“You’ve talked so much about the damn thing I’m gonna have to get one myself. I feel for you, Keller, having to make do with motel TV.”
“What’s aggravating,” he said, “is there’s no TiVo.”
“Now there I have to agree with you,” she said. “TiVo changed my life. And there you are, poor baby, stuck in Des Moines with all the commercials you used to be able to speed through.”
“And I can’t pause the thing when I go to the bathroom, or back up when there’s a line of dialogue I missed, and—”
“For God’s sake, hurry up and come home,” she said, “or I’m gonna have to tell Al you need a hardship bonus.”
He rang off and started walking over to the TV, then stopped himself. He’d looked up stamp dealers in the Yellow Pages the previous afternoon, and he checked again, and called James McCue to make sure he was open for business. No reason to pack the suitcase this time, as he knew he’d be coming back to the motel, so all he’d done was grab up his Scott catalog and his tongs and head out the door.
That was what, a couple of hours ago? Now the governor of Ohio was dead, and he had to do something and wasn’t sure what. If he’d packed his bag and wiped his room down, he wouldn’t have to go back to it. But he’d probably be going there anyway, because where else could he go?
4
When he got to the Days Inn he took a slow turn around the parking lot, looking for any sign of police activity, or indeed anyone at all taking a special interest in the place. But it looked the way it always looked, and he parked his car in its usual spot and went to his room.
Inside, he turned on the television set. The assassination of Governor Longford was all over the dial, unless you wanted to watch QVC or the Food Channel. Keller chose CNN and heard a couple of experts trying to estimate the likelihood of riots in Cleveland. The weather, one of them pointed out, was a significant variable. Heat and humidity added up to riot weather, she said, while a cold snap and rain kept folks indoors.
That was sort of interesting, but Keller, stuck in Des Moines, couldn’t bring himself to care about the weather in Cleveland. He hung in there while they talked the subject to death, but hit the Mute button in a hurry when they rang in a Nexium commercial.
At least the remote had a Mute button. You couldn’t fast-forward, you couldn’t pause, and you couldn’t reverse, but the one thing you could do was make the damn thing shut up, and he did.
Should he pack?
He wasn’t going to try leaving Des Moines, not yet. Whether all of this was coincidence or something a good deal more sinister, he’d be safer holed up than running around in the open. He hadn’t done anything, not even what he’d come here to do, but that wouldn’t matter to anybody who picked him up with bogus ID and an unregistered handgun just a matter of miles from where Longford had been shot dead.
By two shots from a handgun — that’s what someone had been saying, just before they got the weather report from Cleveland, and it just now registered. An unknown assailant brandishing a handgun who’d fired twice at point-blank range and escaped — how, for God’s sake? — into the crowd.
A Glock, he thought. A Glock automatic, the gun he’d been offered and turned down. The gun he’d handled.
He could remember the way the grip had fit his hand. And how he’d turned the gun over in his hands, deliberating, before handing it back to the man with the hairy ears. He’d be willing to bet that was the gun they’d used, and that it still had his prints on it. That’s why they’d offered him two guns, and the important gun wasn’t the one he’d chosen, it was the one he’d touched and rejected.
Well, that really iced the cupcake. All they had to do was pick him up — for anything at all, really — and he was finished. They’d match his prints to the prints on the Glock, and what could he possibly say?
I touched the gun, but I went for the revolver instead, because automatics tend to jam, although this one evidently didn’t. And I didn’t want to shoot a governor with it, just some mope weeding his lawn, and I never did shoot anybody, so what difference does it make?
Yeah, right.
If his prints were on file, if he’d ever been arrested or ever held a government job, if he’d ever done any of the innumerable things that move them to ink your fingers and record your prints, he wouldn’t stand a chance. But he’d led a charmed life thus far, so any prints on the Glock would lead them nowhere for the time being. Until they got their hands on him and got his hands on an ink pad, at which point it was pretty much all over.
Or was he getting ahead of himself here? He didn’t know it was the Glock, didn’t know that they’d recovered the gun. For all he knew the shooter had taken it away with him, in which case it hardly mattered whose prints were on it. He couldn’t be sure that wasn’t how it had happened.
Except somehow he did know, just as he’d somehow known all along that this was a setup. And maybe that was why he’d been so ginchy in Albuquerque, all those months ago. There had been something off about Call-Me-Al from the jump. Paying in advance for unspecified services, calling Dot from out of the blue and telling her money was on its way, then calling again to confirm it had arrived and assure her he’d be in touch. And, months later, making contact once more and sending Keller on his way to New Mexico.
It was, he had to admit, not a bad way to hire a hit man. Nobody, not Dot and not the person who did the work, had any idea who Call-Me-Al might be, or where he lived, or anything else about him. So if things went wrong and Keller wound up in a cell, he couldn’t get himself a deal by giving up his employer. He could give up Dot, but that’s as far back as it would reach, because there was nobody for Dot to give up. Al was out of anybody’s reach.
Say you were planning an extremely high-profile assassination. You wanted a patsy, a fall guy, to give some latter-day Warren Commission a plausible explanation of what had taken place.
