It was hard to believe that they charged two dollars for a Good Humor. Keller wasn’t positive, but it seemed to him he could remember paying fifteen or twenty cents for one. Of course that had been many years ago, and everything had been cheaper way back when, and cost more nowadays.

But you really noticed it when it involved something you hadn’t bought in years, and a Good Humor, ice cream on a stick, was not something he’d often felt a longing for. Now, though, walking in the park, he’d seen a vendor, and the urge for a chocolate-coated ice cream bar, with a firm chocolate center and assorted gook embedded in the chocolate coating, was well nigh irresistible. He’d paid the two dollars-he probably would have paid ten dollars just then, if he’d had to-and went over to sit on a bench and enjoy his Good Humor.

If only.

Because he couldn’t really characterize his own humor as particularly good, or even neutral. He was, in fact, in a fairly dismal mood, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. There were things he liked about his work, but its immediate aftermath had never been one of them; whatever feeling of satisfaction came from a job well done was mitigated by the bad feeling brought about by the job’s nature. He’d just killed three people, and two of them had been his clients. That wasn’t the way things were supposed to go.

But what choice had he had? Both of the women had met him and seen his face, and one of them had tracked him to his apartment. He could leave them alive, but then he’d have to relocate to Chicago; it just wouldn’t be safe to stay in New York, where there’d be all too great a chance of running into one or the other of them.

Even if he didn’t, sooner or later one or the other would talk. They were amateurs, and if he did just what he was supposed to do originally-send Fluffy to that great dog run in the sky-either Evelyn or Myra would have an extra drink one night and delight in telling her friends how she’d managed to solve a problem in a sensible Sopranos-style way.

And of course if he executed the extra commission from one of them by killing the other, well, sooner or later the cops would talk to the survivor, who would hold out for about five minutes before spilling everything she knew. He’d have to kill Myra, because she’d followed him home and thus knew more than Evelyn, and that’s what he’d done, thinking he might be able to leave it at that, but with George dead the cops would go straight to Evelyn, and…

He had to do all three of them. Period, end of story.

And the way he left things, the cops wouldn’t really have any reason to look much further. A domestic triangle, all three participants dead, all shot with the same gun, with nitrate particles in the shooter’s hand and the last bullet fired through the roof of his mouth and into his brain. (And, as Evelyn had observed with delight, out the back of his skull.) It’d make tabloid headlines, but there was no reason for anyone to go looking for a mystery man from Chicago or anywhere else.

Usually, after he’d finished a piece of work, the next order of business was for him to go home. Whether he drove or flew or took a train, he’d thus be putting some substantial physical distance between himself and what he’d just done. That, plus the mental tricks he used to distance himself from the job, made it easier to turn the page and get on with his life.

Walking across the park wasn’t quite the same thing.

He centered his attention on his Good Humor. The sweetness helped, no question about it. Took the sourness right out of his system. The sweetness, the creaminess, the tang of the chocolate center that remained after the last of the ice cream was gone-it was all just right, and he couldn’t believe he’d resented paying two dollars for it. It would have been a bargain at five dollars, he decided, and an acceptable luxury at ten. It was gone now, but…

Well, couldn’t he have another?

The only reason not to, he decided, was that it wasn’t the sort of thing a person did. You didn’t buy one ice cream bar and follow it with another. But why not? He wouldn’t miss the two dollars, and weight had never been a problem for him, nor was there any particular reason for him to watch his intake of fat or sugar or chocolate. So?

He found the vendor, handed him a pair of singles. “Think I’ll have another,” he said, and the vendor, who may or may not have spoken English, took his money and gave him his ice cream bar.

He was just finishing the second Good Humor when the woman showed up. Aida Cuppering walked briskly along the path, wearing her usual outfit and flanked by her usual companion. She stopped a few yards from Keller’s bench, but Fluffy strained at his leash, making a sound that was sort of an angry whimper. Keller looked in the direction the dog was pointing, and fifty yards or so up the path he saw what Fluffy saw, a Jack Russell terrier who was lifting a leg at the base of a tree.

“Oh, you good boy,” Aida Cuppering said, even as she stooped to unclip the lead from Fluffy’s collar.

“Go!” she said, and Fluffy went, tearing down the path at the little terrier.

Keller couldn’t watch the dogs. Instead he looked at the woman, and that was bad enough, as she glowed with the thrill of the kill. After the little dog’s yelping had ceased, after Cuppering’s body had shuddered with whatever sort of climax the spectacle had afforded her, she looked over and realized that Keller was watching her.

“He needs his exercise,” she said, smiling benignly, and turned to clap her hands to urge the dog to return.

Keller never planned what happened next. He didn’t have time, didn’t even think about it. He got to his feet, reached her in three quick strides, cupped her jaw with one hand and fastened the other on her shoulder, and broke her neck every bit as efficiently as her dog had broken the neck of the little terrier.

31

“So you saw Fluffy make a kill.”

He was in White Plains, drinking a glass of iced tea and watching Dot’s television. It was tuned to the Game Show Channel, and the sound was off. Game shows, he thought, were dopey enough when you could hear what the people were saying.

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t watch. The animal’s a killing machine, Dot.”

“Now that’s funny,” she said, “because I was just about to say the same thing about you. I don’t get it, Keller. We take a job for short money because all you have to do is kill a dog. The next thing I know, four people are dead, and two of them used to be clients of ours. I don’t know how we can expect them to recommend us to their friends, let alone give us some repeat business.”

“I didn’t have any choice, Dot.”

“I realize that. They already knew too much when it was just going to be a dog that got killed, but as soon as human beings entered the equation, it became very dangerous to leave them alive.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“And when you come right down to it, all you did was what each of them hired you to do. A says to kill B and C, you kill B and C. And then you kill A, because that’s what B hired you to do. I have to say I think D came out of left field.”

“D? Oh, Aida Cuppering.”

“Nobody wanted her killed,” she said, “and at last report nobody paid to have her killed. Was that what you call pro bono?”

“It was an impulse.”

“No kidding.”

“That dog of hers, killing other dogs is his nature, but there’s no question she did everything she could to encourage it. Just because she liked to watch. I was supposed to kill the dog, but he was just a dog, you know?”

“So you broke her neck. If anyone was watching…”

“Nobody was.”

“A good thing, or you’d have had more necks to break. The police certainly seem puzzled. They seem to think the killing might have been the work of one of her clients. It turns out she really was a dominatrix after all.”