Hit Man Read online

  “How did you find me?” he wanted to know. “Somebody leaked it in Washington?”

  Keller shook his head. “Freak thing,” he said. “Somebody saw you on the street, recognized you, followed you home.”

  “Here in Roseburg?”

  “I don’t think so. Were you out of town a week or so ago?”

  “Oh, God,” Engleman said. “We went down to San Francisco for the weekend.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “I thought it was safe. I don’t even know anybody in San Francisco, I was never there in my life. It was her birthday, we figured nothing could be safer. I don’t know a soul there.”

  “Somebody knew you.”

  “And followed me back here?”

  “I don’t even know. Maybe they got your plate and had somebody run it. Maybe they checked your registration at the hotel. What’s the difference?”

  “No difference.”

  Engleman picked up his coffee and stared into the cup. Keller said, “You knew last night. You’re in that program. Isn’t there someone you’re supposed to call?”

  “There’s someone,” Engleman said. He put his cup down. “It’s not that great a program,” he said. “It’s great when they’re telling you about it, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Keller said.

  “Anyway, I didn’t call anybody. What are they going to do? Say they stake my place out, the house and the print shop, and they pick you up. Even if they make something stick against you, what good does it do me? We’ll still have to move again because the guy’ll just send somebody else, right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Well, I’m not moving anymore. They moved us three times and I don’t even know why. I think it’s automatic, part of the program, they move you a few times during the first year or two. This is the first place we’ve really settled in since we left, and we’re starting to make money at Quik Print, and I like it. I like the town and I like the business. I don’t want to move.”

  “The town seems nice.”

  “It is,” Engleman said. “It’s better than I thought it would be.”

  “And you didn’t want to develop another accounting practice?”

  “Never,” Engleman said. “I had enough of that, believe me. Look what it got me.”

  “You wouldn’t necessarily have to work for crooks.”

  “How do you know who’s a crook and who isn’t? Anyway, I don’t want any kind of work where I’m always looking at the inside of somebody else’s business. I’d rather have my own little business, work there side by side with my wife. We’re right there on the street and you can look in the front window and see us. You need stationery, you need business cards, you need invoice forms, I’ll print ’em for you.”

  “How did you learn the business?”

  “It’s a franchise kind of thing, a turnkey operation. Anybody could learn it in twenty minutes.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Oh, yeah. Anybody.”

  Keller drank some of his coffee. He asked if Engleman had said anything to his wife and learned that he hadn’t. “That’s good,” he said. “Don’t say anything. I’m this guy, weighing some business ventures, needs a printer, has to have, you know, arrangements so there’s no cash-flow problem. And I’m shy talking business in front of women, so the two of us go off and have coffee from time to time.”

  “Whatever you say,” Engleman said.

  Poor scared bastard, Keller thought. He said, “See, I don’t want to hurt you, Burt. I wanted to, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d put a gun to your head, do what I’m supposed to do. You see a gun?”

  “No.”

  “The thing is, I don’t do it, they send somebody else. I come back empty, they want to know why. What I have to do, I have to figure something out. You’re positive you don’t want to run?”

  “No. The hell with running.”

  “Swell, I’ll figure something out,” Keller said. “I’ve got a few days. I’ll think of something.”

  After breakfast the next morning, Keller drove to the office of one of the real estate agents whose ads he’d been reading. A woman about the same age as Betty Engleman took him around and showed him three houses. They were modest homes but decent and comfortable, and they ranged between forty and sixty thousand dollars.

  He could buy any of them out of his safe deposit box.

  “Here’s your kitchen,” the woman said. “Here’s your half-bath. Here’s your fenced yard.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he told her, taking her card. “I have a business deal pending and a lot depends on the outcome.”

  He and Engleman had lunch the next day. They went to the Mexican place and Engleman wanted everything very mild. “Remember,” he told Keller, “I used to be an accountant.”

  “You’re a printer now,” Keller said. “Printers can handle hot food.”

  “Not this printer. Not this printer’s stomach.”

  They each drank a bottle of Carta Blanca with the meal. Keller had another bottle afterward. Engleman had a cup of coffee.

  “If I had a house with a fenced yard,” Keller said, “I could have a dog and not worry about him running off.”

  “I guess you could,” Engleman said.

