The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (4 page)

And that pig shit smell had some other useful features, which was why Doe liked to bring his girls there. Not just because it was isolated and no one ever came down this road, but also because he knew what that smell did. They’d get the feeling even before they realized they were smelling it. It crept up on them, like their terror.

Doe pulled the car a good quarter mile up the dirt road through the haphazard pines to just around a bend. He had to get out to unlock the flimsy metal gate, there as a line pissed in the sand rather than as real security. Then he went back in to pull the car through, out again to lock up, and back behind the wheel one last time. But safety first was his motto. They were pretty well shaded by the cluttered growth of trees, and he’d be able to see someone coming, in the unlikely event that some lost driver decided to head that way.

In the clearing, the hog lot stood like a massive metal shack, and behind that was the waste lagoon. Doe turned off the motor, and as he did so he realized he was grinning; he’d been grinning for so long that his cheeks ached. Christ, he must look like a jack-o’-lantern from hell.

“So, Lisa. You got a job?” He leaned back in his seat, settling into that familiar good sensation—hard and light at the same time. He finished off his bottle of Yoo-hoo. The bourbon had kicked in strong, and he felt just about right. Nothing but bourbon, either. He knew that people, people in the know, figured he was doing crank, but he didn’t touch the stuff. He knew what it did. Shit, just look at Karen. Turned her all skank. Look at Bastard. Turned him half-incompetent.

The woman in the back pivoted her head, checking out her surroundings for the first time, perhaps, noticing that they were in a clearing in the middle of nowhere. Her nose wrinkled, and then her whole face creased as she got a whiff of the waste lagoon. “Where are we?”

“Things are kind of busy down at the station. I thought we’d do our interrogation right here. More comfortable, don’t you think?”

She struggled a bit, as though that would get her anything but more metal slicing into her skin. “I want to get out of here. I want to call a lawyer.”

“A lawyer? What for, honey? You said before you didn’t do nothing wrong. Lawyers are for criminals, ain’t they?”

“I want to see a lawyer. Or a judge.”

“Judge is just a fancy lawyer, in my book.”

Doe got out of the car, taking his time, taking a minute to admire the blue of the sky, the long wisps of clouds like the strings of cotton that come out of an aspirin bottle. Then, acting as if he’d suddenly remembered where he was, he opened the back door and climbed in. He was careful to leave the door nice and open, since there was no inside handle, and if it closed, they’d both be trapped back there. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped with an ugly horse like Lisa. He sat next to her and traded the evil grin for a smile he knew to be charming. “What’d you say you do, now?”

“I work for Channel Eight in Miami,” she said after a moment of sobbing.

Channel Eight? She sure as hell wasn’t on the TV, not with her mushy face. “That right? What you do there? Some kind of a fancy secretary? Is that it? You sit on the boss’s lap and take dictation? I could use me some dick-tation.”

She looked down and didn’t answer, which struck Doe as rude. Someone was talking to her, and she didn’t answer. What, did she think she was Miss Universe or something? She needed to look in a mirror sometime, see what she really was. And now that he was close, he could see things were worse than he’d realized—acne scars covered with makeup, a pale but discernible mustache. Lisa had no business taking an attitude with him. To make this point clear, he put his hand flat against her forehead, very gently, really, and then gave it a little shove.

She didn’t make a noise this time, but the waterworks were going, streaming down her face. “Please let me go,” she said.

“Let you go? Hell, this ain’t Russia. We have laws here. Procedures that have to be followed. You think you can just talk your way out of paying your debt to society?” He bobbed his head for a moment, like he was agreeing with someone somewhere, some words the woman couldn’t hear. Then he turned to her. “So,” he said, “a dog-face like you would probably be pretty grateful for a chance to suck cock, don’t you think?”

“Oh God,” she murmured. She tried to squeeze herself away from him, which was what they did, but there was nowhere to go. This was the backseat of a Ford LTD, for Christ’s sake. But that’s what they did. They tried to get away.

Doe loved this part. They were so scared, and they’d do whatever he said. And they loved it, too. That was the crazy thing. He knew they’d be getting off on remembering it. Sometimes he got phone calls late at night—hang-ups—and he knew what was going on. It was women he’d had in the back of the cruiser. They wanted some more, they wanted to see him again, but they were also embarrassed. They knew they weren’t supposed to want it. But they did. All this
Oh God, no
-ing was just part of a script.

