Once, a few years ago, he’d let someone talk him into going to a psychotherapist. He’d taken what struck him as reasonable precautions, paying cash, furnishing a false name and address, and essentially limiting disclosures to his childhood. It was productive, too, and he developed some useful insights, but in the end it went bad, with the therapist drawing some unwelcome inferences and eventually following Keller, and learning things he wasn’t supposed to know about him. The man wanted to become a client himself, and of course Keller couldn’t allow that, and made him a quarry instead. So much for therapy. So much for shared confidences.

Then, for some months after the therapist’s exit, he’d had a dog. Not Soldier, the dog of his boyhood years, but Nelson, a fine Australian cattle dog. Nelson had turned out to be not only the perfect companion but also the perfect confidant. You could tell him anything, secure in the knowledge that he’d keep it to himself, and it wasn’t like talking to yourself or talking to the wall, because the dog was real and alive and gave every indication of paying close attention. There were times when he could swear Nelson understood every word.

He wasn’t judgmental, either. You could tell him anything and he didn’t love you any the less for it.

If only it had stayed that way, he thought. But it hadn’t, and he supposed it was his own fault. He’d found someone to take care of Nelson when work took him out of town, and that was better than putting him in a kennel, but then he wound up falling for the dog walker, and she moved in, and he only really got to talk to Nelson when Andria was somewhere else. That wasn’t too bad, and she was fun to have around, but then one day it was time for her to move on, and on she moved. He’d bought her no end of earrings during their time together, and she took the earrings along with her when she left, which was okay. But she also took Nelson, and there he was, right back where he’d started.

Another man might have gone right out and got himself another dog-and then, like as not, gone looking for a woman to walk it for him. Keller figured enough was enough. He hadn’t replaced the therapist, and he hadn’t replaced the dog, and, although women drifted in and out of his life, he hadn’t replaced the girlfriend. He had, after all, lived alone for years, and it worked for him.

Most of the time, anyway.

15

“Now this is nice,” Keller said. “The suburbs go on for a ways, but once you get past them you’re out in the desert, and as long as you stay off the interstate you’ve pretty much got the whole place to yourself. It’s pleasant, isn’t it?”

There was no answer from the passenger seat.

“I paid cash for the Sundstrom house,” he went on. “Two weeks, a thousand dollars a week. That’s more than a motel, but I can cook my own meals and save on restaurant charges. Except I like to go out for my meals. But I didn’t drag you all the way out here to listen to me talk about stuff like that.”

Again, his passenger made no response, but then he hadn’t expected one.

“There’s a lot I have to figure out,” he said. “Like what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, for starters. I don’t see how I can keep on doing what I’ve been doing all these years. If you think of it as killing people, taking lives, well, how could a person go on doing it year after year after year?

“But the thing is, see, you don’t have to dwell on that aspect of the work. I mean, face it, that’s what it is. These people are walking around, doing what they do, and then I come along, and whatever it is they’ve been doing, they don’t get to do it anymore. Because they’re dead, because I killed them.”

He glanced over, looking for a reaction. Yeah, right.

“What happens,” he said, “is you wind up thinking of each subject not as a person to be killed but as a problem to be solved. Here’s this piece of work you have to do, and how do you get it done? How do you carry out the contract as expediently as possible, with the least stress all around?

“Now there are guys doing this,” he went on, “who cope with it by making it personal. They find a reason to hate the guy they have to kill. They’re mad at him, they’re angry with him, because it’s his fault that they’ve got to do this bad thing. If it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t be committing this sin. He’s going to be the cause of them going to hell, the son of a bitch, so of course they’re mad at him, of course they hate him, and that makes it easier for them to kill him, which is what they made up their minds to do in the first place.

“But that always struck me as silly. I don’t know what’s a sin and what isn’t, or if one person deserves to go on living and another deserves to have his life ended. Sometimes I think about stuff like that, but as far as working it all out in my mind, well, I never seem to get anywhere.

“I could go on like this, but the thing is I’m okay with the moral aspects of it, if you want to call it that. I just think I’m getting a little old to be still at it, that’s part of it, and the other’s that the business has changed. It’s the same in that there are still people who are willing to pay to have other people killed. You never have to worry about running out of clients. Sometimes business drops off for a while, but it always comes back again. Whether it’s a guy like that Cuban in Miami, who must have had a hundred guys with a reason to want him dead, or this Egmont with his potbelly and his golf clubs, who you’d think would be unlikely to inspire strong feelings in anybody. All kinds of subjects, and all kinds of clients, and you never run out of either one.”

The road curved, and he took the curve a little too fast and had to reach over with his right hand to reposition his silent companion.

“You should be wearing your seat belt,” he said. “Where was I? Oh, the way the business is changing. It’s the world, really. Airport security, having to show ID everywhere you go. And gated communities, and all the rest of it. You think of Daniel Boone, who knew it was time to head west when he couldn’t cut down a tree without giving some thought to which direction it was going to fall.

“I don’t know, it seems to me that I’m just running off at the mouth, not making any sense. Well, that’s okay. What do you care? Just so long as I take it easy on the curves so you don’t wind up on the floor, you’ll be perfectly willing to sit there and listen as long as I want to talk. Won’t you?”

No response.

“If I played golf,” he said, “I’d be out on the course every day, and I wouldn’t have to burn up a tankful of gas driving around the desert. I’d spend all my time within the Sundowner walls, and I wouldn’t have been walking around the mall, wouldn’t have seen you in the display next to the cash register. A batch of different breeds on sale, and I’m not sure what you’re supposed to be, but I guess you’re some kind of terrier. They’re good dogs, terriers. Feisty, lots of personality.

“I used to have an Australian cattle dog. I called him Nelson. Well, that was his name before I got him, and I didn’t see any reason to change it. I don’t think I’ll give you a name. I mean, it’s nutty enough, buying a stuffed animal, taking it for a ride and having a conversation with it. It’s not as if you’re going to answer to a name, or as if I’ll relate to you on a deeper level if I hang a name on you. I mean, I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. I realize I’m talking to polyester and foam rubber, or whatever the hell you’re made out of. Made in China, it says on the tag. That’s another thing, everything’s made in China or Indonesia or the Philippines, nothing’s made in America anymore. It’s not that I’m paranoid about it, it’s not that I’m worried about all the jobs going overseas. What do I care, anyway? It’s not affecting my work. As far as I know, nobody’s flying in hired killers from Thailand and Korea to take jobs away from good homegrown American hit men.