s a three, Keller, because one and two don’t leave you much room to swing.”

“What I had to do,” he said, “was figure out how much money I need.”

“To retire on.”

He nodded. “The figure I came up with,” he said, “is a million dollars.”

“A nice round sum.”

“That’s more than I had when I was thinking about retirement the last time. I think this is a more realistic figure. Invested right, I could probably get a return of around fifty thousand dollars a year.”

“And you can live on that?”

“I don’t want that much,” he said. “I’m not thinking in terms of around-the-world cruises and expensive restaurants. I don’t spend a lot on clothes, and when I buy something I wear it until it’s worn out.”

“Or even longer.”

“If I had a million in cash,” he said, “plus what I could get for the apartment, which is probably another half million.”

“Where would you move?”

“I don’t know. Someplace warm, I suppose.”

“Sundowner Estates?”

“Too expensive. And I wouldn’t care to be walled in, and I don’t play golf.”

“You might, just to have something to do.”

He shook his head. “Some of those guys loved golf,” he said, “but others, you had the feeling they had to keep selling themselves on the idea, telling one another how crazy they were about the game. ‘What time?’”

“How’s that?”

“It’s the punch line of a joke. It’s not important. No, I wouldn’t want to live there. But there are these little towns in New Mexico north of Albuquerque, up in the high desert, and you could buy a shack there or just pick up a mobile home and find a place to park it.”

“And you think you could stand it? Out in the boonies like that?”

“I don’t know. The thing is, say I netted half a million from the apartment, plus the million I saved. Say five percent, comes to seventy-five thousand a year, and yes, I could live fine on that.”

“And your apartment’s worth half a million?”

“Something like that.”

“So all you need is a million dollars, Keller. Now I’d lend it to you myself, but I’m a little short this month. What are you going to do, sell your stamps?”

“They’re not worth anything like that. I don’t know what I’ve spent on the collection, but it certainly doesn’t come to a million dollars, and you can’t get back what you put into them, anyway.”

“I thought they were supposed to be a good investment.”

“They’re better than spending the money on caviar and champagne,” he said, “because you get something back when you sell them, but dealers have to make a profit, too, and if you get half your money back you’re doing well. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to sell them.”

“You want to keep them. And keep on collecting?”

“If I had seventy-five thousand a year coming in,” he said, “and if I lived in some little town in the desert, I could afford to spend ten or fifteen thousand a year on stamps.”

“I bet northern New Mexico ’s full of people doing just that.”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but I don’t see why I couldn’t do it.”

“You could be the first, Keller. Now all you need is a million dollars.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. How’re you going to get it?”

“Well,” he said, “that pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s only one thing I know how to do.”

19

“I think I get it,” Dot said. “You can’t do this anymore, so you’ve got to do it with a vengeance. You have to depopulate half the country in order to get out of the business of killing people.”

“When you put it that way…”

“Well, there’s a certain irony operating, wouldn’t you say? But there’s a certain logic there, too. You want to grab every high-ticket job that comes along, so that you can salt away enough cash to get out of the business once and for all. You know what it reminds me of?”

“What?”

“Cops,” she said. “Their pensions are based on what they make the last year they work, so they grab all the overtime they can get their hands on, and then when they retire they can live in style. Usually we sit back and pick and choose, and you take time off between jobs, but that’s not what you want to do now, is it? You want to do a job, come home, catch your breath, then turn around and do another one.”

“Right.”

“Until you can cash in at an even million.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Or maybe a few dollars more, to allow for inflation.”

“Maybe.”

“A little more iced tea, Keller?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Would you rather have coffee? I could make coffee.”

“No thanks.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“You took a lot of time in Scottsdale. Did he really look just like the man in Monopoly?”

“In the photo. Less so in real life.”

“He didn’t give you any trouble?”

He shook his head. “By the time he had a clue what was happening, it was pretty much over.”

“He wasn’t on his guard at all, then.”

“No. I wonder why he got on somebody’s list.”

“An impatient heir would be my guess. Did it bother you much, Keller? Before, during, or after?”

He thought about it, shook his head.

“And then you took your time getting out of there.”

“I thought it made sense to hang around a few days. One more day and I could have gone to the funeral.”

“So you left the day they buried him?”

“Except they didn’t,” he said. “He had the same kind of funeral as Mr. Lattimore.”

“Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“He had a house I could have bought. He was cremated, and after a nondenominational service his ashes were placed in the water hazard.”

“Just a five-iron shot from his front door.”

“Well,” Keller said. “Anyway, yes, I took my time getting home.”

“All those museums.”

“I had to think it all through,” he said. “Figuring out what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

“Of which today is the first day, if I remember correctly. Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You’re done feeding rescue workers at Ground Zero, and you’re done going to museums for dead outlaws, and you’re ready to get out there and kill one for the Gipper. Is that about it?”

