Lawrence Block - Hit Parade

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.