Hit List

chart.”
    “Because of my thumb?”
    “No, though it was interesting to have that extra bit of confirmation. And the most revealing thing about your thumb was the effort you made to conceal it. But the vibration I picked up from you was far more revealing than anything about your thumb.”
    “The vibration.”
    “I don’t know a better way to put it. Sometimes the intuitive part of the mind picks up things the five senses are blind and deaf to. Sometimes a person just knows something.”
    “Yes.”
    “I knew you were . . .”
    “A killer,” he supplied.
    “Well, a man who has killed. And in a very dispassionate way, too. It’s not personal for you, is it, John?”
    “Sometimes a personal element comes into it.”
    “But not often.”
    “No.”
    “It’s business.”
    “Yes.”
    “John? You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
    Could she read his mind? He hoped not. Because what came to him now was that he was not afraid of her, but of what he might have to do to her.
    And he didn’t want to. She was a nice woman, and he sensed she would be able to tell him things it would be good for him to hear.
    “You don’t have to fear that I’ll do anything, or say anything to anyone. You don’t even need to fear my disapproval.”
    “Oh?”
    “I don’t make many moral judgments, John. The more I see, the less I’m sure I know what’s right and what’s wrong. Once I accepted myself”—she reached, grinning, for a chocolate—“I found it easier to accept other people. Thumbs and all.”
    He looked at his thumb, then raised his eyes to meet hers.
    “Besides,” she said, very gently, “I think you’ve done wonderfully in life, John.” She tapped his chart. “I know what you started with. I think you’ve turned out just fine.”
    He tried to say something, but the words got stuck in his throat.
    “It’s all right,” she said. “Go right ahead and cry. Never be ashamed to cry, John. It’s all right.”
    And she drew his head to her breast and held him while, astonished, he sobbed his heart out.

Ten
----
    “Well, that’s a first,” he said. “I don’t know what I expected from astrology, but it wasn’t tears.”
    “They wanted to come out. You’ve had them stored up for a while, haven’t you?”
    “Forever. I was in therapy for a while and never even got choked up.”
    “That would have been when? Three years ago?”
    “How did you . . . It’s in my chart?”
    “Not therapy per se, but I saw there was a period when you were ready for self-exploration. But I don’t believe you stayed with it for very long.”
    “A few months. I got a lot of insight out of it, but in the end I felt I had to put an end to it.”
    Dr. Breen, the therapist, had had his own agenda, and it had conflicted seriously with Keller’s. The therapy had ended abruptly, and so, not coincidentally, had Breen.
    He wouldn’t let that happen with Louise Carpenter.
    “This isn’t therapy,” she told him now, “but it can be a powerful experience. As you just found out.”
    “I’ll say. But we must have used up our fifty minutes.” He looked at his watch. “We went way over. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
    “I told you it’s not therapy, John. We don’t worry about the clock. And I never book more than two clients a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We have all the time we need.”
    “Oh.”
    “And we need to talk about what you’re going through. This is a difficult time for you, isn’t it?”
    Was it?
    “I’m afraid the coming twelve months will continue to be difficult,” she went on, “as long as Saturn’s where it is. Difficult and dangerous. But I suppose danger is something you’ve learned to live with.”
    “It’s not that dangerous,” he said. “What I do.”
    “Really?”
    Dangerous to others, he thought. “Not to me,” he said. “Not particularly. There’s always a risk, and you have to keep your guard up, but it’s not as though you have to be on edge all the time.”
    “What, John?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You had a thought, it just flashed across your face.”
    “I’m surprised you can’t tell me what it was.”
    “If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d say you thought of something that contradicted the sentence you just spoke. About not having to be on edge all the time.”
    “That’s what it was, all right.”
    “This would have been fairly recent.”
    “You can really tell all that? I’m sorry, I keep doing that. Yes, it