Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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Hit and Run

( John Keller – 4 ) Lawrence Block

Keller’s a hit man. For years now he’s had places to go and people to kill.

But enough is enough. He’s got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. So he carries it out with his usual professionalism, and he heads home, and guess what?

One more job. Paid in advance, so what’s he going to do? Give the money back? In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And one fine morning he’s picking out stamps for his collection (Sweden 1–5, the official reprints) at a shop in Urbandale when somebody guns down the charismatic governor of Ohio.

Back at his motel, Keller’s watching TV when they show the killer’s face. And there’s something all too familiar about that face…

Keller calls his associate Dot in White Plains, but there is no answer. He’s stranded halfway across the country, every cop in America’s just seen his picture, his ID and credit cards are no longer good, and he just spent almost all of his cash on the stamps.

Now what?

Hit and Run

The fourth book in the Keller series

By

Lawrence Block

For my cousin

PETER NATHAN

1

Keller drew his pair of tongs from his breast pocket and carefully lifted a stamp from its glassine envelope. It was one of Norway’s endless Posthorn series, worth less than a dollar, but curiously elusive, and missing from his collection. He examined it closely, held it to the light to make sure the paper hadn’t thinned where a hinge had once secured it to an album page, and returned it to the envelope, setting it aside for purchase.

The dealer, a tall and gaunt gentleman whose face was frozen on one side by what he had explained was Bell’s palsy, gave a one-side-of-the-face chuckle. “One thing I like to see,” he said, “is a man who carries his own tongs with him. Minute I see that, I know I’ve got a serious collector in my shop.”

Keller, who sometimes had his tongs with him and sometimes didn’t, felt it was more a question of memory than seriousness. When he traveled, he always brought along his copy of the Scott catalog, a large 1,100-page volume that listed and illustrated the stamps of the world from the very first issue (Great Britain’s Penny Black, 1840) through the initial century of philately and, in the case of the British Empire, including the last of the George VI issues in 1952. These were the stamps Keller collected, and he used the catalog not only for its information but as a checklist, deliberately circling each stamp’s number in red when he added it to his collection.

The catalog always traveled with him, because there was no way he could shop for stamps without having it at hand. The tongs were useful, but not indispensable; he could always borrow a pair from whoever had stamps to sell him. So it was easy to forget to pack tongs, and you couldn’t just tuck a pair in your pocket at the last minute, or slip them in your carry-on. Not if you were going to get on an airplane, because some clown at Security would confiscate them. Imagine a terrorist with a pair of stamp tongs. Why, he could grab the flight attendant and threaten to pluck her eyebrows…

It was surprising he’d brought the tongs this time, because he’d almost decided against packing the catalog. He’d worked for this particular client once before, on a job that took him to Albuquerque, and he’d never even had time to unpack. In an uncharacteristic excess of caution, he’d booked three different motel rooms, checked into each of them in turn, then wound up rushing the job on an impulse and flying back to New York the same day without sleeping in any of them. If this job went as quickly and smoothly he wouldn’t have time to buy stamps, and who even knew if there were any dealers in Des Moines?

Years ago, when Keller’s boyhood stamp collection rarely set him back more than a dollar or two a week, there would have been plenty of dealers in Des Moines, as there were just about everywhere. The hobby was as strong as ever these days, but the street-level retail stamp shop was on the endangered species list, and conservation was unlikely to save it. The business nowadays was all online or mail order, and the few dealers who still operated stores did so more to attract potential sellers than buyers. People with no knowledge of or interest in stamps would pass their shop every day, and when Uncle Fred died and there was a collection to sell, they’d know where to bring it.

This dealer, James McCue by name, had his store occupying the ground-floor front of his home off Douglas Avenue in Urbandale, a suburb whose name struck Keller as oxymoronic. An urban dale? It seemed neither urban nor a dale to Keller, but he figured it was probably a nice enough place to live. McCue’s house was around seventy years old, a frame structure with a bay window and an upstairs porch. The dealer sat at a computer, where Keller figured he probably did the greater portion of his business, and a radio played elevator music at low volume. It was a peaceful room, its manageable clutter somehow comforting, and Keller picked through the rest of the Norway issues and found a couple more he could use.

“How about Sweden?” McCue suggested. “I got some real nice Sweden.”

