Hit List

’em.”
    “Oh, right,” Keller said. He passed the man an envelope, and the little locksmith put down his fork long enough to lift the flap and count the bills it contained.
    “I always count,” he said, “in case it’s too much or too little. The count’s off about a third of the time, my experience, and what percentage of the time do you figure it’s in my favor?”
    “Hardly ever.”
    “Bingo,” the man said. “This time the count’s right, and thanks very much.”
    “You’re welcome,” Keller said, picking up the keys. “And thanks for helping me out.”
    “What I do,” the man said. “I’m a locksmith, licensed and bonded and on call around the clock. People lose their keys, I let ’em in. They never had keys in the first place, well, it costs a little more.” He grinned. “You’re in a hurry, and no reason for you to stick around until I’m done. I might try that pecan pie, see if it’s as good as the Boston cream. You go ahead, and the check’s on me. The hell, all you had was coffee. Don’t forget, the bright key’s for the top lock.”
    “And I turn it clockwise.”
    “Whatever.” He grabbed a french fry. “You want some advice? Wear sunglasses.”
    It was a small commercial building converted to residential use, with an artist’s loft taking up each of its five stories. The sculptor on the ground floor lived with his wife in Park Slope, and, according to Maggie, used his space on Crosby Street only for work. “He makes these massive hulking statues,” she had told him, “humanoid, but just barely, and they weigh a ton, so it’s good he’s on the ground floor. It takes him forever to finish a piece, but he never sells anything, so it doesn’t matter.”
    “He never sells anything?”
    “I was a painter for years,” she’d said, “and I never sold anything. You don’t have to sell to be an artist. In fact it’s probably easier if you don’t.”
    There was a painter on the third floor, another painter on the fourth. Keller didn’t know what their work looked like, or if they ever sold any of it. He knew that Maggie occupied the top floor, and that the architect on the second floor was somewhere in Europe and wouldn’t be back for months.
    Keller used the new keys, opened the new locks, and stepped into an enormous white room. The floor was white, as the locksmith had told him, and so were the walls and the ceiling, along with the built-in desk and the built-in bookshelves. There were windows at either end of the loft. The ones at the rear were painted white, glass and all, while the ones in the front were out of sight behind white shutters.
    With the track lighting on, the whiteness of the room was enough to give you a headache. Keller turned the lights off, and the room was plunged into darkness. He tried opening one of the shutters a few inches, letting in a little daylight, and that was better.
    There was furniture, he discovered, although he could see how the locksmith had missed it. White cubes, some of them topped with white cushions, served as chairs, and a big white box on one wall held a Murphy bed. Some of the cube chairs were permanently installed, but others were movable, and he carried one over to the front window, cushion and all, and sat on it.
    “I don’t know if you noticed,” Dot said, “but the books on the shelves are white, too. They didn’t start out that way, but somebody took white shelf paper and made individual covers for them.”
    “I know.”
    “You could lose your color vision around here. Between the ding-a-ling upstairs who only wears black, and this fruitcake with everything white. You want to switch? I’ll watch the street for a while.”
    “There’s somebody across the street,” he said.
    “Where?” She joined him at the window, squinted through the space between the shutters. “Oh, there he is. In the doorway, with the windbreaker and the cap.”
    “I spotted him a few minutes ago. He’s just standing there.”
    “Well, he can’t be waiting for a bus, or hoping to flag a cruising taxi. He’s waiting for somebody. Have you got the binoculars?”
    “I thought you had them.”
    “Here they are. He could look up and spot light glinting off them, if there was any light to glint. I can’t really make out his face. Here, you look.”
    He peered through the binoculars, adjusted the focus. The man’s face was in shadow, and indistinct.
    “Well, Keller? Is that the guy you saw in Boston?”
    “I never really