Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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Later he asked Dot if she felt like a visit to the mall, but she’d found something she liked on television. He went to a hardware store and picked up a few things, including a heavy steel pry bar with its end bent into a U, a roll of wire for hanging pictures, a roll of heavy-gauge duct tape, and a pair of wire-cutting pliers. He put his purchases in the trunk and drove around to the theater entrance. He watched a movie, and when it ended he stopped at the men’s room, then bought popcorn before sneaking into one of the other theaters to watch another movie.

Just like old times, he thought. But at least he wouldn’t have to spend the night in the car.

37

At 8:30 Monday morning they were on Belle Mead Lane, parked where they could see the Taggert house. They hadn’t been there five minutes before the garage door rose and the brown SUV emerged from it.

“Taking them to school,” Dot said. “If she’s coming back right away, we’ll want to wait until later. But there’s no way to know, is there?”

“There is if she turns this way,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Here she comes,” Keller said, and as the car approached he opened his door and got out from behind the wheel. He’d brought the Gideon Bible from his motel room, but he left that in his car. He stepped out into the street in front of the oncoming SUV, raising a hand palm-out and waving it from side to side. The Lexus stopped, and Keller smiled the kind of benign smile you’d expect from a studious balding man wearing glasses. He walked over to the side of the car, and when she rolled down the window he explained that he was having trouble finding Frontenac Drive.

“Oh, it doesn’t exist,” she said. “It’s on maps, but they changed their minds and never cut it through.”

“That explains it,” he said, and she drove away, and he got back in the car.

“I knew it,” he said. “There is no Frontenac. The map lied.”

“That’s wonderful, Keller. I’ll sleep better knowing that. But why on earth—”

“She’s dressed to meet the world,” he said, “not just to dump the kids and come home. Lipstick, earrings, and a purse on the seat beside her.”

“And all three kids?”

“Two in the back and one in front. And not a sound, because two of them were listening to their iPods and the other, the boy, was playing something where you use your thumbs a lot.”

“Some video game?”

“I guess.”

“A nice little family group. Keller, you’re having second thoughts about this, aren’t you?”

He said, “She’ll be gone a couple of hours, would be my guess, but we don’t have time to waste. Let’s get it done.”

Keller pulled into the driveway and they got out of the car. Dot, carrying her handbag, led the way up the flagstone path to the front door. Keller, with the Bible in one hand and the pry bar in the other, was a step or two behind her.

She rang the doorbell, and Keller heard it chime. Then nothing, and then footsteps. He flipped the Bible open and held it in his left hand as if he were reading it, so that it obscured the lower portion of his face. His right hand clutched the pry bar, holding it out of sight at his side.

The door opened, and Marlin Taggert, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of camo cargo pants, took a look at the two of them. “Oh, Christ,” he said.

“The very subject I wanted to raise with you,” Dot said. “I hope you’re having a divine day, Mr. Taggert.”

“I don’t need this,” he said. “No disrespect, lady, but I got no use for you or the Jesus shit you’re peddling, so if you’ll just take it somewhere else—”

But that was all he said, because by then Keller had driven the rounded end of the pry bar into the pit of his stomach.

The reaction was heartening. Taggert gasped, clutched at his middle, took an involuntary step backward, stumbled, caught his balance. Keller rushed in after him, with Dot right behind, drawing the door shut after her. Taggert retreated, picked up a glass ashtray, hurled it at Keller. It sailed wide, and Keller went after him, and Taggert yanked a lamp off a table and flung it.

“Son of a bitch,” Taggert bellowed, and charged Keller, swinging a wild right hand. Keller ducked under the blow, swung the pry bar like a sickle, and heard the bone snap when he connected with Taggert’s leg. The man let out a roar and crumpled to the floor, and Keller had the pry bar high overhead and just caught himself in time; he was that close to smashing the man’s skull and rendering him forever silent.

Taggert had an arm raised to ward off a blow. Keller feinted with the pry bar, then swung it in an easy arc that caught the man high on the left temple. Taggert’s eyes rolled up in his head and he pitched over onto his side.

Dot said, “Oh, hell.”

What? Had he struck too hard a blow after all? He looked up and saw the old dog waddling across the carpet toward them. Keller walked toward it, still holding the pry bar, and with a visible effort the dog raised its head to look up at him.

Keller put down the bar, took hold of the dog’s collar, put it in another room, and closed the door.