“I’m strong on Sweden,” Keller said. “At this point the only ones I need are the ones I can’t afford.”

“I know what that’s like. How about numbers one to five?”

“Surprisingly enough, I don’t have them. But then I don’t have the three skilling orange, either.” That stamp, cataloged as number 1a, was an error of color, orange instead of blue green, and was presumably unique; a specimen had changed hands a few years ago for three million dollars. Or maybe it was euros, Keller couldn’t remember.

“Haven’t got that fellow,” McCue said, “but I’ve got one through five, and the price is right.” And, when Keller raised his eyebrows, he added, “The official reprints. Mint, decent centering, and lightly hinged. Book says they’re worth $375 apiece. Want to have a look?”

He didn’t wait for an answer but sorted through a file box and came up with a stock card holding the five stamps behind a protective sheet of clear plastic.

“Take your time, look ’em over carefully. Nice, aren’t they?”

“Very nice.”

“You could fill those blank spaces with these and never need to apologize for them.”

And if he ever did acquire the originals, which seemed unlikely, the set of reprints would still deserve a place in his collection. He asked the price.

“Well, I wanted seven-fifty for the set, but I guess I’ll take six hundred. Save me the trouble of shipping ’em.”

“If it was five,” Keller said, “I wouldn’t have to think about it.”

“Go ahead and think it through,” McCue said. “I wouldn’t really care to go lower than six. I can take a credit card, if that makes it easier.”

It made it easier, all right, but Keller wasn’t sure he wanted to take that route. He had an American Express card in his own name, but he hadn’t used his own name at all this trip, and figured he’d just as soon keep it that way. And he had a Visa card he’d used to rent the Nissan Sentra from Hertz, and to register at the Days Inn, and the name on it was Holden Blankenship, which matched the Connecticut driver’s license in his wallet, on which Blankenship’s middle initial was J., which Keller figured would help to distinguish him from all the other Holden Blankenships in the world.

According to Dot, who had a source for credit cards and driver’s licenses, the license would pass a security check, and the cards would be good for at least a couple of weeks. But sooner or later all the charges would bounce when nobody paid them, and that didn’t bother Keller as far as Hertz and Days Inn and American Airlines were concerned, but the last thing he wanted to do was screw a stamp dealer out of money that was rightfully his. He had a feeling that wouldn’t happen, that the credit card company would be the one to eat the loss, but even so he didn’t like the idea. His hobby was the one area of his life where he got to be completely clean and aboveboard. If he bought the stamps and avoided paying for them, he was essentially stealing them, and it hardly mattered if he was stealing them from James McCue or Visa. He was perfectly comfortable with the notion of having official reprints on the first page of his Swedish issues, but not stolen reprints, or even stolen originals. If he couldn’t come by them honestly, he’d just as soon get along without them.

Dot would have a snappy comeback for that one, he supposed, or at the very least roll her eyes. But he figured most collectors would get the point.

But did he have enough cash?

He didn’t want to check in front of an audience, and asked to use the bathroom, which wasn’t a bad idea anyway, after all the coffee he’d had with breakfast. He counted the bills in his wallet and found they came to just under eight hundred dollars, which would leave him with less than two after he bought the stamps.

And he really wanted them.

That was the trouble with stamp collecting. You never ran out of things to want. If he’d collected something else – rocks, say, or old Victrolas, or art – he’d run out of room sooner or later. His one-bedroom apartment was spacious enough by New York’s severe standards, but it wouldn’t take many paintings to fill the available wall space. With stamps, though, he had a set of ten large albums, occupying no more than five running feet of bookshelf space, and he could collect for the rest of his life and spend millions of dollars and never fill them.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t as though he couldn’t afford six hundred dollars for the Swedish reprints, not with the fee he was collecting for the job that had brought him to Des Moines. And McCue’s price was certainly fair. He’d be getting them for a third of catalog, and would have cheerfully paid close to full catalog value for them.

And did it matter if he wound up short of cash? He’d be out of Des Moines in a day or two, three at the most, and aside from buying the occasional newspaper and the odd cup of coffee, what did he need cash for, anyway? Fifty bucks to cover a cab home from the airport? That was about it.

