Hit List

Dot had shown him, and it was what you noticed, but it was the same face, and here he was, and wasn’t that handy?
    While Stillman took the sun, Keller did the same. When Stillman got up and walked to the water’s edge, so did Keller. When Stillman waded in, to test his mettle in the surf, Keller followed in his wake.
    When Keller came ashore, Stillman stayed behind. And, by the time Keller left the beach, carrying two towels and a cellular phone, Stillman had still not emerged from the water.

Nine
----
    Why a thumb?
    Keller, back in New York, pondered the question. He couldn’t see what a thumb had to do with murder. When you used a gun, it was your index finger that gave the trigger a squeeze. When you used a knife, you held it in your palm with your fingers curled around the handle. Your thumb might press the hilt, as a sort of guide, but a man could have no thumbs at all and still get the business end of a knife to go where he wanted it.
    Did you use your thumbs when you garroted somebody? He mimed the motion, letting his hands remember, and he didn’t see where the thumbs had much of a part to play. Manual strangulation, now that was different, and you did use your thumbs, you used all of both hands, and would have a hard time otherwise.
    Still, why a murderer’s thumb ?
    “Here’s what I don’t get,” Dot said. “You go off to some half-a-horse town at the ass end of nowhere special and you poke around for a week or two. Then you go to a vacation paradise in the middle of a New York winter and you’re back the same day. The same day!”
    “I had an opening and I took it,” he said. “I wait and maybe I never get that good a shot at him again.”
    “I realize that, Keller, and God knows I’m not complaining. It just seems like a shame, that’s all. Here you are, the two of you, fresh off a couple of planes from the frozen North, and before either one of you gets the chill out of your bones, you’re on a flight to New York and he’s rapidly approaching room temperature.”
    “Water temperature.”
    “I stand corrected.”
    “And it was like a bathtub.”
    “That’s nice,” she said. “He could have opened his veins in it, but after you held his head underwater for a few minutes he no longer felt the need to. But couldn’t you have waited a few days? You’d have come home with a tan and he’d have gone into the ground with one. You meet your Maker, you want to look your best.”
    He glanced over at the television set, where a thin young man and a fat young woman were having a food fight. Intermittently a couple of burly men in jumpsuits restrained one or both of them, only to let them resume pelting one another with bowls of salad.
    “Jerry Springer,” Dot said. “It’s sort of a combination of Family Court and WWF Wrestling .”
    “How come you’ve got the sound off?”
    “Believe me, it’s worse if you can hear them.”
    “I can see how it would be,” he said. “But lately you’ve always got the sound off. The picture on and the sound off.”
    “I know.”
    “If you had it the other way around I’d say you invented the radio. This way, what? The silent film?”
    “I hardly look at it, Keller. Then what’s it doing on—is that what you were going to ask?”
    “I might have.”
    “For years,” she said, “I only put the set on to watch something. I had my afternoon programs, and then for a while I got hooked on those home shopping channels.”
    “I remember.”
    “I never bought anything, but I would stare at the screen for hours. Part of it was there were no commercials to break your concentration.”
    “Whole thing’s a commercial.”
    “Well, no kidding,” she said. “I didn’t delude myself that I was watching PBS. Anyway, I watched QVC for a while, and then I got over it before I could spend my life savings on Diamonique.”
    “Close call.”
    “And then he died,” she said, with a glance at the ceiling. “And he wasn’t much company, especially toward the end, but the house all of a sudden felt empty without him. It’s not like I was getting choked up all the time. And I didn’t feel myself longing for the comfort of his presence, because when was he ever a comfort?”
    “Even so.”
    “Even so,” she said. “What I did, I took to keeping the radio going all the time. Just to have the sound of a human voice. Does that sound strange to you?”
    “Not at all.”
    “But I’ll tell you what’s the trouble with radio. You can’t mute the