Keller's Adjustment

  KELLER’S ADJUSTMENT

  Lawrence Block

  copyright © 2005, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Publication History

  Transgressions,

  Edited by Ed McBain, Forge, 2005

  Hit Parade,

  Harper, 2007

  KELLER, WAITING FOR THE traffic light to turn from red to green, wondered what had happened to the world. The traffic light wasn’t the problem. There’d been traffic lights for longer than he could remember, longer than he’d been alive. For almost as long as there had been automobiles, he supposed, although the automobile had clearly come first, and would in fact have necessitated the traffic light. At first they’d have made do without them, he supposed, and then, when there were enough cars around for them to start slamming into one another, someone would have figured out that some form of control was necessary, some device to stop east-west traffic while allowing north-south traffic to proceed, and then switching.

  He could imagine an early motorist fulminating against the new regimen. Whole world’s going to hell. They’re taking our rights away one after another. Light turns red because some damn timer tells it to turn red, a man’s supposed to stop what he’s doing and hit the brakes. Don’t matter if there ain’t another car around for fifty miles, he’s gotta stop and stand there like a goddam fool until the light turns green and tells him he can go again. Who wants to live in a country like that? Who wants to bring children into a world where that kind of crap goes on?

  A horn sounded, jarring Keller abruptly from the early days of the twentieth century to the early days of the twenty-first. The light, he noted, had turned from red to green, and the fellow in the SUV just behind him felt a need to bring this fact to Keller’s attention. Keller, without feeling much in the way of actual irritation or anger, allowed himself a moment of imagination in which he shifted into Park, engaged the emergency brake, got out of the car and walked back to the SUV, whose driver would already have begun to regret leaning on the horn. Even as the man (pig-faced and jowly in Keller’s fantasy) was reaching for the button to lock the door, Keller was opening the door, taking hold of the man (sweating now, fulminating, making simultaneous threats and excuses) by the shirtfront, yanking him out of the car, sending him sprawling on the pavement. Then, while the man’s child (no, make it his wife, a fat shrew with dyed hair and rheumy eyes) watched in horror, Keller bent from the waist and dispatched the man with a movement learned from the Burmese master U Minh U, one in which the adept’s hands barely appeared to touch the subject, but death, while indescribably painful, was virtually instantaneous.

  Keller, satisfied by the fantasy, drove on. Behind him, the driver of the SUV—an unaccompanied young woman, Keller now noted, her hair secured by a bandana, and a sack of groceries on the seat beside her—followed along for half a block, then turned off to the right, seemingly unaware of her close brush with death.

  How you do go on, he thought.

  It was all the damned driving. Before everything went to hell, he wouldn’t have had to drive clear across the country. He’d have taken a cab to JFK and caught a flight to Phoenix, where he’d have rented a car, driven it around for the day or two it would take to do the job, then turned it in and flown back to New York. In and out, case closed, and he could get on with his life.

  And leave no traces behind, either. They made you show ID to get on the plane, they’d been doing that for a few years now, but it didn’t have to be terribly good ID. Now they all but fingerprinted you before they let you board, and they went through your checked baggage and gave your carry-on luggage a lethal dose of radiation. God help you if you had a nail clipper on your key ring.

  He hadn’t flown at all since the new security procedures had gone into effect, and he didn’t know that he’d ever get on a plane again. Business travel was greatly reduced, he’d read, and he could understand why. A business traveler would rather hop in his car and drive five hundred miles than get to the airport two hours early and go through all the hassles the new system imposed. It was bad enough if your business consisted of meeting with groups of salesmen and giving them pep talks. If you were in Keller’s line of work, well, it was out of the question.

  Keller rarely traveled other than for business, but sometimes he’d go somewhere for a stamp auction, or because it was the middle of a New York winter and he felt the urge to lie in the sun somewhere. He supposed he could still fly on such occasions, showing valid ID and clipping his nails before departure, but would he want to? Would it still be pleasure travel if you had to go through all that in order to get there?

  He felt like that imagined motorist, griping about red lights. Hell, if that’s what they’re gonna make me do, I’ll just walk. Or I’ll stay home. That’ll show them!

  IT ALL CHANGED, OF course, on a September morning, when a pair of airliners flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Keller, who lived on First Avenue not far from the UN building, had not been home at the time. He was in Miami, where he had already spent a week, getting ready to kill a man named Rubén Olivares. Olivares was a Cuban, and an important figure in one of the Cuban exile groups, but Keller wasn’t sure that was why someone had been willing to spend a substantial amount of money to have him killed. It was possible, certainly, that he was a thorn in the side of the Castro government, and that someone had decided it would be safer and more cost-effective to hire the work done than to send a team of agents from Havana. It was also possible that Olivares had turned out to be a spy for Havana, and it was his fellow exiles who had it in for him.

  Then too, he might be sleeping with the wrong person’s wife, or muscling in on the wrong person’s drug trade. With a little investigative work, Keller might have managed to find out who wanted Olivares dead, and why, but he’d long since determined that such considerations were none of his business. What difference did it make? He had a job to do, and all he had to do was do it.

