Hit Parade

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.