Hit Man

week and a half after he’d flown to Seattle, when Keller flew home. This time he had to change planes in Chicago, and it was late by the time he got to his apartment. He’d already called White Plains the night before to tell them the job was done. He unpacked his bag, shucked his clothes, took a hot shower, and fell into bed.
    The following afternoon the phone rang.
    “No names, no pack drill,” said Bascomb. “I just wanted to say Well done. ”
    “Oh,” Keller said.
    “Not our usual thing,” Bascomb went on, “but even a seasoned professional can use the occasional pat on the back. You’ve done fine work, and you ought to know it’s appreciated.”
    “That’s nice to hear,” Keller admitted.
    “And I’m not just speaking for myself. Your efforts are appreciated on a much higher level.”
    “Really?”
    “On the highest level, actually.”
    “The highest level?”
    “No names, no pack drill,” Bascomb said again, “but let’s just say you’ve earned the profound gratitude of a man who never inhaled.”
    He called White Plains and told Dot he was bushed. “I’ll come out tomorrow around lunchtime,” he said. “How’s that?”
    “Oh, goody,” she said. “I’ll make sandwiches, Keller. We’ll have a picnic.”
    He got off the phone and couldn’t think what to do with himself. On a whim he took the subway to the Bronx and spent a few hours at the zoo. He hadn’t been to a zoo in years, long enough for him to have forgotten that they always made him sad.
    It still worked that way, and he couldn’t say why. It’s not that it bothered him to see animals caged. From what he understood, they led a better life in captivity than they did in the wild. They lived longer and stayed healthier. They didn’t have to spend half their time trying to get enough food and the other half trying to keep from being food for somebody else. It was tempting to look at them and conclude that they were bored, but he didn’t believe it. They didn’t look bored to him.
    He left unaccountably sad as always and returned to Manhattan. He ate at a new Afghan restaurant and went to a movie. It was a western, but not the sort of Hollywood classic he would have preferred. Even after the movie was over, you couldn’t really tell which ones were the good guys.
    Next day Keller caught an early train to White Plains and spent forty minutes upstairs with the old man. When he came downstairs Dot told him there was fresh coffee made, or iced tea.
    He went for the coffee. She already had a tall glass of iced tea poured for herself. They sat at the kitchen table and she asked him how it had gone in Seattle. He said it went okay.
    “And how’d you like Seattle, Keller? From what I hear it’s everybody’s city du jour these days. Used to be San Francisco and now it’s Seattle.”
    “It was fine,” he said.
    “Get the urge to move there?”
    He had found himself wondering what it might be like, living in one of those converted industrial buildings around Pioneer Square, say, and shopping for groceries at Pike Market, and judging the quality of the weather by the relative visibility of Mount Rainier. But he never went anywhere without having thoughts along those lines. That didn’t mean he was ready to pull up stakes and move.
    “Not really,” he said.
    “I understand it’s a great place for a cup of coffee.”
    “They’re serious about their coffee,” he allowed. “Maybe too serious. Wine snobs are bad enough, but when all it is is coffee. . . ”
    “How’s that coffee, by the way?”
    “It’s fine.”
    “I bet it can’t hold a candle to the stuff in Seattle,” she said. “But the weather’s lousy there. Rains all the time, the way I hear it.”
    “There’s a lot of rain,” he said. “But it’s gentle. It doesn’t bowl you over.”
    “It rains but it never pours?”
    “Something like that.”
    “I guess the rain got to you, huh?”
    “How’s that?”
    “Rain, day after day. And all that coffee snobbery. You couldn’t stand it.”
    Huh? “It didn’t bother me,” he said.
    “No?”
    “Not really. Why?”
    “Well, I was wondering,” she said, looking at him over the brim of her glass. “I was wondering what the hell you were doing in Denver.”
    The TV was on with the sound off, tuned to one of the home shopping channels. A woman with unconvincing red hair was modeling a dress. Keller thought it looked dowdy, but the number in the lower right corner kept advancing, indicating