Hit Man

She considered her reply, and the phone rang. He made a face and answered it.

It was Dot. “Young man,” she said, in an old lady’s quavering voice, “I think you had better pay a call on your kindly old Aunt Dorothy.”

“I just did,” he reminded her. “Just because it was quick and easy doesn’t mean I don’t need a little time off between engagements.”

“Keller,” she said, in her own voice, “get on the next train, will you? It’s urgent.”

“Urgent?”

“There’s a problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember saying something about a piece of cake?”

“So?”

“So your cake fell,” Dot said. “Get it?”

There was no one to meet him at the White Plains station so he took a cab to the big Victorian house on Taunton Place. Dot was waiting on the porch. “All right,” she said. “Report.”

“To you?”

“And then I report to him. That’s how he wants it.”

Keller shrugged and reported. Where he’d gone, what he’d done. It took only a few sentences. When he was done he paused for a moment, and then he said, “The woman wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“Neither was the man.”

“How’s that?”

“You killed the wrong people,” she said. “Wait here, Keller, okay? I have to relay this to His Eminence. You want coffee, there’s a fresh pot in the kitchen. Well, a reasonably fresh pot.”

Keller stayed on the porch. There was an old-fashioned glider and he sat on that, gliding back and forth, but it seemed too frivolous for the circumstances. He switched to a chair but was too restless to stay in it. He was on his feet when Dot returned.

She said, “You said room 314.”

“And that’s the room I went to,” he said. “That was the room I called from downstairs, and those were the numbers on the door. Room 314 at the Sheraton.”

“Wrong room.”

“I wrote it down,” he said. “He gave me the number and I wrote it down.”

“You didn’t happen to save the note, did you?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I keep everything. I have it on my coffee table, along with the boning knife and the vic’s watch and wallet. No, of course I didn’t keep the note.”

“Of course you didn’t, but it would have been nice if you’d made an exception on this particular occasion. The, uh, designated victim was in room 502.”

He frowned. “That’s not even close. What did he do, change his room? If I’d been given a name or a photo, you know-”

“I know. He didn’t change his room.”

“Dot, I can’t believe I wrote it down wrong.”

“Neither can I, Keller.”

“If I got one digit wrong or reversed the order, well, I could almost believe that, but to turn 502 into 314-”

“You know what 314 is, Keller?” He didn’t. “It’s the area code for St. Louis.”

“The area code? As in telephone?”

“As in telephone.”

“I don’t understand.”

She sighed. “He’s had a lot on his mind lately,” she said. “He’s been under a strain. So, just between you and me”-for God’s sake, who was he going to tell?-“he must have looked at the wrong slip of paper and wound up giving you the area code instead of the room number.”

“I thought he seemed tired. I even said something.”

“And I told you life tires people out, if I remember correctly. We were both right. Meanwhile, you have to go to Tulsa.”

“ Tulsa?”

“That’s where the target lives, and it seems he’s canceling the rest of his meetings and going home this afternoon. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or if the business two floors down spooked him. The client didn’t want to hit him in Tulsa, but now there’s no choice.”

“I just did the job,” Keller said, “and now I have to do it again. When she popped out of the bathroom it turned into two for the price of one, and now it’s three for the price of one.”

“Not exactly. He has to save face on this, Keller, so the idea is you stepped on your whatchamacallit and now you’re going to correct your mistake. But when all this is history there will be a little extra in your Christmas stocking.”

“Christmas?”

“A figure of speech. There’ll be a bonus, and you won’t have to wait for Christmas for it.”

“The client’s going to pay a bonus?”

“I said you’d get a bonus,” she said. “I didn’t say the client would be paying it. Tulsa, and you’ll be met at the airport and somebody will show you around and point the finger. Have you ever been to Tulsa?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ll love it. You’ll want to move there.”

He didn’t even want to go there. Halfway down the porch stairs he turned, retraced his steps, and said, “The man and woman in 314. Who were they?”

“Who knows? They weren’t Gu

“That’s who I’m going to see in Tulsa?”

“Let’s hope so. As far as the pair in 314, I don’t know any names. He was a local businessman, owned a dry-cleaning plant or something like that. I don’t know anything about her. They were married, but not to each other. What I hear, you interrupted a matinee.”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“Rang down the curtain,” Dot said. “What a world, huh?”

“His name was Harry.”

“See, I told you it wasn’t Gu

“I’ll be gone longer this time,” he told Andria. “I have to… go someplace and… take care of some business.”

“I’ll take care of Nelson,” she said. “And we’ll both be here when you get back.”

His plane was leaving from Newark. He packed a bag and called a livery service for a car to the airport.

He said, “Does it bother you?”

“What you do? It would bother me if I did it, but I couldn’t do it, so that’s beside the point. But does it bother me that you do it? I don’t think so. I mean, it’s what you do.”

“But don’t you think it’s wrong?”

She thought it over. “I don’t think it’s wrong foryou, ” she said. “I think it’s your karma.”

“You mean like destiny or something?”

“Sort of. It’s what you have to do in order to learn the lesson you’re supposed to learn in this lifetime. We’re not just here once, you know. We live many lives.”

“You believe that, huh?”

“It’s more a matter of knowledge than belief.”

“Oh.” Karma, he thought. “What about the people I go and see? It’s just their karma?”

“Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

He had plenty of time to think about karma. He was in Tulsa for five days before he had a chance to close the file on Gu

“Did somebody make them take the sign down?”

Joel shook his head. “After about a year,” he said, “they sold out, and the new owners took the sign down.”

“They didn’t like the implications?”

“Not hardly. See, they’re Indians. Place is decent, though, and you don’t have to go through the lobby. In fact you’re already registered and paid in advance for a week. I figured you’d like that. Here’s your room key, and here’s a set of car keys. They belong to that Toyota over there, third from the end. Paper for it’s in the glove box, along with a little twenty-two automatic. If you prefer something heavier, just say so.”