Hit List

by Lawrence Block

  “And overseas as well, for all I know. I wrapped his hand around it and stuck the business end in his mouth.”

  “And squeezed off a round.”

  “No,” he said, “because who knows how far the sound is going to carry?”

  “ ‘Hark, I hear the cannon’s roar.’ “

  “And suppose one bullet doesn’t do it? It’s a small calibre, it’s not going to splatter his brains all over the roof liner.”

  “And I guess it’s a pretty severe case of suicide if the guy has to shoot himself twice. Although you could argue that it shows determination.”

  “I stayed with what I’d worked up while I was waiting for him to come home. I had a length of garden hose already cut, and I taped one end to the exhaust pipe and stuck the other end in the car window.”

  “And started the engine.”

  “I had to do that to get the window down. Anyway, I left him there, in a closed garage with the engine running.”

  “And got the hell out.”

  “Not right away,” he said. “Suppose somebody heard him drive in? They might come out to check. Or suppose he came to before the carbon monoxide level built up enough to keep him under?”

  “Or suppose the engine stalled.”

  “Also a possibility. I waited by the side of the car, and then I started to worry about how much exhaust I was breathing myself.”

  “ ‘Two Men Gassed in Suicide Pact.’ “

  “So I let myself out the side door and stood there for ten minutes. I don’t know what I would have done if I heard the engine cut out.”

  “Gone in and fixed it.”

  “Which is fine if it stalled, but suppose he came to and turned it off himself? And I rush in, and he’s sitting there with a gun in his hand?”

  “You left him the gun?”

  “Left it in his hand, and his hand in his lap. Like he was ready to shoot himself if the gas didn’t work, or if he got up the nerve.”

  “Cute.”

  “Well, they gave me the gun. I had to do something with it.”

  “Chekhov,” she said.

  “Check off what?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Anton Chekhov, Keller. The Russian writer. I’ll bet you anything he’s got his picture on a stamp.”

  “I know who he is,” he said. “I just misheard you, because I didn’t know we were having a literary discussion. He was a physician as well as a writer, and he wrote plays and short stories. What about him?”

  “He said if you show a gun in Act One, you’d better have it go off before the final curtain.” She frowned. “At least I think it was Chekhov. Maybe it was somebody else.”

  “Well, it didn’t go off,” he said, “but at least I found a use for it. He had it in his hand with his finger on the trigger, and he had a round in the chamber, and if they happen to look they’ll find traces of gun oil on his lips.”

  “Now that’s a nice touch.”

  “It’s great,” he agreed, “as long as there’s a body to examine, but what if he wakes up? He realizes he’s got a gun in his hand, and he looks up, and there I am.” He shrugged. “As jumpy as I was, I didn’t have a lot of trouble imagining it that way. But it didn’t happen.”

  “You checked him and he was nice and dead.”

  “I didn’t check. I gave him ten minutes with the engine running, and I figured that was enough. The engine wasn’t going to stall and he wasn’t going to wake up.”

  “And he evidently didn’t,” she said, motioning at the money. “And everybody’s happy.” She cocked her head. “Wouldn’t there be marks on his neck from the choke hold?”

  “Maybe. Would they even notice? He’s in a car, he’s got a hose hooked up, he’s holding a gun, his bloodstream’s bubbling over with carbon monoxide . . .”

  “If I found marks on his neck, Keller, I’d just figure he tried to hang himself earlier.”

  “Or choke himself to death with his own hands.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Maybe for an advanced student of the martial arts.”

  “Ninja roulette,” she said.

  He said, “That guy I talked to, thought he was talking to Inside Edition? I asked if there were any other colorful murders in town.”

  “Something worthy of national coverage.”

  “He told me more than I needed to know about some cocaine dealer who got gunned down a few days before I got to town, and about some poor sonofabitch who killed his terminally ill wife, called it in to 911, then shot himself before the cops could get there.”

  “Never a dull moment in Louisville.”

  “He didn’t even mention Hirschhorn. So I guess it’s going in the books as a suicide.”

  “Fine with me,” she said, “and the client’s happy, and we got paid, so I’m happy. And the business at the Super Duper wasn’t an attempt on your life . . .”

  “The Super 8.”

  “Whatever. It was a couple of cheaters suffering divine retribution.”

  “Or bad luck.”

  “Aren’t they the same thing? But here’s my question. Everybody else is happy. Why not you, Keller?”

  “I’m happy enough.”

  “Yeah, I’ve never seen anybody happier. What did it, the pictures of the kids? And the dog?”

  He shook his head. “Once it’s done,” he said, “what’s the difference? It just gets in your way while you’re doing it, but when it’s over, well, dead is dead.”

  “Right.”

  “One reason I didn’t shoot was I didn’t want them walking in on a mess, but it’s the same shock either way, isn’t it? And don’t people blame themselves when there’s a suicide? ‘How could he have felt that bad and not let on?’ “

  “And so on.”

  “But none of that’s important. The important thing is to get it done and get away clean.”

  “And you did, and that’s why you’re so happy.”

