Keller's Adjustment Read online

  “It’s a whole lot more comfortable,” he said.

  “And more secure,” she said, “just in case you’ve got your stamp collection with you.”

  “I don’t,” he said, “but a little security never hurt anybody. I’d like to take it.”

  “I don’t blame you, it’s a real good deal, and nice income for Mr. and Mrs. Sundstrom, who’re in the Galapagos Islands looking at blue-footed boobies. That’s where all the crap on their walls comes from. Not the Galapagos, but other places they go to on their travels.”

  “I was wondering.”

  “Well, they could tell you about each precious piece, but they’re not here, and if they were then their place wouldn’t be available, would it? We’ll go to the office and fill out the paperwork, and then you can give me a check and I’ll give you a set of keys and some ID to get you past the guard at the gate. And a pass to the clubhouse, and information on greens fees and all. I hope you’ll have some time for golf.”

  “Oh, I should be able to fit in a few rounds.”

  “No telling what you’ll be able to fit in,” she said. “Speaking of which, let’s fit in a quick stop at the Lattimore house before we start filling out lease agreements. And no, silly, I’m not trying to get you to buy that place. I just want you to take me into that bedroom again. I mean, you don’t expect me to do it in Cynthia Sundstrom’s bed, do you? With all those weird masks on the wall? It’d give me the jimjams for sure. I’d feel like primitive tribes were watching me.”

  THE SUNDSTROM HOUSE WAS a good deal more comfortable than his motel, and he found he didn’t mind being surrounded by souvenirs of the couple’s travels. The second bedroom, which evidently served as Harvey Sundstrom’s den, had a collection of edged weapons hanging on the walls, knives and daggers and what he supposed were battleaxes, and there was no end of carved masks and tapestries in the other rooms. Some of the masks looked godawful, he supposed, but they weren’t the sort of things to give him the jimjams, whatever the jimjams might be, and he got in the habit of acknowledging one of them, a West African mask with teeth like tombstones and a lot of rope fringe for hair. He found himself giving it a nod when he passed it, even raising a hand in a salute.

  Pretty soon, he thought, he’d be talking to it.

  Because it was becoming clear to him that he felt the need to talk to someone. It was, he supposed, a need he’d had all his life, but for years he’d led an existence that didn’t much lend itself to sharing confidences. He’d spent virtually all his adult life as a paid assassin, and it was no line of work for a man given to telling his business to strangers—or to friends, for that matter. You did what they paid you to do and you kept your mouth shut, and that was about it. You didn’t talk about your work, and it got so you didn’t talk about much of anything else, either. You could go to a sports bar and talk about the game with the fellow on the next barstool, you could gripe about the weather to the woman standing alongside you at the bus stop, you could complain about the mayor to the waitress at the corner coffee shop, but if you wanted a conversation with a little more substance to it, well, you were pretty much out of luck.

  Once, a few years ago, he’d let someone talk him into going to a psychotherapist. He’d taken what struck him as reasonable precautions, paying cash, furnishing a false name and address, and essentially limiting disclosures to his childhood. It was productive, too, and he developed some useful insights, but in the end it went bad, with the therapist drawing some unwelcome inferences and eventually following Keller, and learning things he wasn’t supposed to know about him. The man wanted to become a client himself, and of course Keller couldn’t allow that, and made him a quarry instead. So much for therapy. So much for shared confidences.

  Then, for some months after the therapist’s exit, he’d had a dog. Not Soldier, the dog of his boyhood years, but Nelson, a fine Australian cattle dog. Nelson had turned out to be not only the perfect companion but the perfect confidante. You could tell him anything, secure in the knowledge that he’d keep it to himself, and it wasn’t like talking to yourself or talking to the wall, because the dog was real and alive and gave every indication of paying close attention. There were times when he could swear Nelson understood every word.

  He wasn’t judgmental, either. You could tell him anything and he didn’t love you any the less for it.

  If only it had stayed that way, he thought. But it hadn’t, and he supposed it was his own fault. He’d found someone to take care of Nelson when work took him out of town, and that was better than putting him in a kennel, but then he wound up falling for the dog walker, and she moved in, and he only really got to talk to Nelson when Andria was somewhere else. That wasn’t too bad, and she was fun to have around, but then one day it was time for her to move on, and on she moved. He’d bought her no end of earrings during their time together, and she took the earrings along with her when she left, which was okay. But she also took Nelson, and there he was, right back where he started.

  Another man might have gone right out and got himself another dog—and then, like as not, gone looking for a woman to walk it for him. Keller figured enough was enough. He hadn’t replaced the therapist, and he hadn’t replaced the dog, and, although women drifted in and out of his life, he hadn’t replaced the girlfriend. He had, after all, lived alone for years, and it worked for him.

  Most of the time, anyway.

  “NOW THIS IS NICE,” Keller said. “The suburbs go on for a ways, but once you get past them you’re out in the desert, and as long as you stay off the Interstate you’ve pretty much got the whole pace to yourself. It’s pleasant, isn’t it?”

  There was no answer from the passenger seat.

