Lawrence Block - Hit Man

He called White Plains and told Dot he was bushed. “I’ll come out tomorrow around lunchtime,” he said. “How’s that?”

“Oh, goody,” she said. “I’ll make sandwiches, Keller. We’ll have a picnic.”

He got off the phone and couldn’t think what to do with himself. On a whim he took the subway to the Bronx and spent a few hours at the zoo. He hadn’t been to a zoo in years, long enough for him to have forgotten that they always made him sad.

It still worked that way, and he couldn’t say why. It’s not that it bothered him to see animals caged. From what he understood, they led a better life in captivity than they did in the wild. They lived longer and stayed healthier. They didn’t have to spend half their time trying to get enough food and the other half trying to keep from being food for somebody else. It was tempting to look at them and conclude that they were bored, but he didn’t believe it. They didn’t look bored to him.

He left unaccountably sad as always and returned to Manhattan. He ate at a new Afghan restaurant and went to a movie. It was a western, but not the sort of Hollywood classic he would have preferred. Even after the movie was over, you couldn’t really tell which ones were the good guys.

Next day Keller caught an early train to White Plains and spent forty minutes upstairs with the old man. When he came downstairs Dot told him there was fresh coffee made, or iced tea.

He went for the coffee. She already had a tall glass of iced tea poured for herself. They sat at the kitchen table and she asked him how it had gone in Seattle. He said it went okay.

“And how’d you like Seattle, Keller? From what I hear it’s everybody’s city du jour these days. Used to be San Francisco and now it’s Seattle.”

“It was fine,” he said.

“Get the urge to move there?”

He had found himself wondering what it might be like, living in one of those converted industrial buildings around Pioneer Square, say, and shopping for groceries at Pike Market, and judging the quality of the weather by the relative visibility of Mount Rainier. But he never went anywhere without having thoughts along those lines. That didn’t mean he was ready to pull up stakes and move.

“Not really,” he said.

“I understand it’s a great place for a cup of coffee.”

“They’re serious about their coffee,” he allowed. “Maybe too serious. Wine snobs are bad enough, but when all it is is coffee… ”

“How’s that coffee, by the way?”

“It’s fine.”

“I bet it can’t hold a candle to the stuff in Seattle,” she said. “But the weather’s lousy there. Rains all the time, the way I hear it.”

“There’s a lot of rain,” he said. “But it’s gentle. It doesn’t bowl you over.”

“It rains but it never pours?”

“Something like that.”

“I guess the rain got to you, huh?”

“How’s that?”

“Rain, day after day. And all that coffee snobbery. You couldn’t stand it.”

Huh? “It didn’t bother me,” he said.

“No?”

“Not really. Why?”

“Well, I was wondering,” she said, looking at him over the brim of her glass. “I was wondering what the hell you were doing in Denver.”

The TV was on with the sound off, tuned to one of the home shopping channels. A woman with unconvincing red hair was modeling a dress. Keller thought it looked dowdy, but the number in the lower right corner kept advancing, indicating that viewers were calling in a steady stream to order the item.

“Of course I could probably guess what you were doing in Denver,” Dot was saying, “and I could probably come up with the name of the person you were doing it to. I got somebody to send me a couple of issues of the Denver Post, and what did I find but a story about a woman in someplace called Aurora who came to a bad end, and I swear the whole thing had your fingerprints all over it. Don’t look so alarmed, Keller. Not your actual fingerprints. I was speaking figuratively.”

“Figuratively,” he said.

“It did look like your work,” she said, “and the timing was right. I’d say it might have lacked a little of your usual subtlety, but I figure that’s because you were in a big hurry to get back to Seattle.” He pointed at the television set. He said, “Do you believe how many of those dresses they’ve sold?”

“Tons.”

“Would you buy a dress like that?”

“Not in a million years. I’d look like a sack of potatoes in something cut like that.”

“I mean any dress. Over the phone, without trying it on.”

“I buy from catalogs all the time, Keller. It amounts to the same thing. If it doesn’t look right you can always send it back.”

“Do you ever do that? Send stuff back?”

“Sure.”

“He doesn’t know, does he, Dot? About Denver?”

“No.”

He nodded, hesitated, then leaned forward. “Dot,” he said, “can you keep a secret?”

She listened while he told her the whole thing, from Bascomb’s first appearance in the coffee shop to the most recent phone call, relaying the good wishes of the man who never inhaled. When he was done he got up and poured himself more coffee. He came back and sat down and Dot said, “You know what gets me? ‘Dot, can you keep a secret?’ Can I keep a secret?”

“Well, I-”

“If I can’t,” she said, “then we’re all in big trouble. Keller, I’ve been keeping your secrets just about as long as you’ve had secrets to keep. And you’re asking me-”

“I wasn’t exactly asking you. What do they call it when you don’t really expect an answer?”

“Prayer,” she said.

“Rhetorical,” he said. “It was a rhetorical question. For God’s sake, I know you can keep a secret.”

“That’s why you kept this one from me,” she said. “For lo these many months.”

“Well, I figured this was different.”

“Because it was a state secret.”

“That’s right.”

“Hush-hush, your eyes only, need-to-know basis. Matters of national security.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what if I turned out to be a Commie rat?”

“Dot-”

“So how come I all of a sudden got a top-secret clearance? Or is it need-to-know? In other words, if I hadn’t brought up Denver… ”

“No,” he said. “I was planning on telling you anyway.”

“Sooner or later, you mean.”

“Sooner. When I called yesterday and said I wanted to wait until today to come up, I was buying a little time to think it over.”

“And?”

“And I decided I wanted to run the whole thing by you, and see what you think.”

“What I think.”

“Right.”

“Well, you know what that tells me, Keller? It tells me what you think.”

“And?”

“And I think it’s about the same thing that I think.”

“Spell it out, okay?”

“C-O-N,” she said. “J-O-B. Total B-U-L-L-S-H-am I getting through?”

“Loud and clear.”

“He must be pretty slick,” she said, “to have a guy like you jumping through hoops. But I can see how it would work. First place, you want to believe it. ‘Young man, your country has need of you.’ Next thing you know, you’re knocking off strangers for chump change.”

“Expense money. It never covered the expenses, except the first time.”

“The patent lawyer, caught in his own mousetrap. What do you figure he did to piss Bascomb off?”

“No idea.”

“And the old fart in the wheelchair. It’s a good thing you iced the son of a bitch, Keller, or our children and our children’s children would grow up speaking Russian.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“I’m just making you pay for that rhetorical question. All said and done, do you think there’s a chance in a million Bascomb’s on the level?”