Hit List

let’s check it out.”
    They sent everybody home at three o’clock, and by four he was on the phone with Dot. “I had something to read,” he told her, “and I had a nice lunch. Vietnamese food.”
    “Watch it, Keller. Next you’ll want to move there.”
    “I may just have a couple more days of this. They’re picking juries, and if you don’t get picked in three days there’s a good chance they’ll send you home.”
    “So don’t get picked.”
    “So far so good,” he said. “We all sit in the jury room, and every once in a while they call a bunch of names and take the lucky winners to a courtroom.”
    “And they’re the jury?”
    “They go through voir dire, with lawyers asking them questions, and they stop when they’ve got twelve jurors and two alternates. Then they throw the others back in the pool.”
    “Is that what happened to you?”
    “During the morning I didn’t even get out of the jury room,” he said. “In the afternoon I got herded to a courtroom, and they found fourteen jurors they could live with before they even got to me.”
    “So they tossed you back in the pool.”
    “And I started paddling, keeping my head above water, and they dismissed us for the day. I’d say the odds are I won’t get on a jury at all. But it’s not up to me. It’s up to the lawyers.”
    “Now there’s a bad idea,” she said. “You want to ruin a system, just leave things up to the lawyers. Look, Keller, I think what you want to do is be a little proactive on this one.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean you ought to be able to keep from getting chosen. There’s a word I want, but what the hell is it?”
    “Impaneled.”
    “The very word. You can make sure you don’t get impaneled. When they ask you how you feel about the death penalty, you tell ’em you’re unequivocally opposed to it, that as far as you’re concerned it’s just a form of judicial murder. The DA’ll kick you out so fast you’ll have boot marks on your behind.”
    “That’s brilliant,” he said.
    “Actually it’s pretty obvious, Keller. But it’ll work. Two more days, huh?”
    “That’s what they tell me.”
    “One more day,” Keller said.
    Tuesday morning he had exchanged nods and smiles with his lunch companion from the previous day, and when lunch hour rolled around they fell into step and into conversation. Without either of them actually suggesting it, they walked straight to the Saigon Pearl and took the same table they’d shared the day before.
    “Unless we win the lottery,” Gloria said.
    That was her name, Gloria Dantone. She was a few years younger than Keller, with short dark hair and a lopsided smile. She worked as a legal secretary at a midtown law firm. (“But they’re never in court,” she’d confided. “They do corporate real estate, they represent lenders at closings.”) She lived in Inwood with her husband, an accountant who worked at the World Financial Center. (“One of the Big Four firms. When he started they were the Big Eight, and then the Big Six, and now it’s down to four. They keep merging. Pretty soon it’ll be the Huge Two, I guess, but it doesn’t matter to Jerry. He just goes to the office and deals with what’s on his desk.”) Keller didn’t know what she was talking about. He knew the Big Ten was a college football conference, but this had to be something else. He figured he didn’t need to know more.
    “Win the lottery,” he said. “It’s a matter of chance, all right. But look what you get if you win.”
    “We might get on an interesting case. Listen, it’s got to be as interesting as what I do at the office. And it’s not like it costs me money to be here. The company pays my salary.”
    “And the city pays me,” Keller said.
    “Yeah, all of forty bucks a day. At those prices you’d think people’d be fighting to get on a jury. You’re pretty young to be retired.”
    “Downsizing,” he said. “My job disappeared and the severance package was good, and I had money put aside. I pick up some freelance work now and then.”
    On the way back she asked him how he was enjoying the book. “It’s okay,” he said. “I had to stop myself from finishing it last night.”
    “She’s not really six years old, is she?”
    “Midthirties.”
    “You smartass. Of course that’s just what I was being, busting you for calling her a girl. I hope I get on a case.”
    “Really?”
    “Why not? I’m having fun.”
    He called Dot Wednesday afternoon.