The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (30 page)

Chapter 31

T
HE REPORTER WAS GONE,
convinced that the story was all a hoax. He’d seemed reluctant at first, but a few hundred dollars had set him straight. The Gambler knew those guys liked to act all high and mighty, but they were no better than anyone else.

Now it was just him and B.B. He dumped some Seagram’s vodka into a plastic bathroom cup and then pulled the wet carton of orange juice from the ice bucket. Little disks of ice scattered over the brown carpet, and he idly kicked them under the dresser while he mixed the drink.

“You want?” he asked B.B., bracing himself for rejection, since B.B. generally wouldn’t drink anything but his fancy bullshit wine. Screwdrivers were beneath contempt.

B.B. shook his head. “Nah.”

“We’ve got things to discuss,” the Gambler said. “Big, strategic things that always work better with drinks. You want to get some wine and then sit down to hash it out?”

“Nah, I’m okay.”

Jesus, what was wrong with this guy? Another bombshell dropped, and he sat there looking like a retard. The screwdriver was too vodka heavy, but he drank it down because . . . why the hell not. He then sat at the foot of the bed and looked at B.B.

“Well, let’s do it. What do you think about the kid?”

“The kid?” B.B. asked. “Which one? The older one?”

Holy hell. He was still thinking about those boys outside. His little empire was falling down around him, and he was still thinking about sticking it to those boys outside.

“Altick.” The Gambler tried to rein in his impatience. “You think he’s probably okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“What did Desiree say about him?”

“She didn’t see anything weird with him,” he said, and then turned to look at the window, even though the heavy cloth curtains had been drawn closed. “She said he seemed okay.”

The Gambler got the distinct impression that B.B. hadn’t even talked to Desiree. Not that it mattered. Altick was clearly a red herring in all this, a poor asshole who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not that it meant his troubles were over. The way the Gambler saw it, Doe was beyond corrupt, they had a reporter snooping around, the boss was coming undone by boy buggery, and they had three dead bodies floating in a pit of pig shit. And Scott, one of his own boys, had been the one to tip off the reporter. Scott was going to have to go down for this.

Why would Scott do it? The Gambler had always taken care of him and Ronny Neil. A sellout for big money he could understand, but talking to a reporter? Out of some sort of resentment toward Altick, no doubt. It was a bonehead move, there could be no denying it, but maybe the problem was that he hadn’t given those boys enough to do. Maybe he needed to give them more responsibility in order to motivate them, find a way to channel Scott’s rage.

“So, what’s your next move?” he asked.

B.B. appeared suddenly to come awake. “I need to get my money, Gamb. I can’t have money like this just falling off the face of the earth.”

“We’ve got to face the real possibility that Doe is bent, and if he took the money, we’re not getting it back without some serious violence. You want to risk that?”

“I got the DevilDogs in Gainesville,” B.B. said. “We know for a fact that it was Doe, we have them ride down here and beat it out of him.”

The Gambler shook his head. B.B. was supposed to be the mastermind, but he’d become like a body without a head when his freaky bitch wasn’t around. “The county has made life hell for motorcycle gangs here. You know that. The DevilDogs come riding in, the sheriff’s department is going to be all over them. If a mayor and police chief get worked over and killed, even a bullshit one like Doe, it’s going to mean a big investigation. And we’re fucked if one of those numbnuts gets nailed by the cops. You think they’re going to keep their traps shut? Next thing you know, we’ve got the DEA involved, which means they’ll find something or someone who will tell them about the lab, and that’s going to ultimately lead them back to us.”

“Okay,” B.B. said quietly. “What do we do, then? How do we get the money?”

“I guess we have to figure out a way to get Doe to ‘find’ it, to make him realize that it doesn’t make any sense to rip us off.”

“How do we do that?”

The Gambler said nothing.

B.B. took this as a sign that the Gambler, too, was out of ideas. He stood up and walked to the door, rested one hand on the knob. “Let’s wait until Desiree gets back. She’ll figure something out.”

“So, that’s it?” the Gambler asked.

“For now, yeah. That’s it for now.” Then, all at once, his face grew bright with a private joke. “There’ll be more later, though.” And he was gone.

