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“You accepted what I offered! You agreed to take my contract!”

“A verbal contract isn’t binding. Anyhow, you’re in a seller’s market. What I’m selling is worth more now.”

“You’re a crook!”

The young man’s face looked pained. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“No, wait. Don’t leave. I didn’t mean it.”

“Bob, you hurt my feelings.”

“I apologize. I don’t know what I’m saying. Every time I think about that guy—”

“I understand, Bob. You’re forgiven.”

“Pat, you’ll never guess what Bob did.”

At the railing, Dolan shuddered. He was watching as the horses thundered toward the finish line. He turned. The young man stood beside him, chewing on a hot dog.

“You don’t mean you told him?”

“Pat, I had to. Fair is fair. He offered double our agreement. Four grand now, four later.”

“And you’ve come to me to raise the price?”

“They’re at the stretch!” the track announcer shouted.

“It’s inflation, Pat. It’s killing us.” The young man wiped some mustard from his lips.

“You think I’m stupid?” Dolan asked.

The young man frowned.

“That I’m a moron?” Dolan said.

“Excuse me, Pat?”

“If I pay more, you’ll go to him and he’ll pay more. Then you’ll come back to me and I’ll pay more. Forget it! I’m not paying!”

“Fine with me, Pat. Nice to see you.”

“Wait a minute!”

“Is something wrong?”

“Of course there’s something wrong! You’re going to kill me!”

“Well, the choice is up to you.”

“The winner is number three, Big Trouble—” the track announcer shouted.

Horses rumbled by, their jockeys standing up to slow them. Dust was drifting.

“Damn it, yes, I’ll pay you,” Dolan muttered. “But do it this time! I can’t sleep. I’m losing weight. I’ve got an ulcer.”

“Pat, the race is over. Did you have a bet?”

“On number six to win.”

“A nag, Pat. She came in last. If you had asked me, I’d have told you number three.”

“You’ll never guess what Pat did, Bob.”

MacKenzie stiffened. Dolan stopped beside him, looked around and sighed, then sat down on the park bench. “So you figured you’d have me killed,” Dolan said.

MacKenzie’s face was gaunt. “You weren’t above the same temptation yourself.”

Dolan shrugged. “Self-defense.”

“I should sit back while you sic the IRS on me?”

“That was just a joke.”

“Some joke. It’s costing me a fortune.”

“It’s costing me too.”

“We’ve got a problem.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Dolan said. “The only answer I can see—”

“—is for both of us to kill him.”

“Only way.”

“He’ll bleed us dry.”

“But if we pay someone else to kill him, the new guy might try something cute too.”

“We’ll do it together. That way you can’t point the blame at me.”

“Or vice versa.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?”

They were glaring at each other.

“Hi there, Bob. How are you, Pat?”

The young man smiled from behind their files. He was munching a taco as he went through their records.

“What the hell is this now?” MacKenzie said.

“He claimed you expected him,” the secretary said.

“Just shut the door,” Dolan told her.

“Hey, fellas, your records really are a mess. This skimping on the concrete. And this sub-spec insulation. I don’t know, guys — we’ve got lots of work ahead of us.”

A drop of taco sauce fell on a file folder.

Us?”

“Well, sure — we’re partners now.”

“We’re what?”

“I took the money you gave me and invested it.”

“In what?”

“Insurance. You remember how I said I was a business major? Well, I decided this sideline doesn’t suit me, so I went to see a specialist. The things a graduate is forced to do to get a job these days!”

“A specialist?”

“A hit man. If the two of you decide to have me killed, you’ll be killed as well.”

MacKenzie’s chest began to stab. Dolan’s ulcer started burning.

“So we’re partners. Here, I even had some cards made up.”

He handed one across to each of them. MACKENZIE-DOLAN-SMITH, it read. And at the bottom: CONTRACTORS.

Picking Up

by Ernest Savage

Tom Benton felt alone and alien, a stranger even to himself; but that was inevitable. Two years and five months of the phantasmagoria of Folsom Prison had driven him into a shell of privacy that he would have to break, he knew, like an embryonic bird lusting for light and air. An eagle, he thought; and smiled tentatively as the bus pulled off Main Street in Sheldon, California, and nosed into the station just around the corner on Pine.

There was nobody, of course, to meet him. Sheila was dead — and who else would there be? Harry Moss, maybe, Harry being the only person in town who would know he was coming home. Or so Benton thought.

He waited for his suitcase and then walked it a half block up Pine to the Mountain View Motel and registered. He told the clerk he wanted a room for exactly twenty-eight days, and revived an old civilian skill by bargaining him down to twelve bucks a day from fifteen. A first useful peck at the shell. He would come back, but it would take time and what he would need more than anything else was his house, his land, the place he’d lived for forty of his forty-six years. The place Sheila had lived. But it would be twenty-eight days yet...

It was quarter to six and he went back down Pine to the bus station cafeteria for supper. Last night he’d eaten his final meal at Folsom in the usual silence. No one had said, “Hey, Tom, good luck,” even though they knew his time was up. He’d made no friends in prison, no alliances. It would be a self-erasing interval in his life, an unrecorded hiatus; he wanted no fraying of that cord that bound him to his proper place, his home. He’d been a model prisoner, almost invisible; a cipher. They’d paroled him on his first petition.

He didn’t sleep well that night in the motel bed and was up early, out on Main Street before seven. The street was empty, the air cool and sweet, the sky overhead a comforting blue. In Folsom he’d seldom looked up at the sky; he’d kept his eyes level and unfocused. But those twenty-nine months were behind him now. He smiled as a Safeway truck rumbled by on its way to the store at the east end of town; a friendly, familiar sight, another small peck at the shell.

He stopped in front of Charley Ellison’s Bar deliberately, self-consciously, and gave it his full rueful attention. The scene of the crime. They always come back, it’s said. The fight had taken place here, but he didn’t mind thinking about that — it was pre-Folsom, a part of life, a part, almost, of Sheila’s life; the coda.

The big young man had risen from a table when Benton walked in that night. But Benton didn’t notice him in the smoky, dim light, and didn’t notice Hamp Carswell at the same table. If he’d known Carswell was there, he wouldn’t have come in. Sheila had been dead three weeks then and this was Benton’s first attempt at picking up the threads. All he wanted was a cold beer, a little distracting noise.

He sat at the bar. Ellison drew him a beer and quickly went over to put some coins in the jukebox; the place had fallen suddenly silent. But Benton didn’t notice that either. He was gazing into the back-bar mirror and telling himself he looked too damn old for forty-three. He did see the man on his left get up and move two stools away, and that should have told him something, but it didn’t. Then he saw the big young man standing just behind him and Carswell at his table, hunched over expectantly, staring at him. Then, in the sluggishness of his bereaved mind, he recalled the big young man rising instantly from Carswell’s table when he came in — like a trained guard dog, he thought belatedly.