Hit Parade

“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.