Hit Man

by Lawrence Block

  The keys fit a white Chevy Caprice. Cruising north on the interstate, Keller decided he liked everything about the car but its name. There was nothing capricious about his mission. Riding a thousand miles to kill a man you hadn’t met was not something one undertook on a whim.

  Ideally, he thought, he’d be bouncing along on a rutted two-lane blacktop in a Mustang, say, or maybe a Bronco. Even a Pinto sounded like a better match for a rawboned, leathery desperado like Dale Whitlock than a Caprice.

  It was comfortable, though, and he liked the way it handled. And the color was okay. But forget white. As far as he was concerned, the car was a palomino.

  It took about an hour to drive to Martingale, a town of around ten thousand midway between Casper and Sheridan on I–25. Just looking around, you knew right away that you’d left the East Coast far behind. Mountains in the distance, a great expanse of sky overhead. And, right in front of you, frame buildings that could have been false fronts in a Randolph Scott film. A feed store, a western wear emporium, a rundown hotel where you’d expect to find Wild Bill Hickok holding aces and eights at a table in the saloon, or Doc Holliday coughing his lungs out in a bedroom on the second floor.

  Of course there were also a couple of supermarkets and gas stations, a two-screen movie house and a Toyota dealership, a Pizza Hut and a Taco John’s, so it wasn’t too hard to keep track of what century you were in. He saw a man walk out of the Taco John’s looking a lot like the young Randolph Scott, from his boots to his Stetson, but he spoiled the illusion by climbing into a pickup truck.

  The hotel that inspired Hickok-Holliday fantasies was the Martingale, located right in the center of things on the wide main street. Keller imagined himself walking in, slapping a credit card on the counter. Then the desk clerk—Henry Jones always played him in the movie—would say that they didn’t take plastic. “Or p-p-paper either,” he’d say, eyes darting, looking for a place to duck when the shooting started.

  And Keller would set a silver dollar spinning on the counter. “I’ll be here a few days,” he’d announce. “If I have any change coming, buy yourself a new pair of suspenders.”

  And Henry Jones would glance down at his suspenders, to see what was wrong with them.

  He sighed, shook his head, and drove to the Holiday Inn near the interstate exit. They had plenty of rooms, and gave him what he asked for, a nonsmoking room on the third floor in the rear. The desk clerk was a woman, very young, very blond, very perky, with nothing about her to remind you of Henry Jones. She said, “Enjoy your stay with us, Mr. Whitlock.” Not stammering, eyes steady.

  He unpacked, showered, and went to the window to look at the sunset. It was the sort of sunset a hero would ride off into, leaving a slender blonde to bite back tears while calling after him, “I hope you enjoyed your stay with us, Mr. Whitlock.”

  Stop it, he told himself. Stay with reality. You’ve flown a couple of thousand miles to kill a man you never met. Just get it done. The sunset can wait.

  He hadn’t met the man, but he knew his name. Even if he wasn’t sure how to pronounce it.

  The man in White Plains had handed Keller an index card with two lines of block capitals hand-printed.

  “Lyman Crowder,” he read, as if it rhymed with louder. “Or should that be Crowder?” As if it rhymed with loader.

  A shrug in response.

  “Martingale, WY,” Keller went on. “Why indeed? And where, besides Wyoming? Is Martingale near anything?”

  Another shrug, accompanied by a photograph. Or a part of one; it had apparently been cropped from a larger photo, and showed the upper half of a middle-aged man who looked to have spent a lot of time outdoors. A big man, too. Keller wasn’t sure how he knew that. You couldn’t see the man’s legs and there was nothing else in the photo to give you an idea of scale. But somehow he could tell.

  “What did he do?”

  Again a shrug, but one that conveyed information to Keller. If the other man didn’t know what Crowder had done, he had evidently done it to somebody else. Which meant the man in White Plains had no personal interest in the matter. It was strictly business.

  “So who’s the client?”