The truth was that it also made him a little bit sad on Jenny’s account, because she was probably going to end up a dog-faced whore like this one. His own daughter, a dog-faced whore. In high school she’d be sucking dick in the bathroom because that would be the only way she’d get boys to like her, which they wouldn’t, but it would take her a couple of years of getting smacked around to figure that out. He knew a couple of high school girls like that right now. He felt bad for them and all, but there wasn’t much to be done about it, so there was no point in avoiding their company, now, was there?

And here was Lisa, squirming, crying, wiggling like a toad under a shovel. Meanwhile, he had a telephone pole in his pants. He unzipped himself and pulled it out. “Look at that, Lisa. You look at that. Now, you be a good girl and do your job, and we’ll see what we can do about dropping the charges. Be a good girl, we’ll have you back in your car in fifteen minutes. Quarter hour from now, you’ll be cruising down the highway, heading back to Miami.”

That always helped. You give them something real to hold on to, put them in the future. Just get it over with, and they could go. Which they could. He wasn’t a monster or anything.

He saw that he had her. She turned to him slowly. Her little piggy eyes were red and narrow and pinched with fear, but he saw something like hope there, too. That grim determination to suck and bear it. And the twinkle in her eye, like she knew she was lucky to have a man like Jim Doe force himself on her. Maybe this wasn’t how she’d always dreamed of it, but she’d dreamed of it just the same.

“Okay,” she whispered. Softly. To herself, mostly, he guessed. She had to get herself together. Why, he didn’t know. She’d sucked cock before. And if some pretty little thing locked him in a backseat and told him to eat her pussy, you wouldn’t see Doe having to talk himself into it. But he supposed everyone was different.

“Okay,” she said again, this time more to him. “You’ll let me go?”

“I told you I would,” Doe said urgently. With all this talk he was losing his momentum, starting to get soft. “Now get to sucking, girl.”

“Okay,” she said again. “But you have to take off my cuffs, first.”

“Nice try, Lisa.”

“Please,” she said. “They hurt. I’ll be good.”

I’ll be good. Like she was a little kid. Well, why not? He’d done it before. Sometimes they just needed to feel a little easy, and he knew this girl wasn’t going to get all funny on him. She was broken.

“All right, sugar,” he said. “But nothing tricky. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

He reached around and unlocked her cuffs, wincing at the sound of the click and then the girl’s sigh of relief.

“Thank you.” She sniffed in a big honking snort of boogers, which he didn’t much like, since who wanted to get head mixed with a mess of snot? But fuck it, he reasoned.

“Now I done something for you,” he said. “I think you owe me a little favor.”

His first thought was that she was coming in a little fast. His second was,
Holy Christ!
The fringes of his vision went red with agony, the unbearably sharp, but also dull, thud of pain in his balls that spread like an electric alien fungus to his hips and down his thighs and up his spine. And then again. It hurt so much that he couldn’t even make sense of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind he understood. She was punching him in the balls. Not just punching him, pummeling him. Wind up and release like a rocket.

He tried to back away from her, out the door, but his back was to the car seat, and in the
thud, thud, thud
of her fist against his ’nads, he was in a free fall of pain, up became down, left became right. He couldn’t figure out which way to go. Instead, he started to reach for his gun.

On some level he knew that shooting her in the back of his LTD with his dick out, on his own property, when who knew how many people had seen him stop her, and with her car still sitting by the side of the road, was a bad idea. On the other hand, he had this vague notion that if he could put a bullet in her stupid ugly face, she would stop and the pain would be gone. The pain was somehow linked to her being alive. It didn’t make sense, and he even knew it didn’t make sense, but he didn’t care.

The problem was that he didn’t have the gun. Everything was hazy and distorted, and he was feeling around for his belt, but he couldn’t find it. The other thing was that while the pain was still there, the thudding had stopped. That was an improvement.

But not much. Lisa had managed to get his belt off him, the tricky fucking whore, so she had his keys, his nightstick. And she had his gun. The pain heaved back and forth below his waist, and he hoped to Christ she hadn’t crushed his balls. The horizon shifted, and he understood that he was on his side in the back of the seat. She was standing in front of him, the car door open, her T-shirt disheveled and wet from tears or perspiration, her hair all wild like some crazed fuck bunny in a porn movie.

“You goddamn prick,” she said.

