hitman and back-up. He felt I’d find the active role more to my liking. He was right.
He was right about a lot of things in those five years, though there had been one thing he was wrong about, but that’s a long story, which I’ve recorded elsewhere, and it would be beyond the purpose of this present account to go into all of that again.
Suffice to say I’m alive and the Broker isn’t. And I have the Broker’s list.
It’s a list running to approximately fifty names, fifty entries, each including extensive biographical information, current and previous addresses, photographs, and a record of each specific job carried out. I used to be on the list, but I removed and destroyed my entry as soon as the thing landed in my hands. But I’d been there. All of us were. All of the people like me who’d done work for the Broker.
(This is not to suggest any brotherhood, any bond, between myself and the others on the list. I’d only worked with a handful of them. My longtime partner, for instance, was dead.)
The Broker was by no means a unique entity; there were others like him. And by now most of the people on the list would be working again, carrying out new assignments for their new Brokers. Life goes on, after all. Death, too.
But for me there would be no more Brokers; no more middle men. No way.
I had the list.
And no desire to take over where the Broker left off, no intention of playing the middle man role myself and becoming what I’d come to hate. Nor did I have any intention of using the list to try and blackmail anyone on it. A hired killer isn’t your ideal blackmail victim. Docile they aren’t.
But suppose.
Suppose I were to pick a name off the list, pick a killer out of the Broker’s hat. Suppose I were to follow that killer to his latest job, wait and watch and find out who his potential victim might be. And suppose I were to then go to that potential victim and tell him what’s about to happen to him. And offer my help in the matter. Offer a little preventive medicine. For a fee.
It was a crazy idea.
But suppose it worked…
6
I brought the razor up to my throat and stroked. A final patch of beard disappeared and the face looking back at me in the mirror was vaguely familiar.
And not a little strange. The upper part of my face was Florida tan, but the lower, newly bare half was pale as baby powder. I had grown the beard to change my appearance temporarily, assuming once the thing was off that my rather ordinary features would keep me a face in the crowd. Only not many faces in the crowd have two-tone complexions.
I shrugged at my familiar, strange reflection, thinking what the hell, I’ll just have to take time out and do something about it.
I splashed some water on my face, a little sting of shave lotion, and walked naked out into the bedroom part of the motel room, where the television was going, a morning game show on, a woman dressed as a head of cabbage standing next to a man, presumably her husband, wearing a sort of perforated tin skirt. The host was asking him what he was supposed to be, and the guy was saying, “I grate.” I couldn’t have agreed more. I turned it off, got into my swim trunks, and went out to the pool.
It was eleven-thirty and the sun was almost to the middle of the sky, a nice hot sun that would take care of my facial prob- lem no trouble. I found a beach chair near poolside, adjusted it to make sure I would get full benefit of the sun’s rays, and leaned back, covering the top of my face with a towel.
I suppose I looked a little weird, but it didn’t matter much, as there wasn’t a soul around. It was a terrific place to spend a morning and afternoon. Finally, around three, a mother and her couple of kids took a quick dip, and then a bit later another mother and her teenage daughter came out for some sun. The teenage daughter was a sweet little thing, very slim but very pretty, and she smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. I didn’t want to encourage her. One thing I didn’t need right now was sexual activity. That’s what I was recovering from. I also didn’t need an indignant mother, which can happen when you screw a teenage daughter, as it irks a middle-aged mother to discover her offspring is the more sexually attractive of the two.
I had left the Beach Shore early this morning, waking Nancy to tell her goodbye, as I didn’t want to seem to be sneaking out. I had no idea when the body in the shower would be found, didn’t expect it to be for several days at least, but at any rate I didn’t want to make a suspicious exit. Nancy wasn’t surprised to see me go. She was a little sad; she even managed a tear. Ours, apparently, had been one of her longer-lasting recent relationships.
I had made no attempt to make good time; in fact I had stopped mid-morning while still in Florida (barely) at this motel to get some rest, shave off my beard, do some thinking, and swim in a pool that wasn’t populated with water bunnies of various sexes. Now that I had found out about the pale beneath my beard, I was especially glad I’d stopped while still in the sunny south. I tan easily, or rather burn easily, the burn turning to tan literally overnight. So by tomorrow I’d be a new man.
I knew where she was headed. Glenna Cole or Ivy or whatever you want to call her. All it had taken was a few minutes on the phone with a helpful operator. I merely said a message had been left for me, a request that I call this certain number and I wanted to find out the source of the number before returning the call. The operator had said it was against company policy to do that, and I said I didn’t need a name or a street address, just the town would do fine. She gave me the town and I thanked her and when I hung up I had to laugh.
The name of the town the operator had given me was West Lake, Iowa.
I had picked Glenna Cole from my list because her permanent address was the Beach Shore in Florida. I had wanted to escape the Midwest, a Midwest which was still cold as hell though this was supposed to be spring, and break the rule and mix business with pleasure, get some sun, swim in the ocean, maybe get laid. In my desire to ease the boredom of working stakeout, I had chosen Florida, where I had not once been able to swim in the ocean, and where I got laid till I wanted to check into a monastery, and where I got so much sun half my face got tan.
And now I was heading back to the Midwest, back to Iowa, for Christ’s sake, where I’d just a few months ago been involved in a messy business that had put me in hiding until just a week and a half ago.
The messy business was this federal guy I shot. I didn’t know he was federal at the time. I didn’t know he was anything ex- cept a guy searching my hotel room, and he had a gun, which he started using when he saw me come in, so I used mine.
I never killed a federal agent before, or any kind of cop for that matter, at least that I know of. Finding out the guy was federal gave me a bad moment: I wondered if maybe it might not be hard to get away with.
But I was more worried about mob people, in whose affairs I’d been fiddling when I accidentally shot the federal guy. In fact that’s who I thought I was shooting at the time, a mob guy. So I’d covered my tracks (pretty well, considering it was spur of the moment) and retreated, burrowed in, waited to see what happened next.
Nothing happened next. I just sat around all winter, in my A-frame cottage on Paradise Lake in Wisconsin, drinking Coke and watching television and listening to music and reading paperback novels and swimming once a day (at the YMCA at nearby Lake Geneva) and growing a beard.
And thinking. Thinking about the new role I was preparing to play, assuming some federal guys didn’t come around to kill me. Or mob guys. Neither of which I intended to let happen, but in either case a change of plan would be called for.
By spring nobody had come around, so I figured I was okay. I picked a name off the Broker’s list and got in my Opel GT and went to Florida.
And now I was on my way back to the Midwest. Or would be tomorrow.
Today I had to get half my face sunburned.
7
