Hit List

Powhatan.”
    “Well, it’s all news to me, Keller, and not the most fascinating news I ever heard, either. Where is all of this coming from?”
    He explained about the photo on the Christmas card.
    “What a jerk,” she said. “He couldn’t find a head and shoulders shot, the kind the papers run when you get a promotion or they arrest you for embezzlement? My God, the people you have to work with. Be grateful you were spared the annual Christmas letter, or you’d know how Aunt Mary’s doing great since she got her appendix transplant and little Timmy got his first tattoo.”
    “Little Jason.”
    “God, you know the kids’ names? Well, they wouldn’t put the dog’s name on the card and leave the kids off, would they? What a mess.”
    “The guy was holding a sign. ‘Archibald.’ “
    “At least they got that part right.”
    “And I said that’s me, and he said, ‘Richard Archibald?’ “
    “So.”
    “You told me they said Nathan.”
    “Come to think of it, they did. They screw that up too, huh?”
    “Not exactly. It was a test, to make sure I wasn’t some smartass looking for a free ride.”
    “So if you forgot the first name, or just didn’t want to make waves . . .”
    “He’d have figured me for a phony and told me to get lost.”
    “This gets better and better,” she said. “Look, do you want to forget the whole thing? I can tell you’re getting a bad feeling about it. Just come on home and we’ll tell them to shit in their hat.”
    “Well, I’m already here,” he said. “It could turn out to be easy. And I don’t know about you, but I can use the money.”
    “I can always find a use for it,” she said, “even if all I use it for is to hold on to. The dollars have to be someplace, and White Plains is as good a place as any for them.”
    “That sounds like something he would have said.”
    “He probably did.”
    They were referring to the old man, for whom they had both worked, Dot living with him and running his household, Keller doing what he did. The old man was gone now—his mind had gone first, little by little, and then his body went all at once—but things went on essentially unchanged. Dot took the phone calls, set the fees, made the arrangements, and disbursed the money. Keller went out there, checked out the territory, closed the sale, and came home.
    “Thing is,” Dot said, “they paid half in advance. I hate to send money back once I’ve got it in hand. It’s the same money, but it feels different.”
    “I know what you mean. Dot, they’re not in a hurry on this, are they?”
    “Well, who knows? They didn’t say so, but they also said natural causes and gave you a gun so you could get close to nature. To answer your question, no, I don’t see why you can’t take your time. Been to any stamp dealers, Keller?”
    “I just got here.”
    “But you checked, right? In the Yellow Pages?”
    “It passes the time,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in Louisville before.”
    “Well, make the most of it. Take the elevator up to the top of the Empire State Building, catch a Broadway show. Ride the cable cars, take a boat ride on the Seine. Do all the usual tourist things. Because who knows when you’ll get back there again.”
    “I’ll have a look around.”
    “Do that,” she said. “But don’t even think about moving there, Keller. The pace, the traffic, the noise, the sheer human energy—it’d drive you nuts.”
    It was late afternoon when he spoke to Dot, and twilight by the time he followed the map to Winding Acres Drive, in Norbourne Estates. The street was every bit as suburban as it sounded, with good-sized one- and two-story homes set on spacious landscaped lots. The street had been developed long enough ago for the foundation plantings to have filled in and the trees to have gained some size. If you were going to raise a family, Keller thought, this was probably not a bad place to do it.
    Hirschhorn’s house was a two-story center-hall colonial with the front door flanked by a symmetrical planting of what looked to Keller like rhododendron. There was a clump of weeping birch on the left, a driveway on the right leading to a garage with a basketball hoop and backboard centered over the door. It was, he noted, a two-and-a-half-car garage. Which was handy, he thought, if you happened to have two and a half cars.
    There were lights on inside the house, but Keller couldn’t see anybody, and that was fine with him. He drove