Keller had never spent a lot of time on conspiracy theories, and was by no means convinced that the official explanations were wrong; it seemed entirely possible to him that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had shot down John F. Kennedy, and that James Earl Ray had done the same for Martin Luther King. He wasn’t going to bet the rent money that it happened like that, but he wouldn’t bet the other way, either. Both subjects seemed unlikely assassins, but was either one of them as wildly improbable as Sirhan Sirhan, the killer so witless they had to name him twice? And there was no question that he’d shot Bobby Kennedy, because they’d caught him in the act.
But never mind what actually happened. If you were orchestrating something like that, a fall guy was a handy thing to have. And the best sort of fall guy would be someone who did this sort of thing for a living. If you wanted to frame someone for murder, why not pick a murderer? Hire him to kill some nonentity, and time it so he’s in the right place at the right time, and then frame him for the real killing, the important killing. But don’t let him actually do it, because then he might wind up in a position to rat you out. This way, when the cops picked him up, he couldn’t say anything because he wouldn’t know anything, and the closest he could come to giving a good account of himself would be to start yammering about how he’d come here to Des Moines to kill someone else. Some poor schlump with no criminal ties and no one looking to kill him, some guy whose sole offense was overzealous lawn care.
Wonderful. The cops would love that one. Jesus, if they did pick him up, he’d know better than to try to sell that story. Or, for that matter, any other story he could come up with just now.
He was sitting in front of the television set, his eyes on the screen, but he was too caught up in his own train of thought for his mind to pay any real attention to what his eyes were seeing. None of it registered, until something about the image on the screen forced its way into his consciousness.
It was a picture of a man, though why they were showing it was unclear, as the sound was still muted. Keller didn’t recognize the guy, and yet it seemed to him that there was something familiar
about him. He was middle-aged, with a full head of dark hair and something furtive about him. Not the face of someone you’d be inclined to trust, and—
He shot out a hand, groped for the remote. By the time he’d triggered the Mute button it was too late, the picture was gone, and the news itself gone with it. They played a commercial, one Keller especially hated, the one with the moth coming in to assure the sleeping woman of eight hours of restful sleep. Any woman he’d ever known, a moth came in and settled on her face, what she’d do was leap up and start screaming, then pick up a broom and chase the thing all over the house.
He looked for a button to push to back the thing up, but this was TiVo-less TV, and you had to watch everything in real time. And he’d missed it, but who said CNN was the only game in town? He began switching channels, getting half-second glimpses of everything from a lacrosse match to a Texas Hold-’Em tournament, from a rerun of The Match Game to a hair replacement infomercial, and before he knew it he’d run the table and was back at CNN, staring once again at his own picture on the screen.
Furtive? Is that how he’d seen himself? No he just looked a little tentative, as if he was trying to work out what he was doing there, with his face on national TV for all the world to see.
The sound was on now, and somebody was saying something, but he couldn’t take it in; it was all he could do to look at his own unfortunate face and the caption under it. THE FACE OF A KILLER, it said.
5
The first thing he did was call Dot. After all the years they’d worked together, that was pretty much an automatic reaction. He picked up the phone, hit Redial, and let it ring. Voice mail cut in after the fourth ring, and he sat there with his mouth open for a long moment, then decided it was pointless to leave a message. He closed the phone and sat there, looking at the TV some more.
Ten minutes later he was in the bathroom, taking a shower.
He’d resisted the idea at first, deeming it a waste of time, but what else was he going to do with his time? Waste some more of it staring at the TV, switching channels until he found one that would proclaim his innocence? Hop in the car and make a run for it? Drive over to Dowling’s house and strangle him with his garden hose? He’d showered that morning, he didn’t really need a shower, but who could say when he’d get the chance to shower again? Maybe he’d be living in subway tunnels and sleeping in his clothes, maybe he’d be hopping freight trains. He might as well stay as clean as possible for as long as he could.
Or was he running a risk by showering? Hair from his head or his body could wind up going down the drain and get caught in the trap, and a CSI crew could recover it and determine his DNA. But he’d already showered several times in the course of his stay, so the trap was probably overflowing with his DNA.
For a moment he considered opening the drain himself and trying to get rid of the evidence, but then it struck him that DNA was the least of his worries. They already had his fingerprints, so what possible difference could it make if they had his DNA as well? Once they picked him up, once they got their hands on him, he was finished. DNA wasn’t going to figure in the equation.
He got out of the shower and stood in front of the sink and shaved. He’d already done so a few hours ago, he could barely feel any stubble even against the grain, but when would he get to shave again? And why not leave a little more DNA in the sink trap, just for the hell of it?
He got dressed, and packed his bag. He might not be going anywhere, not until he figured out what to do next and when to do it, but it wouldn’t hurt to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
His bag was black, like everybody else’s, and had wheels and a handle. It was small enough to carry onto an airplane, and would fit easily in an overhead compartment, but nowadays he always checked it because anything as dangerous as a pair of stamp tongs or as potentially explosive as a tube of hair gel would send the airport security people into a frenzy. And when they spotted his Swiss Army knife they’d call out the National Guard.