  A shake of the head. Meaning that he didn’t know who was picking up the tab, or that he knew but wasn’t saying? Hard to tell. The man in White Plains was a man of few words and master of none.

  “What’s the time frame?”

  “The time frame,” the man said, evidently enjoying the phrase. “No big hurry. One week, two weeks.” He leaned forward, patted Keller on the knee. “Take your time,” he said. “Enjoy yourself.”

  On the way out he’d shown the index card to Dot. He said, “How would you pronounce this? As in crow or as in crowd?”

  Dot shrugged.

  “Jesus,” he said, “you’re as bad as he is.”

  “Nobody’s as bad as he is,” Dot said. “Keller, what difference does it make how Lyman pronounces his last name?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Well, stick around for the funeral,” she suggested. “See what the minister says.”

  “You’re a big help,” Keller said.

  There was only one Crowder listed in the Martingale phone book. Lyman Crowder, with a telephone number but no address. About a third of the book’s listings were like that. Keller wondered why. Did these people assume everybody knew where they lived in a town this size? Or were they saddle tramps with cellular phones and no fixed abode?

  Probably rural, he decided. Lived out of town on some unnamed road, picked up their mail at the post office, so why list an address in the phone book?

  Great. His quarry lived in the boondocks outside of a town that wasn’t big enough to have boondocks, and Keller didn’t even have an address for him. He had a phone number, but what good was that? What was he supposed to do, call him up and ask directions? “Hi, this here’s Dale Whitlock, we haven’t met, but I just rode a thousand miles and—”

  Scratch that.

  He drove around and ate at a downtown café called the Singletree. It was housed in a weathered frame building just down the street from the Martingale Hotel. The café’s name was spelled out in rope nailed to the vertical clapboards. For Keller the name brought a vision of a solitary pine or oak set out in the middle of vast grasslands, a landmark for herdsmen, a rare bit of shade from the relentless sun.

  From the menu, he learned that a singletree was some kind of apparatus used in hitching up a horse, or a team of horses. It was a little unclear to him just what it was or how it functioned, but it certainly didn’t spread its branches in the middle of the prairie.

  Keller had the special, a chicken-fried steak and some French fries that came smothered in gravy. He was hungry enough to eat everything in spite of the way it tasted.

  You don’t want to live here, he told himself.

  It was a relief to know this. Driving around Martingale, Keller had found himself reminded of Roseburg, Oregon. Roseburg was larger, with none of the Old West feel of Martingale, but they were both small western towns of a sort Keller rarely got to. In Roseburg Keller had allowed his imagination to get away from him for a little while, and he wouldn’t want to let that happen again.

  Still, crossing the threshold of the Singletree, he had been unable to avoid remembering the little Mexican place in Roseburg. If the food and service here turned out to be on that level—

  Forget it. He was safe.

  After his meal Keller strode out through the bat-wing doors and walked up one side of the street and down the other. It seemed to him that there was something unusual about the way he was walking, that his gait was that of a man who had just climbed down from a horse.

  Keller had been on a horse once in his life, and he couldn’t remember how he’d walked after he got off of it. So this walk he was doing now wasn’t coming from his own past. It must have been something he’d learned unconsciously from movies and TV, a synthesis of all those riders of the purple sage and the silver screen.

&nb
sp; No need to worry about yearning to settle here, he knew now. Because his fantasy now was not of someone settling in but passing through, the saddle tramp, the shootist, the flint-eyed loner who does his business and moves on.

  That was a good fantasy, he decided. You wouldn’t get into any trouble with a fantasy like that.

  Back in his room, Keller tried the book again but couldn’t keep his mind on what he was reading. He turned on the TV and worked his way through the channels, using the remote control bolted to the nightstand. Westerns, he decided, were like cops and cabs, never around when you wanted them. It seemed to him that he never made a trip around the cable circuit without running into John Wayne or Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea or a rerun of Gunsmoke or Rawhide or one of those spaghetti westerns with Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef. Or the great villains—Jack Elam, Strother Martin, the young Lee Marvin in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

  It probably said something about you, Keller thought, when your favorite actor was Jack Elam.