Two drinks later, his head filled with muted vodka clarity, the Gambler answered a knock at his door. It was Doe, leaning against the doorjamb, dressed in uniform, bottle of Yoo-hoo dangling in one hand.

“I got a noise complaint,” he said. “Neighbors say there’s a sound of vibrating bullshit coming from your room.”

The Gambler stood aside to let him in and then quickly shut the door. “You want a drink?” he asked, holding up his cloudy plastic cup.

Doe held up his bottle. “I don’t leave home without it.”

The Gambler sat in his chair by the window. “So, what do you want?”

“I got a noise complaint,” he said. “Neighbors say there’s a sound of vibrating bullshit.”

“It wasn’t funny the first time.”

“How about the second?”

“Doe, this isn’t the tryouts for
MAD
magazine, so how about you tell me why you’re taking up my time.”

Doe took a swig and flashed his crooked teeth. “I hate to bother you when you’re sitting in a cheap motel drinking vodka by yourself, and normally I wouldn’t, but hell, Gamb, I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

“Then say it.”

“First of all, let’s cut the bull-fucking-shit, okay?” He walked over to the dresser and slammed the bottle down hard. A crack appeared in the particleboard. “I know that you and B.B. are full of little ideas about how I ripped you off, is that right? That maybe I killed Bastard and took the money, and now I’m trying to pin it on this fucking hapless kid to get myself off the hook. Does that about cover it?”

The Gambler tried hard to look impassive. This, he knew, was a showdown. Doe was there either to get himself off the hook for what he’d done or to set the record straight. Fine. Either way, it didn’t much matter in the end, since there were more important things than the $40,000. The continuity of the operation, for example. And power. When this little duel was over, the Gambler needed Doe to think of him as tough, decisive, and in charge. Everything else, even that chunk of cash, was secondary.

He took a sip of his drink. “That pretty much covers it.”

“And you want me to come up with cash or face consequences, I suppose.”

“I’ve had thoughts along those lines, yes.”

“Maybe you want to shut those thoughts the fuck up. Did you ever think of that?”

“No, I never thought of that. But since you did, maybe you should tell me why.”

Doe shook his head in sad disbelief. “First of all, I didn’t kill Bastard. And that means someone did, and that someone is still out there and has the money. You can believe me or not, but we’ve been doing this thing long enough that you know if I’d killed him, I’d admit it. Hell, if I stole the money and killed him, I’d still admit to killing him. I’d say he tried to rip us off and got caught and tried to kill me.”

“Now that we’ve established how you would be lying if you were lying, let’s hear number two.”

“Number fucking two,” Doe said, “is why the fuck would I rip you off? You cut me out or try to find the balls to take me out, I’m worse off than if we keep going on like we’ve been. I’m earning way too much from this shit to dick it up, so think with your fucking head for a second instead of B.B.’s. Snoop into my shit, if you want. I don’t got any debts, I got a pile in the Caymans. I want more, and I’m not going to fuck with the system.”

It was all true. Doe had relatively little to gain in the short term and nothing to gain in the long term by ripping them off. In fact, the only thing that made the Gambler still doubt Doe was the Altick kid, who said he’d seen the chief snooping around Bastard’s trailer. But that could have had something to do with the girl, he supposed.

He sat still, looking thoughtful for a few more minutes. “And those are your two points?”

“No, I got one more point. Point number three,” he said, “is that B.B. called the station today, disguised his voice, and said that you killed Bastard and took the cash. Now, I don’t know who has the money, but maybe that doesn’t matter so much right now, because B.B. has decided to fuck you up, and I think you want me on your side.”

“How do you know it was B.B. if the voice was disguised?”

“Because he’s an asshole, and I recognized him. Besides, who knows that Bastard is dead besides you, me, B.B., and his whore?”

Doe gave a half nod. “And how do I know you aren’t setting him up?”

“I guess you don’t. But you maybe want to decide what you believe, because if B.B. figures out I’m not going to deal with you, he might have a backup plan that takes you by surprise.”