“For a second there,” Dot said, “I thought it was about to attack. But it was just waiting for Queen Elizabeth to take it for a walk.”

He checked Taggert, found him unconscious but breathing. He rolled him over, secured his hands behind his back with a few loops of the wire he’d bought, and used some more of the wire to bind his ankles together.

He straightened up, handed the pry bar to Dot. “Watch him,” he said, and went looking for the kitchen.

A door from the kitchen led into the attached garage. Keller found a button to raise the garage door, parked his car alongside the Cadillac, and lowered the door. He wasn’t gone long, and Taggert was still out when he returned to the living room. The lamp was back on its table, he noticed, and so was the glass ashtray.

Dot shrugged. “What can I say, Keller? I’m neat. And this mope’s still out. What do we do, throw water on him?”

“We can give him a minute or two.”

“You know, I thought you were exaggerating about the hair in his ears. If he doesn’t come to on his own, I’ll find a tweezers and start ripping out ear hair. That should bring him around.”

“This is simpler,” he said, and poked his toe gently into Taggert’s shin. He found the spot where he’d struck with the pry bar, and the pain cut right through. Taggert yelped and opened his eyes.

He said, “Jesus, my leg. I think you broke it.”

“So?”

“‘So?’ So you broke my fucking leg. Who the hell are you people? If this is some religious cult, you got a hell of a way of recruiting, is all I can say. If it’s a robbery, you’re out of luck. I don’t keep any money in the house.”

“That’s a good policy.”

“Huh? Look, wiseass, how’d you pick my house? You got any idea who I am?”

“Marlin Taggert,” Keller said. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Huh?”

“To tell me who I am,” Keller said.

“How the hell do I know who you are? Wait a minute. Do I know you?”

“That was my question.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You’re the guy.”

“I guess you remember.”

“You look different.”

“Well, I’ve been through a lot.”

“Look,” Taggert said, “I’m sorry that didn’t go the way it was supposed to.”

“Oh, I think it went exactly the way it was supposed to.”

“You’re probably upset that you didn’t get paid, and that’s something that can be taken care of. All you had to do was get in touch. I mean, there’s no need for violence.”

This was taking too long. Keller kicked him hard in the leg, and Taggert screamed.

“Cut the crap,” Keller said. “You set me up and left me hanging.”

“All I ever did,” Taggert said, “was what I got paid to do. Pick up this guy, take him here, take him there, show him this, tell him that. I was doing my job.”

“I realize that.”

“There was nothing personal to it. Jesus, you ought to be able to understand that. What the hell were you doing in Iowa? You weren’t there on a relief mission for the Red Fucking Cross. You went there to do a job, and if I didn’t keep telling you ‘Not today, not today,’ you’d have iced that poor schmuck we saw pruning his roses.”

“Watering his lawn.”

“Who gives a shit? One word from me and you’d have killed him without even knowing his name.”

“Gregory Dowling.”

“So you know his name. I guess that changes everything. You’d have killed him without it being personal, is what I’m saying here, and I did what I did, and that wasn’t personal, either.”

“I understand that.”

“So what do you want from me? Money? I got twenty thousand dollars in my safe. You want it, you can take it.”

“I thought you didn’t keep any money in the house.”

“And I thought you were the strong-arm division of the Little Sisters of the Poor. You want money?”

Keller shook his head. “We’re both professionals,” he said, “and I’ve got nothing against you. Like you said, you were just doing a job.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“Information.”

“Information?”

“I want to know who you did the job for.”

“Jesus,” Taggert said. “Why don’t you ask me something easy, like where’s Jimmy Hoffa? You want to know who put the hit on Longford, you’re pissing on the wrong tree. Nobody’s gonna tell me shit like that.”

“I don’t care who ordered the hit.”

“You don’t? Who are you after, the shooter?”

“No,” Keller said. “He was just doing his job.”

“Like you and me.”

“Just like us. Except we’re alive, and I have the feeling the shooter’s not.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Oh, you’d know, Keller thought. But since he didn’t care either way, he didn’t bother to push the point. He said, “I don’t care about the shooter, or about the person who commissioned the job. And I’ll stop caring about you as soon as you give me somebody else to care about.”

“Like who?”

“Call me Al,” Dot said.

“Huh?”

“The man who made the call to hire me,” Keller said. “The man who gave you your orders. Your boss.”

“Forget it.”

