Hit List

say active?”
    “It sounds better.”
    “It does?”
    “Sure. Proactive, like you’re really getting off your ass and doing something, and being professional about it, too. And I would have to say it’s about time. We’ve been taking precautions, but all that means is that Roger’s been killing other people. It would be nice if one of them caught on and turned the tables on him, but he’s a pro and he’s active and he takes them by surprise, so what chance have they got? Hejust keeps on doing what he does best, and we’re turning down jobs and looking over our shoulders when we do take one, and it’s about time we turned that around.”
    “And hunted him down,” he said.
    “And left him with a stake through his heart, because with a guy like that you want to make sure.”
    “But how, Dot? How would you find him? Where would you start?”
    “He has to come to us.”
    He nodded. “We set a trap,” he said, “and draw him right into it.”
    “There you go.”
    “How? Offer him a job? He won’t take it. Unless—“
    “What?”
    “Well,” he said, “if the job was to hit a hit man, wouldn’t he make an exception? I mean, he’s been doing that for free, and if he was going to get paid for it—“
    “I’d call him with a contract for a hit man.”
    “Right.”
    “And not just any hit man. I presume we’re talking about you.”
    “Right.”
    “So I give him your name and your address and a reasonably flattering photograph of you, while you sit home in front of the TV and listen for footsteps. Do I have to explain why that’s a bad idea?”
    “No.”
    “I’ve been working on this for a while,” she said, “so why don’t I lay it out for you? What I do, I call Roger and leave word, and he picks up the message and calls back on some hi-tech untraceable line, and I run down a contract I want to give him. I give him the name and address, and he mulls it over and turns it down.”
    “And?”
    “And I give it to somebody else.”
    “Me? No, that wouldn’t make sense. Who would you give it to?”
    “Some other pro. What I’d probably do is call another contractor and let him find somebody. Not that there are a hell of a lot of people left to be found, but whoever he picked wouldn’t have to be all that slick. Once he was on the case, I’d call Roger and tell him not to worry, that I managed to get somebody else. You beginning to get the picture?”
    “I think so.”
    “You stake out the mark’s house and wait for the two of them to show up. One of them’ll be a guy looking to do what he was hired to do. The other’ll be Roger.”
    “How do I know which is which?”
    “You could just kill ’em both,” she said, “and let God sort ’em out, like it says on the T-shirt. But I don’t think so. What you’d do is wait for one of them to take out the mark. Whoever does that, the other one is Roger.”
    Keller was nodding. “And once the hit’s been made,” he said, “he’ll be ready to take out the hitter. So I follow the hitter and keep an eye out for Roger.”
    “When he’s ready to make his move,” she said, “that’s when you make yours. If you can nail him before he does his thing, so much the better. If not, well, you tried. Either way, Roger’s off the board.”
    “With a stake through his heart.” He frowned. “I’d want to get him in time. Be a shame to let some innocent guy get killed for nothing.”
    “Innocent’s a stretch, since he’d have just finished taking out the mark. But I know what you mean.”
    “The mark,” Keller said. “I hadn’t even thought of him. He was sort of hypothetical, because you don’t really have a job for Roger, or for Mr. Second Choice, either. That’s just a trap, but a trap has to have bait in it, doesn’t it?”
    “It does if you expect to catch anything.”
    “So who’s the bait? If it’s not me, who is it? Do you just pick some poor mope at random?”
    “That’d be a way to do it. Keller, you look unhappy.”
    “The bait probably gets killed, right?”
    “Since the bait wouldn’t have any reason to suspect a thing, and since there’d be not one but two world-class hit men on the case, I’d have to say the bait’s chances are less than average.”
    “Chances of surviving, you mean.”
    “Right. On the other hand, if you want to look on the bright side, the bait’s chances of getting killed are not at all bad.”
    “See,” he said, “that’s the part I don’t like. Throwing darts at a