Hit List

your judgment. Better to wait and have a proper meal afterward.
    While his coffee was cooling he went to the men’s room and took the letter opener out of its gift box, which he discarded. He put the letter opener in his jacket pocket where he could reach it in a hurry. You couldn’t cut with it, the blade’s edge was rounded, but it came to a good sharp point. But was it sharp enough to penetrate several layers of cloth? Just as well he hadn’t acted on the spur of the moment. Wait for Thurnauer to get out of his coat and jacket and shirt, and then the letter opener would have an easier time of it.
    He drank his coffee, donned his green coat, picked up his umbrella, and went back to finish the job.

Twelve
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    Nothing to it, really.
    The keys worked. He didn’t run into anybody in the entryway or on the stairs. He listened at the door of the second-floor apartment, heard music playing and water running, and let himself in.
    He put down his umbrella, took off his coat, slipped off his shoes, and made his way in silence through the living room and along a hallway to the bedroom door. That was where the music was coming from, and it was where the woman, a slender dishwater blonde with translucent white skin, was sitting cross-legged on the edge of an unmade bed, smoking a cigarette.
    She looked frighteningly vulnerable, and Keller hoped he wouldn’t have to hurt her. If he could get Thurnauer alone, if he could do the man and get out without being seen, then he could let her live. If she saw him, well, then all bets were off.
    The shower stopped running, and a moment later the bathroom door opened. A man emerged with a dark green towel around his waist. The guy was completely bald, and Keller wondered how the hell he’d managed to wind up in the wrong apartment. Then he realized it was Thurnauer after all. The guy had taken off his hair before he got in the shower.
    Thurnauer walked over to the bed, made a face, and reached to take the cigarette away from the girl, stubbing it out in an ashtray. “I wish to God you’d quit,” he said.
    “And I wish you’d quit wishing I would quit,” she said. “I’ve tried. I can’t quit, all right? Not everybody’s got your goddam willpower.”
    “There’s the gum,” he said.
    “I started smoking to get out of the habit of chewing gum. I hate how it looks, grown women chewing gum, like a herd of cows.”
    “Or the patch,” he said. “Why can’t you wear a patch?”
    “That was my last cigarette,” she said.
    “You know, you’ve said that before, and much as I’d like to believe it—“
    “No, you moron,” she snapped. “It was the last one I’ve got with me, not the last one I’m ever going to smoke. If you had to play the stern daddy and take a cigarette away from me, did it have to be my last one?”
    “You can buy more.”
    “No kidding,” she said. “You’re damn right I can buy more.”
    “Go take a shower,” Thurnauer said.
    “I don’t want to take a shower.”
    “You’ll cool off and feel better.”
    “You mean I’ll cool off and you ’ll feel better. Anyway, you just took a shower and you came out grumpy as a bear with a sore foot. The hell with taking a shower.”
    “Take one.”
    “Why? What’s the matter, do I stink? Or do you just want to get me out of the room so you can make a phone call?”
    “Mavis, for Christ’s sake . . .”
    “You can call some other girl who doesn’t smoke and doesn’t sweat and—“
    “Mavis—“
    “Oh, go to hell,” Mavis said. “I’m gonna go take a shower. And put your hair on, will you? You look like a damn cue ball.”
    The shower was running and Thurnauer was hunched over her makeup mirror, adjusting his hairpiece, when Keller got a hand over his mouth and plunged the letter opener into his back, fitting it deftly between two ribs and driving it home into his heart. The big man had no time to struggle; by the time he knew what was happening, it had already happened. His body convulsed once, then went slack, and Keller lowered him to the floor.
    The shower was still running. Keller could be out the door before she was out of the shower. But as soon as she did come out she would see Thurnauer, and she’d know at a glance that he was dead, and she’d scream and yell and carry on and call 911, and who needed that?
    Besides, the pity he’d felt for her had dried up during her argument with her lover. He’d responded to a sense of her vulnerability, a fragile quality that