Hit List

fine.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I’m sure,” he said. He wasn’t sure, he was miles short of sure, but it had a much better ring to it than I don’t know .
    Tuesday, the day before he was supposed to go to Boston, Keller had a strong urge to call Louise Carpenter. It had been a couple of weeks since she’d gone over his chart with him, and he wouldn’t be seeing her again for a year. He’d thought it might turn out to be like therapy, with weekly appointments, and he knew some of her clients dropped in frequently for an astrological tune-up and oil change, but he gathered that astrology was a sort of hobby for them. He already had a hobby, and Louise seemed to think an annual checkup was sufficient, and that was fine with him.
    So he’d see her in a year’s time. If he was still alive.
    The forecast for Wednesday was rain and more rain, and when he woke up he saw they weren’t kidding. It was a bleak, gray day, and the rain was coming down hard. An apologetic announcer on New York One said the downpour was expected to continue throughout the day and evening, accompanied by high winds and low temperatures. The way he was carrying on, you’d have thought it was his fault.
    Keller put on a suit and tie, good protective coloration in a formal kind of city like Boston, and the standard uniform on the air shuttle. He got his trench coat out of the closet, put it on, and wasn’t crazy about what he saw in the mirror. The salesman had called it olive, and maybe it was, at least in the store under their fluorescent lights. In the cold damp light of a rainy morning, however, the damn thing looked green.
    Not shamrock green, not Kelly green, not even putting green. But it was green, all right. You could slip into it on St. Patrick’s Day and march up Fifth Avenue, and no one would mistake you for an Orangeman. No question about it, the sucker was green.
    In the ordinary course of things, the coat’s color wouldn’t have bothered him. It wasn’t so green as to bring on stares and catcalls, just green enough to draw the occasional appreciative glance. And there was a certain convenience in having a coat that didn’t look like every other coat on the rack. You knew it on sight, and you could point it out to the cloakroom attendant when you couldn’t find the check. “Right there, a little to your left,” you’d say. “The green one.”
    But when you were flying up to Boston to kill a man, you didn’t want to stand out in a crowd. You wanted to blend right in, to look like everybody else. Keller, in his unremarkable suit and tie, looked pretty much like everybody else.
    In his coat, no question, he stood out.
    Could he skip the coat? No, it was cold outside, and it would be colder in Boston. Wear his other topcoat, unobtrusively beige? No, it was porous, and he’d get soaked. He’d take an umbrella, but that wouldn’t help much, not with a strong wind driving the rain.
    What if he bought another coat?
    But that was ridiculous. He’d have to wait for the stores to open, and then he’d spend an hour picking out the new coat and dropping off the old one at his apartment. And for what? There weren’t going to be any witnesses in Boston, and anyone who did happen to see him go into the building would only remember the coat.
    And maybe that was a plus. Like putting on a postman’s uniform or a priest’s collar, or dressing up as Santa Claus. People remembered what you were wearing, but that was all they remembered. Nobody noticed anything else about you that might be distinctive. Your thumb, for instance. And, once you took off the uniform or the collar or the red suit and the beard, you became invisible.
    Ordinarily he wouldn’t have had to think twice. But this was an ominous day, one of the days his motherly astrologer had warned him about, and that made every little detail something to worry about.
    And wasn’t that silly? He had an enemy, and this enemy was trying to kill him, and on this particular day he was particularly at risk. And he had an assignment to kill a man, and that task inevitably carried risks of its own.
    And, with all that going on, he was worrying about the coat he was wearing? That it was too discernibly green, for God’s sake?
    Get over it, he told himself.
    A cab took him to La Guardia and a plane took him to Logan, where another cab dropped him in front of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He walked through the lobby, came out on Newbury Street, and walked along looking for a sporting