Hit Man

you?”
    “Gee, I’m glad you told me that, Keller. It never would have occurred to me.”
    “What does that mean, anyway, ‘No names, no pack drill’? I’m familiar with the expression, I get the sense of it, but what’s a pack drill, do you happen to know?”
    “It’s just an expression, for God’s sake.”
    “Give me the letter again,” he said, and read it through rapidly. “Most of the time,” he said, “the people who hire these things, there’s other things they could do. They may think otherwise, but there’s usually another way out.”
    “So?”
    “So what choice has she got?”
    “Nelson,” Dot said, “you know what I just did? I watched your master talk himself into something.”
    “Muscatine,” he said. “Do planes go there?”
    “Not if they can help it.”
    “What do I do, go there and call her up? ‘Toxic Waste,’ and then I wait for her to pick up?”
    “It’s ‘Toxic Shock’ now,” she said. “I changed the password for security reasons.”
    “Thank God for that,” he said. “You can’t be too careful.”
    Back at his apartment, he called Andria and made arrangements for her to care for Nelson in his absence. Then he found Muscatine on the map. You could probably fly there, or at least to Davenport, but Chicago wasn’t that far. United had hourly non-stops to Chicago, and O’Hare was a nice anonymous place to rent a car.
    He flew out in the morning, had a Hertz car waiting, and was in Muscatine and settled in a chain motel on the edge of the city by dinnertime. He ate right down the road at a Pizza Hut, came back and sat on the edge of his bed. He had used false identification to rent the car at O’Hare, and had registered at the motel under a different name and paid cash in advance for a week’s stay. Even so, he didn’t want to call the client from the motel. He was dealing with an amateur, and there were two principles to observe in dealing with amateurs. The first was to be ultra-professional yourself. The second, alas, was never to deal with an amateur.
    There was a pay phone just next door; he’d noticed it coming back from the Pizza Hut. He spent a quarter and dialed the number, and after two rings the machine answered and a computer-generated voice repeated the last four numbers of the number and invited him to leave his message at the tone.
    “Toxic Shock,” he said.
    Nothing happened. He stayed on the line for fifteen seconds and hung up.
    But was that long enough? Suppose she was washing her hands, or in the kitchen making coffee. He dug out another quarter, tried again. Same story. “Toxic Shock,” he said a second time, and waited for thirty seconds before hanging up.
    “Great system,” he said aloud, and went back to the motel.
    Back at the motel, he put on the television set and watched the last half of a movie about a wife who gets her lover to kill her husband. You didn’t have to have watched the first half to know what was going on, nor did you need to be a genius to know that everything was going to go wrong for them. Amateurs, he thought.
    He went out and tried the number again. “Toxic Shock.” Nothing.
    Hell.
    On the desk in his room, along with carry-out menus from half a dozen nearby fast-food outlets and a handout from the local Board of Realtors on the joys of settling in Muscatine, there was a flyer inviting him to try his luck gambling on a Mississippi riverboat. It looked appealing at first. You pictured an old paddle wheeler chunking along, heading down the river to New Orleans, with women in hoop skirts and men in frock coats and string ties, but he knew it wouldn’t be anything like that. The boat wouldn’t move, for one thing. It would stand at anchor, and boarding it would be like crossing the threshold of a hotel in Atlantic City.
    No thanks.
    Unpacking, he found the morning paper he’d read on the flight to Chicago. He hadn’t finished it, and did so now, saving the crossword puzzle for last. There was a step-quote, a saying of some sort running like a flight of stairs from the upper-left to lower-right corner. He liked those, because you had the sense that solving the crossword led to a greater solution. Sometimes, too, the step-quote itself was a pearl of wisdom of the sort you found in a fortune cookie.
    Often, though, the puzzles with step-quotes in them proved difficult, and this particular puzzle was one of those. There were a couple of areas he had trouble with, and they formed important parts of the