He shifted six hundred dollars from his wallet to his breast pocket and went back to have another look at the stamps. No question, these babies were going home with him. “Suppose I pay cash?” he said. “That get me any kind of a discount?”

“Don’t see much cash anymore,” McCue said, and grinned. One side of his mouth went up while the rest stayed frozen. “Tell you what, we can skip the sales tax, long as you promise not to tell the governor.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“And I’ll throw in those Norway stamps you picked out, though I don’t guess that’ll save you much. They can’t come to more than ten dollars, can they?”

“More like six or seven.”

“Well, that’ll buy you a hamburger, if you don’t want fries with it. Call it an even six hundred and we’re good.”

Keller gave him the money. McCue was counting it while Keller made sure he had all of the stamps he’d bought, tucking them away in an inside jacket pocket, adding the pair of tongs to another, closing the stamp catalog, when abruptly McCue said, “Oh, holy hell! Hold everything.”

Were the bills counterfeit? He froze, wondering what was the matter, but McCue was on his feet, walking over to the radio, turning up the volume. The music had stopped and an agitated announcer was interrupting with a news bulletin.

“Holy hell,” McCue said again. “We’re in for it now.”

2

Dot must have been sitting right next to the phone. She picked it up halfway through the first ring and said, “That wasn’t you, was it?”

“Of course not.”

“I didn’t think so. The picture they showed on CNN didn’t look much like the one they sent us.”

It made him nervous, talking like this on a cell phone. The technology kept improving, to the point where you had to take it for granted that there was a record somewhere of every call you made, and that the authorities could access the information in a heartbeat. If you used a cell phone, they could pinpoint the location of it when you made the call. They kept building better mousetraps, and the mice had to be correspondingly more resourceful. Lately, whenever he had a job, he would buy two prepaid cell phones for cash from a store on West Twenty-third Street, making up a name and address for their records. He’d give one to Dot and keep the other for himself, and the only calls either would make were to the other. He’d called a few days ago, to report his arrival in Des Moines, and he’d called again earlier that morning to say that they’d told him to wait at least one more day, although he could have hit the guy and been on his way home by now.

And he was calling now because someone had just killed the governor of Ohio. Which would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, given that John Tatum Longford, the best OSU running back since Archie Griffin, who’d gone to law school after he blew out his knee in his one pro season with the Bengals, was personable and charismatic and the first black governor ever to grace the statehouse in Columbus. But Governor Longford had not been in Columbus when a well-placed bullet blew out more than his knee, had not in fact been anywhere in Ohio. The man was a hot presidential prospect, and Iowa was one of those important early states, and the night before Longford had been in Ames, addressing a group of students and faculty at Iowa State University. From there the governor and his party had driven down to Des Moines, where he’d spent the night at Terrace Hill as the guest of the governor of Iowa. At 10:30 the next morning he’d appeared onstage at a high school auditorium, and around noon he’d shown up to address a Rotary luncheon. Then the gunshot, and the race to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

“My guy’s white,” he told Dot. “And short and fat, like the photograph.”

“It was a head shot, wasn’t it? I mean the photograph, not what happened just now. So you couldn’t really tell that he was short. Or fat, as far as that goes.”

“He was jowly.”

“Well.”

“And you could certainly tell he was white.”

“No argument there. The man was white as the ace of clouds.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I saw my guy just yesterday morning, I was almost close enough to spit on him.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“What I’m getting at is that I could have done the job and been home by now. I almost did it, anyway, Dot. With the gun or with my hands. I was supposed to wait but I thought, hell, why wait? They’d have been pissed but I’d have been out of here, and instead I’m in the middle of a manhunt for a killer they haven’t identified yet. Unless there’s been something on the news in the last few minutes?”

“I’ve got the set on,” she said, “and there hasn’t. Maybe you should just come home.”

“I was thinking of that. But when you think what airport security is going to be like around here—”

“No, don’t even try. You’ve got a rental, right? You could drive to, I don’t know, Chicago? And catch a flight there.”

“Maybe.”

“Or just drive all the way. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.”

“You don’t think they’ll have road blocks set up?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Of course I didn’t do anything, but the ID’s fake, and just attracting any attention—”

“Is not the greatest idea in the world.”

He took a moment, thought about it. “You know,” he said, “the son of a bitch who did this, they’ll probably catch him in a matter of hours. My guess is he’ll be killed resisting arrest.”