Keller touched the man’s shin with his foot, pressed just enough to get the message across. “You’re going to tell me,” he said. “It’s just a question of when.”

“So we’ll see who’s got the most patience,” Taggert said.

You had to admire the man’s nerve. “You really want the other leg broken? And everything else that comes after that?”

“Once I give you what you want, I’m dead.”

“And if you don’t—”

“If I don’t I’m dead anyway? Maybe, maybe not. Way I see it, if you’re up for killing me, you’ll do it whether I talk or not. In fact as long as I don’t talk, you’ll keep me alive hoping you can open me up. But once I turn rat and sell the boss out, I’m a dead man walking.”

“Not walking,” Keller said.

“Not on this leg, you’re right about that. Point is, either you kill me or he does. Either way it’s the same ending. So I think maybe I’ll see how long I can hold out.”

“There’s only one problem with that.”

“Oh?”

“Sooner or later,” Keller said, “your wife’s going to come home. She was dressed for a day on the town, so maybe she’ll go shopping, maybe have lunch with a girlfriend. If we’re gone by the time she gets back, she’ll be fine. If we’re still here, we’ll have to deal with her.”

“You’d hurt an innocent woman?”

“It wouldn’t hurt her much. She’d get what the dog got.”

“Jesus Christ, what did you do with the dog?”

Keller brandished the pry bar, made a chopping motion with it. “Hated to do it,” he said, “but I couldn’t take the chance he’d bite somebody.”

“Aw, God,” Taggert said. “Poor old Sulky? He never bit anybody in his life. He could barely bite his dinner. Why’d you go and do a thing like that?”

“I didn’t feel I had any choice.”

“Yeah, the poor old guy might have licked your face. Slobbered all over you. He’s got arthritis, he can barely walk, most of his teeth are gone—”

“It sounds like I did him a favor.”

“Sometimes I think I’m a hard case,” Taggert said, “and then I run into a son of a bitch like you. My kids loved that fucking dog. He’s been part of the family longer’n they’ve been alive. How am I gonna explain to them that their buddy Sulky’s dead?”

“Make up some story about Doggie Heaven,” Dot suggested. “Kids buy that crap all the time.”

“Jesus, you’re colder’n he is.”

“And speaking of the kids,” Keller said, “if you’re still holding out when they come home—”

“You’d do that?”

“I’d rather not, but if we’re still here when they turn up, you want to tell me what choice I’d have?”

He looked at Keller, looked at Dot, looked down at his own broken leg. “It hurts like a bastard,” he said.

“Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, I can tell. Okay, you win. Between you and him, either one of you would kill me, but he wouldn’t come after my family.”

“What’s his name?”

“Benjamin Wheeler. And you never heard of him. That’s his fucking secret, nobody ever heard of him.”

“Call me Ben,” Dot said.

“How’s that?”

“Never mind,” Keller said. “Keep talking. His address, his schedule, everything you can think of.”

38

“That’s a nice computer his kids have,” Dot said, “and a real fast broadband connection. You go to Google Image and type in ‘Benjamin Wheeler’ and you get a ton of hits. You make it ‘Benjamin Wheeler Portland’ and it narrows it down.” She was holding three sheets of paper, and she showed one to Taggert. He nodded, and nodded again at each of the other two sheets.

Keller took one of the sheets he’d nodded at and looked at a color photo of three men standing next to a horse. A fourth man, the jockey, was on top of the horse, and one of the men was holding a trophy, to be presented to the horse, the jockey, or the owner. Keller couldn’t tell which, nor did he know which of the men was Wheeler – although he was ready to rule out the jockey.

He looked at the other photos, and there was only one man who appeared in all three. In one he was with two women, posing for the camera, while the third shot showed him and another man in conversation. In each of the pictures Wheeler was the dominant figure, taller than anyone else, except for the horse. He dressed in expensive suits conservatively cut, and wore them with the ease of a retired athlete. His dark hair was well barbered, his face deeply tanned, and he wore a mustache.

“‘Financier, sportsman, and philanthropist,’” Keller read aloud.

“A hell of a guy,” Dot said. “On all these committees for civic betterment. Patron of local cultural events. That one woman there is an opera star, and there was a pretty good shot of him shaking hands with the new mayor, but I thought three was plenty.”