  He switched off the set and looked up Lyman Crowder’s phone number. He could dial it, and when someone picked up and said, “Crowder residence,” he’d know how the name was pronounced. “Just checking,” he could say, cradling the phone and giving them something to think about.

  Of course he wouldn’t say that, he’d mutter something harmless about a wrong number, but was even that much contact a good idea? Maybe it would put Crowder on his guard. Maybe Crowder was already on his guard, as far as that went. That was the trouble with going in blind like this, knowing nothing about either the target or the client.

  If he called Crowder’s house from the motel, there might be a record of the call, a link between Lyman Crowder and Dale Whitlock. That wouldn’t matter much to Keller, who would shed the Whitlock identity on his way out of town, but there was no reason to create more grief for the real Dale Whitlock.

  Because there was a real Dale Whitlock, and Keller was giving him grief enough without making him a murder suspect.

  It was pretty slick the way the man in White Plains worked it. He knew a man who had a machine with which he could make flawless American Express cards. He knew someone else who could obtain the names and account numbers of bona fide American Express cardholders. Then he had cards made that were essentially duplicates of existing cards. You didn’t have to worry that the cardholder had reported his card as stolen, because it hadn’t been stolen, it was still sitting in his wallet. You were off somewhere charging the earth, and he didn’t have a clue until the charges turned up on his monthly statement.

  The driver’s license was real, too. Well, technically it was a counterfeit, of course, and the photograph on it showed Keller, not Whitlock. But someone had managed to access the Connecticut Bureau of Motor Vehicles computer, and thus the counterfeit license showed the same number as Whitlock’s, and gave the same address.

  In the old days, Keller thought, it had been a lot more straightforward. You didn’t need a license to ride a horse or a credit card to rent one. You bought or stole one, and when you rode into town on it nobody asked to see your ID. They might not even come right out and ask your name, and if they did they wouldn’t expect a detailed reply. “Call me Tex,” you’d say, and that’s what they’d call you as you rode off into the sunset.

  “Goodbye, Tex,” the blonde would call out. “I hope you enjoyed your stay with us.”

  The lounge downstairs turned out to be the hot spot in Martingale. Restless, Keller had gone downstairs to have a quiet drink. He walked into a thickly carpeted room with soft lighting and a good sound system. There were fifteen or twenty people in the place, all of them either having a good time or looking for one.

  Keller ordered a Coors at the bar. On the jukebox, Barbara Mandrell sang a song about cheating. When she was done, a duo he didn’t recognize sang a song about cheating. Then came Hank Williams’s oldie, “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

  A subtle pattern was beginning to emerge.

  “I love this song,” the blonde said.

  A different blonde, not the perky young thing from the front desk. This woman was taller, older, and fuller-figured. She wore a skirt and a sort of cowgirl blouse with piping and embroidery on it.

  “Old Hank,” Keller said, to say something.

  “I’m June.”

  “Call me Tex.”

  “Tex!” Her laughter came in a sort of yelp. “When did anybody ever call you Tex, tell me that?”

  “Well, nobody has,” he admitted, “but that’s not to say they never will.”

  “Where are you from, Tex? No, I’m sorry, I can’t call you that, it sticks in my throat. If you want me to call you Tex you’re going to have to start wearing boots.”

  “You see by my outfit that I’m not a cowboy.”

  “Your outfit, your accent, your haircut. If you’re not an easterner, then I’m a virgin.”

  “I’m from Connecticut.”

  “I knew it.”

  “My name’s Dale.”

  “Well, you could keep that. If you were fixing to be a cowboy, I mean. You’d have to change the way you dress and talk and comb your hair, but you could hang on to Dale. There another name that goes with it?”

  In for a penny, in for a pound. “Whitlock,” he said.