  “I paid cash for the Sundstrom house,” he went on. “Two weeks, a thousand dollars a week. That’s more than a motel, but I can cook my own meals and save on restaurant charges. Except I like to go out for my meals. But I didn’t drag you all the way out here to listen to me talk about stuff like that.”

  Again, his passenger made no response, but then he hadn’t expected one.

  “There’s a lot I have to figure out,” he said. “Like what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, for starters. I don’t see how I can keep on doing what I’ve been doing all these years. If you think of it as killing people, taking lives, well, how could a person go on doing it year after year after year?

  “But the thing is, see, you don’t have to dwell on that aspect of the work. I mean, face it, that’s what it is. These people are walking around, doing what they do, and then I come along, and whatever it is they’ve been doing, they don’t get to do it anymore. Because they’re dead, because I killed them.”

  He glanced over, looking for a reaction. Yeah, right.

  “What happens,” he said, “is you wind up thinking of each subject not as a person to be killed but as a problem to be solved. Here’s this piece of work you have to do, and how do you get it done? How do you carry out the contract as expediently as possible, with the least stress all around?

  “Now there are guys doing this,” he went on, “who cope with it by making it personal. They find a reason to hate the guy they have to kill. They’re mad at him, they’re angry with him, because it’s his fault that they’ve got to do this bad thing. If it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t be committing this sin. He’s going to be the cause of them going to hell, the son of a bitch, so of course they’re mad at him, of course they hate him, and that makes it easier for them to kill him, which is what they made up their minds to do in the first place.

  “But that always struck me as silly. I don’t know what’s a sin and what isn’t, or if one person deserves to go on living and another deserves to have his life ended. Sometimes I think about stuff like that, but as far as working it all out in my mind, well, I never seem to get anywhere.

  “I could go on like this, but the thing is I’m okay with the moral aspects of it, if you want to call it that. I just think I’m getting a little old to be still at it, that�
��s part of it, and the other’s that the business has changed. It’s the same in that there are still people who are willing to pay to have other people killed. You never have to worry about running out of clients. Sometimes business drops off for a while, but it always comes back again. Whether it’s a guy like that Cuban in Miami, who must have had a hundred guys with a reason to want him dead, or this Egmont with his pot belly and his golf clubs, who you’d think would be unlikely to inspire strong feelings in anybody. All kinds of subjects, and all kinds of clients, and you never run out of either one.”

  The road curved, and he took the curve a little too fast, and had to reach over with his right hand to reposition his silent companion.

  “You should be wearing your seatbelt,” he said. “Where was I? Oh, the way the business is changing. It’s the world, really. Airport security, having to show ID everywhere you go. And gated communities, and all the rest of it. You think of Daniel Boone, who knew it was time to head west when he couldn’t cut down a tree without giving some thought to which direction it was going to fall.

  “I don’t know, it seems to me that I’m just running off at the mouth, not making any sense. Well, that’s okay. What do you care? Just so long as I take it easy on the curves so you don’t wind up on the floor, you’ll be perfectly willing to sit there and listen as long as I want to talk. Won’t you?”

  No response.

  “If I played golf,” he said, “I’d be out on the course every day, and I wouldn’t have to burn up a tankful of gas driving around the desert. I’d spend all my time within the Sundowner walls, and I wouldn’t have been walking around the mall, wouldn’t have seen you in the display next to the cash register. A batch of different breeds on sale, and I’m not sure what you’re supposed to be, but I guess you’re some kind of terrier. They’re good dogs, terriers. Feisty, lots of personality.

  “I used to have an Australian cattle dog. I called him Nelson. Well, that was his name before I got him, and I didn’t see any reason to change it. I don’t think I’ll give you a name. I mean, it’s nutty enough, buying a stuffed animal, taking it for a ride and having a conversation with it. It’s not as if you’re going to answer to a name, or as if I’ll relate to you on a deeper level if I hang a name on you. I mean, I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. I realize I’m talking to polyester and foam rubber, or whatever the hell you’re made out of. Made in China, it says on the tag. That’s another thing, everything’s made in China or Indonesia or the Philippines, nothing’s made in America anymore. It’s not that I’m paranoid about it, it’s not that I’m worried about all the jobs going overseas. What do I care, anyway? It’s not affecting my work. As far as I know, nobody’s flying in hired killers from Thailand and Korea to take jobs away from good homegrown American hit men.

  “It’s just that you have to wonder what people in this country are doing. If they’re not making anything, if everything’s imported from someplace else, what the hell do Americans do when they get to the office?”

  He talked for a while more, then drove around some in silence, then resumed the one-sided conversation. Eventually he found his way back to Sundowner Estates, circling the compound and entering by the southwestern gate.

  Hi, Mr. Miller. Hello, Harry. Hey, whatcha got there? Cute little fella, isn’t he? A present for my sister’s little girl, my niece. I’ll ship it to her tomorrow.

  The hell with that. Before he got to the guard shack, he reached into the back seat for a newspaper and spread it over the stuffed dog in the passenger seat.

