Lawrence Block - Hit and Run

“They found a body.”

She made a face. “I was going to skip that part,” she said. “You know, I was going to take my chances, and then this woman turned up, and all I could think was that God sent her.”

“God sent her?”

“You remember how Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac? And God sent a ram for him to sacrifice instead?”

“That story never made much sense to me,” he said.

“Well, it’s the Bible, Keller. What the hell do you want from it? All I know is I was scrambling, trying to decide where to pour gasoline, and the doorbell rang. And I went there, and there she was.”

“Selling magazine subscriptions? Taking a survey?”

“She was a Jehovah’s Witness,” she said. “You know what you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with an agnostic?”

“What?”

“Someone who rings your doorbell for no apparent reason. You can figure out the rest, can’t you? I invited her in and sat her down, and then I got the gun from the silverware drawer and shot her a couple of times, and she got to be the corpse they found in the kitchen. I poured enough gas on her hands so I wouldn’t have to worry about fingerprints. Mine aren’t on file anywhere, but how did I know hers weren’t? People who turn up on your doorstep, you never know where they’ve been. Why are you frowning?”

“I read something about a positive identification based on dental records.”

“Right.”

“Well, how did you manage that?”

“That’s why I have to figure God sent her, Keller. The little darling had false teeth.”

“She had false teeth.”

“Cheap ones, too. You could just about spot ’em before she opened her mouth. First thing I did, I yanked ’em out and popped mine in.”

“Yours?”

“What’s so remarkable about that?”

“I didn’t know your teeth were false.”

“You weren’t supposed to know,” she said. “That’s why I paid ten or twenty times as much for them as Jehovah’s little godchild paid for hers, so they’d look like the original equipment. I lost all my teeth before I was thirty, Keller, and I’ll save that story for another day, if it’s all the same to you. I switched the teeth and set the fire and got the hell out.”

“I always thought—”

“That my teeth were real? See these?” She drew back her lips. “I have to say I like them even better than the ones I left in White Plains. They don’t look perfect, that’s the giveaway with so many of them, and yet they look really nice. Don’t ask what they cost.”

“I won’t,” he said, “and that’s not what I was going to say. What I always thought was that Jehovah’s Witnesses always came around in pairs.”

“Oh, right. Him.”

“Him?”

“I shot him first,” she said, “because he was bigger, and looked more like trouble, although I can’t say either one of them struck me as a dangerous customer. I shot him, and then I shot her, and I put him in the trunk of my car and dumped him where nobody would find him for a while, and then I came back and switched the teeth and set the fire, di dah di dah di dah.”

She left her car in the garage, so no one would go looking for it, and she took no more than would fit into a small overnight bag. She took a bus to the train station and a train to Albany and holed up there for six weeks in an apartment hotel catering mostly to people with political business in the state capital.

“State senators and assemblymen and the lobbyists who throw money at them,” she said. “I had plenty of cash, and credit cards in my new name, and I bought a car and picked up a laptop and did a little research. I decided Sedona looked good.”

“Sedona, Arizona.”

“I know, it rhymes, just like New York, New York. And there the resemblance ends. It’s small and upscale, and the climate’s ideal and the setting’s beautiful, and the town doubles its population every twenty minutes, so a person could drop in out of the blue without drawing attention, and after six months you’d be an old-timer. I figured I’d drive there and see some of the country on the way, and then I thought it through and decided the hell with seeing the country, so I sold the car and flew out to Phoenix and bought a new car and drove to Sedona. I picked out a two-bedroom penthouse condo for myself, and from one window I can see the golf course and from another I’ve got a great view of Bell Rock, and you probably don’t even know what that is.”

“A rock that chimes on the hour?”

“The hair’s different,” she said, “but it’s still the same old Keller underneath it, isn’t it? As soon as I was settled in, I tried to work out a way of getting in touch with you, assuming I could do that without holding a séance. I knew from the news coverage that you made it out of Des Moines, and the law never caught up with you, but if Al got to you first there wouldn’t have been anything in the papers. And if you were alive, there was only one way I could think of to reach you without attracting anybody else’s attention, so that’s what I did.”

“You placed an ad in Linn’s .”

“I ran that damn advertisement every place I could find. Who would have guessed there were so many papers and magazines for stamp collectors? Besides Linn’s there’s Global Stamp News , and Scott’s Monthly Journal , and the magazine the national stamp society sends its members—”

“The American Philatelic Society. It’s a pretty good magazine.”

“Well, that’s a load off my mind. Good or bad, my ad’s been in it, every goddamn month. Plus some others I can’t think of. McBeal’s ?”

“ Mekeel’s .”

“There you go. I’ve got run-until-canceled status with all of them, and every month all the charges show up on my Visa statement. And I was beginning to wonder how long I should go on running the ad, because I was starting to feel like that football team owner who always leaves a ticket at the front gate for Elvis, just in case he shows up. And he at least gets some free publicity out of it.”

“It must have cost you quite a bit.”

“Not really. Small ads at low rates, and they get even lower on a long-term basis. The real cost was emotional wear and tear, because every time I got my credit card statement that was one more month without word from you, and it was that much more likely that I’d never hear from you again. You at least had closure, Keller. You knew for sure that I was dead, but I had to sit around wondering.”

“I wonder which was worse.”

“You could probably make a good case either way,” she said, “but either way we’re both alive, so the hell with it. You saw the ad and called the number—”

“After I finally figured out that it was a number.”

“Well, if I made it too obvious the phone would have been ringing off the hook. And I knew you’d work it out once you put your mind to it. But what I still can’t understand is why it took you so long. Not to work it out but to pay attention to it in the first place. How many times do you suppose you saw that ad before it rang any kind of a bell?”

“Just once.”

“Just once? How is that possible, Keller? I don’t suppose you could have had the post office forward your mail, but that ad ran in all the places I mentioned and one or two I forgot. How hard is it to find a copy of Linn’s ? Or send in and get a new subscription?”

“Not hard at all,” he said, “but why would I bother? What would be the point? Dot, I saw the ad because Julia picked up a copy of Linn’s and brought it home with her. She wasn’t sure she should give it to me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at it.”

“But you did.”