“You could have a hundred pictures,” Taggert said, “and that’s as close as you’re gonna get to him, because you can’t just pick up a Bible and go ring his doorbell. He’s got a house that’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a castle, up on a hill with an electric fence around the whole property. You got to go through a gate to get close to the house, and the guy on the gate confirms by intercom before he lets anyone in. If you got over the fence, you’d have the dogs to contend with, and you couldn’t deal with them the way you did with poor Sulky. Man, I can’t believe you killed my dog.”

“Then don’t.”

“They’re Rhodesian ridgebacks, a boy and a girl, and if you took a swat at one of them, he’d take your hand off at the wrist, while his sister was having your balls for dinner. Get past ’em somehow and make it into the house and he’s got four guys on staff, and they’ve all got guns and know how to use ’em. When he leaves the house, two of them go with him, one to drive and one to ride shotgun. The other two stick around and guard the house.”

“All those precautions,” Keller said. “I guess a lot of people must have tried to kill him over the years.”

“Why? Mr. Wheeler’s respected throughout the state, he calls the mayor and the governor by their first names. As far as I know, there’s never been a single attempt on his life.”

“No kidding. Where do you keep your guns?”

“My guns?”

“You know.” He pointed his finger, wiggled his thumb. “Bang! Your guns.”

There was a locked gun rack in the den, and the key was where Taggert had said it would be – and, Keller thought, right where any kid would look for it. Keller took the shotgun and slipped a few shells in his pocket. He left the rifle in the rack. He could fire a rifle but wasn’t that confident of his ability to hit anything with it. With a shotgun, all you had to do was get close enough to the target. A clay pigeon might present a certain challenge, but a human being standing still would be pretty hard to miss.

“They’re for hunting,” Taggert said, “and if I’ve gone out three times in the last ten years it’s a lot. Hell, if I was a hunter, you think my dog’d be a corgi? I still can’t believe you killed my dog.”

“You said that before. You must have handguns.”

“Just the one, in the bedside table. For emergencies.”

It was a revolver, a.38 Ivor Johnson, immobilized with a cylinder lock. Keller had a vision of an intruder surprising the Taggerts in their sleep, and Taggert yanking the gun out and rushing to the den for the key. Handy.

“It’s hard to believe you’re a pro,” Taggert said. “Taking my guns? You didn’t bring your own?”

“You offered me a choice of guns in Des Moines,” Keller reminded him. “So I’ve come to think of you as my regular supplier.”

“You took the revolver. Were you even planning on using it?”

“No,” Keller said, “but it came in handy later on.”

“You could have an AK-47 and you wouldn’t have a chance with Mr. Wheeler. You know what I would do in your position?”

“Tell me.”

“Put the guns back, let yourselves out, and go home. Mr. Wheeler won’t send anybody after you because he’ll never know you were here. He’s sure not about to hear it from me.”

“You can tell him you broke your leg tripping over your dog.”

“Jesus,” Taggert said. “I can’t believe you killed the poor damn dog.”

“Let’s be clear on this,” Keller said. “Packing up and going home, that’s not on the table. So what you’ve got to do is come up with a way for us to get to him.”

“Mr. Wheeler, you mean.”

“Right.”

“You want to use my gun, and you want me to work out how you’re gonna do it.”

“That’s your best shot.”

“It’s my best shot? How the hell do you figure that?”

“It’s pretty simple,” Keller told him. “That’s the only way you stand a chance of coming out of this alive. Say we go up against Wheeler and we wind up dead.”

“Which you will.”

“If we do, so do you. He’ll know how we got to him. We’ll tell him if he asks, and he’ll figure it out if we don’t. How long do you figure he’d let you live, and how far could you run with a broken leg?”

“And if I help you, and you get lucky? Then you turn around and kill me.”

“Not if you help us. Why kill you?”

“Shit, why kill Mr. Wheeler, for all you’re going to get out of it? Why would you kill me? Because you’re some kind of a psychopath, is all I can think of. Look what you went and did to Sulky.”

“Jesus,” Dot said.

“I still can’t believe it,” Taggert said. “I can’t believe you killed a poor old dog like that.”

“I can’t fucking stand any more of this,” Dot said, and went over to the door Keller had closed earlier. She opened it and made clucking noises, and Taggert turned his head in time to see the old dog waddle into the room.

“My God,” he said.

“It’s Sulky,” Dot announced, “back from the dead, and I bet you can’t believe that, either.”

39

“If you didn’t have to go and break my leg,” Taggert said, “this part would be a whole lot easier.”