  IN THE CLUBHOUSE BAR, Keller listened sympathetically as a fellow named Al went over his round of golf, stroke by stroke. “What kills me,” Al said, “is that I just can’t put it all together. Like on the seventh hole this afternoon, my drive’s smack down the middle of the fairway, and my second shot with a three-iron is hole-high and just off the edge of the green on the right. I’m not in the bunker, I’m past it, and I’ve got a good lie maybe ten, twelve feet from the edge of the green.”

  “Nice,” Keller said, his voice carefully neutral. If it wasn’t nice, Al could assume he was being ironic.

  “Very nice,” Al agreed, “and I’m lying two, and all I have to do is run it up reasonably close and sink the putt for a par. I could use a wedge, but why screw around? It’s easier to take this little chipping iron I carry and run it up close.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So I run it up close, all right, and it doesn’t miss the cup by more than two inches, but I played it too strong, and it picks up speed and rolls past the pin and all the way off the green, and I wind up farther from the cup than when I started.”

  “Hell of a thing.”

  “So I chip again, and pass the hole again, though not quite as badly. And by the time I’m done hacking away with my goddam putter I’m three strokes over par with a seven. Takes me two strokes to cover four hundred and forty yards and five more strokes to manage the last fifty feet.”

  “Well, that’s golf,” Keller said.

  “By God, you said a mouthful,” Al said. “That’s golf, all right. How about another round of these, Dave, and then we’ll get ourselves some dinner? There’s a couple of guys you ought to meet.”

  He wound up at a table with four other fellows. Al and a man named Felix were residents of Sundowner Estates, while the other two men were Felix’s guests, seasonal residents of Scottsdale who belonged to one of the other local country clubs. Felix told a long joke, involving a hapless golfer driven to suicide by a bad round of golf. For the punch line, Felix held his wrists together and said, “What time?” and everybody roared. They all ordered steaks and drank beer and talked about golf and politics and how screwed-up the stock market was these days, and Keller managed to keep up his end of the conversation without anybody seeming to notice that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

  “So how’d you do out there today?” someone asked him, and Keller had his reply all ready.

  “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s a hell of a thing. You can hack away like a man trying to beat a ball to death with a stick, and then you hit one shot that’s so sweet and true that it makes you feel good about the whole day.”

  He couldn’t even remember when or where he’d heard that, but it evidently rang true with his dinner companions. They all nodded solemnly, and then someone changed the subject and said something disparaging about Democrats, and it was Keller’s turn to nod in agreement.

  Nothing to it.

  “SO WE’LL GO OUT tomorrow morning,” Al said to Felix. “Dave, if you want to join us…”

  Keller pressed his wrists together, said, “What time?” When the laughter died down he said, “I wish I could, Al. I’m afraid tomorrow’s out. Another time, though.”

  “YOU COULD TAKE A lesson,” Dot said. “Isn’t there a club pro? Doesn’t he give lessons?”

  “There is,” he said, “and I suppose he does, but why would I want to take one?”

  “So you could get out there and play golf. Protective coloration and all.”

  “If anyone sees me swinging a golf club,” he said, “with or without a lesson, they’ll wonder what the hell I’m doing here. But this way they just figure I fit in a round earlier in the day. Anyway, I don’t want to spend too much time around the clubhouse. Mostly I get the hell out of here and go for drives.”

  “On the driving range?”

  “Out in the desert,” she said.

  “You just ride around and look at the cactus.”

  “There’s a lot of it to look at,” he said, “although they have a problem with poachers.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” he said, and explained how the cacti were protected, but criminals dug them up and sold them to florists.

  “Cactus rustlers,” Dot said. “That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of. I guess they have to be careful of the spines.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Serve them right if they get stuck. You just drive
around, huh?”

  “And think things out.”

  “Well, that’s nice. But you don’t want to lose sight of the reason you moved in there in the first place.”

  HE STAYED AWAY FROM the clubhouse the next day, and the day after. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, he got in his car and drove around, staying within the friendly confines of Sundowner. He passed the Lattimore house and wondered if Mitzi Prentice had shown it to anyone lately. He drove past William Egmont’s house, which looked to be pretty much the same model as the Sundstrom place. Egmont’s Cadillac was parked in the carport, but the man owned his own golf cart, and Keller couldn’t see it there. He’d probably motored over to the first tee on his cart, and might be out there now, taking big divots, slicing balls deep into the rough.

  Keller went home, parked his Toyota in the Sundstrom carport. He’d worried, after taking the house for two weeks, that Mitzi would call all the time, or, worse, start turning up without calling first. But in fact he hadn’t heard a word from her, for which he’d been deeply grateful, and now he found himself thinking about calling her, at work or at home, and figuring out a place to meet. Not at his place, because of the masks, and not at her place, because of her daughter, and—

  That settled it. If he was starting to think like that, well, it was time he got on with it. Or the next thing you knew he’d be taking golf lessons, and buying the Lattimore house, and trading in the stuffed dog on a real one.

  He went outside. The afternoon had already begun fading into early evening, and it seemed to Keller that the darkness came quicker here than it did in New York. That stood to reason, it was a good deal closer to the Equator, and that would account for it. Someone had explained why to him once, and he’d understood it at the time, but now all that remained was the fact: the further you were from the Equator, the more extended twilight became.