Hit List - Lawrence Block [72]
Instead he’d flown to Orange County, just in case Roger might be lurking in San Diego. He didn’t really think there was much likelihood of this. They hadn’t heard a peep out of Roger since he’d killed a man in Boston, a man who’d stolen Keller’s green trench coat and paid dearly for his crime. That was when he and Dot had figured out who Roger was and what he was trying to do.
At the time, Keller had found the whole business extremely upsetting. The idea that there was someone out there, hell-bent on being the impersonal instrument of his death, had him constantly looking over his shoulder. He’d never had to do that before, and he didn’t much like it.
But you got used to it. Keller supposed it was a little like having a heart condition. You worried about it at first, and then you stopped worrying. You took sensible precautions, you didn’t take the stairs two at a time, you paid a kid to shovel out your driveway in the winter, but you didn’t think about it all the time. You got used to it.
And he had gotten used to Roger. There was a man out there, a man who didn’t know his name and might or might not recognize him by sight, a man who shared Keller’s profession and wanted to thin the ranks of the competition. You quit letting clients meet you at the airport, you covered your tracks, but you didn’t have to hide under the bed. You went about your business.
Flying into a less convenient airport came under the heading of sensible precautions. Keller saw it as a bonus that the airport was named for John Wayne. Approaching the Avis counter, he felt a few inches taller, a little broader in the shoulders.
The clerk—Keller wanted to call him Pilgrim, but suppressed the urge—checked the license and credit card Keller showed him and was halfway through the paperwork when something pulled him up short. Keller asked him if something was wrong.
“Your reservation,” the man said. “It seems it’s been canceled.”
“Must be a mistake.”
“I can reinstate it, no problem. I mean, we have cars available, and you’re here.”
“Right.”
“So I’ll just . . . oh, there’s a note here. You’re supposed to call your office.”
“My office.”
“That’s what it says. Shall I go ahead with this?”
Keller told him to wait. From a pay phone, he called his own apartment in New York. While it rang he had the eerie feeling that the call would be answered, and that the voice he heard would be his own, talking to him. He shook his head, amused at the workings of his own mind, and then he did in fact hear his own voice, inviting him to leave a message. It was his answering machine, of course, but it took him a split second to realize as much, and he almost dropped the phone.
There were no messages.
He broke the connection and called Dot in White Plains, and she picked up halfway through the first ring. “Good,” she said. “It worked. I thought of having you paged. ‘Mr. Keller, Mr. John Keller, please pick up the white courtesy phone.’ But do we really want your name booming out over a loudspeaker?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“And would you even hear it? He’ll be through the airport like a shot, I thought. He won’t have to stop at the baggage claim, and as soon as he picks up his rental car he’s out of there. Bingo, I thought.”
“So you called Avis.”
“I called everybody. I remembered the name on that license and credit card of yours, but suppose you were using something else? Anyway, Avis had your reservation, and they said they’d see that you got the message, and they were as good as their word. So it worked.”
“Not entirely,” he said. “While they were at it, they canceled my reservation.”
“I canceled your reservation, Keller. You don’t need a car because you’re not going anywhere, aside from the next plane back to New York.”
“Oh?”
“Three hours ago, while you were over what? Illinois? Iowa?”
“Whatever.”
“While you were experiencing slight turbulence at thirty-five thousand feet,” she said, “a couple of uniforms were making vain efforts to revive Heck Palmieri, who had put