Hit Man

that viewers were calling in a steady stream to order the item.
    “Of course I could probably guess what you were doing in Denver,” Dot was saying, “and I could probably come up with the name of the person you were doing it to. I got somebody to send me a couple of issues of the Denver Post, and what did I find but a story about a woman in someplace called Aurora who came to a bad end, and I swear the whole thing had your fingerprints all over it. Don’t look so alarmed, Keller. Not your actual fingerprints. I was speaking figuratively.”
    “Figuratively,” he said.
    “It did look like your work,” she said, “and the timing was right. I’d say it might have lacked a little of your usual subtlety, but I figure that’s because you were in a big hurry to get back to Seattle.” He pointed at the television set. He said, “Do you believe how many of those dresses they’ve sold?”
    “Tons.”
    “Would you buy a dress like that?”
    “Not in a million years. I’d look like a sack of potatoes in something cut like that.”
    “I mean any dress. Over the phone, without trying it on.”
    “I buy from catalogs all the time, Keller. It amounts to the same thing. If it doesn’t look right you can always send it back.”
    “Do you ever do that? Send stuff back?”
    “Sure.”
    “He doesn’t know, does he, Dot? About Denver?”
    “No.”
    He nodded, hesitated, then leaned forward. “Dot,” he said, “can you keep a secret?”
    She listened while he told her the whole thing, from Bascomb’s first appearance in the coffee shop to the most recent phone call, relaying the good wishes of the man who never inhaled. When he was done he got up and poured himself more coffee. He came back and sat down and Dot said, “You know what gets me? ‘Dot, can you keep a secret?’ Can I keep a secret?”
    “Well, I—”
    “If I can’t,” she said, “then we’re all in big trouble. Keller, I’ve been keeping your secrets just about as long as you’ve had secrets to keep. And you’re asking me—”
    “I wasn’t exactly asking you. What do they call it when you don’t really expect an answer?”
    “Prayer,” she said.
    “Rhetorical,” he said. “It was a rhetorical question. For God’s sake, I know you can keep a secret.”
    “That’s why you kept this one from me,” she said. “For lo these many months.”
    “Well, I figured this was different.”
    “Because it was a state secret.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Hush-hush, your eyes only, need-to-know basis. Matters of national security.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And what if I turned out to be a Commie rat?”
    “Dot—”
    “So how come I all of a sudden got a top-secret clearance? Or is it need-to-know? In other words, if I hadn’t brought up Denver. . . ”
    “No,” he said. “I was planning on telling you anyway.”
    “Sooner or later, you mean.”
    “Sooner. When I called yesterday and said I wanted to wait until today to come up, I was buying a little time to think it over.”
    “And?”
    “And I decided I wanted to run the whole thing by you, and see what you think.”
    “What I think.”
    “Right.”
    “Well, you know what that tells me, Keller? It tells me what you think.”
    “And?”
    “And I think it’s about the same thing that I think.”
    “Spell it out, okay?”
    “C-O-N,” she said. “J-O-B. Total B-U-L-L-S-H—am I getting through?”
    “Loud and clear.”
    “He must be pretty slick,” she said, “to have a guy like you jumping through hoops. But I can see how it would work. First place, you want to believe it. ‘Young man, your country has need of you.’ Next thing you know, you’re knocking off strangers for chump change.”
    “Expense money. It never covered the expenses, except the first time.”
    “The patent lawyer, caught in his own mousetrap. What do you figure he did to piss Bascomb off?”
    “No idea.”
    “And the old fart in the wheelchair. It’s a good thing you iced the son of a bitch, Keller, or our children and our children’s children would grow up speaking Russian.”
    “Don’t rub it in.”
    “I’m just making you pay for that rhetorical question. All said and done, do you think there’s a chance in a million Bascomb’s on the level?”
    He made himself think it over, but the answer wasn’t going to change. “No,” he said.
    “What was the tip-off? The approval from on high?”
    “I guess so. You know, I got a hell of a rush.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “I mean, the