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Hit and Run
  • Текст добавлен: 26 сентября 2016, 15:40

Текст книги "Hit and Run"


Автор книги: Block Lawrence



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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

“You can laugh all you want,” she said, “but they work like a charm.”

The days passed slowly. Periodically he checked the Laurel Inn for messages, and on the third day the clerk read a number for him to call. He called, and a voice he didn’t recognize asked his name. “Leroy Montrose,” Keller said. “I’m supposed to call this number.”

“Hang on,” the voice said, and a moment later the man with the ear hair came on the line. “You’re a hard man to get hold of, Leroy,” he said. “You don’t answer your phone and you don’t check your voice mail.”

“You gave me a dead phone,” Keller told him. “And no charger. I figured you’d know to call the room.”

“Jesus, I coulda sworn—”

“Suppose I just call this number a couple of times a day,” Keller said. “That’ll work, won’t it?”

The man wanted to bring him another phone, or a charger, or both, but Keller managed to talk him out of it. He’d call that number every morning and afternoon, and before he turned in for the night. And, he added, with a little steel in his voice, he hoped it wouldn’t be too much longer, because Des Moines was an okay place, but he had things to do back home.

“Probably tomorrow,” the fellow said. “Gimme a call first thing in the morning.”

But the first thing he’d done the following morning, after a quick breakfast down the street, was find his way back to Gregory Dowling’s ranch house in West Des Moines. He’d driven past it once before, just to make sure he remembered where it was, and this time his quarry was out in front again, not watering the lawn but on his knees alongside a flower bed, doing something with a trowel.

Keller had taken the trouble to leave his Days Inn room so that he wouldn’t need to return to it. He’d packed his bag, wiped down the few spots he might have touched, and did everything but drop his key at the desk. If he got the go-ahead from his contact, he could take out the target and go straight to the airport. If not, the room would be waiting for him.

Without having planned it, he braked to a stop right in front of Dowling’s house, leaned across the front seat, rolled down the window. He couldn’t quite bring himself to honk, it struck him as impolite, but he didn’t have to; the man had heard the car approach and trotted right over to see if he could be of help. Keller told him he was new in the neighborhood and had managed to get lost trying to find the Rite Aid, and while the fellow was providing elaborate directions, Keller’s hand dropped into the pocket where he’d stowed the revolver.

Be nothing to it. Dowling, blissfully unaware, was gripping the window opening with one hand while gesturing expansively with the other. Whip out the gun, point it at him, give him two in the chest. The motor was running, so all he’d need to do was put the car in gear and he’d be around the corner before the body hit the ground.

Or forget the gun and just grab the poor bastard by the hair and the shirtfront. Yank him in through the open window, break his neck, then give him a shove and let him go.

Al might not be happy. But the job would be done, and what could they do, make him come back and do it over?

“Well,” Gregory Dowling said, straightening up and stepping back. “If there’s nothing else—”

“You’ve been a big help,” Keller told him.

He followed directions to the drugstore – it was as good a place as any to find a pay phone – and called the number. If he’d done that in the first place, he thought, the job would be done by now. Okay, fair enough, he’d make the call now, and if he got the green light he’d go right back and tell the fellow he must have misheard him, and they’d go through the farce again, only this time he’d use the gun or his hands and finish the job once and for all.

He made the call. “No, today’s no good,” he was told. “Give us a call first thing tomorrow morning.”

And he’d done just that, only to get the same message yet again. “Tomorrow,” the man told him. “Tomorrow’s a sure bet. In fact tomorrow morning you don’t even have to check with us, okay? Because it’s all set up. Anytime tomorrow, morning or afternoon, you can just go and do what you gotta do.”

“We’re all set for tomorrow,” he told Dot.

“High time.”

“You said it. I’ll be glad to get back.”

“Back to your own bed.”

“The bed’s okay. Tell you the truth, it’s better than my own. I’m overdue for a new mattress.”

“The things you don’t know about a person.”

“What I miss,” he said, “is my TV.”

“Fifty-inch, hi-def, plasma, flat panel. Did I forget anything?”

“No, and neither did the manufacturer. It’s just about perfect.”

“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.


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