If he’d known he was going to be checking it all the time, he’d have bought another color. It seemed to him that three out of four bags coming down the baggage carousel were essentially indistinguishable from his, and he’d come to envy the few garishly colored ones that you saw now and then. To make it a little easier to find his own bag, he’d bought a flame-orange device to wrap around the handle, and it helped. Dot had assured him it would serve a dual purpose; it might help keep some hunter from mistaking his suitcase for a deer.
Dot. He picked up the phone, hesitated, then hit Redial. It rang four times and switched him to voice mail, with a computerized voice inviting him to leave a message. Once again he decided against it, and was about to ring off when he noticed an icon on the screen indicating that he’d received a voice mail message himself. It took him a moment to remember how to retrieve it.
“You have one messages,” a recorded voice informed him. “First message.”
First and only, he thought.
And then there was silence, ten or fifteen seconds of it, enough to make him wonder if there was going to be a message after all. And then a computer-generated voice, completely uninflected and straight out of a science-fiction movie, pronounced a series of words one at a time:
“Ditch. The. Phone. Repeat. Ditch. The. Damn. Phone.”
He stared at the phone as he might have stared at a talking dog. It was Dot, it could only be Dot. Nobody else had his cell number, and who else would have repeated the message and inserted damn the second time around? But how had Dot managed to turn herself into a robot?
Then he remembered. A neat trick she’d discovered in one of the applications she ran on her computer. You highlighted a piece of text, pressed something or other, and the computer read the words aloud in a voice all its own. Just. Like. That. One. Robotic. Word. At. A. Time.
Voiceprints, he thought. That’s what she was guarding against. You could beat voiceprint identification by whispering, or at least you used to be able to, but who knew how much better they’d made the mousetrap?
He called voice mail again, listened to the message again, and this time when the voice mail lady offered him the options of repeating or saving or erasing the message, he chose Erase. “Message is erased,” she told him, and the little voice mail icon vanished from the screen.
Ditch the phone. Ditch the damn phone.
How? Just toss it?
If someone found it, and if FBI technicians went to work on it, who could say what it would tell them? They could find out the number he’d called and when he’d called it. They couldn’t recover the actual conversations, at least he didn’t see how they could, but why leave anything to chance?
One bullet would take care of the phone forever, but it might attract unwelcome attention, and at the very least it would reduce his arsenal by a fourth. He should have taken Hairy Ears up on his offer of a box of shells, but at the time all he’d had to be able to do was kill one person. It never occurred to him that he’d wind up running for his life.
He unloaded the gun, weighed the four bullets in his hand, set them down gently on the bed. A revolver was a pretty simple device, and you couldn’t make it fire by hitting something with the butt, but enough strange things had already happened today and he didn’t want to risk another. He took the unloaded revolver and the treacherous cell phone into the bathroom, wrapped the phone in a towel, placed it on the floor, and smashed it to bits with the gun butt.
He opened the towel and looked at the collections of bits and pieces of what had moments ago been a sophisticated and very useful machine. It was no longer a threat to him, could not lead anyone to him, wherever he might be, or to Dot’s house in White Plains.
Nor was it the lifeline it had been, the link to the only person on earth who could help him, or was likely to want to. Well, she couldn’t help him now. Nobody could help him.
He was on his own.
6
He was ready when the knock came. The pizza and Coke came to twelve
dollars and change, and he had a ten and a five in hand. “Just leave it outside the door,” he told the delivery man. “We’re, uh, a little on the informal side at the moment. Here you go, fifteen bucks, keep the change.”
He slid the bills under the door and watched them disappear. There was a peephole in the door, and he saw the delivery guy straighten up, hesitate for a long moment, and then walk away. Keller waited a couple of minutes, then opened the door and retrieved his meal.
He wasn’t hungry, but he made himself eat just as he’d made himself shower and shave, and for a similar reason, because who knew when he’d get the chance again? His face was appearing on every TV screen in America, and when the paper came out it would be there, too. It wasn’t a very good likeness, and he’d been blessed with a fairly generic face, with no outstanding features to grab onto, but when a few hundred million people had been exposed to that picture, it stood to reason that one of them would recognize him.
So it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to Denny’s, say, and treat himself to another of those patty melts.
No, he’d have to stick to food he could have delivered, and that would only work so long as he had a place for them to deliver it to. The only person who’d seen his face at the Days Inn was the clerk on duty when he’d registered, and that had been quick and easy and he doubted he’d made much of an impression. Desk clerks saw hundreds of people every day, and barely looked at them. He himself had only seen one desk clerk this trip, and had entirely forgotten what she looked like, so why shouldn’t she have forgotten him as completely?
On the other hand, suppose he were to see her picture, over and over and over. How long would it take before she started looking curiously familiar to him? How long before he remembered who she was?
He ate some of the pizza, drank half of the Coke. The four bullets were still on the bed where he’d put them, and he scooped them up and loaded them back into the gun, leaving an empty chamber under the firing pin. He tried the gun in a pocket, then slipped it under the waistband of his trousers, then put it in the suitcase. And if he needed it in a hurry? What was he going to do, open the suitcase for a quick draw? He got it out of the suitcase and returned it to its place under his waistband.
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