Hit Man Read online

  H I T

  LAWRENCE BLOCK

  M A N

  Dedication

  for EVAN HUNTER

  Contents

  Dedication

  1 Answers to Soldier

  2 Keller on Horseback

  3 Keller’s Therapy

  4 Dogs Walked, Plants Watered

  5 Keller’s Karma

  6 Keller in Shining Armor

  7 Kellers Choice

  8 Keller on the Spot

  9 Keller’s Last Refuge

  10 Keller in Retirement

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Lawrence Block

  Also by Lawrence Block

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Answers to Soldier

  Keller flew United to Portland. He read a magazine on the leg from JFK to O’Hare, ate lunch on the ground, and watched the movie on the nonstop flight from Chicago to Portland. It was a quarter to three local time when he carried his hand luggage off the plane, and then he had only an hour’s wait before his connecting flight to Roseburg.

  But when he got a look at the size of the plane he walked over to the Hertz desk and told them he wanted a car for a few days. He showed them a driver’s license and a credit card and they let him have a Ford Taurus with thirty-two hundred miles on the clock. He didn’t bother trying to refund his Portland-to-Roseburg ticket.

  The Hertz clerk showed him how to get on I–5. Keller pointed the car in the right direction and set the cruise control three miles an hour over the posted speed limit. Everybody else was going a few miles an hour faster than that, but he was in no hurry, and he didn’t want to invite a close look at his driver’s license. It was probably all right, but why ask for trouble?

  It was still light out when he took the off ramp for the second Roseburg exit. He had a reservation at the Douglas Inn, a Best Western on Stephens Street. He found it without any trouble. They had him in a ground-floor room in the front, and he had them change it to one a flight up in the rear.

  He unpacked, showered. The phone book had a street map of downtown Roseburg, and he studied it, getting his bearings, then tore it out and took it with him when he went out for a walk. The little print shop was only a few blocks away on Jackson, two doors in from the corner, between a tobacconist and a photographer with his window full of wedding pictures. A sign in Quik Print’s window offered a special on wedding invitations, perhaps to catch the eye of bridal couples making arrangements with the photographer.

  Quik Print was closed, of course, as were the tobacconist and the photographer and the credit jeweler next door to the photographer and, as far as Keller could tell, everybody else in the neighborhood. He didn’t stick around long. Two blocks away he found a Mexican restaurant that looked dingy enough to be authentic. He bought a local paper from the coin box out front and read it while he ate his chicken enchiladas. The food was good, and ridiculously inexpensive. If the place were in New York, he thought, everything would be three or four times as much and there’d be a line in front.

  The waitress was a slender blonde, not Mexican at all. She had short hair and granny glasses and an overbite, and she sported an engagement ring on the appropriate finger, a diamond solitaire with a tiny stone. Maybe she and her fiancé had picked it out at the credit jeweler’s, Keller thought. Maybe the photographer next door would take their wedding pictures. Maybe they’d get Burt Engleman to print their wedding invitations. Quality printing, reasonable rates, service you can count on.

  In the morning he returned to Quik Print and looked in the window. A woman with brown hair was sitting at a gray metal desk, talking on the telephone. A man in shirtsleeves stood at a copying machine. He wore horn-rimmed glasses with round lenses and his hair was cropped short on his egg-shaped head. He was balding, and that made him look older, but Keller knew he was only thirty-eight.

  Keller stood in front of the jeweler’s and pictured the waitress and her fiancé picking out rings. They’d have a double-ring ceremony, of course, and there would be something engraved on the inside of each of their wedding bands, something no one else would ever see. Would they live in an apartment? For a while, he decided, until they saved the down payment for a starter home. That was the phrase you saw in real estate ads and Keller liked it. A starter home, something to practice on until you got the hang of it.

  At a drugstore on the next block, he bought an unlined paper tablet and a black felt-tipped pen. He used four sheets of paper before he was pleased with the result. Back at Quik Print, he showed his work to the brown-haired woman.

  “My dog ran off,” he explained. “I thought I’d get some flyers printed, post them around town.”

  LOST DOG, he’d printed. PART GER. SHEPHERD. ANSWERS TO SOLDIER. CALL 555-1904.

  “I hope you get him back,” the woman said. “Is it a him? Soldier sounds like a male dog, but it doesn’t say.”

  “It’s a male,” Keller said. “Maybe I should have specified.”

  “It’s probably not important. Did you want to offer a reward? People usually do, though I don’t know if it makes any difference. If I found somebody’s dog, I wouldn’t care about a reward. I’d just want to get him back with his owner.”

  “Everybody’s not as decent as you are,” Keller said. “Maybe I should say something about a reward. I didn’t even think of that.” He put his palms on the desk and leaned forward, looking down at the sheet of paper. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks kind of homemade, doesn’t it? Maybe I should have you set it in type, do it right. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Ed? Would you come and take a look at this, please?”