“Which will save somebody the trouble of sending a latter-day Jack Ruby to take him out.”

“You asked if this was my doing.”

“I really knew it wasn’t.”

“Of course not,” he said, “because you know I’d never touch anything like this. High-profile stuff, it doesn’t matter how much they pay, because you don’t live long enough to spend it. If the cops don’t kill you your employers will, because it’s not safe to leave you around. You know what I’m going to do?”

“What?”

“Sit tight,” he said.

“And wait for it to blow over.”

“Or burn itself out, or something. It shouldn’t take too long. A few days and either they catch the guy or they know he got away from them, and people stop giving a rat’s ass about what’s happening in Des Moines.”

“And then you can come home.”

“I could even do the job, as far as that goes. Or not. Right now it wouldn’t bother me to give the money back.”

“For perhaps the first time in my life,” Dot said, “I feel that way myself. Still, all things being equal—”

“Whatever that means.”

“I’ve often wondered myself. It does get a sentence started, though. All things being equal, I’d just as soon keep the money. And it’s the last job.”

“That’s what we said,” he said, “about the job before this one.”

“I know.”

“But then this one came along.”

“It was a special situation.”

“I know.”

“You know, if it really bothered you, you should have said something.”

“It didn’t really bother me until a few minutes ago,” he said, “when the radio switched from ‘The Girl with Emphysema’ to ‘This Just In.’”

“Ipanema.”

“Huh?”

“‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ Keller.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You said ‘The Girl with Emphysema.’”

“Are you sure?”

“Never mind.”

“Because why would I say that?”

“Never mind, for God’s sake.”

“It just doesn’t sound like something I would say.”

“Call it a slip of the ear, Keller, if that makes you happy. We’re both a little rattled, and who can blame us? Go back to your room and wait this out.”

“I will.”

“And if anything comes up—”

“I’ll let you know,” he said.

He closed the phone. He was sitting behind the wheel of the rented Nissan, parked at the first strip mall he’d come to since leaving McCue’s place. His new stamps were in an envelope in one pocket, his tongs in another, and his Scott catalog was on the seat beside him. He was still holding the cell phone, and he had no sooner put it in a pocket than he changed his mind and took it out again. He opened it and was looking for the Redial button when it rang. The caller ID screen was blank, but there was only one person it could be.

He answered it and said, “I was just about to call you.”

“Because you had the same thought I did.”

“I guess so. Either it’s a coincidence—”

“Or it’s not.”

“Right.”

“I have a feeling that thought was in both our minds from the minute we got the news flash.”

“I think you’re right,” he said, “because when it just now came to me it felt like something I’ve known all along.”

“Day to day,” she said, “before Longford made the news, did it feel wrong?”

“It always does.”

“Really?”

“Lately, yeah. That’s one reason I want to pack it in. You remember Indianapolis? The plan there was that they’d kill me once I took out the target. They put a bug on my car so they’d always be able to find me.”

“I remember.”

“If I hadn’t overheard two of them talking—”

“I know.”

“And then the other job for Al, the one in Albuquerque, I was so paranoid I booked three motel rooms under three different names.”

“And didn’t stay in any of them, as I recall.”

“Or anywhere else, either. I did the job and came home. Most of the time everything’s fine, Dot, but I’m gun-shy, and I take so many precautions I trip over them. And then when I start to relax, somebody shoots the governor of Ohio.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Be careful, Keller.”

“I intend to.”

“Lay low as long as you have to, if you’re sure you’re in a safe place. Don’t even think about doing the job for Al, not as long as there’s the slightest chance that this might be a setup.”

“All right.”

“And stay in touch,” she said, and rang off.

3

Was it a setup?

That would explain the delays. His purported quarry, the short fat white guy who was manifestly not the governor of Ohio or anyplace else, was not a terribly difficult target. An hour or so after Keller’s plane had landed, the man who’d met it was driving Keller through a tree-lined neighborhood in West Des Moines, near Holiday Park. The driver, a big man with large facial features and a lot of hair growing out of his ears, eased up on the accelerator as they passed a ranch house with compulsively symmetrical shrubbery in front of it. A man in Bermuda shorts and a baggy T-shirt stood on the flawless front lawn, watering it with a hose.

