Hit Man - Lawrence Block [7]
“How does it work?”
“What does that switch do?”
“This one?”
Engleman leaned forward and Keller drew the loop of wire from his pocket and whipped it around the other man’s neck. The garrote was fast, silent, effective. Keller made sure Engleman’s body was where you couldn’t see it from the street, made sure to wipe his own prints off any surfaces he might have touched. He turned off the lights, closed the door behind him.
He had already checked out of the Douglas Inn, and now he drove straight to Portland, with the Ford’s cruise control set just below the speed limit. He drove half an hour in silence, then turned on the radio and tried to find a station he could stand. Nothing pleased him and he gave up and switched it off.
Somewhere north of Eugene he said, “Jesus, Ed, what else was I going to do?”
He drove straight through to Portland and got a room at the ExecuLodge near the airport. In the morning he turned in the Hertz car and dawdled over coffee until his flight was called.
He called White Plains as soon as he was on the ground at JFK. “It’s all taken care of,” he said. “I’ll come by sometime tomorrow. Right now I just want to get home, get some sleep.”
The following afternoon in White Plains, Dot asked him how he had liked Roseburg.
“Really nice,” he said. “Pretty town, nice people. I wanted to stay there.”
“Oh, Keller,” she said. “What did you do, look at houses?”
“Not exactly.”
“Every place you go,” she said, “you want to live there.”
“It’s nice,” he insisted. “And living’s cheap compared to here. They don’t even have a sales tax in the state, if you can believe that.”
“Is sales tax a big problem for you, Keller?”
“A person could have a decent life there,” he said.
“For a week,” she said. “Then you’d go nuts.”
“You really think so?”
“Come on,” she said. “Roseburg, Oregon? Give me a break.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess a week’s about as much as I could handle.”
A few days later he was going through his pockets before taking some clothes to the cleaners. He found the Roseburg street map and pored over it, remembering where everything was. Quik Print, the Douglas Inn, the house on Cowslip Lane. The Mexican café , the other places he’d eaten. The gun shop. The houses he’d looked at.
Seemed so long ago, he thought. So long ago, so far away.
2
Keller on Horseback
At the airport newsstand, Keller picked up a paperback western. The cover was pretty much generic, showing a standard-issue Marlboro man, long and lean, walking down the dusty streets of a western town with a gun riding his hip. Neither the title nor the author’s name meant anything to Keller. What drew him was a line that seemed to leap out from the cover.
“He rode a thousand miles,” Keller read, “to kill a man he never met.”
Keller paid for the book and tucked it into his carry-on bag. When the plane was in the air he dug it out and looked at the cover, wondering why he’d bought it. He didn’t read much, and when he did he never chose westerns.
Maybe he wasn’t supposed to read this book. Maybe he was supposed to keep it as a talisman.
All for that one sentence. Imagine riding a thousand miles on a horse for any purpose, let alone the killing of a stranger. How long would it take, a thousand-mile journey on horseback? A thoroughbred got around a racecourse in something like two minutes, but it couldn’t go all day at that pace any more than a human being could string together twenty-six four-minute miles and call it a marathon.
What could you manage on a horse, fifty miles a day? A hundred miles in two days, a thousand miles in twenty? Three weeks, say, at the conclusion of which a man would probably be eager to kill anybody, stranger or blood kin.
Was Ol’ Sweat ’n’ Leather getting paid for his thousand miles? Was he in the trade? Keller turned the book over in his hands, read the paragraph on the back cover. It did not sound promising. Something about a drifter in the Arizona territory, a saddle tramp,