Hit List

“They sent you home early,” she said. “I guess that means for you the war is over.”
    “I got on a jury.”
    “You’re kidding,” she said. “Did you tell them how you felt about the death penalty?”
    “It didn’t come up,” he said. “I guess when some kid runs off with a woman’s purse, they don’t much care how you feel about the death penalty.”
    “Some little bastard snatches a woman’s purse, he damn well ought to get the needle. Is that the case they stuck you with? A purse-snatching?”
    “No, I think it involves stolen goods. The defendant was sitting there throughout voir dire, and he looks too old andslow for purse-snatching. I’ll find out more tomorrow, when we hear the opening arguments.”
    “You’ll be up all night wondering.”
    “I’ll be up all night finishing this book.”
    “The one about the plague? I thought you were saving it to read in court.”
    “Once you’re on a jury,” he said, “they make you stop reading. You have to pay attention.”
    “Unless you’re the judge. Keller, couldn’t you have done something during the whatchacallit?”
    “Voir dire.”
    “Whatever. Couldn’t you have expressed an extreme opinion?”
    “I didn’t really know what they would or wouldn’t like,” he said, “so I gave up trying to figure it out and just answered the questions. And they picked me.”
    “Lucky you. You still get weekends off, right?”
    “Friday afternoon to Monday morning.”
    “Unless you get sequestered.”
    “The kind of trial where they lock up the jury every night,” he said, “is the kind where it takes them a week to select a jury. They picked all twelve jurors and two alternates in a few hours.”
    “Small potatoes, in other words. How long will it last?”
    “A few days. Maybe a week.”
    “That’s not too bad.”
    “No.”
    “You’ll go down to Baltimore this weekend?”
    “As soon as they send us home.”
    “And either you’ll get it done right away or you’ll go back a few days later when the trial’s over. I don’t see a problem. Do you, Keller?”
    “No,” he said. “No problem.”
    * * *
    Alone in his apartment, with nothing to distract him, he got caught up in the book. The evolving relationship of the hero and the heroine, prickly at first and increasingly romantic, left him unmoved, but there was an urgency to the rest of the plot that kept him turning pages.
    And he couldn’t help liking the bad guy. The author tried to humanize the villain by telling you what a rotten childhood he had, how his father abused him and his mother died and all the other bad things that happened to him. That might explain why he was the way he was, though Keller didn’t really buy it. Keller liked him because he liked the way the guy operated, the way his mind worked.
    Early on, there was this scene where this cute little girl is playing with her puppy, and the bad guy befriends her, and it’s sweet, how he has these nice conversations with the kid. And then he tests the virus on her, spikes her milk shake with it, and she dies the way people die from this disease, bleeding from every orifice and writhing in agony. That was to show you what a son of a bitch he was, in case you’d been harboring any doubts.
    Keller didn’t see it that way. The only reason the guy befriended the kid in the first place was because he intended to feed her the virus. So it wasn’t as though they had a real friendship. The friendship was just part of the act.
    Besides, the man was planning on killing off the entire population of New York City, if not the world. The kid would die anyway, along with everybody else. This way she’d beat the crowds, and would wind up in a hospital while there were still doctors and nurses alive to take care of her. They couldn’t help her, but they could at least make her halfway comfortable.
    Of course, Keller thought, he had a tendency to root for the bad guys. In books, anyway, and in movies. His favorite actors were the guys who got mowed down one after the other by Bruce Willis and Steven Seagall and Jean-Claude Van Damme. There were plenty of good Hollywood villains these days, but as far as he was concerned none of them could hold a torch to Jack Elam, possibly the greatest bad guy who ever got in front of a camera. And when did Jack Elam ever still have a pulse by the time they rolled the final credits?
    He wasn’t exactly pulling for this particular villain. How could you root for the annihilation of the