by Otto Penzler
“I thought it would be easier than doing it myself,” Garrity said. “I thought I’d just let a professional take me by surprise. I’d be like an old bull elk on a hillside, never expecting the bullet that takes him out in his prime.”
“It makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. Because the elk didn’t arrange for the hunter to be there. Far as the elk knows, he’s all alone there. He’s not wondering every damn day if today’s the day. He’s not bracing himself, trying to sense the crosshairs centering on his shoulder.”
“I never thought of that.”
“Neither did I,” said Garrity. “Or I never would have called that fellow in the first place. Mike, what the hell are you doing here tonight? Don’t tell me you came over to kill me.”
“I came to tell you I can’t.”
“Because we’ve come to know each other.”
Keller nodded.
“I grew up on a farm,” Garrity said. “One of those vanishing family farms you hear about, and of course it’s vanished, and I say good riddance. But we raised our own beef and pork, you know, and we kept a milk cow and a flock of laying hens. And we never named the animals we were going to wind up eating. The milk cow had a name, but not the bull calf she dropped. The breeder sow’s name was Elsie, but we never named her piglets.”
“Makes sense,” Keller said.
“I guess it doesn’t take a Chinaman to see how you can’t kill me once you’ve hauled Timmy out of the drink. Let alone after you’ve sat at my table and smoked my cigars. Reminds me, you care for a cigar?”
“No, thank you.”
“Well, where do we go from here, Mike? I have to say I’m relieved. I feel like I’ve been bracing myself for a bullet for weeks now. All of a sudden I’ve got a new lease on life. I’d say this calls for a drink except we’re already having one, and you’ve scarcely touched yours.”
“There is one thing,” Keller said.
—
He left the den while Garrity made his phone call. Timothy was in the living room, puzzling over a chessboard. Keller played a game with him and lost badly. “Can’t win ’em all,” he said, and tipped over his king.
“I was going to checkmate you,” the boy said. “In a few more moves.”
“I could see it coming,” Keller told him.
He went back to the den. Garrity was selecting a cigar from his humidor. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m fixing to smoke one of these things. If you won’t kill me, maybe it will.”
“You never know.”
“I made the call, Mike, and it’s all taken care of. Be a while before the word filters up and down the chain of command, but sooner or later they’ll call you up and tell you the client changed his mind. He paid in full and called off the job.”
They talked some, then sat a while in silence. At length Keller said he ought to get going. “I should be at my hotel,” he said, “in case they call.”
“Be a couple of days, won’t it?”
“Probably,” he said, “but you never know. If everyone involved makes a phone call right away, the word could get to me in a couple of hours.”
“Calling you off, telling you to come home. Be glad to get home, I bet.”
“It’s nice here,” he said, “but yes, I’ll be glad to get home.”
“Wherever it is, they say there’s no place like it.” Garrity leaned back, then allowed himself to wince at the pain that came over him. “If it never hurts worse than this,” he said, “then I can stand it. But of course it will get worse. And I’ll decide I can stand that, and then it’ll get worse again.”
There was nothing to say to that.
“I guess I’ll know when it’s time to do something,” Garrity said. “And who knows? Maybe my heart’ll cut out on me out of the blue. Or I’ll get hit by a bus, or I don’t know what. Struck by lightning?”
“It could happen.”
“Anything can happen,” Garrity agreed. He got to his feet. “Mike,” he said, “I guess we won’t be seeing any more of each other, and I have to say I’m a little bit sorry about that. I’ve truly enjoyed our time together.”
“So have I, Wally.”
“I wondered, you know, what he’d be like. The man they’d send to do this kind of work. I don’t know what I expected, but you’re not it.”
He stuck out his hand, and Keller gripped it. “Take care,” Garrity said. “Be well, Mike.”
—
Back at his hotel, Keller took a hot bath and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning he went out for breakfast, and when he got back there was a message at the desk for him: Mr. Soderholm—please call your office.
He called from a pay phone, even though it didn’t matter, and he was careful not to overreact when Dot told him to come home, the mission was aborted.
“You told me I had all the time in the world,” he said. “If I’d known the guy was in such a rush—”
“Keller,” she said, “it’s a good thing you waited. What he did, he changed his mind.”
“He changed his mind?”
“It used to be a woman’s prerogative,” Dot said, “but now we’ve got equality between the sexes, so that means anyone can do it. It works out fine because we’re getting paid in full. So kick the dust of Texas off your feet and come on home.”
“I’ll do that,” he said, “but I may hang out here for a few more days.”
“Oh?”
“Or even a week,” he said. “It’s a pretty nice town.”
“Don’t tell me you’re itching to move there, Keller. We’ve been through this before.”
“Nothing like that,” he said, “but there’s this girl I met.”
“Oh, Keller.”
“Well, she’s nice,” he said. “And if I’m off the job there’s no reason not to have a date or two with her, is there?”
“As long as you don’t decide to move in.”
“She’s not that nice,” he said, and Dot laughed and told him not to change.
