Hit Man

caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.
    Tails.
    He reached for the phone.
    “This time it’s iced tea,” Dot said. “Last time I promised you iced tea and gave you lemonade.”
    “It was good lemonade.”
    “Well, this is good iced tea, as far as that goes. Made with real tea.”
    “And real ice, I’ll bet.”
    “You put the tea bags in a jar of cold water,” she said, “and set the jar in the sun, and forget about them for a few hours. Then you put the jar in the fridge.”
    “You don’t boil the water at all?”
    “No, you don’t have to. For years I thought you did but it turns out I was wrong. But I lost track of what I was getting at. Iced tea. Oh, right. This time you called and said, ‘I’m on my way. Get ready to break out the lemonade.’ So you were expecting lemonade this time, and here I’m giving you iced tea. Get it, Keller? Each time you get the opposite of what you expect.”
    “As long as it’s just a question of iced tea or lemonade,” he said, “I think I can ride with it.”
    “Well, you’ve always adjusted quickly to new realities,” she said. “It’s one of your strengths.” She cocked her head and looked up at the ceiling. “Speaking of which. You were upstairs, you talked to him. What do you think?”
    “He seemed all right.”
    “His old self ?”
    “Hardly that. But he listened to what I had to say and told me I’d done well. I think he was covering. I think he was clueless as to where I’d been, and he was covering.”
    “He does that a lot lately.”
    “It’s got a real tea flavor, you know? And you don’t boil the water at all?”
    “Not unless you’re in a hurry. Keller?”
    He looked up from his glass of tea. She was sitting on the porch railing, her legs crossed, one flip-flop dangling from her toe.
    She said, “Why both of them? If you do one, we get the final payment from the other one. This way there’s nobody left to sign a check.”
    “He takes checks?”
    “Just a manner of speaking. Point is, there’s nobody left to pay up. It’s not just a case of doing the second one for nothing. It cost you money to do it.”
    “I know.”
    “So explain it to me, will you?”
    He took his time thinking about it. At length he said, “I didn’t like the process.”
    “The process?”
    “Making a choice. There was no way to choose, and tossing a coin didn’t really help. I was still choosing, because I was choosing to accept the coin’s choice, if you can follow me.”
    “The trail is faint,” she said, “but I’m on it like a bloodhound.”
    “I figured they should both get the same,” he said. “So I tossed twice, and got heads the first time and tails the second time, and I made appointments with both of them.”
    “Appointments.”
    “They were both good at setting up secret meetings. Strang told me how to get onto his property from the rear. There was an electric fence, but there was a place you could get over it.”
    “So he gave the fox the keys to the hen house.”
    “There wasn’t any hen house, but there was a toolshed.”
    “And two men went into it that fateful morning and only one came out,” Dot said. “And then you ran off to meet Moncrieff?”
    “At the Omni downtown. He was having lunch at the restaurant, which according to him is pretty good. There’s no men’s room for the restaurant, you use the one off the hotel lobby. So we could meet there without ever having been in the same public space together.”
    “Clever.”
    “They were clever men, both of them. Anyway, it worked fine, same as with Strang. I used. . . well, you don’t like to hear about that part of it.”
    “Not particularly, no.”
    He was silent for a time, sipping his iced tea, listening to the wind chimes when a breeze blew up. They had been still for a while when he said, “I was angry, Dot.”
    “I wondered about that.”
    “You know, I’m better off without that dog.”
    “Nelson.”
    “He was a good dog, and I liked him a lot, but they’re a pain in the ass. Feed them, walk them.”
    “Sure.”
    “I liked her, too, but I’m a man who lived alone all my life. Living alone is what I’m good at.”
    “It’s what you’re used to.”
    “That’s right. But even so, Dot. I’ll walk along the street looking in windows and my eyes’ll hit on a pair of earrings, and I’ll be halfway in the door to buy them for her before I remember there’s no point.”
    “All the earrings you bought for that