“Everybody else on earth,” he said, “sets up a sprinkler and leaves it the hell alone. That jerkoff has to stand there and hold it. I guess he’s the kind’s got to be in charge.”

“Well,” Keller said.

“Don’t he look just like his picture? That’s your guy. Okay, now you know where he lives. Next thing we’ll do is drive past his office.”

And, in downtown Des Moines, the driver pointed out a ten-story office building, on the sixth floor of which Gregory Dowling had an office. “Except you’d have to be nuts to hit him down here,” he told Keller, “with all the people around, and they even got a security staff in the building, and there’s traffic to make it tough to get away when the job’s finished. You go to his house, catch him watering his lawn, just cram the nozzle down his throat till it comes out of his ass.”

“Slick,” Keller said.

“Just a manner of speaking. You know where he lives, you know where he works, now it’s time to take you home.”

Home?

“We’re putting you up at this place, the Laurel Inn. Nothing fancy but not too shabby, either, you know? Nice pool, decent coffee shop, plus you got a Denny’s right across the road. You’re right at an interstate exit, so you’re on and off in a hurry. And it’s all taken care of, so you got no bill to pay. Charge anything you want to the room, it’s on the boss.”

The place certainly looked good from the highway. Around back in the parking lot, the big fellow handed Keller a palm-size cardboard folder holding a key card. Only the name of the motel appeared on the key card; the room number, 204, was written on the folder.

“They never told me your name,” the fellow said.

“They never told me yours, either.”

“Meaning let’s keep it that way? Fair enough. Name you’re registered under is Leroy Montrose, and don’t blame me, ’cause I ain’t the one picked it out.”

The hair on the man’s head was neatly cut and styled, and Keller wondered why his barber didn’t do something about the hair growing out of his ears. Keller had never thought of himself as particularly fastidious, but he really didn’t like to look at it, all that hair sprouting out of the guy’s ears.

“Leroy Montrose, Room 204. Any charges, just sign your name. Well, Leroy’s name. You sign your own name, which I guess you like keeping a secret, and they’ll just look at you funny.”

Keller didn’t say anything. Maybe the ear hair functioned like antennae, maybe the guy was getting signals on it from his home planet.

“Thing is,” the guy said, “it’s good you’re here now, but it might be a while before you can go ahead and do your thing.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a guy has to make sure he’s someplace else when it goes down, if you get my drift. And there’s a couple other whatchacall variables involved. So what they want you to do is stay pretty close to the room so we can call you and keep you in the loop. Like go ahead or don’t go ahead, you follow me?”

“As day follows night,” Keller said.

“Yeah? Good way to put it. What am I forgetting? Oh, right. Open the glove compartment. See the paper bag? Take it out.”

It was heavy, and he didn’t need to open it to know what it contained.

“Two of ’em, Leroy. Okay if I call you Leroy?”

“Feel free.”

“Get the feel of ’em, pick the one you like. No rush, take your time.”

They were handguns, of course, one a pistol, the other a revolver. Keller didn’t much want to handle them, but neither did he want to look squeamish. The pistol fit his hand better, but pistols could jam, which gave the revolver a definite edge.

But did he want either of them?

“I’m not sure I want to use a gun,” he said.

“You really like the idea of jamming the nozzle down his throat, huh? Still, you want to keep your options open. They’re both loaded. I got an extra clip for the Glock auto somewhere. The revolver, I can send over a box of shells later on.”

“Maybe I’ll take them both.”

“Walk up on him with a gun in each hand? I don’t think so. I had to guess, I’d say you look like a Glock guy to me.”

That was reason enough for Keller to choose the revolver. He checked the cylinder, noted the four bullets and the one empty chamber, snapped it shut. And for a moment he had a strong and entirely unexpected urge to point the thing at the man with the hairy ears and pull the trigger. Just blow him away and catch the next plane back to New York.

Instead he handed him the Glock, pocketed the revolver. “Never mind the extra shells,” he said.

“You don’t miss, huh?” Big grin. “I guess a pro is a pro, right? Oh, before I forget, lemme have the number of your cell phone.”

