Patterns…

You could tell me, she’d said, thinking she was joking, but then you’d have to kill me. Oddly, in the languor that followed their lovemaking, he’d had the impulse to confide in her, to tell her what had brought him to Scottsdale.

Yeah, right.

He drove around for a while, then found his way back to his motel and surfed the TV channels without finding anything that caught his interest. He turned off the set and sat there in the dark.

He thought of calling Dot. There were things he could talk about with her, but others he couldn’t, and anyway he didn’t want to do any talking on a cell phone, not even an untraceable one.

He found himself thinking about the guy in Roseburg. He tried to picture him and couldn’t. Early on he’d worked out a way to keep people from the past from flooding the present with their faces. You worked with their images in your mind, leached the color out of them, made the features grow dimmer, shrank the picture as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. You made them grow smaller and darker and hazier until they disappeared, and if you did it correctly you forgot everything but the barest of facts about them. There was no emotional charge, no weight to them, and they became more and more difficult to recall to mind.

But now he’d bridged a gap and closed a circuit, and the man’s face was there in his memory, the face of an aging chipmunk. Jesus, Keller thought, get out of my memory, will you? You’ve been dead for years. Leave me the hell alone.

If you were here, he told the face, I could talk to you. And you’d listen, because what the hell else could you do? You couldn’t talk back, you couldn’t judge me, you couldn’t tell me to shut up. You’re dead, so you couldn’t say a goddam word.

He went outside, walked around for a while, came back in and sat on the edge of the bed. Very deliberately he set about getting rid of the man’s face, washing it of color, pushing it farther and farther away, making it disappear. The process was more difficult than it had been in years, but it worked, finally, and the little man was gone to wherever the washed-out faces of dead people went. Wherever it was, Keller prayed he’d stay there.

He took a long hot shower and went to bed.

In the morning he found someplace new to have breakfast. He read the paper and had a second cup of coffee, then drove pointlessly around the perimeter of Sundowner Estates.

Back at the motel, he called Dot on his cell phone. “Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with,” he said. “I park where I can watch the entrance. Then, when some resident drives out, I follow them.”

“Them?”

“Well, him or her, depending which it is. Or them, if there’s more than one in the car. Sooner or later, they stop somewhere and get out of the car.”

“And you take them out, and you keep doing this, and sooner or later it’s the right guy.”

“They get out of the car,” he said, “and I hang around until nobody’s watching, and I get in the trunk.”

“The trunk of their car.”

“If I wanted to get in the trunk of my own car,” he said, “I could go do that right now. Yes, the trunk of their car.”

“I get it,” she said. “Their car morphs into the Trojan Chrysler. They sail back into the walled city, and you’re in there, and hoping they’ll open the trunk eventually and let you out.”

“Car trunks have a release mechanism built in these days,” he said. “So kidnap victims can escape.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “The automakers added something for the benefit of the eight people a year who get stuffed into car trunks?”

“I think it’s probably more than eight a year,” he said, “and then there are the people, kids mostly, who get locked in accidentally. Anyway, it’s no problem getting out.”

“How about getting in? You real clever with auto locks?”

“That might be a problem,” he admitted. “Does everybody lock their car nowadays?”

“I bet the ones who live in gated communities do. Not when they’re home safe, but when they’re out and about in a dangerous place like the suburbs of Phoenix. How crazy are you about this plan, Keller?”

“Not too,” he admitted.

“Because how would you even know they were going back? Your luck, they’re on their way to spend two weeks in Las Vegas.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Of course you’d know right away,” she said, “when you tried to get in the trunk and it was full of suitcases and copies of Beat the Dealer.”

“It’s not a great plan,” he allowed, “but you wouldn’t believe the security. The only other thing I can think of is to buy a place.”

“Buy a house there, you mean. I don’t think the budget would cover it.”

“I could keep it as an investment,” he said, “and rent it out when I wasn’t using it.”

“Which would be what, fifty-two weeks a year?”

“But if I could afford to do all that,” he said, “I could also afford to tell the client to go roll his hoop, which I’m thinking I might have to go and do anyway.”

“Because it’s looking difficult.”

“It’s looking impossible,” he said, “and then on top of everything else…”

“Yes? Keller? Where’d you go? Hello?”

“Never mind,” he said. “I just figured out how to do it.”

“As you can see,” Mitzi Prentice said, “the view’s nowhere near as nice as the Lattimore house. And there’s just two bedrooms instead of three, and the furnishing’s a little on the generic side. But compared to spending the next two weeks in a motel-”

“It’s a whole lot more comfortable,” he said.

“And more secure,” she said, “just in case you’ve got your stamp collection with you.”

“I don’t,” he said, “but a little security never hurt anybody. I’d like to take it.”

“I don’t blame you, it’s a real good deal, and nice income for Mr. and Mrs. Sundstrom, who’re in the Galapagos Islands looking at blue-footed boobies. That’s where all the crap on their walls comes from. Not the Galapagos, but other places they go to on their travels.”

“I was wondering.”

“Well, they could tell you about each precious piece, but they’re not here, and if they were then their place wouldn’t be available, would it? We’ll go to the office and fill out the paperwork, and then you can give me a check and I’ll give you a set of keys and some ID to get you past the guard at the gate. And a pass to the clubhouse, and information on greens fees and all. I hope you’ll have some time for golf.”

“Oh, I should be able to fit in a few rounds.”

“No telling what you’ll be able to fit in,” she said. “Speaking of which, let’s fit in a quick stop at the Lattimore house before we start filling out lease agreements. And no, silly, I’m not trying to get you to buy that place. I just want you to take me into that bedroom again. I mean, you don’t expect me to do it in Cynthia Sundstrom’s bed, do you? With all those weird masks on the wall? It’d give me the jimjams for sure. I’d feel like primitive tribes were watching me.”

The Sundstrom house was a good deal more comfortable than his motel, and he found he didn’t mind being surrounded by souvenirs of the couple’s travels. The second bedroom, which evidently served as Harvey Sundstrom’s den, had a collection of edged weapons hanging on the walls, knives and daggers and what he supposed were battle-axes, and there was no end of carved masks and tapestries in the other rooms. Some of the masks looked god-awful, he supposed, but they weren’t the sort of things to give him the jimjams, whatever the jimjams might be, and he got in the habit of acknowledging one of them, a West African mask with teeth like tombstones and a lot of rope fringe for hair. He found himself giving it a nod when he passed it, even raising a hand in a salute.

Pretty soon, he thought, he’d be talking to it.

Because it was becoming clear to him that he felt the need to talk to someone. It was, he supposed, a need he’d had all his life, but for years he’d led an existence that didn’t much lend itself to sharing confidences. He’d spent virtually all his adult life as a paid assassin, and it was no line of work for a man given to telling his business to strangers-or to friends, for that matter. You did what they paid you to do and you kept your mouth shut, and that was about it. You didn’t talk about your work, and it got so you didn’t talk about much of anything else, either. You could go to a sports bar and discuss the game with the fellow on the next barstool, you could gripe about the weather to the woman standing alongside you at the bus stop, you could complain about the mayor to the waitress at the corner coffee shop, but if you wanted a conversation with a little more substance to it, well, you were pretty much out of luck.