  The man in the horn-rims came over and said he thought a hand-lettered look was best for a lost-dog notice. “It makes it more personal,” he said. “I could do it in type for you, but I think people would respond to it better as it is. Assuming somebody finds the dog, that is.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s a matter of national importance, anyway,” Keller said. “My wife’s attached to the animal and I’d like to recover him if it’s possible, but I’ve a feeling he’s not to be found. My name’s Gordon, by the way. Al Gordon.”

  “Ed Vandermeer,” the man said. “And this is my wife, Betty.”

  “A pleasure,” Keller said. “I guess fifty of these ought to be enough. More than enough, but I’ll take fifty. Will it take you long to run them?”

  “I’ll do it right now. Take about three minutes, set you back three-fifty.”

  “Can’t beat that,” Keller said. He uncapped the felt-tipped pen. “Just let me put in something about a reward.”

  Back in his motel room, he put through a call to a number in White Plains. When a woman answered he said, “Dot, let me speak to him, will you?” It took a few minutes, and then he said, “Yeah, I got here. It’s him, all right. He’s calling himself Vandermeer now. His wife’s still going by Betty.”

  The man in White Plains asked when he’d be back.

  “What’s today, Tuesday? I’ve got a flight booked Friday, but I might take a little longer. No point rushing things. I found a good place to eat. Mexican joint, and the motel set gets HBO. I figure I’ll take my time, do it right. Engleman’s not going anywhere.”

  He had lunch at the Mexican café. This time he ordered the combination plate. The waitress asked if he wanted the red or green chili.

  “Whichever’s hotter,” he said.

  Maybe a mobile home, he thought. You could buy one cheap, a nice double-wide, make a nice starter home for her and her fellow. Or maybe the best thing for them was to buy a duplex and rent out half, then rent out the other half when they were ready for something nicer for themselves. No time at all you’re in real estate, mak
ing a nice return, watching your holdings appreciate. No more waiting on tables for her, and pretty soon her husband could quit slaving at the lumber mill, quit worrying about layoffs when the industry hit one of its slumps.

  How you do go on, he thought.

  He spent the afternoon walking around town. In a gun shop, the proprietor, a man named McLarendon, took some rifles and shotguns off the wall and let him get the feel of them. A sign on the wall read GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE UNLESS YOU AIM REAL GOOD. Keller talked politics with McLarendon, and socioeconomics. It wasn’t that tricky to figure out his position and to adopt it as one’s own.

  “What I really been meaning to buy,” Keller said, “is a handgun.”

  “You want to protect yourself and your property,” McLarendon said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “And your loved ones.”

  “Sure.”

  He let the man sell him a gun. There was, locally, a cooling-off period. You picked out your gun, filled out a form, and four days later you could come back and pick it up.

  “You a hothead?” McLarendon asked him. “You fixing to lean out the car window, bag a state trooper on the way home?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Then I’ll show you a trick. We just backdate this form and you’ve already had your cooling-off period. I’d say you look cool enough to me.”

  “You’re a good judge of character.”

  The man grinned. “This business,” he said, “a man’s got to be.”

  It was nice, a town that size. You got into your car and drove for ten minutes and you were way out in the country.

  Keller stopped the Taurus at the side of the road, cut the ignition, rolled down the window. He took the gun from one pocket and the box of shells from the other. The gun—McLarendon had kept calling it a weapon—was a .38-caliber revolver with a two-inch barrel. McLarendon would have liked to sell him something heavier and more powerful. If Keller had wanted, he probably would have been thrilled to sell him a bazooka.

  Keller loaded the gun and got out of the car. There was a beer can lying on its side perhaps twenty yards off. He aimed at it, holding the gun in one hand. A few years ago they started firing two-handed in cop shows on TV, and nowadays that was all you saw, television cops leaping through doorways and spinning around corners, gun gripped rigidly in both hands, held out in front of their bodies like a fire hose. Keller thought it looked silly. He’d feel self-conscious, holding a gun like that.

  He squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand, and he missed the beer can by several feet. The report of the gunshot echoed for a long time.

  He took aim at other things—at a tree, at a flower, at a white rock the size of a clenched fist. But he couldn’t bring himself to fire the gun again, to break the stillness with another gunshot. What was the point, anyway? If he used the gun, he’d be too close to miss. You got in close, you pointed, you fired. It wasn’t rocket science, for God’s sake. It wasn’t neuro-surgery. Anyone could do it.

  He replaced the spent cartridge and put the loaded gun in the car’s glove compartment. He spilled the rest of the shells into his hand and walked a few yards from the road’s edge, then hurled them with a sweeping sidearm motion. He gave the empty box a toss and got back into the car.

  Traveling light, he thought.

  * * *

  Back in town, he drove past Quik Print to make sure it was still open. Then, following the route he’d traced on the map, he found his way to 1411 Cowslip Lane, a Dutch Colonial house on the north edge of town. The lawn was neatly trimmed and fiercely green, and there was a bed of rosebushes on either side of the path leading from the sidewalk to the front door.

  One of the leaflets at the motel had told how roses were a local specialty. But the town had been named not for the flower but for Aaron Rose, an early settler.

  He wondered if Engleman knew that.