The Gambler finished his drink and set down the plastic cup. “Okay,” he said after a minute or so, a minute he needed mostly to keep Doe waiting. “I’ll keep this information in mind. But let’s be clear about something. I don’t care if you stole the money or not. This is your house and your mess, and you need to clean it up. I’ll look into what you say about B.B., and I’d better not find out that you’re fucking with me, or I’m going to be pissed off. But if you’re not, then we’re going to be under new management, and new management says you clean up your fucking mess.” He stood up. “Because if you can’t get your act together, then you’re fucking worthless to me. So by Monday morning I want that money or I want to know what happened to it. And if you go with choice number two, you’d better make me believe you’re telling the truth. Now get the fuck out of here.”

Doe finished his bottle and dropped it on the floor. “I like that,” he said. “I like that forceful shit. We need more of that around here.” He walked to the door and then turned around. “You want me to take care of B.B.?”

“Why?” the Gambler asked. “Because things on your end are running so smoothly that you have lots of extra time?”

“No,” Doe said, “because I figured you might want to keep your hands clean. But have it your way, boss.”

When Doe was gone, the Gambler rose to fix himself another drink. Fucking B.B. trying to screw him over. Why? And his efforts were so inept, it hardly mattered. An anonymous phone call. He’d lost it completely, and even if he hadn’t been conspiring against the Gambler, he’d have to go, just for safety’s sake.

So maybe there was some order in the universe, he thought. Maybe there was a way to turn liabilities into assets. And maybe, he thought, there was a way to turn Scott’s inappropriate rage into something more useful.

After his unsatisfying meeting with the Gambler, B.B. had gone out to a local McDonald’s for a strawberry milk shake and to take in the local scene. He liked to go to McDonald’s. There were always lots of happy kids getting the crappy food they loved. In his work with the Young Men’s Foundation, he saw only the unhappy boys. He liked the happy ones, too.

B.B. brought a newspaper with him but couldn’t be bothered to read it. He looked into nothingness and tried to avoid the stare of the big-eyed black kid behind the counter who acted as though he’d never seen a man drink a milk shake before. He ought to have seen it. It probably happened pretty often in here.

After nearly an hour with no one interesting to look at, B.B. went back to the hotel. He figured he ought to be thinking about the money, but that was Desiree’s job. And where was Desiree? He hadn’t heard from her all day except for one hasty phone call in which she’d said that the kid appeared to be hapless and clean, but she was going to keep tailing him. It wasn’t like her not to check in more often.

Approaching his room from the parking lot, he could see there was a piece of paper taped to his door. It was yellow, wide-lined notebook paper with torn perforation. When he pulled it free, it took a good chunk of the door’s aqua blue paint along with the tape.

It would be from the Gambler, or maybe Doe, possibly even Desiree. Instead, a clumsy, childish hand had written in scrawling letters, “Mister my Dad called and said he wont be back before Late and my little brother gone off with his aunt. Can I have that Ice Cream now, and mabey talk about some stuff that’s going on with my dad? Carl. Room 232.”

B.B. folded up the note and held it in his hands. Then he unfolded it and read it once more. He held the paper in one hand and then the other, as though he could gauge its import from its flimsy weight.

Could it be a joke? Who would play such a joke? And what would be the point? On the other hand, how would that kid know his room number? Maybe he’d asked the Indian behind the counter. The guy wasn’t supposed to give out that sort of information, but he probably didn’t know any better, since who knew what sorts of ideas about privacy they had in India, where cattle wandered in and out of people’s houses? Besides, Carl was nothing but a little kid who surely didn’t mean any harm. Carl, he thought. Carl.

B.B. went into his room and washed his face, combed his hair, and put on a little bit of aftershave. Not too much, since kids didn’t like too much, but enough so that he’d smell mature and sophisticated. That’s what boys Carl’s age wanted in a mentor. They liked to be in the presence of a grown man who knew how to talk to a boy.

Not that Carl was worth all this fuss. No reason to think he was. Back at home was Chuck Finn, and Chuck Finn would be worth the fuss. Even so, spending a little time with Carl might be productive. It would certainly be helpful to the young man, and that was why he did this work, after all. He did it for the young men, and for himself, if he was going to be honest. He liked the feeling of being helpful. And there was something else, too, something on the edge of his vision, just outside his range of hearing, a smell too vague to identify but strong enough to notice. But this wasn’t the time. Maybe next week, maybe with Chuck, but not just now.