  Monday night, he’d followed Olivares around, watched him eat dinner at a steakhouse in Coral Gables, then tagged along when Olivares and two of his dinner companions hit a couple of titty bars in Miami Beach. Olivares left with one of the dancers, and Keller tailed him to the woman’s apartment and waited for him to come out. After an hour and a half, Keller decided the man was spending the night. Keller, who’d watched lights go on and off in the apartment house, was reasonably certain he knew which apartment the couple was occupying, and didn’t think it would prove difficult to get into the building. He thought about going in and getting it over with. It was too late to catch a flight to New York, it was the middle of the night, but he could get the work done and stop at his motel to shower and collect his luggage, then go straight to the airport and catch an early morning flight to New York.

  Or he could sleep late and fly home sometime in the early afternoon. Several airlines flew from New York to Florida, and there were flights all day long. Miami International was not his favorite airport—it was not anybody’s favorite airport—but he could skip it if he wanted, turning in his rental car at Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach and flying home from there.

  No end of options, once the work was done.

  But he’d have to kill the woman, the topless dancer.

  He’d do that if he had to, but he didn’t like the idea of killing people just because they were in the way. A higher body count drew more police and media attention, but that wasn’t it, nor was the notion of slaughtering the innocent. How did he know the woman was innocent? For that matter, who was to say Olivares was guilty of anything?

  Later, when he thought about it, it seemed to him that the deciding factor was purely physical. He’d slept poorly the night before, rising early and spending the whole day driv
ing around unfamiliar streets. He was tired, and he didn’t much feel like forcing a door and climbing a flight of stairs and killing one person, let alone two. And suppose she had a roommate, and suppose the roommate had a boyfriend, and—

  He went back to his motel, took a long hot shower, and went to bed.

  When he woke up he didn’t turn on the TV, but went across the street to the place where he’d been having his breakfast every morning. He walked in the door and saw that something was different. They had a television set on the back counter, and everybody was staring at it. He watched for a few minutes, then picked up a container of coffee and took it back to his room. He sat in front of his own TV and watched the same scenes, over and over and over.

  If he’d done his work the night before, he realized, he might have been in the air when it happened. Or maybe not, because he’d probably have decided to get some sleep instead, so he’d be right where he was, in his motel room, watching the plane fly into the building. The only certain difference was that Rubén Olivares, who as things stood was probably watching the same footage everybody else in America was watching (except that he might well be watching it on a Spanish-language station)—well, Olivares wouldn’t be watching TV. Nor would he be on it. A garden-variety Miami homicide wasn’t worth airtime on a day like this, not even if the deceased was of some importance in the Cuban exile community, not even if he’d been murdered in the apartment of a topless dancer, with her own death a part of the package. A newsworthy item any other day, but not on this day. There was only one sort of news today, one topic with endless permutations, and Keller watched it all day long.

  IT WAS WEDNESDAY BEFORE it even occurred to him to call Dot, and late Thursday before he finally got a call through to her in White Plains. “I’ve been wondering about you, Keller,” she said. “There are all these planes on the ground in Newfoundland, they were in the air when it happened and got rerouted there, and God knows when they’re gonna let them come home. I had the feeling you might be there.”

  “In Newfoundland?”

  “The local people are taking the stranded passengers into their homes,” she said. “Making them welcome, giving them cups of beef bouillon and ostrich sandwiches, and—”

  “Ostrich sandwiches?”

  “Whatever. I just pictured you there, Keller, making the best of a bad situation, which I guess is what you’re doing in Miami. God knows when they’re going to let you fly home. Have you got a car?”

  “A rental.”

  “Well, hang on to it,” she said. “Don’t give it back, because the car rental agencies are emptied out, with so many people stranded and trying to drive home. Maybe that’s what you ought to do.”

  “I was thinking about it,” he said. “But I was also thinking about, you know. The guy.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “I don’t want to say his name, but—”

  “No, don’t.”

  “The thing is, he’s still, uh…”

  “Doing what he always did.”

  “Right.”

  “Instead of doing like John Brown.”

  “Huh?”

  “Or John Brown’s body,” Dot said. “Moldering in the grave, as I recall.”

  “Whatever moldering means.”

  “We can probably guess, Keller, if we put our minds to it. You’re wondering is it still on, right?”

  “It seems ridiculous even thinking about it,” he said. “But on the other hand—”

  “On the other hand,” she said, “they sent half the money. I’d just as soon not have to give it back.”

  “No.”

  “In fact,” she said, “I’d just as soon have them send the other half. If they’re the ones to call it off, we keep what they sent. And if they say it’s still on, well, you’re already in Miami, aren’t you? Sit tight, Keller, while I make a phone call.”

  Whoever had wanted Olivares dead had not changed his mind as a result of several thousand deaths fifteen hundred miles away. Keller, thinking about it, couldn’t see why he should be any less sanguine about the prospect of killing Olivares than he had been Monday night. On the television news, there was a certain amount of talk about the possible positive effects of the tragedy. New Yorkers, someone suggested, would be brought closer together, aware as never before of the bonds created by their common humanity.

