Lawrence Block - Hit Parade

“Works for me,” he said.

“The only thing I don’t like to do,” she said, “is mix business and pleasure. So I made sure not to commit myself until I knew you weren’t going to buy this place. And you’re not, are you?”

“How did you know?”

“A feeling I got, when I said how you should make an offer. Instead of trying to think how much to offer, you were looking for a way out-or at least that was what I picked up. Which was okay with me, because by then I was more interested in getting laid than in selling a house. I didn’t have to tell you about a whole lot of tax advantages, and how easy it is to rent the place out during the time you spend somewhere else. It’s all pretty persuasive, and I could give you that whole rap now, but you don’t really want to hear it, do you?”

“I might be in the market in a little while,” he said, “but you’re right, I’m nowhere near ready to make an offer at the present time. I suppose it was wrong of me to drag you out here and waste your time, but-”

“Do you hear me complaining, David?”

“Well, I just wanted to see the place,” he said. “So I exaggerated my interest somewhat. Whether or not I’ll be serious about settling in here depends on the outcome of a couple of business matters, and it’ll be a while before I know how they’re going to turn out.”

“Sounds very mysterious,” she said.

“I wish I could talk about it, but you know how it is.”

“You could tell me,” she said, “but then you’d have to kill me. In that case, don’t you say a word.”

He ate dinnerby himself in a Mexican restaurant that reminded him of another Mexican restaurant. He was lingering over a second cup of café con leche before he figured it out. Years ago work had taken him to Roseburg, Oregon, and before he got out of there he’d picked out a real estate agent and spent an afternoon driving around looking at houses for sale.

He hadn’t gone to bed with the Oregon realtor, or even considered it, nor had he used her as a way to get information on an approach to his quarry. That man, whom the Witness Protection Program had imperfectly protected, had been all too easy to find, but Keller, who ordinarily knew well enough to keep his business and personal life separate, had somehow let himself befriend the poor bastard. Before he knew it he was having fantasies about moving to Roseburg himself, buying a house, getting a dog, settling down.

He’d looked at houses, but that was as far as he’d let it go. The night came when he got a grip on himself, and the next thing he got a grip on was the man who’d brought him there. He used a garrote, and what he got a grip on was the guy’s throat, and then it was time to go back to New York.

He remembered the Mexican café in Roseburg now. The food had been good, though he didn’t suppose it was all that special, and he’d had a mild crush on the waitress, about as realistic as the whole idea of moving there. He thought of the man he’d killed, an accountant who’d become the proprietor of a quick-print shop.

You could learn the business in a couple of hours , the man had said of his new career. You could buy the place and move in the same day , Mitzi had said of the Lattimore house.

Patterns…

You could tell me , she’d said, thinking she was joking, but then you’d have to kill me . Oddly, in the languor that followed their lovemaking, he’d had the impulse to confide in her, to tell her what had brought him to Scottsdale.

Yeah, right.

He drove around for a while, then found his way back to his motel and surfed the TV channels without finding anything that caught his interest. He turned off the set and sat there in the dark.

He thought of calling Dot. There were things he could talk about with her, but others he couldn’t, and anyway he didn’t want to do any talking on a cell phone, not even an untraceable one.

He found himself thinking about the guy in Roseburg. He tried to picture him and couldn’t. Early on he’d worked out a way to keep people from the past from flooding the present with their faces. You worked with their images in your mind, leached the color out of them, made the features grow dimmer, shrank the picture as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. You made them grow smaller and darker and hazier until they disappeared, and if you did it correctly you forgot everything but the barest of facts about them. There was no emotional charge, no weight to them, and they became more and more difficult to recall to mind.

But now he’d bridged a gap and closed a circuit, and the man’s face was there in his memory, the face of an aging chipmunk. Jesus , Keller thought, get out of my memory, will you? You’ve been dead for years. Leave me the hell alone .

If you were here , he told the face, I could talk to you. And you’d listen, because what the hell else could you do? You couldn’t talk back, you couldn’t judge me, you couldn’t tell me to shut up. You’re dead, so you couldn’t say a goddam word .

He went outside, walked around for a while, came back in and sat on the edge of the bed. Very deliberately he set about getting rid of the man’s face, washing it of color, pushing it farther and farther away, making it disappear. The process was more difficult than it had been in years, but it worked, finally, and the little man was gone to wherever the washed-out faces of dead people went. Wherever it was, Keller prayed he’d stay there.

He took a long hot shower and went to bed.

In the morninghe found someplace new to have breakfast. He read the paper and had a second cup of coffee, then drove pointlessly around the perimeter of Sundowner Estates.

Back at the motel, he called Dot on his cell phone. “Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with,” he said. “I park where I can watch the entrance. Then, when some resident drives out, I follow them.”

“Them?”

“Well, him or her, depending which it is. Or them, if there’s more than one in the car. Sooner or later, they stop somewhere and get out of the car.”

“And you take them out, and you keep doing this, and sooner or later it’s the right guy.”

“They get out of the car,” he said, “and I hang around until nobody’s watching, and I get in the trunk.”

“The trunk of their car.”

“If I wanted to get in the trunk of my own car,” he said, “I could go do that right now. Yes, the trunk of their car.”

“I get it,” she said. “Their car morphs into the Trojan Chrysler. They sail back into the walled city, and you’re in there, and hoping they’ll open the trunk eventually and let you out.”

“Car trunks have a release mechanism built in these days,” he said. “So kidnap victims can escape.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “The automakers added something for the benefit of the eight people a year who get stuffed into car trunks?”

“I think it’s probably more than eight a year,” he said, “and then there are the people, kids mostly, who get locked in accidentally. Anyway, it’s no problem getting out.”

“How about getting in? You real clever with auto locks?”

“That might be a problem,” he admitted. “Does everybody lock their car nowadays?”

“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.”