The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (7 page)

Otto coughed and put a hand to his Adam’s apple but was otherwise quiet and still.

An old couple strolled through the parking lot, staring unabashedly at the small white woman straddling the large black man in the car.

“I’ve got some phone calls to make,” Desiree said. She gave him a quick kiss, just a peck, really, but directly on his dry lips, and then slid off and opened the driver’s-side door. The old man had looked away, but the woman continued to stare over at her.

“You want to say something?” Desiree asked, and she turned her empty, judgmental eyes away.

Otto was just now rousing himself from his wounded surprise. He reached out to close his door, but he met her eyes as he did so, and, of all things, he offered her another of his grins. “Does this mean you don’t want the job, my darling?”

“Not at this moment.” She strolled over to B.B.’s Mercedes and shook her head softly. The thing was, Otto might have been a player and a schemer, and in his own way he might have been every bit as bad as B.B., but he had a sense of humor, and that alone made her hope she wouldn’t have to wrap her hands around his throat again.

Chapter 6

T
HERE
I
WAS,
survivor of a double homicide, in the Kwick Stop’s public bathroom. Halfway to the store I realized I needed to piss and piss badly, so badly that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t pissed myself during the shootings. It was all I could do to keep from ducking behind a tree and taking a whiz under the canopy of stars; but public urination, even obscured public urination, seemed a bad idea. What if I had been caught? What if the cops picked me up and found evidence? Hairs and fibers and that sort of thing? My knowledge of police investigations came from a pastiche of television and movies, so I had no idea how it worked in real life.

When I walked into the store, I spotted the bathrooms in an instant—in the door-to-door book trade, you grow skillful at quickly finding the toilets in convenience stores—and rushed back without even the pretense of calm. In general, I didn’t like to act as though I needed the bathroom; it embarrassed me that complete strangers should know about my body functions.

In this case, however, I was in no frame of mind for the casual shop, a pantomime of interest in beef jerky and then a rub of palm against palm, like, Oh, I sure could do with a hand washing, before a calm stroll into the bathroom.

When I looked up from the urinal, I realized I must have already pissed since nothing was coming out and the crampy, stretched feeling had faded into a tranquil fatigue. I zipped up and washed, checking in the mirror for signs of blood. Nothing in my hair or on my hands or clothes. It all looked okay. I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that’s what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry? Not that soap stockholders would gain much here; the inverted pear-shaped dispenser contained only encrusted pink dregs of soap gone by. Nothing in the way of towels—only one of those rotating towel machines, where someone else’s dirt gets pressed or washed or just permanently affixed before it comes back around again. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper from a loose roll propped above the dispenser and then dabbed it gently against my face.

The bathroom smelled like shit and piss and sickly floral deodorizers struggling to beat down the stench of crap and piss. My hands trembled violently, and I felt the need to puke. The problem with puking was that I would have to get on my hands and knees to do it, and the floor was covered with a deep coat of gummy dried urine, and there was a fuzzy lump of gray shit in the toilet. My reptile brain had no intention of letting me mark territory already well scented up by creatures more powerful and less hygienic than I.

Instead, I reached into my pocket for the check, the check Karen had written so that she could buy books for her now orphaned daughters. “Karen Wane,” it said in the top left corner. It seemed odd that she and her husband wouldn’t share the same account.

If I were worried about them passing the credit app, it might be worth considering, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. I tore up the check and dropped the pieces in the horrifically unflushed toilet. One of the shreds fell into a viscous pool by the toilet’s side, and I had to pick it up by its tiny dry corner and then daintily drop it in. I flushed, using the toe of my shoe so I wouldn’t have to touch anything, and then went to wash my hands again.

Should I have flushed the check in two different toilets? Of course, it wasn’t as if cops were going to don hazmat suits and go wading through treatment plants in search of check fragments. Still, I had to pound down that feeling of nausea again, a process that involved closing my eyes and trying hard to think of nothing. In about a minute I felt sure I wouldn’t puke, so I pushed open the door and got out of there.

The convenience store was a couple of miles from the motel. I could easily have walked it, would have preferred to, but that wasn’t the way it worked. I had to wait for Bobby, so I grabbed a sixteen-ounce ginger ale from one of the wall-length refrigerator displays in the hopes it would settle my stomach. Then I stood on line behind a guy wearing jeans and a black T-shirt.

I couldn’t see the man’s face, and all but a few strands of hair were hidden under a baseball cap with a glittery Confederate flag emblazoned along the front, but I could tell he was probably in his thirties or forties, and he was chatting with the girl at the counter, a teenager, plenty young but not very pretty. She had a long-faced, horsey look to her, with an upside-down U-shaped mouth that seemed never to close entirely; the whole package ended up resembling nothing so much as an Easter Island statue. No matter, as the man in the Confederate hat liked her plenty, and his eyes rested with particular interest on her large, squishy-looking breasts, which flashed out of a short-sleeved blouse one or two buttons past modesty. The Confederate laughed at something and slapped the counter and peered into the girl’s shirt unapologetically.

“Oh shit,” he said. “I think I must have dropped my quarter in there. Let me just get it out.” He raised his hand like it was getting ready to slide into the cleavage.

“Jim,” the girl said through a fan of splayed fingers, “you stop that.” She glanced at me as though trying to decide something, then looked back at the Confederate. “You’re so bad.”

On the radio, an eager voice encouraged everyone to “Wang Chung” tonight, which was one of the many confusing songs I figured I’d understand when I knew more of the world. Sort of like the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the comprehension of which I assumed required a familiarity with European arts and music. An educated person would know precisely what a scaramouch was and why he ought to do the fandango.