  Did Keller feel a bond with Rubén Olivares of which he’d been previously unaware? He thought about it and decided he did not. If anything, he was faintly aware of a grudging resentment against the man. If Olivares had spent less time over dinner and hurried through the foreplay of the titty bar, if he’d gone directly to the topless dancer’s apartment and left the premises in the throes of post-coital bliss, Keller could have taken him out in time to catch the last flight back to the city. He might have been in his own apartment when the attack came.

  And what earthly difference would that have made? None, he had to concede. He’d have watched the hideous drama unfold on his own television set, just as he’d watched on the motel’s unit, and he’d have been no more capable of influencing events whatever set he watched.

  Olivares, with his steak dinners and topless dancers, made a poor surrogate for the heroic cops and firemen, the doomed office workers. He was, Keller conceded, a fellow member of the human race. If all men were brothers, a possibility Keller, an only child, was willing to entertain, well, brothers had been killing one another for a good deal longer than Keller had been on the job. If Olivares was Abel, Keller was willing to be Cain.

  If nothing else, he was grateful for something to do.

  And Olivares made it easy. All over America, people were writing checks and inundating blood banks, trying to do something for the victims in New York. Cops and firemen and ordinary citizens were piling into cars and heading north and east, eager to join in the rescue efforts. Olivares, on the other hand, went on leading his life of self-indulgence, going to an office in the morning, making a circuit of bars and restaurants in the afternoon and early evening, and finishing up with rum drinks in a room full of bare breasts.

  Keller tagged him for three days and three nights, and by the third night he’d decided not to be squeamish about the topless dancer. He waited outside the titty bar, until a call of nature led him into the bar, past Olivares’s table (where the man was chatting up three silicone-enhanced young ladies) and on to the men’s room. Standing at the urinal, Keller wondered what he’d do if the Cuban took all three of them home.

  He washed his hands, left the restroom, and saw Olivares counting out bills to settle his tab. All three women were still at the table, and playing up to him, one clutching his arm and leaning her breasts against it, the others just as coquettish. Keller, who’d been ready to sacrifice one bystander, found himself drawing the line at three.

  But wait—Olivares was on his feet, his body language suggesting he was excusing himself for a moment. And yes, he was on his way to the men’s room, clearly aware of the disadvantage of attempting a night of love on a full bladder.

  Keller slipped into the room ahead of him, ducked into an empty stall. There was an elderly gentleman at the urinal, talking soothingly in Spanish to himself, or perhaps to his prostate. Olivares entered the room, stood at the adjoining urinal, and began chattering in Spanish to the older man, who spoke slow sad sentences in response.

  Shortly after arriving in Miami, Keller had gotten hold of a gun, a .22-caliber revolver. It was a small gun with a short barrel, and fit easily in his pocket. He took it out now, wondering if the noise would carry.

  If the older gentleman left first, Keller might not need the gun. But if Olivares finished first, Keller couldn’t let him leave, and would have to do them both, and that would mean using the gun, and a minimum of two shots. He watched them over the top of the stall, wishing that something would happen before some other drunken voyeur felt a need to pee. Then the older man finished up, tucked himself in, and headed for the door.

  And paused at the threshold, re
turning to wash his hands, and saying something to Olivares, who laughed heartily at it, whatever it was. Keller, who’d returned the gun to his pocket, took it out again, and replaced it a moment later when the older gentleman left. Olivares waited until the door closed after him, then produced a little blue glass bottle and a tiny spoon. He treated each of his cavernous nostrils to two quick hits of what Keller could only presume to be cocaine, then returned the bottle and spoon to his pocket and turned to face the sink.

  Keller burst out of the stall. Olivares, washing his hands, evidently couldn’t hear him with the water running; in any event he didn’t react before Keller reached him, one hand cupping his jowly chin, the other taking hold of his greasy mop of hair. Keller had never studied the martial arts, not even from a Burmese with an improbable name, but he’d been doing this sort of thing long enough to have learned a trick or two. He broke Olivares’s neck and was dragging him across the floor to the stall he’d just vacated when, damn it to hell, the door burst open and a little man in shirtsleeves got halfway to the urinal before he suddenly realized what he’d just seen. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and Keller got him before he could make a sound.

  The little man’s bladder, unable to relieve itself in life, could not be denied in death. Olivares, having emptied his bladder in his last moments of life, voided his bowels. The men’s room, no garden spot to begin with, stank to the heavens. Keller stuffed both bodies into one stall and got out of there in a hurry, before some other son of a bitch could rush in and join the party.

  Half an hour later he was heading north on I-95. Somewhere north of Stuart he stopped for gas, and in the men’s room—empty, spotless, smelling of nothing but pine-scented disinfectant—he put his hands against the smooth white tiles and vomited. Hours later, at a rest area just across the Georgia line, he did so again.

  He couldn’t blame it on the killing. It had been a bad idea, lurking in the men’s room. The traffic was too heavy, with all those drinkers and cocaine-sniffers. The stench of the corpses he’d left there, on top of the reek that had permeated the room to start with, could well have turned his stomach, but it would have done so then, not a hundred miles away when it no longer existed outside of his memory.