Hit List

have felt.
    Wouldn’t she?
    Back home, he worked on his stamp collection for a few minutes, then put everything away and turned on the TV. He worked his way through the channels two or three times, triggering the remote until his hand was tired, then thumbing the power button and darkening the set. And sat there in what little light came in from the window, looking at the remote in his hand. Looking at his thumb.
    Maggie knew he had a murderer’s thumb. She’d pointed it out, called it to his attention.
    Maybe she’d think about that and put it together with whatever she’d picked up when he’d been ready to reach for her. And maybe she’d factor in the way he was retired at an early age, but went out of town occasionally on special jobs for unspecified corporate employers. And maybe there’d be a hired killer in the headlines, or in some movie she saw, or some TV program. And maybe her eyes would widen, and she’d make a connection, and realize just who he was and what he was.
    And then?

Eighteen
----
    The airport in Orange County was named after John Wayne. Keller got off the plane with a tune running through his head, and he was halfway to the baggage claim before he worked out what it was. The theme from The High and the Mighty .
    Funny how the mind did things like that.
    There were half a dozen men standing alongside the baggage claim, some in chauffeur’s livery, all of them holding hand-lettered signs. Keller walked past them without a glance. No one was meeting him—that was policy, now that the mysterious Roger was out there somewhere. Anyway, no one would be expecting him to fly to Orange County, because his assignment was all the way down in La Jolla. La Jolla was a suburb of San Diego, and San Diego had a perfectly good airport of its own, larger and busier than Orange County’s, and not named after anyone.
    “Unless you count St. James,” Dot had said. When he looked blank, she told him that San Diego was Spanish for St. James. “Or Santiago,” she said. “San Diego, Santiago. Same guy.”
    “Then why do they have two names for him?”
    “Maybe one’s the equivalent of James,” she said, “and the other’s more like Jimmy. What’s the difference? You’re not flying there.”
    Instead he’d flown to Orange County, just in case Roger might be lurking in San Diego. He didn’t really think there was much likelihood of this. They hadn’t heard a peep out of Roger since he’d killed a man in Boston, a man who’d stolen Keller’s green trench coat and paid dearly for his crime. That was when he and Dot had figured out who Roger was and what he was trying to do.
    At the time, Keller had found the whole business extremely upsetting. The idea that there was someone out there, hell-bent on being the impersonal instrument of his death, had him constantly looking over his shoulder. He’d never had to do that before, and he didn’t much like it.
    But you got used to it. Keller supposed it was a little like having a heart condition. You worried about it at first, and then you stopped worrying. You took sensible precautions, you didn’t take the stairs two at a time, you paid a kid to shovel out your driveway in the winter, but you didn’t think about it all the time. You got used to it.
    And he had gotten used to Roger. There was a man out there, a man who didn’t know his name and might or might not recognize him by sight, a man who shared Keller’s profession and wanted to thin the ranks of the competition. You quit letting clients meet you at the airport, you covered your tracks, but you didn’t have to hide under the bed. You went about your business.
    Flying into a less convenient airport came under the heading of sensible precautions. Keller saw it as a bonus that the airport was named for John Wayne. Approaching the Avis counter, he felt a few inches taller, a little broader in the shoulders.
    The clerk—Keller wanted to call him Pilgrim, but suppressed the urge—checked the license and credit card Keller showed him and was halfway through the paperwork when something pulled him up short. Keller asked him if something was wrong.
    “Your reservation,” the man said. “It seems it’s been canceled.”
    “Must be a mistake.”
    “I can reinstate it, no problem. I mean, we have cars available, and you’re here.”
    “Right.”
    “So I’ll just . . . oh, there’s a note here. You’re supposed to call your office.”
    “My office.”
    “That’s what it says.