“It’s close enough.”

“Because I’ve been turning down jobs left and right, Keller, and what I want to do is get on the horn and spread the word that we’re ready to do business. We’re not holding any two-for-one sales, but we’re very much in the game. Am I clear on that?” She got to her feet. “Which reminds me. Don’t go away.”

She came back with a pair of envelopes and dropped one on the table in front of him. “They paid up right away, and it took you so long to get home I was beginning to think of it as my money. What’s this?”

“Something I picked up on the way home.”

She opened the package, took the little black clay pot in her hands. “That’s really nice,” she said. “What is it, Indian?”

“From a pueblo in New Mexico.”

“And it’s for me?”

“I got the urge to buy it,” he said, “and then afterward I wondered what I was going to do with it. And I thought maybe you’d like it.”

“It would look nice on the mantel,” she said. “Or it would be handy to keep paper clips in. But it’ll have to be one or the other, because there’s no point in keeping paper clips on the mantel. You said you got it in New Mexico? In the town you’re figuring to wind up in?”

He shook his head. “It was a pueblo. I think you have to be an Indian.”

“Well, they do nice work. I’m very pleased to have it.”

“Glad you like it.”

“What’s not to like? It’s beautiful. And I think you’ll like this,” she said, brandishing the second envelope. “But maybe not. I told you I got a strange telephone call.”

“This was a while ago.”

“Right.”

“And you didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

“Partly because it was the phone, and partly because I didn’t know what to say about it.”

“Oh.”

She leaned back in her chair. “This guy called,” she said, “and it wasn’t a voice I recognized, and the only name he gave me was Al.”

“Al.”

“‘Al who?’ I said. ‘Just Al,’ he said.”

“Just Al.”

“He said he wanted to send me something,” she said, “and wanted to know where to send it.”

“What did he want to send you?”

“My question precisely. Something on account, he said.”

“On account?”

“On account of what, is what I wanted to know. On account of it’s Tuesday? Just something on account, he said, and where would I like him to send it.”

“He wanted to find out your address.”

“My first thought,” she said, “and I wanted to tell him to shit in his hat. I’m not telling you my address, I said, and he said he already knew it, but maybe I’d rather receive the parcel at another location. What parcel? I asked him. The parcel I’m going to send you, he said.”

“On account.”

“Right. At this point I was confused.”

“I can understand why.”

“I told him to let me think about it, and he said he’d call in a day or two. And that’s where it stood when I spoke to you that time.”

“When you said you had a weird conversation. You weren’t kidding.”

“He called back in a couple of days,” she went on, “and by then I had just about decided I wouldn’t hear from him again, which would have been fine with me, but there he was on the other end of the phone. ‘It’s Al,’ he said.”

“And?”

“I’d had some time to think. You know, a couple of times over the years I’ve used a post office box, or one of those private mailboxes. When we were dealing with somebody we didn’t know who didn’t know us, the box let us keep our distance. But if he already knew the address here on Taunton Place, why make a trip to a post office?”

“If he knew the address.”

“Well, he’d have to know it, wouldn’t he? He knew the phone number, and any four-year-old can Google a reverse directory and find an address to go with the number.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“So I told him to go ahead and send it here, whatever it was. I mean, say it was a letter bomb. What’s the advantage of picking it up at Mailboxes ‘R’ Us as opposed to getting it right here?”

“So you told him to send it.” He nodded at the envelope. “Is that it?”

She shook her head. “What I got,” she said, “came by overnight FedEx.”

“And it wasn’t a letter bomb.”

“I didn’t really think it would be. I thought it would be money, and it was.”

“Money.”

“Cash,” she said. “Fifty thousand dollars.”

“On account.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s…substantial.”

“It is,” she said, “and I don’t know what it’s for, but I could probably make an educated guess. I figured I’d get a phone call to explain it.”

“And did you?”

“I got a phone call, but not much of an explanation. ‘This is Al. I hope the parcel arrived in good order.’ I said it did, but I didn’t understand what was involved. ‘You’ll hear from me,’ he said, ‘when the time comes.’ That was all I could get out of him.”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“Hundred-dollar bills,” she said, “used and out of sequence. Five hundred of them.”

“That’s a lot better than a letter bomb,” he said. “Still…”

“It makes you think.”

“It does.”

“Sooner or later,” she said, “Al’s gonna expect us to earn it. Like the Godfather, talking to that undertaker. ‘Someday I’ll need a favor.’”

“I guess that was supposed to be Marlon Brando.”

“If I could do imitations,” she said, “I’d be on the Comedy Channel. Whoever he is, Al’s got a credit balance with us. My guess is we’ll hear from him. In the meantime, you get your share.”

He weighed the envelope in his hand. “You don’t really have to split this with me,” he said. “I mean, there are other people you’ve used from time to time. Who’s to say you won’t use somebody else for Al’s job?”

