The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page A

having the next step in place and following it to its conclusion.
    A professional, yes—but he’d seen too many professionals to take comfort in the word, too many people who’d lost touch with the simple doing of the thing, the skill, the execution, and had gone off in search of The Big Picture, some grander frame. There was no big picture. Not for this, not for anything else.
    The other side of the coin was that what you did, your profession, could so easily become routine, workaday, all pride and pleasure in doing, all feeling, drained away.
    You had to find some passage, some between .
    Windows rattled from the thumping bass of a passing car. Speakers must be the size of Marshall stacks, for that. Music never made much sense to him; he just didn’t get it, though as a teenager he listened to all kinds, classical, jazz, rock, trying for a connection, if not with the music itself, then with everyone else, to whom it seemed so important. The car moved away, sound narrowing to little more than rhythm, like distant talking drums.
    He didn’t know what to do.
    Nothing got put in writing. For a time he’d kept it all on one of those personal pocket-size computers, but after leaving the thing behind in a Dallas motel room and barely getting back in time to retrieve it, he stopped. He wrote the details down, only as an aide to memorizing them, then destroyed the paper. Driver’s license, passport, Social Security card, all had been obtained under false names. He had no fixed address, received no mail, had no family or acquaintances, paid cash. His life was undocumented. Once he was gone there’d be virtually nothing left behind, nothing to show he’d existed.
    The contact had come via the Internet, by referral, as all his work came. He’d tapped in at a cybercafé in San Diego, a place the size of a small barn with tables so far apart the patrons may as well have been marooned on islands.
     
I have been introduced to your work by a mutual friend and would like to discuss the possibility of purchasing a custom doll.
    Dolls, because that was what first came into his mind years ago when setting up the system. He had no idea why. He’d always found dolls creepy. An old woman he knew as a kid had a house full of them. You’d look up as you passed through a doorway and one would be staring down at you with rosy cheeks. They were on shelves and windowsills, in glass cases, lined up in polished wooden chairs against the baseboards.
    In subsequent days he had bounced the client around various blinds on the Net before directing him to a post office box rented an hour earlier. Three days later he was waiting outside and hit the box with the first rush, walking out, package in hand, alongside women in crisp business dress and old men in ill-fitting pants, polyester shirts, and sweaters. That night just before closing, from a library in Carlsbad, he sent a message: Your order has been received and is being processed. Thank you for your business.
    Sitting at the particleboard desk in his motel that night, fresh from the shower and still undressed, he began. The desk was pushed up right against the window, overhanging the window ledge and air conditioner vent by inches; meager, barely chilled streams of air blew up to the desktop, then onto him. Kids were skateboarding on the sun-warped paving of the parking lot across the street, riding those small waves. Their cries reminded him of jungle birds.
    John Rankin. Fifty-one years old. Worked at a mid-level accounting firm in central Phoenix with a client list of real estate brokers and small businesses, owned an old but spacious and well-kept home in the area where Tempe and Mesa rubbed shoulders. Wife did social services (whatever that meant) at a retirement home. No children. Transplants from the Midwest, one of Chicago’s pilotfish suburbs, lured to Phoenix (he surmised) by one of that city’s periodic housing booms. Photos had Rankin waist-up in a suit whose coat came close to