Hit Man

You said you hadn’t seen me in ages.”
    “That’s closer to hello than goodbye. Well, let it go. The important thing is I caught you before you left the house.”
    “Just,” he said. “I had one foot out the door.”
    “I’d have called back right away,” she said, “but I had a hell of a time getting quarters. You ask for change of a dollar around here, people look at you like you’ve got a hidden agenda.”
    Quarters? What did she need with quarters?
    “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “There’s this little Italian place about four blocks from you called Giuseppe Joe’s. Don’t ask me what street it’s on.”
    “I know where it is.”
    “They’ve got tables set up outside under the awning. It’s a beautiful spring day. Why don’t you take your dog for a walk, swing by Giuseppe Joe’s. See if there’s anybody there you recognize.”
    * * *
    “So this is the famous Nelson,” Dot said. “He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he? I think he likes me.”
    “The only person he doesn’t like,” Keller said, “is the delivery boy for the Chinese restaurant.”
    “It’s probably the MSG.”
    “He barks at him, and Nelson almost never barks. The breed’s part dingo, and that makes him the silent type.”
    “Nelson the Wonder Dog. What’s the matter, Nelson? Don’t you like mu shu pork?” She gave the dog a pat. “I thought he’d be bigger. An Australian cattle dog, and you think how big sheep dogs are, and cows are bigger than sheep, et cetera, et cetera. But he’s just the right size.”
    If he hadn’t come looking for her, Keller might not have recognized Dot. He’d never seen her away from the old man’s house on Taunton Place, where she’d always lounged around in a Mother Hubbard or a housedress. This afternoon she wore a tailored suit, and she’d done something to her hair. She looked like a suburban matron, Keller thought, in town on a shopping spree.
    “He thinks I’m shopping for summer clothes,” she said, as if reading his mind. “I shouldn’t be here at all, Keller.”
    “Oh?”
    “I’ve been doing things I shouldn’t do,” she said. “Idle hands and all that. What about you, Keller? Been a long dry spell. What have your idle hands been up to?”
    Keller looked at his hands. “Nothing much,” he said.
    “How are you fixed for dough?”
    “I’ll get by.”
    “You wouldn’t mind work, though.”
    “No, of course not.”
    “That’s why you couldn’t wait to hang up on me and hop on a train.” She drank some iced tea and wrinkled her nose. “Two bucks a glass for this crap and they make it from a mix. You wonder why I don’t come to the city often? It’s nice, though, sitting at an outside table like this.”
    “Pleasant.”
    “You probably do this all the time. Walk the dog, pick up a newspaper, stop and have a cup of coffee. While away the hours. Right?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “You’re patient, Keller, I’ll give you that. I take all day to come to the point and you sit there like you’ve got nothing better to do. But in a way that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You don’t have anything better to do and neither do I.”
    “Sometimes there’s no work,” he said. “If nothing comes in—”
    “Things have been coming in.”
    “Oh?”
    “I’m not here, you never saw me, and we never had this conversation. Understood?”
    “Understood.”
    “I don’t know what’s the matter with him, Keller. He’s going through something and I don’t know what it is. It’s like he’s lost his taste for it. There’ve been calls, people with work that would have been right up your alley. He tells them no. He tells them he hasn’t got anybody available at the moment. He tells them to call somebody else.”
    “Does he say why?”
    “Sure, there’s always a reason. This one he doesn’t want to deal with, that one won’t pay enough, the other one, something doesn’t sound kosher about it. There’s three jobs he turned down I know of since the first of the year.”
    “No kidding.”
    “And who knows what came in that I don’t know about.”
    “I wonder what’s wrong.”
    “I figure it’ll pass,” she said. “But who knows when? So I did something crazy.”
    “Oh?”
    “Don’t laugh, all right?”
    “I won’t.”
    “You familiar with a magazine called Mercenary Times ?”
    “Like Soldier of Fortune, ” he said.
    “Like it, but more homemade and reckless.” She drew a copy from her handbag, handed it to him. “Page