Keller couldn’t argue the point. Getting the man from the living room floor to the back seat of his Cadillac took a lot of work on everybody’s part. Keller had snipped the wire from around his ankles, which made it a little easier, but security concerns had led him to leave Taggert’s wrists tied together behind his back. The whole process, through the kitchen and into the garage, was difficult to negotiate, and Taggert inevitably bumped into something here and there, and yelped with pain.

“What’s funny,” Taggert said, “is I was ready to beg you to take me in the car. Instead of killing me right there in my own house. On account of I didn’t want her to walk in and find her husband dead on the floor. I figured it was bad enough she’d come in and trip over the dead dog. See, this was back when I still thought the dog was dead.”

“Now she’ll trip over the live dog.”

Taggert didn’t seem to appreciate the line. It was hard to tell, he was in back where Keller couldn’t see his face, not and concentrate on his driving at the same time. Dot would have enjoyed it, but she was in the other car, tagging along in Keller’s wake. So there were no cars in the garage at 71 Belle Mead Lane, and the garage door was shut and the other doors locked, and the only signs of their visit were the absence of a shotgun and a revolver, both now in the trunk of the Cadillac, a table lamp that refused to light, and a dent in one wall where the glass ashtray had struck it.

“You want to take your next left turn,” Taggert said. “Point is, I didn’t want her to see that. Or the kids, if they came home the same time she did. And I thought that was the best I could do, just fix it so I could die somewhere else, because I didn’t think I had a chance of getting out of this alive.”

Keller waited until the oncoming traffic cleared, then took the left turn. He kept an eye on the mirror, made sure Dot had gone straight through the intersection, heading back to the motel.

“Now you got me believing I might have a shot,” Taggert said. “Not a real good one, but I have to say it’s better than nothing.”

“I suppose you could knock out the power,” Taggert had said. “Find a way to take out a power line and you’ll do two things at once. The fence won’t be electrified anymore, so all you have to do is climb over it. And, if you go in at night, you’ll have all the confusion of darkness going for you. No lights in the house, and everybody running around and bumping into each other.”

“Unless they’ve got one of those generators,” Dot said, “that kicks in automatically if the power supply’s compromised.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. But I have to say it’s the kind of thing Mr. Wheeler would have.”

“Suppose we had you with us,” Keller said. “Wouldn’t that get us through the gate?”

“Only if he knew I was coming, and he told them to let me in. Say if I called him, made up something I had to see him about.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I can’t come up with anything right off the top of my head. I’d have to think of something.”

“You’d have to think up some way to explain what I was doing in the car with you,” Keller pointed out. “That might be tricky.”

“Say you’re my prisoner,” Taggert said, and snapped his fingers. “That’s it! I’ll tell him the guy we set up in Des Moines turned up, and I managed to subdue him and now I want to bring him over for questioning. Then I march you in there and it looks as though you’re tied up securely, but you get loose and—”

Keller was shaking his head.

“Okay, this is better yet,” Taggert said. “I go over to see him, I make up some story, doesn’t matter what. And you’re in the trunk.”

“I’m in the trunk?”

“The trunk of my car. I park the car, Mr. Wheeler and I go in the house, and when the time’s right you open the trunk—”

“From the inside?”

“They got a way to do that now, to save kidnap victims. Or small children who crawl in car trunks when they can’t find an abandoned refrigerator to play in. So that’s what you do, you pop out of the trunk and go to work.”

“Mowing the lawn?”

“You do what you came to do. They’ll be off guard, all you got to worry about is the dogs.”

“Those Rhodesian ridgebacks.”

“I grant you they’re vicious,” Taggert said, “but do you think they’re gonna bother with a parked car?”

“They might take an interest,” Dot said, “what with everybody else standing there with guns in their hands, waiting for the trunk to open. You’re driving and he’s in the trunk? I don’t think so.”

“You don’t trust me,” Taggert said. He sounded hurt.

“I don’t even trust you to drive,” she said. “How are you going to work the gas pedal with that leg?”

“I could use my other foot.”

“And the brake?”

“Same thing. I mean, it’s not as if I’d have a clutch pedal to contend with. The Cadillac’s got automatic transmission.”

“You’re kidding. What’ll they think of next?”

Keller said, “I like cutting the power line. It seems to me you don’t run an auxiliary generator all the time, you just switch it on when the lights go out. So you do it in the daytime, and the only thing that goes out is the fence.”

