Hit Man

2 Keller on Horseback

A t the airportnewsstand, 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 di

“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 di

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 Co

The keys fit a white Chevy Caprice. Cruising north on the interstate, Keller decided he liked everything about the car but its name. There was nothing capricious about his mission. Riding a thousand miles to kill a man you hadn’t met was not something one undertook on a whim.

Ideally, he thought, he’d be bouncing along on a rutted two-lane blacktop in a Mustang, say, or maybe a Bronco. Even a Pinto sounded like a better match for a rawboned, leathery desperado like Dale Whitlock than a Caprice.

It was comfortable, though, and he liked the way it handled. And the color was okay. But forget white. As far as he was concerned, the car was a palomino.

It took about an hour to drive to Martingale, a town of around ten thousand midway between Casper and Sheridan on I-25. Just looking around, you knew right away that you’d left the East Coast far behind. Mountains in the distance, a great expanse of sky overhead. And, right in front of you, frame buildings that could have been false fronts in a Randolph Scott film. A feed store, a western wear emporium, a rundown hotel where you’d expect to find Wild Bill Hickok holding aces and eights at a table in the saloon, or Doc Holliday coughing his lungs out in a bedroom on the second floor.

Of course there were also a couple of supermarkets and gas stations, a two-screen movie house and a Toyota dealership, a Pizza Hut and a Taco John’s, so it wasn’t too hard to keep track of what century you were in. He saw a man walk out of the Taco John’s looking a lot like the young Randolph Scott, from his boots to his Stetson, but he spoiled the illusion by climbing into a pickup truck.

The hotel that inspired Hickok-Holliday fantasies was the Martingale, located right in the center of things on the wide main street. Keller imagined himself walking in, slapping a credit card on the counter. Then the desk clerk-Henry Jones always played him in the movie-would say that they didn’t take plastic. “Or p-p-paper either,” he’d say, eyes darting, looking for a place to duck when the shooting started.

And Keller would set a silver dollar spi

And Henry Jones would glance down at his suspenders, to see what was wrong with them.

He sighed, shook his head, and drove to the Holiday I

He unpacked, showered, and went to the window to look at the sunset. It was the sort of sunset a hero would ride off into, leaving a slender blonde to bite back tears while calling after him, “I hope you enjoyed your stay with us, Mr. Whitlock.”

Stop it, he told himself. Stay with reality. You’ve flown a couple of thousand miles to kill a man you never met. Just get it done. The sunset can wait.

He hadn’t met the man, but he knew his name. Even if he wasn’t sure how to pronounce it.

The man in White Plains had handed Keller an index card with two lines of block capitals hand-printed.

“Lyman Crowder,” he read, as if it rhymed withlouder. “Or should that be Crowder?” As if it rhymed withloader.

A shrug in response.

“Martingale, WY,” Keller went on. “Why indeed? And where, besides Wyoming? Is Martingale near anything?”

Another shrug, accompanied by a photograph. Or a part of one; it had apparently been cropped from a larger photo, and showed the upper half of a middle-aged man who looked to have spent a lot of time outdoors. A big man, too. Keller wasn’t sure how he knew that. You couldn’t see the man’s legs and there was nothing else in the photo to give you an idea of scale. But somehow he could tell.

“What did he do?”

Again a shrug, but one that conveyed information to Keller. If the other man didn’t know what Crowder had done, he had evidently done it to somebody else. Which meant the man in White Plains had no personal interest in the matter. It was strictly business.

“So who’s the client?”