He hung up and drove around and found a movie he’d been meaning to see. The next morning he packed and checked out of his hotel.
He drove across town and got a room on the motel strip, paying cash for four nights in advance and registering as J. D. Smith from Los Angeles.
There was no girl he’d met, no girl he wanted to meet. But it wasn’t time to go home yet.
He had unfinished business, and four days should give him time to do it. Time for Wallace Garrity to get used to the idea of not feeling those imaginary crosshairs on his shoulder blades.
But not so much time that the pain would be too much to bear.
And, sometime in those four days, Keller would give him a gift. If he could, he’d make it look natural—a heart attack, say, or an accident. In any event it would be swift and without warning, and as close as he could make it to painless.
And it would be unexpected. Garrity would never see it coming.
Keller frowned, trying to figure out how he would manage it. It would be a lot trickier than the task that had drawn him to town originally, but he’d brought it on himself. Getting involved, fishing the boy out of the pool. He’d interfered with the natural order of things. He was under an obligation.
It was the least he could do.
Rogue: An Unnamed Paris Street Urchin
Boudin Noir
R. T. LAWTON
AFTER WORKING AS AN UNDERCOVER AGENT for the DEA for twenty-five years, Robert Thomas Lawton (1943– ) devoted himself to writing mystery short stories in five different series, producing more than a hundred tales for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Easyriders, Outlaw Biker, and other magazines and anthologies.
One series of historical mysteries features an Armenian trader who solves crimes set in a dangerous region of tsarist Russia, one is set in the France of Louis the XIV with the despicable leader (self-proclaimed “king”) of the criminal underworld of Paris, and another sequence of stories features the Twin Brothers Bail Bond firm, which accepts
only special clients who must put up very high-value collateral that may not be entirely legal. Oddly, its clients seem unusually accident prone and seldom claim their goods.
On his use of initials for his byline, the author tells this story: “Being named after both grandfathers, the R. stands for Robert and the T. stands for Thomas. I started going by my initials decades ago while working with state and local drug task forces and every outfit had their own radio call numbers which was too confusing, so we used first names for radio call signs. But we had too many Roberts and Bobs. The case agent would come on the radio to say the bad guy was leaving the house and for Bob to follow him. At that point, all the surveillance cars would leave. So, I became R.T.”
“Boudin Noir” was first published in the December 2009 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
BOUDIN NOIR
R. T. Lawton
I HAD LOVED Josette ever since she first showed me how to pick a fat merchant’s pocket on the busy streets of Paris. And no doubt she would have loved me in return, had it not been for that damned Chevalier, the one we called Remy. He was a thief, a trickster, and a well dressed popinjay, who had no right to deprive me of her affections. No matter that she was nineteen at the time, and I a mere several years younger. Someday, I swore, I would make an end to Remy for having robbed me of my dreams. I would find a way to turn the tables on this fallen son of nobility and see how he liked it. Then my sleep would be much more at ease. Or at least without his constant interruptions.
“Boy, you’re wanted.”
Ah, that voice again. The very devil himself calls me from my slumbers. No doubt he has new torments to inflict upon my young life. I thought to pretend sleep longer, but that never seemed to work. Better to answer and get it over with.
“Leave me alone. It’s barely morning.”
“Morning? The sun’s past midday. Get up.”
I soon felt the toe of Remy’s leather boot prodding through a ragged hole in my shirt, nudging several of my bare ribs as he continued with his tirade.
“King Jules requests your presence.”
King Jules, he says, as if this second devil in my life were the anointed ruler of France and all its holdings. Even the least of us knew this so-called king was nothing more than a base-born tyrant who had seen fit to crown himself with a lofty title. At most, he ruled our motley underworld of thieves, beggars, counterfeiters, and trollops, and did it through fear of his personal wrath. That, and his grim bodyguard of muggers and dark-faced assassins used to enforce his every dictate. All souls within his grasp paid tithes out of their hard earned coins that each managed, by one means or another, to separate from the unwary citizens of Paris. It seemed the compass of Jules’s fiefdom stretched from the old Roman ruins atop the Buttes Chaumont down to the River Seine, on across the bridges and deep into the shadowed backstreets of Paris. Even so, Jules was no king of royal blood like our young Louis the XIV, our Roi Soleil, our true Sun King.
To avoid another nudge in the ribs, I opened one eye and glared at Remy, but my tormentor was not one to be put off that easily.
“What, I wonder,” he mused aloud, “could Jules possibly want with an orphan pickpocket? Especially one who is so…”
“I pay my share at tithing time,” I quickly interrupted, “just like all the rest.”
“…so incompetent,” he finished. “One who barely graduated from Mother Margaux’s School for Orphan Pickpockets. I suspect that Mother threw you out rather than suffer further embarrassment from your lack of talent.”
“I can pick a pocket as well as any other.”
The Chevalier rubbed his chin. “The fact that you believe so troubles me.”
He shook his head slowly, then stepped out through the open doorway of our hovel, a simple structure consisting of nothing more than three remnant walls of a small storeroom in one of the villa’s outbuildings. A scrap of oiled canvas stretched overhead served to keep out rain and some of the wind. Just beyond the rubble doorway, the Chevalier paused long enough to give parting words.