  “You know what it is, Dot? I knew something was wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I sensed something. I had a feeling. When I get off the plane, when I can’t read the first sign, when I go through a song and dance with the moron who meets me. And later on some drunk turns up at my door and I grab the gun and I’m ready to start blasting away through the door. And it’s just some poor slob who can’t find the right room. He staggers off and never comes back, and I have to lie down and wait for my heart to quit doing the tango.”

  “And then the bikers.”

  “And then the bikers, and toilet paper in my ears, and the kids with the basketball. Everything was out of synch, and it felt worse than that, it felt dangerous.”

  “Like you were in danger?”

  “Uh-huh. But I wasn’t. It was the room.”

  “The room?”

  “Room One forty-seven. Something bad was scheduled to take place there. And I sensed it.”

  She gave him a look.

  “Dot, I know how it sounds.”

  “You don’t,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have said it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it to anybody but you. Remember that girl I was seeing a while ago?”

  “As far as I know, you haven’t been seeing anybody since Andria.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “The dog walker, the one with all the earrings.”

  “She used to talk about karma,” he said, “and energy, and vibrations, and things like that. I didn’t always understand what she was saying.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “But I think sometimes a person senses things.”

  “And you sensed something was wrong.”

  “And that something was going to happen.”

  “Keller, something always happens.”

  “Something violent.”

  “When you take a business trip,” she said, “something violent is par for the course.”

  “You know what I mean, Dot.”

  “You had a premonition.”

 
; “I guess that’s what it was.”

  “You checked into a room and just got the feeling that somebody was going to get killed there.”

  “Not exactly, because the room felt fine to me.”

  “So?”

  He looked away for a moment. “I went over all this in my mind,” he said. “Last night, and again coming up here on the train today. And it made sense, but now it’s not coming out right.”

  “That’s what they call a reality check, Keller. Keep going.”

  “I sensed something bad coming,” he said, “and I was somehow drawn to the place where it was going to happen.”

  “Like a moth to a flame.”

  “I picked the motel, Dot. I looked at the map, I said here’s where I am, here’s where he lives, here’s the airport, here’s the interstate, and there ought to be a motel right here. And I drove right to it and there it was and I asked for a ground-floor room in the rear. I asked for it!”

  “ ‘Give me the death room,’ you said. ‘I’m a man. I can take it.’ “

  “And I panicked when the drunk came knocking, because I knew I was in a dangerous place, even if I didn’t know I knew it. That’s why I grabbed the gun, that’s why I reacted the way I did.”

  “But it was only a drunk.”

  “It was a warning.”

  “A warning?”

  He drew a breath. “Maybe it was just a drunk looking for Ralph,” he said, “and maybe it was someone sent to get my attention.”

  “Sent,” she said.

  “I know it sounds crazy.”

  “Sent, like an angel?”

  “Dot, I’m not sure I even believe in angels.”

  “How can you not believe in them? They’re on television where everybody can see them. My favorite’s the young one with the bad Irish accent. Though she’s probably not as young as she looks. She’s probably a thousand years old.”

  “Dot . . .”

  “Or whatever that comes to in dog years. You don’t believe in angels? What about the bikers partying upstairs? Angels from Hell, Keller. Pure and simple.”

  “Simple,” he said, “but probably not pure. But that’s the whole thing, that’s why they were there.”

  “So that you would change your room.”

  “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

  “And you changed your room first thing in the morning.”

  “To one in front,” he said. “On the second floor.”

  “Out of harm’s way. And later on who came along but two people out of a bad country song, and what room did they get?” She hummed the opening bars of the Dragnet theme. “Dum-de-dum-dum. Dum-de-dum-dum-dah! One forty-seven! The death room!”

  “All I know,” he said doggedly, “is a couple of hours later they were dead.”

  “While you lived to bear witness.”

  “I guess it really does sound weird, doesn’t it?”

  “Weirder than weird.”

  “It made sense on the train.”

  “Well, that’s trains for you.”

  “What you said earlier, about a reality check?”

  “You want my take on it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Now you have to bear in mind that I don’t know squat about karma or angels or any of that Twilight Zone stuff. You got a bad feeling when the pickup at the airport came off a little raggedy-ass, and then the guy they sent to meet you turned out to be a turkey. And seeing the family photo didn’t help, either.”

  “I already said all that.”

  “Then the drunk knocked on your door, and you were edgy to begin with, and you reacted the way you did. And your own reaction made you edgier than ever.”

  “Exactly how it was.”

  “But all he was,” she said, “was a drunk knocking on doors. He probably knocked on every door he came to until he found Ralph. You don’t need angel’s wings to do that.”

  “Go on.”

  “The noisy party upstairs? Bikers aren’t exactly famous for their silent vigils. A motel’s dumb enough to rent to people like that, they’re going to have some loud parties. Somebody’s got to be downstairs from them, and this time it was you, and as soon as you could you got your room changed.”

  “But if I hadn’t—“

  “If you hadn’t,” she said, patiently but firmly, “then the loving couple would have wound up in some other room when they decided they couldn’t keep their hands off each other another minute. Not One forty-seven but, oh, I don’t know. Say Two oh eight.”