“And keep you from reaching your million-dollar goal? Not likely. No, I got fifty large on account, and you’re getting half of it, also on account. With both of those envelopes, I’d say you’re off to a good start. Though I suppose you’ll want to spend some of it on stamps.”

20

Two days later he was working on his stamps when the phone rang. “I’m in the city,” she said. “Right around the corner from you, as a matter of fact.”

She told him the name of the restaurant, and he went there and found her in a booth at the back, eating an ice cream sundae. “When I was a kid,” she said, “they had these at Wohler’s drugstore for thirty-five cents. It was five cents extra if you wanted walnuts on top. I’d hate to tell you what they get for this beauty, and walnuts weren’t part of the deal, either.”

“Nothing’s the way it used to be.”

“You’re right about that,” she said, “and a philosophical observation like that is worth the trip. But it’s not why I came in. Here’s the waitress, Keller. You want one of these?”

He shook his head, ordered a cup of coffee. The waitress brought it, and when she was out of earshot Dot said, “I had a call this morning.”

“From Al?”

“Al? No, not Al. I haven’t heard a thing from Al. This was somebody else.”

“Oh?”

“And I was going to call you, but it wasn’t anything to discuss on the phone, and I didn’t feel right about telling you to come out to White Plains because I was pretty sure you’d be wasting your time. So I figured I’d come in, and have an ice cream sundae while I’m at it. It’s worth the trip, incidentally, even if they do charge the earth for it. You sure you don’t want one?”

“Positive.”

“I got a call,” she said, “from a guy we’ve worked with before, a broker, very solid type. And there’s some work to be done, a nice upscale piece of work, which would put a nice piece of change in your retirement fund and one in mine, too.”

“What’s the catch?”

“It’s in Santa Barbara, California,” she said, “and there’s a very narrow window operating. You’d have to do it Wednesday or Thursday, which makes it impossible, because it would take longer than that for you to drive there even if you left right away and only stopped for gas. I mean, suppose you drove it in three days, which is ridiculous anyway. You’d be wiped out when you got there, and you’d get there when, Thursday afternoon at the earliest? Can’t be done.”

“No.”

“So I’ll tell them no,” she said, “but I wanted to check with you first.”

“Tell them we’ll do it,” he said.

“Really?”

“I’ll fly out tomorrow morning. Or tonight, if I can get something.”

“You weren’t ever going to fly again.”

“I know.”

“And then a job comes along.”

“And all at once not flying just doesn’t seem that important,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.”

“Actually,” she said, “I have a theory.”

“Oh?”

“When the towers came down,” she said, “it was very traumatic for you. Same as it was for everybody else. You had to adjust to a new reality, and that’s not easy to do. Your whole world went tilt, and for a while there you stayed off airplanes, and you went downtown and fed the hungry, and you bided your time and tried to figure out a way to get along without doing your usual line of work.”

“And?”

“And time passed,” she said, “and things settled down, and you adjusted to the way the world is now. While you were at it, you realized what you’ll have to do if you’re going to be in a position to retire. You thought things through and came up with a plan.”

“Well, sort of a plan.”

“And a lot of things which seemed very important a while ago, like not flying with all this security and ID checks and all, turn out to be just an inconvenience and not something to make you change your life around. You’ll get a second set of ID, or you’ll use real ID and find some other way to cover your tracks. One way or another, you’ll work it out.”

“I suppose,” he said. “ Santa Barbara. That’s between L.A. and San Francisco, isn’t it?”

“Closer to L.A. They have their own airport.”

He shook his head. “They can keep it,” he said. “I’ll fly to LAX. Or Burbank, that’s even better, and I’ll rent a car and drive up to Santa Barbara. Wednesday or Thursday, you said?” He pressed his wrists together. “‘What time?’”

“What time? What do you mean, ‘what time’? What’s so funny, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s a joke one of the golfers told in the clubhouse in Scottsdale. This golfer goes out and he has the worst round of his life. He loses balls in the rough, he can’t get out of sand traps, he hits ball after ball into the water hazard. Nothing goes right for him. By the time he gets to the eighteenth green all he’s got left is his putter, because he’s broken every other club over his knee, and after he four-putts the final hole he breaks the putter, too, and sends it flying.

“He marches into the locker room, absolutely furious, and he unlocks his locker and takes out his razor and opens it up and gets the blade in his hand and slashes both his wrists. And he stands there, watching the blood flow, and someone calls to him over the bank of lockers. ‘Hey, Joe,’ the guy says, ‘we’re getting up a foursome for tomorrow morning. You interested?’

“And the guy says”-Keller raised his hands to shoulder height, pressed his wrists together-“‘What time?’”

“‘What time?’”

“Right.”

“‘What time?’” She shook her head. “I like it, Keller. And any old time you want’ll be just fine.”