The gun was pointed at him, which he didn’t like, but even in his agony he could see that she didn’t know how to hold a gun—she had it in both hands like a cop on some dumb-ass show. If he had to guess, he’d say she’d never fired one, probably hadn’t taken the safety off. Not that he wanted to take the chance she’d figure it out if she needed to, since she’d already proved herself clever. Still, she might be the cleverest ugly bitch in the world, but if he’d been able to move his body below his waist, he would have gotten up, taken that thing away from her, and broken her potato of a nose with it. That’s what he would have done.

“You wanted to know what I do for Channel Eight. I’m a reporter, you asshole. Get ready for camera crews.”

She kicked the door shut, trapping him into the back of his car.

The smell of pig shit from the waste lagoon washed over him like an insult, like a big ugly laugh, like a tax audit, like a dose of VD. Doe was trapped. He was in pain. His balls were smashed. The Yoo-hoo and bourbon churned menacingly in his stomach and then came up onto the seat, onto his chest, his face, his arms. He felt himself passing out, and he stayed passed out until the next morning when his deputy finally found him and woke him with a series of delicate and mocking taps of his nightstick against the window.

Chapter 4

M
Y HEART POUNDED,
and a clenched coil of fear hardened in my chest. I had witnessed the death of two people. I would be next. I was going to die. Everything was cold and icy and slow, unreal and so achingly, physically, undeniably real as to be a new state of consciousness.

I never decided to turn and face the killer, but it happened. I pivoted my neck and saw an unusually tall man standing behind me, holding a gun pointed in my general direction, if not exactly at me. The lunar eclipse of his head blocked the overhead naked bulb, and for an instant he was a dark, wild-haired silhouette. The gun, which I could see clearly, had a longish black cylinder at the tip, which I recognized from TV shows as a silencer.

“Crap!” the man said. He moved and came into view, looking not raging or murderous, but puzzled. “Who are
you
?”

I opened my mouth but said nothing. It wasn’t that in my terror I’d forgotten my name or how to make the sounds come out; it was more that I knew my name would mean nothing to him. He wanted some sort of description that would place me in context, something that would help him decide if he should let me live or not, and I wasn’t up to the task.

With the gun still pointed toward me, the man gazed at my confused face with an expression of patience both coolly reptilian and strangely warm. He had blond hair, white really, that spiked out Warholishly, and he was unusually thin, like Karen and Bastard, but he didn’t look sickly and drawn the way they had. In fact, he seemed sort of fit and stylish in his black Chuck Taylors, black jeans, white dress shirt buttoned all the way up, and black gloves. A collegiate-looking backpack dangled insouciantly over his right shoulder. Even in the smoky light of the trailer, his emerald eyes stood out against the whiteness of his skin.

“Stay calm,” he said. He had the demeanor of a man totally in control, but in the tiniest fraction of a second, his composure appeared to crack and then reassemble itself, going from statue to rubble to statue again.

He took a step to his left and then to his right, a truncated sort of pacing. “You might have noticed that I haven’t killed you, and I can pretty much tell you that I’m not planning on killing you. I’m not a murderer. I’m an assassin. Worst that will happen, if you do something stupid and piss me off, I’ll shoot you in the knee. It will hurt like hell, might leave you crippled, so I don’t want to do it. Just be cool, and do what I say, and I promise you’re going to be just fine.” He looked around and then let out a breath of air so that his lips vibrated. “Crap. I was so hopped up on adrenaline, I didn’t even see you until I took them down.”

I continued to stare, in something like shock, I suppose. The terror swelled in my head like a dull roar against my ears, and my heart pounded, but the thud of it felt distant and detached, the tinny echo of someone banging on something far away. My neck ached from craning, but I didn’t want to look away. Too much shifting might make him nervous.

“What are you doing here?” the assassin asked. “You don’t look like a friend of theirs.”

I knew I’d better answer a direct question, but something in the pulley-and-wheel mechanism of my vocal cords wouldn’t move. I swallowed hard, painfully, forcing something down, and tried again. “Selling encyclopedias.”

The green eyes went wide. “To those assholes? Jesus. You should have done it a few years ago. Maybe a little knowledge would have saved them. But you know what? I doubt it.”

Don’t ask him, I warned myself. Just shut up, play it cool, see what he wants. He hasn’t killed you yet, so maybe he won’t. He says he won’t. Don’t ask him anything. “Why did you kill them?” I asked anyway.

“You don’t need to know that. You just need to know that they deserved it.” He grabbed the chair next to mine and sat down, moving in deliberate and authoritative movements, as if he were about to deliver an older brother’s kindly lecture on saying no to drugs. I could now see that the assassin was younger than I had first realized, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. He looked cheerful, as though he had a good sense of humor, almost certainly dry humor—the kind of guy you might want at your party or to live on the same floor of your dorm. Even as I thought it I knew it sounded idiotic, but there it was.

