Hit Man

himself wondering why they didn’t deputize someone to shoot the son of a bitch in the back of the neck, right below his star-covered helmet.
    Still, it was better than watching golf, say, which in turn had to be better than playing golf. And he couldn’t get out and work, because there was nothing for him to do. Last night’s reconnaissance mission had been both better and worse than he could have hoped, and what was he supposed to do now, park his rented Ford across the street from the Garrity mansion and clock the comings and goings?
    No need for that. He could bide his time, just so he got there in time for Sunday dinner.
    “Some more potatoes, Mr. Soderholm?”
    “They’re delicious,” Keller said. “But I’m full. Really.”
    “And we can’t keep calling you Mr. Soderholm,” Garrity said. “I’ve only held off this long for not knowing whether you prefer Mike or Michael.”
    “Mike’s fine,” Keller said.
    “Then Mike it is. And I’m Wally, Mike, or W.P., though there are those who call me ‘The Walrus.’ ” Timmy laughed, and clapped both hands over his mouth.
    “Though never to his face,” said the woman who’d offered Keller more potatoes. She was Ellen Garrity, Timmy’s aunt and Garrity’s daughter-in-law, and Keller was now instructed to call her Ellie. Her husband, a big-shouldered fellow who seemed to be smiling bravely through the heartbreak of male-pattern baldness, was Garrity’s son Hank.
    Keller remembered Timothy’s mother from the night before, but hadn’t got her name at the time, or her relationship to Garrity. She was Rhonda Sue Butler, as it turned out, and everybody called her Rhonda Sue, except for her husband, who called her Ronnie. His name was Doak Butler, and he looked like a college jock who’d been too light for pro ball, although he now seemed to be closing the gap.
    Hank and Ellie, Doak and Rhonda Sue. And, at the far end of the table, Vanessa, who was married to Wally but who was clearly not the mother of Hank or Rhonda Sue, or anyone else. Keller supposed you could describe her as Wally’s trophy wife, a sign of his success. She was young, no older than Wally’s kids, and she looked to be well bred and elegant, and she even had the good grace to hide the boredom Keller was sure she felt.
    And that was the lot of them. Wally and Vanessa, Hank and Ellen, Doak and Rhonda Sue. And Timothy, who he was assured had been swimming that very afternoon, the aquatic equivalent of getting right back on the horse. He’d had no cramps this time, but he’d had an attentive eye kept on him throughout.
    Seven of them, then. And Keller . . . also known as Mike.
    “So you’re here on business,” Wally said. “And stuck here over the weekend, which is the worst part of a business trip, as far as I’m concerned. More trouble than it’s worth to fly back to Chicago?”
    The two of them were in Wally’s den, a fine room paneled in knotty pecan and trimmed out in red leather, with western doodads on the walls—here a branding iron, there a longhorn skull. Keller had accepted a brandy and declined a cigar, and the aroma of Wally’s Havana was giving him second thoughts. Keller didn’t smoke, but from the smell of it the cigar wasn’t a mere matter of smoking. It was more along the lines of a religious experience.
    “Seemed that way,” Keller said. He’d supplied Chicago as Michael Soderholm’s home base, though Soderholm’s license placed him in Southern California. “By the time I fly there and back. . . ”
    “You’ve spent your weekend on airplanes. Well, it’s our good fortune you decided to stay. Now what I’d like to do is find a way to make it your good fortune as well.”
    “You’ve already done that,” Keller told him. “I crashed a great party last night and actually got to feel like a hero for a few minutes. And tonight I sit down to a fine dinner with nice people and get to top it off with a glass of outstanding brandy.”
    The heartburn told him how outstanding it was.
    “What I had in mind,” Wally said smoothly, “was to get you to work for me.”
    Whom did he want him to kill? Keller almost blurted out the question until he remembered that Garrity didn’t know what he did for a living.
    “You won’t say who you work for,” Garrity went on.
    “I can’t.”
    “Because the job’s hush-hush for now. Well, I can respect that, and from the hints you’ve dropped I gather you’re here scouting out something in the way of