Hit Man

when his eye caught the paperback western. Take it along? Leave it for the maid? What?
    He picked it up, read the cover line, sighed. Was this what Randolph Scott would do? Or John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood? How about Jack Elam?
    No, of course not.
    Because then there’d be no movie. A man rides into town, starts to have a look at the situation, meets a woman, gets it on with her, then just backs out and rides off? You put something like that on the screen, it wouldn’t even play in the art houses.
    Still, this wasn’t a movie.
    Still . . .
    He looked at the book and wanted to heave it across the room. But all he heaved was a sigh. Then he unpacked.
    He was having a cup of coffee in town when a pickup pulled up across the street and two men got out of it. One of them was Lyman Crowder. The other, not quite as tall, was twenty pounds lighter and twenty years younger. Crowder’s son, by the looks of him.
    His son-in-law, as it turned out. Keller followed the two men into a store where the fellow behind the counter greeted them as Lyman and Hobie. Crowder had a lengthy shopping list composed largely of items Keller would have been hard put to find a use for.
    While the owner filled the order, Keller had a look at the display of hand-tooled boots. The pointed toes would be handy in New York, he thought, for killing cockroaches in corners. The heels would add better than an inch to his height. He wondered if he’d feel awkward in the boots, like a teenager in her first pair of high heels. Lyman and Hobie looked comfortable enough in their boots, as pointy in the toes and as elevated in the heels as any on display, but they also looked comfortable in their string ties and ten-gallon hats, and Keller was sure he’d feel ridiculous dressed like that.
    They were a pair, he thought. They looked alike, they talked alike, they dressed alike, and they seemed uncommonly fond of one another.
    Back in his room, Keller stood at the window and looked down at the parking lot, then across the way at a pair of mountains. A few years ago his work had taken him to Miami, where he’d met a Cuban who’d cautioned him against ever taking a hotel room above the second floor. “Suppose you got to leave in a hurry?” the man said. “Ground floor, no problem. Second floor, no problem. Third floor, break your fockeen leg.”
    The logic of this had impressed Keller, and for a while he had made a point of taking the man’s advice. Then he happened to learn that the Cuban not only shunned the higher floors of hotels but also refused to enter an elevator or fly in an airplane. What had looked like tradecraft now appeared to be nothing more than phobia.
    It struck Keller that he had never in his life had to leave a hotel room, or any other sort of room, by the window. This was not to say that it would never happen, but he’d decided it was a risk he was prepared to run. He liked high floors. Maybe he even liked running risks.
    He picked up the phone, made a call. When she answered he said, “This is Tex. Would you believe my business appointment canceled? Left me with the whole afternoon to myself.”
    “Are you where I left you?”
    “I’ve barely moved since then.”
    “Well, don’t move now,” she said. “I’ll be right on over.”
    Around nine that night Keller wanted a drink, but he didn’t want to have it in the company of adulterers and their favorite music. He drove around in his palomino Caprice until he found a place on the edge of town that looked promising. It called itself Joe’s Bar. Outside it was nondescript. Inside it smelled of stale beer and casual plumbing. The lights were low. There was sawdust on the floor and the heads of dead animals on the walls. The clientele was exclusively male, and for a moment this gave Keller pause. There were gay bars in New York that tried hard to look like this place, though it was hard for Keller to imagine why. But Joe’s, he realized, was not a gay bar, not in any sense of the word.
    He sat on a wobbly stool and ordered a beer. The other drinkers left him alone, even as they left each other alone. The jukebox played intermittently, with men dropping in quarters when they could no longer bear the silence.
    The songs, Keller noted, ran to type. There were the tryin’-to-drink-that-woman-off-of-my-mind songs and the if-it-wasn’t-for-bad-luck-I-wouldn’t-have-no-luck-at-all songs. Nothing about Celia in the Jackson Park Inn, nothing about heaven being just a sin away.
    These