Hit List

are when you’re born? What has that got to do with anything?”
    “I don’t know how anything works,” she said, “or why it should. Why does the light go on when I throw the switch? Why do I get wet when you touch me? It’s all a mystery.”
    “But head bumps, for Christ’s sake. Tarot cards.”
    “Sometimes it’s just a way for a person to access her intuition,” she said. “I used to know a woman who could read shoes.”
    “The labels? I don’t follow you.”
    “She’d look at a pair of shoes that you’d owned for a while, and she could tell you things about yourself.”
    “ ‘You need half-soles.’ “
    “No, like you eat too much starchy food, and you need to express the feminine side of your personality, and the relationship you’re in is stifling your creativity. Things like that.”
    “All by looking at your shoes. And that makes sense to you?”
    “Does sense make sense? Look, do you know what holism is?”
    “Like eating brown rice?”
    “No, that’s whole foods. Holism is like with holograms, the principle’s that any cell in the body represents the entire life in microcosm. That’s why I can rub your feet and make your headache go away.”
    “You can?”
    “Well, not me personally, but a foot reflexologist could. That’s why a palmist can look at your hand and see evidence of physical conditions that have nothing to do with your hands. They show up there, and in the irises of your eyes, and the bumps on your head.”
    “And the heels of your shoes,” Keller said. “I had my palm read once.”
    “Oh?”
    “A year or two ago. I was at this party, and they had a palmist for entertainment.”
    “Probably not a very good one, if she was hiring out for parties. How good a reading did she give you?”
    “She didn’t.”
    “I thought you said you had your palm read.”
    “I was willing. She wasn’t. I sat down at the table with her and gave her my hand, and she took a good look and gave it back to me.”
    “That’s awful. You must have been terrified.”
    “Of what?”
    “That she saw imminent death in your hand.”
    “It crossed my mind,” he admitted. “But I figured she was just a performer, and this was part of the performance. I was a little edgy the next time I got on a plane—“
    “I’ll bet.”
    “—but it was a routine flight, and time passed and nothing happened, and I forgot about it. I couldn’t tell you the last time I even thought about it.”
    She reached out a hand. “Gimme.”
    “Huh?”
    “Give me your hand. Let’s see what got the bitch in a tizzy.”
    “You can read palms?”
    “Not quite, but I can claim a smattering of ignorance on the subject. Let’s see now, I don’t want to know too much, because it might jeopardize the superficiality of our relationship. There’s your head line, there’s your heart line, there’s your life line. And no marriage lines. Well, you said you’ve never been married, and your hand says you were telling the truth. I can’t say I can see anything here that would make me tell you not to sign any long-term leases.”
    “That’s a relief.”
    “So I bet I know what spooked her. You’ve got a murderer’s thumb.”
    Keller, working on his stamp collection, kept interrupting himself to look at his thumb. There it was, teaming up with his forefinger to grip a pair of tongs, to pick up a glassine envelope, to hold a magnifying glass. There it was, his own personal mark of Cain. His murderer’s thumb.
    “It’s the particular way your thumb is configured,” Maggie had told him. “See how it goes here? And look at my thumb, or your left thumb, as far as that goes. See the difference?”
    She was able to recognize the murderer’s thumb, he learned, because a childhood friend of hers, a perfectly gentle and nonviolent person, had one just like it. A palmist had told her friend it was a murderer’s thumb, and the two of them had looked it up in a book on the subject. And there it was, pictured life size and in color, the Murderer’s Thumb, and it was just like her friend Jacqui’s thumb, and, now, just like Keller’s.
    “But she never should have given you your hand back the way she did,” Maggie had assured him. “I don’t know if anybody’s keeping statistics, but I’m sure most of the murderers walking around have two perfectly normal thumbs, while most people who do happen to have a murderer’s thumb have never killed anybody in their life, and never will.”
    “That’s a