“I’d like you to pack up your stuff,” the assassin said. “Don’t leave any evidence of being here.”

I couldn’t make myself move. It seemed like the stench from the trailer park had begun to seep inside, to beat down the smell of tobacco and gunpowder and sweat, but then I realized it was the smell of the bodies—shit and piss and blood. And there were those dead faces with their empty eyes. My gaze kept drifting over to their ruined heads, frozen in terminal surprise.

“This is important,” the killer said, not unkindly. “I need you to clean up your stuff.”

I rose in hypnotic compliance, expecting to discover his promise not to hurt me to be a lie. The instant I turned my back, I’d hear the squeak of the silencer and the burning rupture of metal in my back. I knew he was going to kill me. Yet at the same time, I didn’t quite believe it. Maybe it was intuition or wishful thinking, but when he said he didn’t want to kill me, part of me believed he meant it—and not desperate, pathetic belief, either. It didn’t seem to me like the desperate hope of the blindfolded condemned, feeling the roughness of the noose as it slipped over his neck while certain the reprieve would come. For whatever reason, the idea that I could get out of this alive struck me as entirely plausible.

I looked at my stuff. All of the book materials were on the table, and miraculously, none had been splattered with blood. My hands, big surprise, trembled like an outboard motor, but I began to pick up the brochures and samples and pricing sheets, holding each gingerly as though I were a cop collecting evidence, and I dropped them into my stepfather’s moldy bag. I took the check Karen had written and shoved it in my pocket. Meanwhile, the assassin began to organize Karen and Bastard’s stuff. He placed the checkbook next to a pile of bills by the phone, returned the pens to a cup on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. Careful not to step in any blood, he brought my cup over to the sink and washed it methodically with a sponge, somehow keeping his gloves reasonably dry.

He was so cool about it, so damn cool, moving around the room with unflappable focus, the sort of person who acted as though everything had gone according to plan, even when it hadn’t. My being in the trailer hadn’t thrown him off for more than an instant. He’d changed the plan, was all. I flipped out when I overslept by five minutes, but this guy was centered.

He stepped back over the bodies, over the blood, and sat next to me. I ought to have cringed at his proximity, but I don’t think I did. Under the heat of his gaze, my mind emptied of everything except a loose, preverbal fear and an irrational hope.

The assassin pointed the gun toward the ceiling, unscrewed the silencer, and then ejected the clip and removed a bullet from the firing chamber. Keeping his eye on me, he placed these accessories in his backpack and then set the gun on the table. I stared at it. We didn’t have guns in my family. We didn’t have firearms or knives or even baseball bats under the bed. We didn’t handle weapons. If there were mice in the house, we called an exterminator and let him touch the traps and the poison. I came from a background of squeamishness, and I’d been raised to believe as a matter of faith that if I handled anything with the capacity to do harm, it would turn on me like a mutinous robot and destroy its master.

Now, there it was, right in front of me: the gun. Just like in the movies. I understood the pistol wasn’t loaded, but for a moment I thought I should grab it, do something heroic. Maybe I could smack the assassin with the gun. Pistol-whip him or something tough guy-ish like that. While I pondered my options, however, the assassin took another gun out of his backpack, so pistol-whipping became less of an option.

Once again, he sort of aimed his firearm at me, less at me than in my direction, not to terrify me, but to make sure I kept my head, remembered who stood where in the hierarchy. “Give me your wallet.”

I didn’t want to give up my wallet. It had my money, my driver’s license, the credit card my stepfather had reluctantly handed over, which I was allowed to use only in absolute emergencies, and even then I could expect to get yelled at. On the other hand, if the assassin wanted my wallet, I told myself, maybe he really wouldn’t kill me. It would be easy to take a wallet off my dead body. So I reached into my back pocket, maneuvered it out—not so easy since it and my pants were moist with sweat—and handed it over. The assassin deftly thumbed through it, unimpeded by his black gloves, and then removed my driver’s license, in which I looked unspeakably dorky and was wearing a velour shirt, which surely must have seemed like a good idea at the time, though now the decision mystified me.

The assassin studied it briefly. “I’ll keep this, if you don’t mind, Lemuel.”

He wanted to take my license. That meant something significant; it portended of terrible things to come, though I couldn’t quite shape the ideas in my mind.

