Breathless

you learned from a good education was to face the reality of existence and not live with the illusion that wrong was always wrong and right was always right. Sometimes wrong was right, and sometimes right was wrong, and most of the time neither word applied. Think, do, accept, move on.
    In the kitchen, as he was preparing an inadequate lunch from the pathetic provisions left to him by his departed kin, he heard noises in the attic. Someone was crawling around up there.

Fifty-four

M onday morning, less than two hours after his meeting with Liddon Wallace on the eighteenth green, Rudy Neems flew out of Seattle to San Francisco.
    He had told the attorney that he would make the trip that afternoon. He also promised to kill the wife and son Tuesday night.
    In both instances, Rudy lied.
    He didn’t trust Liddon Wallace. A guy who hired you to kill his family couldn’t be relied on to treat you with fairness and respect.
    Wallace admitted having other guys like Rudy on tap. Say one of them was named Burt.
    Say Burt’s job was to be waiting in Rudy’s hotel room when Rudy got back from killing Kirsten and her little boy.
    Say Burt killed Rudy and made it look like suicide.
    The suicide note, composed by Burt in a perfect imitation of Rudy’s handwriting, might say Rudy killed a lot of girls over theyears and hated himself and hated Liddon Wallace for getting him acquitted in the Hardy case when what he really wanted was for someone to stop him before he killed again.
    Alive, Rudy was a loose end. Dead, he couldn’t rat on Wallace.
    With Rudy dead, you wouldn’t want to be Burt.
    Say one of Liddon Wallace’s other guys was named Ralph—or it could be Kenny or anything. When Burt returned to his
own
room in the hotel, maybe Ralph would be waiting for him.
    Ralph wouldn’t know that Burt just killed Rudy, so when Burt was dead, no one survived who could link the attorney with the murders of his wife and child. No more loose ends.
    Or maybe when Ralph returned to
his
room in the hotel, Kenny—or maybe his name might be Fred—was waiting to kill him. Maybe it just went on and on until the hotel filled up with dead people.
    Rudy Neems possessed sufficient self-awareness to know he was paranoid. That was one of the reasons why he killed people. Although not the primary one, of course, because if it had been the primary reason, he would have been insane.
    Rudy was as sane as anyone. He did not kill in mad rages. He knew exactly why he killed. His motivation was complex and arrived at by reason: masterless freedom.
    So he lied to Liddon Wallace. He flew out of Seattle eight hours before he said he would. And Rudy intended to kill Kirsten and Benny that same night rather than on the following night, when Burt would be waiting to kill Rudy.
    The flight from Seattle could not have been more pleasant. They encountered no turbulence, and they didn’t crash.
    Rudy chatted all the way with Pauline, an elderly woman en route to San Francisco for the birth of her great-great-grandson.
    She carried a little album of snapshots of her family. She had pictures of her two cats, as well. They were cuter than her family.
    Rudy had no desire to kill Pauline. Because he didn’t have sex with elderly women, he never killed elderly women.
    At the baggage carousel, Pauline’s daughter and son-in-law were waiting for her. Their names were Don and Jennifer.
    Pauline introduced Rudy as “the angel who made me forget all about my fear of flying.”
    In fact, Rudy chatted with seatmates on airplanes because he, too, feared flying. He needed to distract himself from thinking about all the things that could go wrong in the air. Like, say, an engine might fall off, probably because a mechanic sabotaged it.
    At the airport, he picked up a rental SUV and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin County.
    Rudy disliked cities. They were chaotic.
    Being a golf-course groundskeeper might be the best job in the world. The golf environment remained at all times quiet, serene, orderly, manicured.
    And the work didn’t require constant thinking. While you did your job, you could let your mind roam.
    On the job, Rudy mostly replayed in memory all the murders that he committed. Indulging in hours of nostalgic recollection seemed to be one reason he could restrain himself for so long between killings.
    Another reason that he killed no more than two people a year was because he only killed people whom he found attractive, and very few people met his