Lawrence Block - Hit Man

After lunch Engleman went back to the shop and Keller returned to the motel for his car. He drove out of town on the same road he’d taken the day he bought the gun. This time he drove a few miles farther before pulling over and cutting the engine.

He got the gun from the glove box and opened the cylinder, spilling the shells into his palm. He tossed them underhand, then weighed the gun in his hand for a moment before hurling it into a patch of brush.

McLarendon would be horrified, he thought. Mistreating a weapon in that fashion. Showed what an astute judge of character the man was.

He got back into his car and drove back to town.

He called White Plains. When the woman answered, he said, “You don’t have to disturb him, Dot. Just tell him I didn’t make my flight today. I changed the reservation, I moved it ahead to Tuesday. Tell him everything’s okay, only it’s taking a little longer, like I thought it might.” She asked how the weather was. “It’s real nice,” he said. “Very pleasant. Listen, don’t you think that’s part of it? If it was raining I’d probably have it all taken care of, I’d be home by now.”

Quik Print was closed Saturdays and Sundays. Saturday afternoon Keller called Engleman at home and asked him if he felt like going for a ride. “I’ll pick you up,” he offered.

When he got there Engleman was waiting out in front. He got in and fastened his seat belt. “Nice car,” he said.

“It’s a rental.”

“I didn’t figure you drove your own car all the way out here. You know, it gave me a turn. When you said, ‘How about going for a ride?’ You know, going for a ride. Like there’s a connotation.”

“Actually,” Keller said, “we probably should have taken your car. I figured you could show me the area.”

“You like it here, huh?”

“Very much,” Keller said. “I’ve been thinking. Suppose I just stayed here.”

“Wouldn’t he send somebody?”

“You think he would? I don’t know. He wasn’t knocking himself out trying to find you. At first, sure, but then he forgot about it. Then some eager beaver in San Francisco happens to spot you, and sure, he tells me to go out and handle it. But if I just don’t come back-”

“Caught up in the lure of Roseburg,” Engleman said.

“I don’t know, Burt, it’s not a bad place. You know, I’m going to stop that.”

“What?”

“Calling you Burt. Your name’s Ed now, so why don’t I call you Ed? What do you think, Ed? That sound good to you, Ed, old buddy?”

“And what do I call you?”

“Al’s fine,” Keller said. “What should I do, take a left here?”

“No, go another block or two,” Engleman said. “There’s a nice back road, leads through some very pretty scenery.”

A while later Keller said, “You miss it much, Ed?”

“Working for him, you mean?”

“No, not that. The city.”

“ New York? I never lived in the city, not really. We were up in Westchester.”

“Still, the whole area. You miss it?”

“No.”

“I wonder if I would.” They fell silent, and after perhaps five minutes Keller said, “My father was a soldier, he was killed in the war when I was just a baby. That’s why I named the dog Soldier.”

Engleman didn’t say anything.

“Except I think my mother was lying,” he went on. “I don’t think she was married, and I have a feeling she didn’t know who my father was. But I didn’t know that when I named the dog. When you think about it, it’s a stupid name anyway for a dog, Soldier. It’s probably stupid to name a dog after your father, as far as that goes.”

Sunday he stayed in the room and watched sports on television. The Mexican place was closed; he had lunch at Wendy’s and dinner at a Pizza Hut. Monday at noon he was back at the Mexican café. He had the newspaper with him, and he ordered the same thing he’d ordered the first time, chicken enchiladas.

When the waitress brought coffee afterward, he asked her, “When’s the wedding?”

She looked utterly blank. “The wedding,” he repeated, and pointed at the ring on her finger.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m not engaged or anything. The ring was my mom’s from her first marriage. She never wears it, so I asked could I wear it, and she said it was all right. I used to wear it on the other hand, but it fits better here.”

He felt curiously angry, as though she’d betrayed the fantasy he’d spun out about her. He left the same tip he always left and took a long walk around town, gazing in windows, wandering up one street and down the next.

He thought, Well, you could marry her. She’s already got the engagement ring. Ed’ll print the invitations, except who would you invite?

And the two of you could get a house with a fenced yard, and buy a dog.

Ridiculous, he thought. The whole thing was ridiculous.

At dinnertime he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to go back to the Mexican café but he felt perversely disinclined to go anywhere else. One more Mexican meal, he thought, and he’d wish he had that gun back, so he could shoot himself.

He called Engleman at home. “Look,” he said, “this is important. Could you meet me at your shop?”

“When?”

“As soon as you can.”

“We just sat down to dinner.”

“Well, don’t ruin your meal,” Keller said. “What is it, seven-thirty? How about if you meet me in an hour?”

He was waiting in the photographer’s doorway when Engleman parked the Honda in front of his shop. “I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, “but I had an idea. Can you open up? I want to see something inside.”

Engleman unlocked the door and they went in. Keller kept talking to him, saying he’d figured out a way he could stay in Roseburg and not worry about the man in White Plains. “This machine you’ve got,” he said, pointing to one of the copiers. “How does it work?”

“How does it work?”

“What does that switch do?”

“This one?”

Engleman leaned forward and Keller drew the loop of wire from his pocket and whipped it around the other man’s neck. The garrote was fast, silent, effective. Keller made sure Engleman’s body was where you couldn’t see it from the street, made sure to wipe his own prints off any surfaces he might have touched. He turned off the lights, closed the door behind him.

He had already checked out of the Douglas Inn, and now he drove straight to Portland, with the Ford’s cruise control set just below the speed limit. He drove half an hour in silence, then turned on the radio and tried to find a station he could stand. Nothing pleased him and he gave up and switched it off.

Somewhere north of Eugene he said, “Jesus, Ed, what else was I going to do?”

He drove straight through to Portland and got a room at the ExecuLodge near the airport. In the morning he turned in the Hertz car and dawdled over coffee until his flight was called.

He called White Plains as soon as he was on the ground at JFK. “It’s all taken care of,” he said. “I’ll come by sometime tomorrow. Right now I just want to get home, get some sleep.”

The following afternoon in White Plains, Dot asked him how he had liked Roseburg.

“Really nice,” he said. “Pretty town, nice people. I wanted to stay there.”

“Oh, Keller,” she said. “What did you do, look at houses?”

“Not exactly.”

“Every place you go,” she said, “you want to live there.”

“It’s nice,” he insisted. “And living’s cheap compared to here. They don’t even have a sales tax in the state, if you can believe that.”

“Is sales tax a big problem for you, Keller?”

“A person could have a decent life there,” he said.