“Now, pick up the other gun. Come on. I promise if you cooperate, you’re not going to get hurt.”

I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. And what would happen if I did? Would he shoot me, claim self-defense, claim I’d shot Bastard and Karen? Picking up the gun was insanity, but so was not picking it up, so I slowly wrapped my fingers around the handle and lifted. It was both heavier and lighter than I imagined, and it trembled in my hand.

“Aim it at the refrigerator,” the assassin said.

Beyond the point of making trouble or arguing, I did as I was told.

“Squeeze the trigger.”

Though I knew he’d taken out the clip, which I understood meant the gun was unloaded, I still winced as I followed the order. I pressed down hard, expecting the rich boom of a TV shot report, but I got nothing except a hollow click. I kept my arm out. The gun continued to shake.

“Good job, Lemuel. Now put the gun down on the table.”

I did.

“So, here’s the deal,” the assassin said. “Your fingerprints are now on the murder weapon. Bad for you, good for me, but let me be clear about this. You leave here, you keep quiet about what you saw, and no one will ever find this gun, no one will know you were here, and there will be no problem for either of us. I’m not looking to frame you, just to keep you from reporting to anyone what you saw. So if you decide you want to go to the police, they’ll get an anonymous tip about you, Lemuel Altick, and discover the hidden location of this gun, which will mark you as the killer. On the other hand, if you accept that there are bigger things at play here than you can understand—and accordingly keep quiet—the police will never link you to what happened here today. Now, you can see I’m being fair about this, so keep that in mind if you have any moral qualms. Believe me, these were bad, bad people, and they had it coming. So, are we cool here?”

I nodded slowly, thinking for the first time that the assassin was probably gay. He wasn’t effeminate or anything like that, but there was something about him, about the way he moved and spoke, that seemed full of unarticulated significance. Then a little voice inside me said that it didn’t matter if he was gay. It didn’t matter if he liked to do three-ways with proboscis monkeys. I had to stay focused if I was going to avoid getting killed. And now I had a new problem: Maybe he really would let me live, but only so he could frame me for murder.

I looked up, and he was shaking his head. “I really wish you hadn’t stumbled into this. What’s a clean-cut kid like you doing selling encyclopedias? You going to college?”

I swallowed hard. “I’m raising money. I got in, but I can’t afford it, so I deferred.”

He pointed at me. “Quick! What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?”

I couldn’t believe I was even having this conversation. “I’m not sure.
Twelfth Night,
maybe.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really kind of cruel and creepy. The play’s villain is the guy who’s actually just trying to restore order.”

“Interesting.” He nodded thoughtfully. Then he waved a hand in the air. “Who cares, anyway, right? Shakespeare’s overrated. Now Milton. There’s a poet.”

The fear, which I had done a reasonable job of pushing back for a while, was now so intense that it flashed around me like electricity in a Tesla ball. Crazy people ranted like this before they killed you, didn’t they? That’s what I’d learned from the movies. Even if I was misreading those signals, I had just seen two people killed. Every time my attention shifted to something else, every time I tried to comfort myself with the realization that the assassin probably wouldn’t strike again, that knowledge came back with a gruesome thump. Two people were dead. Forever. Whatever Bastard and Karen had done, they didn’t deserve to be gunned down like animals.

Even so, with the sadness that crept over me at the thought of the indelible cruelty of murder, I felt the beginnings of something—admiration, maybe, though that wasn’t quite right—for the man who had done the killing. The assassin terrified me, but I also wanted his approval. I knew it made no sense, but I felt I had to earn his trust, which was why I spoke out.

“There’s something else,” I said with deliberate slowness, a hopeless effort to control the trembling in my voice. “Besides Shakespeare, I mean. A guy saw me go in here.”

He arched an eyebrow. “What sort of guy?”

“Just a guy. A creepy redneck.”

“When?”

“Three hours ago, I guess.”

The assassin waved his hand dismissively. “Forget it. He won’t remember who you are, what you were doing here, any of that. He’s not going to give you trouble. And if he does bring in the cops, tell them that you tried to sell them some books, it didn’t fly, and you took off. There’s nothing to link you to these guys, to suggest you had a motive. Nothing like that.”

“I don’t know.”

“If the cops come to see you, say you were in and out without luck, saw nothing unusual—except maybe this creepy redneck—and that’s all you have to say. They’ll be off your case in no time and on that redneck’s. Can you trust me on that?”