Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“But—”

“But it didn’t,” she said. “Whatever endangered you, the danger passed. Then those two people were killed, and that got your attention.”

“Like ice cracking,” he said, “but on another pond. I’ll have to think about this.”

“I’m sure you will.”

He cleared his throat. “Louise? Is it all written in the stars, and do we just walk through it down here on earth?”

“No.”

“You can look at that piece of paper,” he said, “and you can say, ‘Well, you’ll come very close to death on such and such a day, but you’ll get through it safe and sound.’ ”

“Only the first part. ‘You’ll come very close to death’—I could have looked at this and told you that much. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that you’d survive. The stars show propensities and dictate probabilities, but the future is never entirely predictable. And we do have free will.”

“If those people hadn’t been killed, and if I’d just gone on home—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I’d be here having this conversation, and you’d tell me what a close shave I’d had, and I’d figure it for just so much starshine. I’d had a feeling, but I would have forgotten all about it. So I’d look at you and say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and turn the page.”

“You can be grateful to the man and woman.”

“And to the guy who shot them, as far as that goes. And to the bikers who made all the noise in the first place. And to Ralph.”

“Who was Ralph?”

“The drunk’s friend, the one he was looking for in all the wrong places. I can be grateful to the drunk, too, except I don’t know his name. But then I don’t know any of their names, except for Ralph.”

“Maybe the names aren’t important.”

“I used to know the name of the man and woman, and of the man who shot them, the husband. I can’t remember them now. You’re right, the names aren’t important.”

“No.”

He looked at her. “The next year...”

“Will be dangerous.”

“What do I have to worry about? Should I think twice before I get on an airplane? Put on an extra sweater on windy days? Can you tell me where the threat’s coming from?”

She hesitated, then said, “You have an enemy, John.”

“An enemy?”

“An enemy. There’s someone out there who wants to kill you.”

“I don’t know,”he told Dot.

“You don’t know? Keller, what’s to know? What could be simpler? It’s in Boston, for God’s sake, not on the dark side of the moon. You take a cab to La Guardia, you hop on the Delta shuttle, you don’t even need a reservation, and half an hour later you’re on the ground at Logan. You take a cab into the city, you do the thing you do best, and you’re on the shuttle again before the day is over, and back in your own apartment in plenty of time for Jay Leno. The money’s right, the client’s strictly blue-chip, and the job’s a piece of cake.”

“I understand all that, Dot.”

“But?”

“I don’t know.”

“Keller,” she said, “clearly I’m missing something. Help me out here. What part of ‘I don’t know’ don’t I understand?”

I don’t know, he very nearly answered, but caught himself in time. In high school, a teacher had taken the class to task for those very words. “The way you use it,” she said, “ ‘I don’t know’ is a lie. It’s not what you mean at all. What you mean is ‘I don’t want to say’ or ‘I’m afraid to tell you.’ ”

“Hey, Keller,” one of the other boys had called out. “What’s the capital of South Dakota?”

“I’m afraid to tell you,” he’d replied.

And what was he afraid to tell Dot? That the Boston job just wasn’t in the stars? That the day the client had selected as ideal, this coming Wednesday, was a day specifically noted by his astrologer — his astrologer! — as a day fraught with danger, a day when he would be at extreme risk.

(“So what do I do on those days?” he’d asked her. “Stay in bed with the door locked? Order all my meals delivered?” “The first part’s not a terrible idea,” she’d advised him, “but I’d be careful who was on the other side of the door before I opened it. And I’d be careful what I ate, too.” The kid from the Chinese restaurant could be a Ninja assassin, he thought. The beef with oyster sauce could be laced with cyanide.)

“Keller?”

“The thing is, Wednesday’s not the best day for me. There was something I’d planned on doing.”

“What have you got, tickets to a matinee?”

“No.”

“No, of course not. It’s a stamp auction, isn’t it? The thing is, Wednesday’s the day the subject goes to his girlfriend’s apartment in Back Bay, and he has to sneak over there, so he leaves his security people behind. Which makes it far and away the easiest time to get next to him.”

“And she’s part of the package, the girlfriend?”

“Your call, whatever you want. She’s in or she’s out, whatever works.”

“And it doesn’t matter how? Doesn’t have to be an accident, doesn’t have to look like an execution?”

“Anything you want. You can plunge the son of a bitch into a vat of lanolin and soften him to death. Anything at all, just so he doesn’t have a pulse when you’re through with him.”

Hard job to say no to, he thought. Hard job to say I don’t know to.

“I suppose the following Wednesday might work,” Dot said. “The client would rather not wait, but my guess is he will if he has to. He said I was the first person he called, but I don’t believe it. He’s the type of guy’s not that comfortable doing business with a woman. Our kind of business, anyway. So I think I was more like the third or fourth person he called, and I think he’ll wait a week if I tell him he has to. Do you want me to see?”

Was he really going to lie in bed waiting for the bogeyman to get him?

“No, don’t do that,” he said. “This Wednesday’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said. He wasn’t sure, he was miles short of sure, but it had a much better ring to it than I don’t know .

Tuesday, the daybefore he was supposed to go to Boston, Keller had a strong urge to call Louise Carpenter. It had been a couple of weeks since she’d gone over his chart with him, and he wouldn’t be seeing her again for a year. He’d thought it might turn out to be like therapy, with weekly appointments, and he gathered that there were some clients who dropped in frequently for an astrological tune-up and oil change, but he gathered that astrology was a sort of hobby for them. He already had a hobby, and Louise seemed to think an annual checkup was sufficient, and that was fine with him.

So he’d see her in a year’s time. If he was still alive.

The forecast forWednesday was rain and more rain, and when he woke up he saw they weren’t kidding. It was a bleak, gray day, and the rain was coming down hard. An apologetic announcer on New York One said the downpour was expected to continue throughout the day and evening, accompanied by high winds and low temperatures. The way he was carrying on, you’d have thought it was his fault.

Keller put on a suit and tie, good protective coloration in a formal kind of city like Boston, and the standard uniform on the air shuttle. He got his trench coat out of the closet, put it on, and wasn’t crazy about what he saw in the mirror. The salesman had called it olive, and maybe it was, at least in the store under their fluorescent lights. In the cold, damp light of a rainy morning, however, the damn thing looked green.

Not shamrock green, not Kelly green, not even putting green. But it was green, all right. You could slip into it on St. Patrick’s Day and march up Fifth Avenue, and no one would mistake you for an Orangeman. No question about it, the sucker was green.