  He circled the block, parked two doors away on the other side of the street from the Engleman residence. “Vandermeer, Edward,” the white pages listing had read. It struck Keller as an unusual alias. He wondered if Engleman had picked it out for himself, or if the feds had selected it for him. Probably the latter, he decided. “Here’s your new name,” they would tell you, “and here’s where you’re going to live and what you’re going to be.” There was an arbitrariness about it that somehow appealed to Keller, as if they relieved you of the burden of decision. Here’s your new name, and here’s your new driver’s license with your new name already on it. You like scalloped potatoes in your new life, and you’re allergic to bee stings, and your favorite color is cobalt blue.

  Betty Engleman was now Betty Vandermeer. Keller wondered why her first name had remained the same. Didn’t they trust Engleman to get it right? Did they figure him for a bumbler, apt to blurt out “Betty” at an inopportune moment? Or was it sheer coincidence or sloppiness on their part?

  Around six-thirty the Englemans came home from work. They rode in a Honda Civic hatchback with local plates. They had evidently stopped to shop for groceries on the way home. Engleman parked in the driveway while his wife got a bag of groceries from the back. Then he put the car in the garage and followed her into the house.

  Keller watched lights go on inside the house. He stayed where he was. It was starting to get dark by the time he drove back to the Douglas Inn.

  On HBO, Keller watched a movie about a gang of criminals who had come to a town in Texas to rob the bank. One of the criminals was a woman, married to one of the other gang members and having an affair with another. Keller thought that was a pretty good recipe for disaster. There was a prolonged shoot-out at the end, with everybody dying in slow motion.

  When the movie ended he went over to switch off the set. His eye was caught by the stack of flyers Engleman had run off for him. LOST DOG. PART GER. SHEPHERD ANSWERS TO SOLDIER. CALL 555-1904. REWARD.

  Excellent watchdog, he thought. Good with children.

  He didn’t get up until almost noon. He went to the Mexican place and ordered huevos rancheros and put a lot of hot sauce on them. He watched the waitress’s hands as she served the food and again when she took his empty plate away. Light glinted off the little diamond. Maybe she and her husband would wind up in Cowslip Lane, he thought. Not right away, of course; they’d have to start out in the duplex, but that’s what they could aspire to, a Dutch Colonial with that odd kind of pitched roof. What did they call it, anyway? Was that a mansard roof, or did that word describe something else? Was it a gambrel, maybe?

  He thought he ought to learn these things. You saw the words and didn’t know what they meant, saw the houses and couldn’t describe them properly.

  He had bought a paper on his way into the café , and now he turned to the classified ads and read through the real estate listings. Houses seemed very inexpensive. You could actually buy a low-priced home here for twice what he would be paid for the week’s work.

  There was a safe deposit box no one knew about, rented under a name he’d never used for another purpose, and in it he had enough currency to buy a nice home here outright for cash.

  Assuming you could still do that. People were funny about cash these days, leery of letting themselves be used to launder drug money.

  Anyway, what difference did it make? He wasn’t going to live here. The waitress could live here, in a nice little house with mansards and gambrels.

  Engleman was leaning over his wife’s desk when Keller walked into Quik Print. “Why, hello,” he said. “Have you had any luck finding Soldier?”

  He remembered the name, Keller noticed.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the dog came back on his own. I guess he wanted the reward.” Betty Engleman laughed.

  “You see how fast your flyers worked,” he went on. “They brought the dog back before I even got the chance to post them. I’ll get some use out of them eventually, though. Old Soldier’s got itchy feet, he’ll take off again one of these days.”

  “
Just so he keeps coming back,” she said.

  “Reason I stopped by,” Keller said, “I’m new in town, as you might have gathered, and I’ve got a business venture I’m getting ready to kick into gear. I’m going to need a printer, and I thought maybe we could sit down and talk. You got time for a cup of coffee?”

  Engleman’s eyes were hard to read behind the glasses. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  They walked down to the corner, Keller talking about what a nice day it was, Engleman saying little beyond agreeing with him. At the corner Keller said, “Well, Burt, where should we go for coffee?”

  Engleman just froze. Then he said, “I knew.”

  “I know you did. I could tell the minute I walked in there. How?”

  “The phone number on the flyer. I tried it last night. They never heard of a Mr. Gordon.”

  “So you knew last night. Of course you could have made a mistake on the number.”

  Engleman shook his head. “I wasn’t going on memory. I kept an extra copy of the flyer and dialed the number right off it. No Mr. Gordon and no lost dog. Anyway, I think I knew before then. I think I knew the minute you walked in the door.”

  “Let’s get that coffee,” Keller said.

  They went into a place called the Rainbow Diner and had coffee at a table on the side. Engleman added artificial sweetener to his and stirred it long enough to dissolve marble chips. He had been an accountant back east, working for the man Keller had called in White Plains. When the feds were trying to make a RICO case against Engleman’s boss, Engleman was a logical place to apply pressure. He wasn’t really a criminal, he hadn’t done much of anything, and they told him he was going to prison unless he rolled over and testified. If he did what they said, they’d give him a new name and move him someplace safe. If not, he could talk to his wife once a month through a wire screen and have ten years to get used to it.