no obvious business in the area. He’d learned it was safer not to take a room opposite a factory or a pub, but things change. Someone opened a sandwich bar the week before last, and it was time he moved on.
There was a man in one of the cars. The light from the streetlamps bouncing off the wet road was enough to show a face that would have been unreadable on a better night. Still mostly from habit Horn gave him a glance as he walked past—casual enough not to arouse curiosity, long enough to remember what he saw. A middle-aged man in a dark coat. Narrow, longish face, no glasses or mustache, short graying hair. Hard to say how tall when he was sitting down. He looked up as Horn looked down and their eyes met for a second, then the man looked away—unhurriedly, checking the mirror. Waiting for someone in the café, probably. Horn walked on, his toolbag slung over his shoulder, crossed the road and went home.
It was gone ten o’clock. He took overtime when he could get it, to make up for the times when he’d had to leave a good job without collecting his pay because the look on a stranger’s face said he’d been recognized. More than once, he was sure, he’d read too much into an everyday exchange of glances and fled his latest job and his latest bed because someone had nothing better to do than idly watch the passersby. It couldn’t be helped. He had to act on instinct. If he waited for proof it would be too late.
And then, he thought his face was more famous than it was. Because he remembered what happened as if it were yesterday, he thought everyone else did too.
There was a grainy television in his room but he didn’t turn it on. He watched when there was something to watch, but background noise was never a good idea. He needed to hear the unexpected footstep, the soft hand trying the door. He dropped his tools in a corner, hung his jacket on the nail, eased his feet out of his boots and lay down on top of the bed with his eyes closed. It was a comfortable bed, the best he’d had for more than a year. He’d miss it when he left.
The sharp silhouettes of mountains appeared on the inside of his eyelids. But he couldn’t afford the distraction of a flashback. He sat up abruptly, reached out and turned on the TV. There was nothing worth watching, but anything was better than the memories. Tonight he’d take the risk of numbing his senses.
Talking heads came on the screen. Horn tried to concentrate, but it was politics or economics or international trade, one of those subjects that he knew affected him but failed to engage his interest. Slumped on his comfortable bed, bone tired, lulled by knowledgeable voices using words he didn’t understand when he was awake, still fully dressed he slid sideways into sleep.
Sometime later—he couldn’t judge how long: the economists on the TV had given way to a cartoon dog with subtitles but nothing else appeared to have changed—something woke him. He sat up with a guilty start, as if he were being paid to stay awake. While his senses were still working out where in his brain they belonged, his well-trained body had already moved into self-preservation mode, rolling silently off the bed, padding sock-footed into the corner beside the door and away from the window.
He wished he’d turned the TV off earlier. He couldn’t do it now without advertising the fact that he was awake. He sipped shallow breaths and listened with all his being.
He heard nothing. With his ear against the door he still heard nothing. He reached down carefully and slipped the special hammer out of its pocket in his bag. Successive colleagues laughed when he said it was a present from a girlfriend and he wanted to keep it nice, and anyway it was a lie. The point of the thick sock he kept wrapped around its head was that he didn’t want to be responsible for another death.
The fingers of his left hand rested butterfly-light on the door handle. Half a second before it turned he’d feel if someone grasped the other side. He felt nothing. He went on waiting, and still nothing happened, nothing changed. Which left him with a choice: to open the door and look, to go back to bed, or to