Hit Man

with children.
    He didn’t get up until almost noon. He went to the Mexican place and ordered huevos rancheros and put a lot of hot sauce on them. He watched the waitress’s hands as she served the food and again when she took his empty plate away. Light glinted off the little diamond. Maybe she and her husband would wind up in Cowslip Lane, he thought. Not right away, of course; they’d have to start out in the duplex, but that’s what they could aspire to, a Dutch Colonial with that odd kind of pitched roof. What did they call it, anyway? Was that a mansard roof, or did that word describe something else? Was it a gambrel, maybe?
    He thought he ought to learn these things. You saw the words and didn’t know what they meant, saw the houses and couldn’t describe them properly.
    He had bought a paper on his way into the café , and now he turned to the classified ads and read through the real estate listings. Houses seemed very inexpensive. You could actually buy a low-priced home here for twice what he would be paid for the week’s work.
    There was a safe deposit box no one knew about, rented under a name he’d never used for another purpose, and in it he had enough currency to buy a nice home here outright for cash.
    Assuming you could still do that. People were funny about cash these days, leery of letting themselves be used to launder drug money.
    Anyway, what difference did it make? He wasn’t going to live here. The waitress could live here, in a nice little house with mansards and gambrels.
    Engleman was leaning over his wife’s desk when Keller walked into Quik Print. “Why, hello,” he said. “Have you had any luck finding Soldier?”
    He remembered the name, Keller noticed.
    “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the dog came back on his own. I guess he wanted the reward.” Betty Engleman laughed.
    “You see how fast your flyers worked,” he went on. “They brought the dog back before I even got the chance to post them. I’ll get some use out of them eventually, though. Old Soldier’s got itchy feet, he’ll take off again one of these days.”
    “Just so he keeps coming back,” she said.
    “Reason I stopped by,” Keller said, “I’m new in town, as you might have gathered, and I’ve got a business venture I’m getting ready to kick into gear. I’m going to need a printer, and I thought maybe we could sit down and talk. You got time for a cup of coffee?”
    Engleman’s eyes were hard to read behind the glasses. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
    They walked down to the corner, Keller talking about what a nice day it was, Engleman saying little beyond agreeing with him. At the corner Keller said, “Well, Burt, where should we go for coffee?”
    Engleman just froze. Then he said, “I knew.”
    “I know you did. I could tell the minute I walked in there. How?”
    “The phone number on the flyer. I tried it last night. They never heard of a Mr. Gordon.”
    “So you knew last night. Of course you could have made a mistake on the number.”
    Engleman shook his head. “I wasn’t going on memory. I kept an extra copy of the flyer and dialed the number right off it. No Mr. Gordon and no lost dog. Anyway, I think I knew before then. I think I knew the minute you walked in the door.”
    “Let’s get that coffee,” Keller said.
    They went into a place called the Rainbow Diner and had coffee at a table on the side. Engleman added artificial sweetener to his and stirred it long enough to dissolve marble chips. He had been an accountant back east, working for the man Keller had called in White Plains. When the feds were trying to make a RICO case against Engleman’s boss, Engleman was a logical place to apply pressure. He wasn’t really a criminal, he hadn’t done much of anything, and they told him he was going to prison unless he rolled over and testified. If he did what they said, they’d give him a new name and move him someplace safe. If not, he could talk to his wife once a month through a wire screen and have ten years to get used to it.
    “How did you find me?” he wanted to know. “Somebody leaked it in Washington?”
    Keller shook his head. “Freak thing,” he said. “Somebody saw you on the street, recognized you, followed you home.”
    “Here in Roseburg?”
    “I don’t think so. Were you out of town a week or so ago?”
    “Oh, God,” Engleman said. “We went down to San Francisco for the weekend.”
    “That sounds right.”
    “I thought it was safe. I