Hit List

of them. But he tried the ear plugs anyway, just to see how they felt, and fell asleep before he could get around to taking them out.
    He woke up around ten-thirty, coming awake abruptly, sitting up in bed with his heart pounding. He couldn’t hear a thing, of course, and it took him a minute to figure out why. Then he glanced at the phone, expecting to see the red light flashing, but it wasn’t. He checked his watch and was amazed he’d slept so long. Plug up your ears and you slept like the dead.
    He unplugged his ears and put the plugs, no longer sterile, in with the unsullied pair. Was that okay? Did you have to throw away ear plugs after you’d used them once? Or could you reuse them? They weren’t sterile anymore, he understood that much, but did they have to be? It wasn’t as though somebody else was going to be exposed to your ear wax. If they’d never been anywhere but your own ears, and if that was their sole future destination, how unsanitary was it to use them again? Was it like reusing a Q-Tip, or more like getting a second shave out of a disposable razor?
    He packed his bag and carried it to the car, and as he rounded the building he saw the rear parking lot filled with police cars and emergency vehicles, some with lights flashing on their tops. Yellow crime scene tape was stretched here and there, and, while he stood watching, two men in teal jumpsuits emerged from one room carrying a stretcher between them. There was an olive-drab body bag on the stretcher, and it was zipped up tight.
    Keller, suitcase in hand, went to the office to check out. “What a horrible thing!” the girl at the desk said, clearly loving every minute of it. “The maid, the Mexican girl? No doughnut on the door, so she knocked, and—“
    “No doughnut?”
    “Like the sign? Do Not Disturb, only my boyfriend calls it Doughnut Disturb, on account of there’s a hole where you slip it over the doorknob? Anyway, where was I?”
    “No doughnut.”
    “Right, so she knocked, and when nobody answered she used her key. And she saw they were in bed, and when this happens you’re supposed to just leave and close the door without saying anything? So you won’t disturb them more than you already did?”
    Why did she make an ordinary statement of fact come out sounding like a question? She paused, too, as if waiting for an answer. Keller nodded, which seemed to be what was required to get her going again.
    “But she must have noticed something. Maybe the smell? Anyway, she went in, and when she got a good look she started screaming. Both of them shot dead in their bed, and blood on the bed linen, and . . .”
    He let her go on for a while. Then he said, “Say, my car’s back there. Are the cops letting people drive their cars out?”
    “Oh, sure. It’s been like hours since Rosalita found the bodies. Hasn’t she got a pretty name?”
    “Very pretty.”
    “It means Little Rose, which is kind of sweet, but imagine naming someone Little Rose in English. It would sound like she was an Indian. Or like her mother’s name was Rose, too. Big Rose and Little Rose?”
    Jesus, Keller thought.
    “Anyway, the police have been here for hours, and they’ve been letting people come and go. Just so you don’t need to go in the room where it happened.”
    But he’d already been there. Why would he want to go back?

Four
----
    “Room One forty-seven,” he told Dot. “My original room. I moved out in the morning, and that night a man and woman checked in.”
    “They checked in but they never checked out,” she said. “Where were you staying, Keller? The Roach Motel?”
    They were in the kitchen of the big house on Taunton Place. There was a pitcher of iced tea on the table between them, and Dot helped herself to a second glass. Keller’s was still more than half full.
    He said, “I got the hell out of there. I was driving to the airport, and don’t ask me why, but I turned around and got on I-71 and drove straight to Cincinnati.” He frowned. “Well, Cincinnati Airport. It’s actually across the river in Kentucky.”
    “I’ll be glad you told me that,” she said, “one of these nights when it comes up on Jeopardy! You didn’t want to fly out of Louisville?”
    “I figured it would probably be all right, but what if it wasn’t? I didn’t really know what to think. All I knew was I took care of Hirschhorn and a couple of hours later somebody took care of the people in my old room.”
    “Took good care of them, it