Hit Man

“I came to tell you I can’t.”

“Because we’ve come to know each other.” Keller nodded.

“I grew up on a farm,” Garrity said. “One of those vanishing family farms you hear about, and of course it’s vanished, and I say good riddance. But we raised our own beef and pork, you know, and we kept a milk cow and a flock of laying hens. And we never named the animals we were going to wind up eating. The milk cow had a name, but not the bull calf she dropped. The breeder sow’s name was Elsie, but we never named her piglets.”

“Makes sense,” Keller said.

“I guess it doesn’t take a Chinaman to see how you can’t kill me once you’ve hauled Timmy out of the drink. Let alone after you’ve sat at my table and smoked my cigars. Reminds me, you care for a cigar?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, where do we go from here, Mike? I have to say I’m relieved. I feel like I’ve been bracing myself for a bullet for weeks now. All of a sudden I’ve got a new lease on life. I’d say this calls for a drink except we’re already having one, and you’ve scarcely touched yours.”

“There is one thing,” Keller said.

He left the den while Garrity made his phone call. Timothy was in the living room, puzzling over a chessboard. Keller played a game with him and lost badly. “Can’t win ’em all,” he said, and tipped over his king.

“I was going to checkmate you,” the boy said. “In a few more moves.”

“I could see it coming,” Keller told him.

He went back to the den. Garrity was selecting a cigar from his humidor. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m fixing to smoke one of these things. If you won’t kill me, maybe it will.”

“You never know.”

“I made the call, Mike, and it’s all taken care of. Be a while before the word filters up and down the chain of command, but sooner or later they’ll call you up and tell you the client changed his mind. He paid in full and called off the job.”

They talked some, then sat a while in silence. At length Keller said he ought to get going. “I should be at my hotel,” he said, “in case they call.”

“Be a couple of days, won’t it?”

“Probably,” he said, “but you never know. If everyone involved makes a phone call right away, the word could get to me in a couple of hours.”

“Calling you off, telling you to come home. Be glad to get home, I bet.”

“It’s nice here,” he said, “but yes, I’ll be glad to get home.”

“Wherever it is, they say there’s no place like it.” Garrity leaned back, then allowed himself to wince at the pain that came over him. “If it never hurts worse than this,” he said, “then I can stand it. But of course it will get worse. And I’ll decide I can standthat, and then it’ll get worse again.”

There was nothing to say to that.

“I guess I’ll know when it’s time to do something,” Garrity said. “And who knows? Maybe my heart’ll cut out on me out of the blue. Or I’ll get hit by a bus, or I don’t know what. Struck by lightning?”

“It could happen.”

“Anything can happen,” Garrity agreed. He got to his feet. “Mike,” he said, “I guess we won’t be seeing any more of each other, and I have to say I’m a little bit sorry about that. I’ve truly enjoyed our time together.”

“So have I, Wally.”

“I wondered, you know, what he’d be like. The man they’d send to do this kind of work. I don’t know what I expected, but you’re not it.”

He stuck out his hand, and Keller gripped it. “Take care,” Garrity said. “Be well, Mike.”

Back at his hotel, Keller took a hot bath and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning he went out for breakfast, and when he got back there was a message at the desk for him:Mr. Soderholm-please call your office.

He called from a pay phone, even though it didn’t matter, and he was careful not to overreact when Dot told him to come home, the mission was aborted.

“You told me I had all the time in the world,” he said. “If I’d known the guy was in such a rush-”

“Keller,” she said, “it’s a good thing you waited. What he did, he changed his mind.”

“He changed his mind?”

“It used to be a woman’s prerogative,” Dot said, “but now we’ve got equality between the sexes, so that means anyone can do it. It works out fine because we’re getting paid in full. So kick the dust of Texas off your feet and come on home.”

“I’ll do that,” he said, “but I may hang out here for a few more days.”

“Oh?”

“Or even a week,” he said. “It’s a pretty nice town.”

“Don’t tell me you’re itching to move there, Keller. We’ve been through this before.”

“Nothing like that,” he said, “but there’s this girl I met.”

“Oh, Keller.”

“Well, she’s nice,” he said. “And if I’m off the job there’s no reason not to have a date or two with her, is there?”

“As long as you don’t decide to move in.”

“She’s not that nice,” he said, and Dot laughed and told him not to change.

He hung up and drove around and found a movie he’d been meaning to see. The next morning he packed and checked out of his hotel.

He drove across town and got a room on the motel strip, paying cash for four nights in advance and registering as J. D. Smith from Los Angeles.

There was no girl he’d met, no girl he wanted to meet. But it wasn’t time to go home yet.

He had unfinished business, and four days should give him time to do it. Time for Wallace Garrity to get used to the idea of not feeling those imaginary crosshairs on his shoulder blades.

But not so much time that the pain would be too much to bear.

And, sometime in those four days, Keller would give him a gift. If he could, he’d make it look natural-a heart attack, say, or an accident. In any event it would be swift and without warning, and as close as he could make it to painless.

And it would be unexpected. Garrity would never see it coming.

Keller frowned, trying to figure out how he would manage it. It would be a lot trickier than the task that had drawn him to town originally, but he’d brought it on himself. Getting involved, fishing the boy out of the pool. He’d interfered with the natural order of things. He was under an obligation.

It was the least he could do.

9 Keller's Last Refuge

K eller, reaching fora red carnation, paused to finger one of the green ones. Kelly green it was, and vivid. Maybe it was an autumnal phenomenon, he thought. The leaves turned red and gold, the flowers turned green.

“It’s dyed,” said the florist, reading his mind. “They started dyeing them for St. Patrick’s Day, and that’s when I sell the most of them, but they caught on in a small way year-round. Would you like to wear one?”

Would he? Keller found himself weighing the move, then reminded himself it wasn’t an option. “No,” he said. “It has to be red.”

“I quite agree,” the little man said, selecting one of the blood-red blooms. “I’m a traditionalist myself. Green flowers. Why, how could the bees tell the blooms from the foliage?”

Keller said it was a good question.

“And here’s another. Shall we lay itacross the buttonhole and pin it to the lapel, or shall we insert itinto the buttonhole?”

It was a poser, all right. Keller asked the man for his recommendation.

“It’s controversial,” the florist said. “But I look at it this way. Whyhave a buttonhole if you’re not going touse it?”

Keller, suit pressed and shoes shined and a red carnation in his lapel, boarded the Metroliner at Pe

It would have been nice to know where the magazine stood on the buttonhole issue, but they had nothing to say on the subject. According to the florist, who admittedly had a small stake in the matter, Keller had nothing to worry about.