  “But then when the husband turned up—“

  “He’d have gone to Two oh eight, Keller, because that’s where they were. He was looking for them, not whatever damn fool happened to be in One forty-seven. He followed them to their room and wreaked his horrible revenge, and it had nothing to do with what room they were in and even less to do with you.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “That’s your take on it? ‘Oh?’ “

  “I had this whole elaborate theory,” he said, “and it was all crap, wasn’t it?”

  “It was certainly out there on the crap side of the spectrum.”

  “But you thought it was a coincidence. That was your first thought.”

  “No, my first thought was it couldn’t be a coincidence. That it was the client, or somebody the client sent.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No, because the client’s satisfied, and he couldn’t have found you even if he wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean it had to be angels. What it means is it really was a coincidence after all.”

  “Oh.”

  “And it was a coincidence for everybody in the motel, Keller, not just you. They were all there while the couple in One forty-seven was getting killed.”

  “But they hadn’t just checked out of the room.”

  “So? That means they had an even narrower escape. They might have checked into One forty-seven. But you couldn’t do that, because you’d already checked out of it.”

  He wasn’t sure he followed that, but he let it go. “I guess it was a coincidence,” he said.

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

  “But I sensed something. I knew something was going to happen.”

  “And it did,” she said. “To Mr. Hirschhorn, may he rest in peace. Go home, Keller. Those stamps you bought? Go paste them in your album. What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”

  “You don’t paste them,” he said. “You use hinges.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  “Or mounts, sometimes you use mounts.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “I already mounted them. Last night. I was up until three in the morning.”

  “Well, isn’t that a coincidence? You’re all done mounting your stamps, and you coincidentally just came into some money.” She beamed at him. “That means you can go buy some more.”

  Five

  * * *

  Keller speared a cube of cheese with a toothpick, helped himself to a glass of dry white wine. To his left, two young women clad entirely in black were chatting. “I can’t believe he really said that,” one announced. “I mean, just because you’re postmodern doesn’t mean you absolutely have to be an asshole.”

  “Chad would be just as big an asshole if he was a Dadaist,” the other replied. “He could be a Pre-Raphaelite, and you know what he’d be? He’d be a Pre-Raphaelite asshole.”

  “I know,” the first one said. “But I still can’t believe he said that.”

  They wandered off, leaving Keller to wonder who Chad was (aside from being an asshole) and what he’d said that was so hard to believe. If Chad had said it to him, he thought, he probably wouldn’t have understood it. He hadn’t understood most of the words the two women used, and he hadn’t understood anything of what Declan Niswander himself had had to say about the paintings on display.

  The show’s brochure contained photographs of several of the works, along with a brief biography of the
artist, a chronological listing of his one-man and group shows, and another list of the museums and private collections in which he was represented. The last two pages were given over to Niswander’s own explanation of what he’d been trying to do, and Keller knew what most of the words meant, but he couldn’t make head or tail out of the sentences. The man didn’t seem to be writing about art at all, but about philosophical determinism and the evanescence of imagery and casuistry as a transcendent phenomenon. Words Keller recognized, every one of them, but what were they doing all jumbled together like that?

  The paintings, on the other hand, weren’t at all hard to understand. Unless there was something to them that he wasn’t getting, something that the two pages in the brochure might clarify for someone who spoke the language. That was possible, because Keller didn’t feel he himself understood art in a particularly profound way.

  He hardly ever went to galleries, and only once before had he attended an opening. That had been a few years back, when he went to one in SoHo with a woman he’d seen a couple of times. The opening was her idea. The artist was an old friend of hers—an ex-lover, Keller figured—and she hadn’t wanted to show up unescorted. Keller had been introduced to the artist, a scruffy guy with a potbelly, whose paintings were drab and murky seas of brown and olive drab. He hadn’t wanted to say as much to the artist, and didn’t know what you were supposed to say, so he’d just smiled and kept his mouth shut. He figured that got you through most situations.

  He tried the wine. It wasn’t very good, and it reminded him of the wine they’d served at that other opening. Maybe bad wine was part of the mystique, bad wine and rubbery cheese and people dressed in black. Black jeans, black T-shirts, black chinos, black turtlenecks and sweatshirts, and the occasional black sport jacket. Here and there a black beret.

  Not everyone was wearing black. Keller had shown up in a suit and tie, and he wasn’t the only one. There was a variety of other attire, including a few women in dresses and a young man in white overalls spattered with paint. But there was, on balance, a great deal of black, and it was the men and women in black who looked most at home here.

  Maybe there was a good reason for it. Maybe you wore black to an art gallery for the same reason you turned off your pager at a concert, so as to avoid distracting others from what had brought them there. That made a kind of sense, but Keller had the feeling there was more to it than that. He somehow knew that these people wore black all the time, even when they gathered in dimly lit coffeehouses with nothing on the walls but exposed brick. It was a statement, he knew, even if he wasn’t sure what was being stated.