Hit List

he called her from a pay phone in a bar at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker.
    She picked up right away, and without preamble she said, “It was great fun, but it was just one of those things.” And hung up.
    Keller, feeling he’d missed something, took a seat at the bar. The crowd was mixed—downtown types, uptown types, out-of-town types. The bartender was a Chinese girl with long straight hair the color of buttercups. She had a nose ring, but almost everybody did these days. Keller wondered how the hell that had caught on.
    He heard someone order a Black Russian. He’d had one years ago and couldn’t remember if he’d liked it or not. He had the yellow-haired Chinese girl make him one, took a sip, and decided he could go years before he ordered another.
    A song played on the jukebox. Keller didn’t recognize it, but, listening to it, he realized Maggie’s parting shot had been a line from a song. She’d delivered it like conversation, with no irony, none of the cadence you gave lines when you were quoting them, and it had taken him until now to place it. Great fun. Just one of those things.
    I was out of town, he’d said. I know, she’d said.
    And there’d been a tingling in his hands.
    Had she sensed anything? Had she had any idea how close she’d come, how his hands had been ready to reach for her?
    He thought about it and decided she hadn’t, not consciously. But maybe she’d picked something up on a deeper level, and maybe that was why, still in the afterglow of their lovemaking, she’d rushed him into his clothes and out of her life.
    After all, his thoughts were powerful. Why shouldn’t she pick up on them?
    He took another sip of his drink. Somewhere out there, the man they were calling Roger had him on a list. Not by name—Roger wouldn’t know his name, any more than he knew Roger’s. But Roger had tried to kill him twice, and would very likely try to kill him again.
    Did Roger even know the same man had been his target both times, in Louisville and in Boston? For that matter, did Roger have a clue he’d killed the wrong person on both occasions?
    If so, Keller could see how Roger might begin to take the whole thing personally, like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.
    Keller knew it was nothing personal. How could it be, when you didn’t know the person you were killing? Still, he seemed to be taking it personally himself, at those times when Roger took up space in his thoughts.
    Which wasn’t that often. The days went by, and he didn’t see anything when he looked over his shoulder, and he forgot about Roger. And every once in a while Dot sent him out on a job, at which time he did do a certain amount of looking over his shoulder, a certain amount of thinking about Roger. But then he came back from the job without having done anything, to Roger or to anyone else, and the client paid him, and that was that.
    And then he’d said he was out of town, and Maggie said she knew, and he’d been ready to grab her and snap her neck. Just like that.
    He’d called up, as requested, to replace his home number on her Caller ID with the number of the pay phone. But was that how Caller ID worked? Did it keep track of just one number at a time? He didn’t have it on his phone, he couldn’t imagine why he’d want it, so he wasn’t too clear on how it worked. And, even if it was the way she’d said it was, how did he know she hadn’t picked up the phone the minute he was out the door? She could have copied the number off the screen before he called back to erase it.
    She was, let’s face it, more than a little strange. That had been part of her initial appeal, that offbeat downtown weirdness, though he had to say it had grown less appealing with time. Still, it made it impossible to guess what the woman would do.
    If she had the number, she could get the address. She’d mentioned the reverse directory herself, so she knew about it, knew how to get an address to go with a phone number. If she knew all that, and of course she already knew his name, she’d known that from the beginning . . .
    But that didn’t mean she knew what he did for a living. Suppose she’d picked up on his reaction, suppose she’d half-sensed that he’d been ready to reach for her and put her down. The fact remained that he hadn’t done anything, hadn’t even acted angry, let alone homicidal. Once he was out the door, once it was clear that she was safe, she’d talk herself out of any alarm she might