“Tarry at your own peril, boy. Jules does not brook delays of his grandiose schemes, and it seems you are to have some involvement in his latest one.” Then he turned and started off.
“I’m not afraid of Jules,” I retorted as I threw a rock at the Chevalier’s back, but that meddling popinjay was already beyond my range. He had no idea how lucky he was. Bah, enough of him.
Now that I was fully awake, with no chance of returning to sleep, hunger pains gnawed at my belly. Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I scrounged through a leather pouch kept tied at my waist. Tucked somewhere in this bag, among all the other small objects of value to me, was a wrapped length of blood sausage recently liberated from a common laborer who had obviously intended it as part of yesterday’s noon meal. Had the man been more vigilant of his possessions, no doubt it would still be his. Of course, in thinking back on the incident, the lingering scent on the man’s lunch basket should have warned me that my victim spent his days toiling in the endless sewers of Paris. I had been better served to have found a victim with a less fragrant job and a more decent lunch.
Preparing now to break my morning fast, I almost bit deeply into this meat delicacy when its slightly off aroma tickled my nostrils. I held the sausage closer to my nose and sniffed. That one quick whiff warned I had waited too long in this autumn heat. The meat was slowly turning. Still, I was hungry and my next meal could be a ways off. I sniffed again. No, not good at all. My appetite fled. Wrapping the blood sausage back in its scrap of cloth, I returned the package to my leather pouch. If nothing else, I’d find a way to slip the tainted sausage into the Chevalier’s evening soup and let him be sick for a couple of days. It would serve him right for all the trouble he dealt me.
Still scheming on ways to even the score against Remy, I made my way to the enclosed yard where Jules usually held his private court. And there his majesty lounged upon his throne, a high-backed wooden chair that had seen grander times. Its cushioned seat of once-rich fabric was now threadbare and faded. Stuffing poked awkwardly out of rents in the cloth. Yet, Jules sat with his left leg resting over one arm of this declining chair as if the whole world were his. A wine goblet dangled from the fingers of his right hand.
“I am here as requested,” I blurted out with small attempt to restrain my sarcasm. My resulting bow was much exaggerated.
Jules’s eyes went narrow. He appeared to study me closely. I feared I’d gone too far this time, but then his face gradually creased in a smile, and I assumed I was safe after all. I grinned back.
“It was good of you to come so quickly,” said Jules. “I have a very important job for you.”
An important job. Ah yes, if no one else, Jules had a true appreciation for my light-finger talents.
“What would you have me do?”
Jules motioned me closer and lowered his voice. “I have it on good notice that the Abbess of the Benedictine Convent currently has a purse of gold coins in her possession.”
“I see,” I replied, but I really had no idea as to what he had in mind, other than he desired to somehow separate the Abbess from her gold and I was to play a part in this separation.
“The Abbess,” he continued, “has business matters to attend in the city. As such, she will walk along a certain street this afternoon. In doing so, she is always careful to let few men, other than the Monastery Door Keeper, get close to her person.”
Jules paused and appeared to have a weighty decision working on his mind. “What I need is a young boy, someone with a look of innocence, but one who has the proper skills to relieve her of her purse.” He spread his hands as if to embrace me. “Without her knowledge, of course.”
There came a long moment of silence between us. His eyes gazed into mine with a look of expectancy.
Oh.
Suddenly I realized this was my chance to prove myself to all in our little community. I moved quickly into the void. “I will not fail you.”
“I know you won’t fail me,” he replied, “and as your payment for this job, you may keep one fourth of all you acquire from the Abbess.”
“One half is a better amount,” I bargained.
Jules raised his right hand, palm forward, and curled his fingers. Immediately Sallambier, a hulk of a man, appeared out of a nearby nook and stepped to the right of Jules’s throne. The hulk’s mangled nose had the appearance of having once collided with the sharp edge of a paving brick. It was said that Sallambier had afterward lost his sense of smell. No matter to me, he was merely one more of King Jules’s killers. I had no business with this man.
“One third to you for your services,” concluded Jules as he watched for my reaction, “and no more.”
Standing silently at Jules’s side, Sallambier removed a long knife from the leather belt at his waist, using its pitted blade to slice chunks off a large red apple held in his other hand, and then stuffing those chunks into his maw of a mouth. No emotions showed on his pockmarked face, but his eyes seemed to linger on the vicinity of my bare throat.
Ha. The meaning of that look came quite clear to me. Even I knew that further bargaining on my part was obviously at an end.
“Done,” I said, figuring I had already gotten more than I had hoped for when the day began.
“We are agreed then. Sallambier will take you to a place of advantage along the Abbess’s route. All you need do is acquire her purse and bring it to me.”
“And then we’ll divide the coins?”
“Of course.”
I waited to see if there was more, but my audience with King Jules was evidently over. Although I did notice him occasionally wrinkling his nose and glancing about as if something faint were in the wind.