  “I had a dog when I was a kid,” Keller said. “Just the once. I had him for about two years when I was eleven, twelve years old. His name was Soldier.”

  “I was wondering about that.”

  “He wasn’t part shepherd. He was a little thing. I suppose he must have been some kind of terrier cross.”

  “Did he run off?”

  “No, he got hit by a car. He was stupid about cars, he just ran out into the street. The driver couldn’t help it.”

  “How did you happen to call him Soldier?”

  “I forget. Then, when I did the flyer, I don’t know, I had to put ‘Answers to something.’ All I could think of were names like Fido and Rover and Spot. Be like signing John Smith on a hotel register, you know? Then it came to me. Soldier. Been years since I thought about that dog.”

  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.

  “For a week,” she said. “Then you’d go nuts.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Come on,” she said. “Roseburg, Oregon? Give me a break.”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess a week’s about as much as I could handle.”

  A few days later he was going through his pockets before taking some clothes to the cleaners. He found the Roseburg street map and pored over it, remembering where everything was. Quik Print, the Douglas Inn, the house on Cowslip Lane. The Mexican café , the other places he’d eaten. The gun shop. The houses he’d looked at.

  Seemed so long ago, he thought. So long ago, so far away.

  2

  Keller on Horseback

  At the airport newsstand, Keller picked up a paperback western. The cover was pretty much generic, showing a standard-issue Marlboro man, long and lean, walking down the dusty streets of a western town with a gun riding his hip. Neither the title nor the author’s name meant anything to Keller. What drew him was a line that seemed to leap out from the cover.

  “He rode a thousand miles,” Keller read, “to kill a man he never met.”

  Keller paid for the book and tucked it into his carry-on bag. When the plane was in the air he dug it out and looked at the cover, wondering why he’d bought it. He didn’t read much, and when he did he never chose westerns.

  Maybe he wasn’t supposed to read this book. Maybe he was supposed to keep it as a talisman.

  All for that one sentence. Imagine riding a thousand miles on a horse for any purpose, let alone the killing of a stranger. How long would it take, a thousand-mile journey on horseback? A thoroughbred got around a racecourse in something like two minutes, but it couldn’t go all day at that pace any more than a human being could string together twenty-six four-minute miles and call it a marathon.

  What could you manage on a horse, fifty miles a day? A hundred miles in two days, a thousand miles in twenty? Three weeks, say, at the conclusion of which a man would probably be eager to kill anybody, stranger
or blood kin.

  Was Ol’ Sweat ’n’ Leather getting paid for his thousand miles? Was he in the trade? Keller turned the book over in his hands, read the paragraph on the back cover. It did not sound promising. Something about a drifter in the Arizona territory, a saddle tramp, looking to avenge an old Civil War grievance.

  Forgive and forget, Keller advised him.

  Keller, riding substantially more than a thousand miles, albeit on a plane instead of a horse, was similarly charged with killing a man as yet unmet. And he was drifting into the Old West to do it, first to Denver, then to Casper, Wyoming, and finally to a town called Martingale. That had been reason enough to pick up the book, but was it reason enough to read it?

  He gave it a try. He read a few pages before they came down the aisle with the drink cart, read a couple more while he sipped his V-8 and ate the salted nuts. Then he evidently dozed off, because the next thing he knew the stewardess was waking him to apologize for not having the fruit plate he’d ordered. He told her it didn’t matter, he’d have the regular dinner.

  “Or there’s a Hindu meal that’s going begging,” she said.

  His mind filled with a vision of an airline tray wrapped in one of those saffron-colored robes, extending itself beseechingly and demanding alms. He had the regular dinner instead and ate most of it, except for the mystery meat. He dozed off afterward and didn’t wake up until they were making their descent into Stapleton Airport.

  Earlier, he’d tucked the book into the seat pocket in front of him, and he’d intended to let it ride off into the sunset wedged between the air-sickness bag and the plastic card with the emergency exit diagrams. At the last minute he changed his mind and brought the book along.

  He spent an hour on the ground in Denver, another hour in the air flying to Casper. The cheerful young man at the Avis counter had a car reserved for Dale Whitlock. Keller showed him a Connecticut driver’s license and an American Express card and the young man gave him a set of keys and told him to have a nice day.