“If you say so,” he said, “but can’t it wait, and I’ll do it on my way home?”

“Make the call now,” she said, “on your way home.”

“Oh.”

“Or wherever else you want to go. Because we’re history, Keller. So get your number off my phone, and lose my number, and we’ll both get on with our lives. How does that sound?”

He wasn’t sure if the question required an answer, but in any event he couldn’t come up with one. He got out of bed and into his clothes and out of her loft, and he called her from a pay phone in a bar at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker.

She picked up right away, and without preamble she said, “It was great fun, but it was just one of those things.” And hung up.

Keller, feeling he’d missed something, took a seat at the bar. The crowd was mixed-downtown types, uptown types, out-of-town types. The bartender was a Chinese girl with long straight hair the color of buttercups. She had a nose ring, but almost everybody did these days. Keller wondered how the hell that had caught on.

He heard someone order a Black Russian. He’d had one years ago and couldn’t remember if he’d liked it or not. He had the yellow-haired Chinese girl make him one, took a sip, and decided he could go years before he ordered another.

A song played on the jukebox. Keller didn’t recognize it, but, listening to it, he realized Maggie’s parting shot had been a line from a song. She’d delivered it like conversation, with no irony, none of the cadence you gave lines when you were quoting them, and it had taken him until now to place it. Great fun. Just one of those things.

I was out of town, he’d said. I know, she’d said.

And there’d been a tingling in his hands.

Had she sensed anything? Had she had any idea how close she’d come, how his hands had been ready to reach for her?

He thought about it and decided she hadn’t, not consciously. But maybe she’d picked something up on a deeper level, and maybe that was why, still in the afterglow of their lovemaking, she’d rushed him into his clothes and out of her life.

After all, his thoughts were powerful. Why shouldn’t she pick up on them?

He took another sip of his drink. Somewhere out there, the man they were calling Roger had him on a list. Not by name-Roger wouldn’t know his name, any more than he knew Roger’s. But Roger had tried to kill him twice, and would very likely try to kill him again.

Did Roger even know the same man had been his target both times, in Louisville and in Boston? For that matter, did Roger have a clue he’d killed the wrong person on both occasions?

If so, Keller could see how Roger might begin to take the whole thing personally, like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

Keller knew it was nothing personal. How could it be, when you didn’t know the person you were killing? Still, he seemed to be taking it personally himself, at those times when Roger took up space in his thoughts.

Which wasn’t that often. The days went by, and he didn’t see anything when he looked over his shoulder, and he forgot about Roger. And every once in a while Dot sent him out on a job, at which time he did do a certain amount of looking over his shoulder, a certain amount of thinking about Roger. But then he came back from the job without having done anything, to Roger or to anyone else, and the client paid him, and that was that.

And then he’d said he was out of town, and Maggie said she knew, and he’d been ready to grab her and snap her neck. Just like that.

He’d called up, as requested, to replace his home number on her Caller ID with the number of the pay phone. But was that how Caller ID worked? Did it keep track of just one number at a time? He didn’t have it on his phone, he couldn’t imagine why he’d want it, so he wasn’t too clear on how it worked. And, even if it was the way she’d said it was, how did he know she hadn’t picked up the phone the minute he was out the door? She could have copied the number off the screen before he called back to erase it.

She was, let’s face it, more than a little strange. That had been part of her initial appeal, that offbeat downtown weirdness, though he had to say it had grown less appealing with time. Still, it made it impossible to guess what the woman would do.

If she had the number, she could get the address. She’d mentioned the reverse directory herself, so she knew about it, knew how to get an address to go with a phone number. If she knew all that, and of course she already knew his name, she’d known that from the beginning…

But that didn’t mean she knew what he did for a living. Suppose she’d picked up on his reaction, suppose she’d half-sensed that he’d been ready to reach for her and put her down. The fact remained that he hadn’t done anything, hadn’t even acted angry, let alone homicidal. Once he was out the door, once it was clear that she was safe, she’d talk herself out of any alarm she might have felt.

Wouldn’t she?

Back home, he worked on his stamp collection for a few minutes, then put everything away and turned on the TV. He worked his way through the channels two or three times, triggering the remote until his hand was tired, then thumbing the power button and darkening the set. And sat there in what little light came in from the window, looking at the remote in his hand. Looking at his thumb.

Maggie knew he had a murderer’s thumb. She’d pointed it out, called it to his attention.

Maybe she’d think about that and put it together with whatever she’d picked up when he’d been ready to reach for her. And maybe she’d factor in the way he was retired at an early age, but went out of town occasionally on special jobs for unspecified corporate employers. And maybe there’d be a hired killer in the headlines, or in some movie she saw, or some TV program. And maybe her eyes would widen, and she’d make a connection, and realize just who he was and what he was.

And then?

Eighteen

The airport in Orange County was named after John Wayne. Keller got off the plane with a tune running through his head, and he was halfway to the baggage claim before he worked out what it was. The theme from The High and the Mighty.

Funny how the mind did things like that.

There were half a dozen men standing alongside the baggage claim, some in chauffeur’s livery, all of them holding hand-lettered signs. Keller walked past them without a glance. No one was meeting him-that was policy, now that the mysterious Roger was out there somewhere. Anyway, no one would be expecting him to fly to Orange County, because his assignment was all the way down in La Jolla. La Jolla was a suburb of San Diego, and San Diego had a perfectly good airport of its own, larger and busier than Orange County ’s, and not named after anyone.

“Unless you count St. James,” Dot had said. When he looked blank, she told him that San Diego was Spanish for St. James. “Or Santiago,” she said. “ San Diego, Santiago. Same guy.”

“Then why do they have two names for him?”

“Maybe one’s the equivalent of James,” she said, “and the other’s more like Jimmy. What’s the difference? You’re not flying there.”

Instead he’d flown to Orange County, just in case Roger might be lurking in San Diego. He didn’t really think there was much likelihood of this. They hadn’t heard a peep out of Roger since he’d killed a man in Boston, a man who’d stolen Keller’s green trench coat and paid dearly for his crime. That was when he and Dot had figured out who Roger was and what he was trying to do.

At the time, Keller had found the whole business extremely upsetting. The idea that there was someone out there, hell-bent on being the impersonal instrument of his death, had him constantly looking over his shoulder. He’d never had to do that before, and he didn’t much like it.