“And the TV,” Dot said, “and the air conditioner, and everything else with a plug and a switch.”

“Still, it’s better than at night.”

“Then what you want is a rainy day,” Taggert said. “So you’ll have a decent shot of finding him at home. Day like today, Mr. Wheeler’s gonna be playing golf. What? Did I say something?”

Benjamin Wheeler belonged to three country clubs, and when he played a round of golf the drill was always the same. Two of his aides would accompany him, while the other two remained at the house. One man, the driver, would stay with the car; the other, more of an all-purpose bodyguard, would walk to the first tee with Wheeler, then wait at the clubhouse while Wheeler and his playmates buzzed around in their golf carts for eighteen holes.

Rose Hill, according to Taggert, was Wheeler’s most likely choice, so that was the first place Dot called. Posing as the secretary of one of Wheeler’s fellow golfers, she said she wanted to confirm the foursome’s tee time. It was scheduled for 11:15, said a young woman with a snooty English accent, and would there be four? Because she had Mr. Wheeler down as a party of three.

“Yes, three,” Dot said. “That’s quite right, because Mr. Podston won’t be able to make it after all.”

She hung up and Keller said, “Mr. Podston?”

“What I almost said,” she said, “was Pond Scum. Podston was the best I could do. Eleven-fifteen, that’s when they’re teeing off, so there’s not a lot of time to waste.”

You had to pass a gate attendant and assorted other functionaries at the entrance to Rose Hill Country Club, and then a valet would turn up to park your car. Keller drove right past the entrance and followed the map from the club’s website. Dot had printed out a copy, and he studied it again and decided the best bet was the seventh hole, a 465-yard par four with a dogleg to the left and woods on the right. A slice would put Wheeler in the woods, and that was where Keller decided to wait for him.

And there was a place forty or fifty yards from the fairway where he could park. He had a feeling it wasn’t entirely legal to park there, but any cop who felt compelled to do something about a nice big Cadillac with Oregon plates parked where it wasn’t in anybody’s way, well, the worst result would be a ticket, not a tow.

The only problem was that the parking spot was on the wrong side of the fairway. To get to the woods you had to cross the fairway, easy enough for Keller, but not so easy for a man with a broken leg. Keller could put an arm around Taggert and take most of his weight, but what would the two of them look like to anybody playing the hole? And you couldn’t just wait until a foursome played through, not with the amount of time it would take to get Taggert across the fairway; by the time they were halfway across, the next group of golfers would be at the tee.

One man trotting across a fairway, that was nothing remarkable. Two men, one unable to walk, the other struggling to assist him – even someone as singleminded as a golfer would zoom over on his cart to see what was wrong, and what he could do to help.

And could Taggert make it across, even with support? His entire lower leg, including the knee joint, was swollen and inflamed. They’d removed his shoe earlier, when Taggert complained that his foot had grown too large for it, and now it was larger still, twice the size of the other one.

No, the man couldn’t go anywhere.

“You’re going to have to wait here,” Keller told him. “In the trunk.”

“The trunk!”

“It won’t be that uncomfortable, and you won’t be in there that long. As soon as my work’s done, I’ll run you to a hospital and you can get that taken care of.”

“But what if—”

“If I don’t come back?”

“I didn’t want to say that.”

“Well, it’s possible. But there’s a latch, remember? You’re the one who told me about it. For kids playing refrigerator.”

“How am I supposed to reach it with my hands tied behind my back?”

“That’s a point,” Keller conceded, and clipped the wire on Taggert’s wrists. It still was no easy matter getting him into the trunk, and throughout it Taggert reeled off a litany of complaints – his leg was killing him, he could barely move his fingers, his shoulders felt dislocated, di dah di dah di dah.

“It won’t be long,” Keller said. He put the shotgun on the floor of the trunk, near Taggert’s swollen foot, and checked to make sure that the revolver was fully loaded.

“You’re leaving me the gun?”

“The shotgun? I don’t want to carry it around on the golf course. Too easy for somebody to spot it.”

“So you’re leaving it with me?”

“Although I suppose they’d just mistake it for a four wood. But it’s bulky, I don’t want to carry it.”

There was a car coming. Keller turned so his face wouldn’t show, waited for the car to pass. Meanwhile, Taggert said he was glad Keller trusted him enough to leave the shotgun with him.

“It’s not exactly a matter of trust,” Keller said.