  “Dale Whitlock. Shoot, that’s pretty close to perfect. You tell ’em a name like that, you got credit down at the Agway in a New York minute. Wouldn’t even have to fill out a form. You married, Dale?”

  What was the right answer? She was wearing a ring herself, and the jukebox was now playing yet another cheating song.

  “Not in Martingale,” he said.

  “Oh, I like that,” she said, eyes sparkling. “I like the whole idea of regional marriage. I am married in Martingale, but we’re not in Martingale. The town line’s Front Street.”

  “In that case,” he said, “maybe I could buy you a drink.”

  “You easterners,” she said. “You’re just so damn fast.”

  There had to be a catch.

  Keller didn’t do too badly with women. He got lucky once in a while. But he didn’t have the sort of looks that made heads turn, nor had he made seduction his life’s work. Some years ago he’d read a book called How to Pick Up Girls, filled with opening lines that were guaranteed to work. Keller thought they were silly. He was willing to believe they would work, but he was not able to believe they would work for him.

  This woman, though, had hit on him before he’d had time to become aware of her presence. This sort of thing happened, especially when you were dealing with a married woman in a bar where all they played were cheating songs. Everybody knew what everybody else was there for, and nobody had time to dawdle. So this sort of thing happened, but it never seemed to happen to him, and he didn’t trust it.

  Something would go wrong. She’d call home and find out her kid was running a fever. Her husband would walk in the door just as the jukebox gave out with “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille.” She’d be overcome by conscience, or rendered unconscious by the drink Keller had just bought her.

  “I’d say my place or yours,” she said, “but we both know the answer to that one. What’s your room number?” Keller told her. “You go on up,” she said. “I won’t be a minute. Don’t start without me.”

  He brushed his teeth, splashed on a little aftershave. She wouldn’t show, he told himself. Or she’d expect to be paid, which would take a little of the frost off the pumpkin. Or her husband would turn up and they’d try to work some variation of the badger game.

  Or she’d be sloppy drunk, or he’d be impotent. Or something.

  “Whew,” she said. “I don’t guess you need boots after all. I’ll call you Tex or Slim or any damn thing you want me to, just so you come when you’re called. How long are you in town for, Dale?”

  “I’m not sure. A few days.”

  “Business, I suppose. What sort of business are you in?”

  “I work for a big corporation,” he said. “They fly me over
to look into situations.”

  “Sounds like you can’t talk about it.”

  “Well, we do a lot of government work,” he said. “So I’m really not supposed to.”

  “Say no more,” she said. “Oh, Lord, look at the time!”

  While she showered, he picked up the paperback and rewrote the blurb. He killed a thousand miles, he thought, to ride a woman he never met. Well, sometimes you got lucky. The stars were in the right place, the forces that ruled the universe decided you deserved a present. There didn’t always have to be a catch to it, did there?

  She turned off the shower, and he heard the last line of the song she’d been singing. “ ‘And Celia’s at the Jackson Park Inn,’ ” she sang, and moments later she emerged from the bathroom and began dressing.

  “What’s this?” she said. “ ‘He rode a thousand miles to kill a man he never met.’ You know, that’s funny, because I just had the darnedest thought while I was running the soap over my pink and tender flesh.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just said that last to remind you what’s under this here skirt and blouse. Oh, the thought I had? Well, something you said, government work. I thought maybe this man’s CIA, maybe he’s some old soldier of fortune, maybe he’s the answer to this maiden’s prayers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that it was already a real fine evening, Dale, but it would be heaven on earth if what you came to Martingale for was to kill my damn husband.”

  Christ. Was she the client? Was the pickup downstairs a cute way for them to meet? Could she actually be that stupid, coming on in a public place to a man she was hiring to kill her husband?

  For that matter, how had she recognized him? Only Dot and the man in White Plains had known the name he was using. They’d have kept it to themselves. And she’d made her move before she knew his name. Had she been able to recognize him? I see by your outfit that you are a hit man? Something along those lines?