Yeah, right. Keller told him he didn’t have one, and the man patted his own pockets until he found one and handed it over. “So we can call you. Keep it with you when you go over to the Denny’s for a patty melt. I love them things, but you want to tell them to let you have it on rye bread. Makes all the difference.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“No problem. Now, the car. You shouldn’t have any trouble with it. You got a full tank of gas and she’s got eighteen hundred miles before she’s due for an oil change.”

“That’s comforting.”

There was more about the car – how to adjust the seats, the tendency of one of the trouble lights to go on for no good reason – but Keller hadn’t paid much attention. The fellow took the keys out of the ignition and handed them to Keller, and Keller asked him how he was planning to get home.

“I go home,” he said, “and I got my wife to deal with. I’d rather go someplace else, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I meant—”

“Hell, I know what you meant. See that beat-up Monte Carlo over there? That’s my ride, just waiting for me. Now you could go to the front desk if you wanted, but there’s no need. Room 204’s on the second level, and you can just take those outside stairs right over there.”

Suitcase in hand, gun in pocket, Keller mounted the stairs and found his room. He stuck the key in the lock and turned for a look at the Monte Carlo, which hadn’t moved. He opened the door and went inside.

It was a pretty nice room, with a good-size television set and a king-size bed. The framed prints on the wall were easy enough to ignore. The air conditioner was set a little on the chilly side, but he left it alone. He sat on a chair for five minutes, and when he drew the drapery aside and looked out the window, the Monte Carlo was gone.

Half an hour later he was across the street in a booth at Denny’s, with his suitcase on the seat opposite him. He had a patty melt on rye with a side of well-done french fries, and he had to admit it was pretty good. The coffee was not going to put Starbucks out of business, but it was decent enough for him to take the waitress up on her offer of a second cup.

Now how hard was that? Guy suggests a meal and you follow his suggestion and it’s not bad at all. So what’s so bad about going along with the program?

But no, the patty melt was where the program ended. They make it easy, he told himself, and you have to make it hard. They supply a decent room at a clean, well-situated motel, and you won’t even use the john because you don’t want to leave your DNA in it. The only thing he was willing to leave in the room was the cell phone they’d provided – turned off, wiped free of prints, and tucked away under the very center of the king-size mattress. He’d thought about leaving the gun there as well, but in the end he’d decided to hang on to it for the time being, and it was in his suitcase.

He’d returned to the car they gave him, but only in order to wipe any surfaces he might have touched. He triggered the remote on the key fob to lock the car, and had the urge to fling the keys into a handy Dumpster. Could they use the car keys to track him? He wasn’t sure, and his sense of contemporary technology was that anybody could do anything, and if they couldn’t today they’d be able to tomorrow. Still, he didn’t see any reason to toss the car keys just yet, or the room key, either.

He’d walked across the street to Denny’s, finished his patty melt and fries and two cups of coffee, and now he used a pay phone next to the men’s room to call a taxi. “Going to the airport,” he said, and they wanted to know his name. He felt like telling them he’d be the only person in front of Denny’s waiting for a cab, but instead he just told them his name was Eddie. “Be ten minutes, Eddie,” said the woman on the other end of the line, and the cab showed up in eight.

The girl at the Hertz counter was happy to rent Holden Blankenship a Nissan Sentra. He called ahead on one of the courtesy phones across from baggage claim and booked himself into a Days Inn, and the room was ready for him by the time he drove there. He unpacked, took a shower, turned the TV on, surfed through a slew of cable channels, turned it off again, and stretched out on the bed. But he sat up almost immediately, convinced he’d left the wrong phone in Room 204 at the Laurel Inn.

He found his phone – if in fact that’s what it was. It looked all right, but the truth was he’d never really looked at it much since he bought it, and hadn’t looked much at the one Mr. Ear Hair had given him, either, and—

He opened it up and hit Redial, and it rang twice before Dot got to it. He relaxed when he heard her voice. They talked for a few minutes, and he brought her up to date.

“I’m in a holding pattern,” he said, “and I think I just made things more complicated than they needed to be. They have to let me know when it’s okay to do the work, and I just made it impossible for them to contact me.”

“If a phone rings and it’s underneath a mattress, does it make a sound?”

“Not when it’s turned off. I’ll have to check the desk for messages.”

“Or maybe they can send you signals through the fillings on your teeth.”

“If I were any more paranoid, I’d probably worry about that. I’d have to make myself a protective cap out of tinfoil.”