The unnaturally bright fluorescent lighting in the store made me feel as if I were onstage or caught in a police searchlight, which was a particularly unhappy metaphor. Getting out of there, escaping the lights, the bad pop, the freakish customer and clerk, took on a kind of urgency. I would gladly have stolen the ginger ale if I’d thought I might get away with it. The Kwick Stop, never the sort of place where I felt comfortable, now seemed too small, and it was getting smaller. I didn’t want to leave the ginger ale, and I didn’t want to say anything to the counter girl. It also seemed a foregone conclusion that the man with the Confederate hat wouldn’t much like a kid with a northern accent and a tie telling him he had to hurry it up. But I was thirsty and my stomach lurched violently, so I twisted open the cap and took a drink. It did make me feel a little better. Less like puking, anyway.

“You can’t drink that before you pay for it,” the Confederate man told me. He grinned broadly, exposing a mouth full of wild and white teeth. “It’s called stealing, and we got laws about that here.”

Only now did I recognize him. The guy from the Ford pickup outside of Bastard and Karen’s trailer. The split-level haircut was tucked under his hat, but it was the same guy. An icy terror burst in my chest and radiated out to my limbs. But what the hell was I going to do? Run? The guy had
seen
me go into a trailer where two people were murdered.

The nausea, I realized, most likely stemmed from my desire to suppress the one obvious fact in all of this—once those bodies were found, the cops were going to come looking for me. No matter what the assassin had told me, no matter what sweet lies he tried to conjure, I knew full well that I would be their prime suspect. It wasn’t a matter of maybes or ifs. They would want me. APB on Lem Altick. Take no chances with Lem Altick, boys, he’s probably armed and dangerous. The only question was if my being totally innocent would save me.

I walked up to the counter and put down a dollar. The soda was seventy-nine cents.

“Wait your turn,” the girl told me. “Can’t you see that there’s people ahead of you?”

“There aren’t people,” I said. My voice sounded edgy and nervous, and I wished I would shut up. “There’s person, and he’s not buying anything.”

“You being rude to this little girl?” the Confederate asked.

“Rude as in pushy?” I asked. “Or rude as in trying to stick my hand down her shirt?”

“Boy, you don’t know who you’re messing with,” the Confederate said.

But I did. I knew I was messing with a guy who wouldn’t give a second thought about sucker-punching me and kicking my head when I was down. Still, I was apt to run my mouth. The thing I’d learned over the years was that the only power I had against someone like this was in mouthing off. It didn’t keep me from getting my ass kicked. It might even promote an ass kicking, but at least I got to perpetuate the stereotype of weak kids being verbally dexterous.

But this wasn’t high school, and I’d already learned tonight that the stakes were higher than a few bruises and a dose of humiliation. It was time, I decided, to show some deference.

“I didn’t mean to be pushy,” I said quietly. “I just want to pay.”

“It ain’t
time
for you to pay. You think you go walking around here in your tie and your fancy briefcase and you don’t have to wait on line? You think you’re somehow better than us?”

The math, science, and language arts curricula had been pretty weak, but the one thing I’d learned back in middle school was that accusations of thinking I was better than someone else were a prelude to violence. Some asshole revving his engine, in the process of convincing himself or witnesses or God that the ass kicking he was about to unleash was utterly righteous.

I needed to cool things down, but it was hard to figure out my next move when my brain was spinning with terror. There was a tiny hamster wheel of fear clacking around, and I just couldn’t get my thoughts to settle. So I said what was probably the worst thing I could have. I said, “ ‘We.’ ”

The Confederate angled his head and stared. “What?”

It was an out-of-body experience. I saw myself speaking, and I had no power to stop.

“You meant, ‘You think you’re better than
we.
’ We is a subject.
‘We are here.’
Who is here?
We
are. Us, on the other hand, is an object, the recipient of action. ‘
Bob
gave the ball to
us.
’ Who gave the ball? Bob, the subject, did. To whom did he give it?
Us,
the object.”

A stupid smile flattened out across my face.

The Confederate stared as though I were a formaldehyde freak behind Coney Island glass. The girl behind the counter took a step back. Her eyes went wide and she half raised her hands as though to protect her face from the coming blast.

The blast never came. Outside the store, Bobby’s Chrysler Cordoba pulled gloriously, miraculously, into the parking lot. The most fortunate timing in the history of the world—far better luck than my nearly eighteen years had led me to expect or even hope for. “That’s my ride,” I said, as though we’d been hanging out, talking sports.

The Confederate didn’t say anything. I looked to the counter girl, but she would not meet my eyes. Nothing to do but forget the soda, so I put it down on a pile of Coors cases and began to head for the door.

“You leave now, and you’re stealing.” It was the counter girl. Her voice had grown small, and her hands, which now hung limp by her side, trembled just a little.

I stopped. “Then let me pay,” I said.

“You gotta wait your turn.” Her voice was just above a whisper.

Now the redneck bent toward me. He wasn’t unusually tall, just under six feet, and he had maybe an inch or so on me, but he bent forward like a giant stooping to offer advice to a midget. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked. “Correcting me?”

I turned away, hoping to God that Bobby could see me, would come to my rescue if he spotted trouble. Feeling the burn of the redneck’s eyes, I picked up the soda and took the dollar out from my pocket. I put it back on the counter. I didn’t care that they were assholes, and I didn’t care about the change. I cared only about getting out of there.

I turned away and pushed open the door, which chimed merrily along with the sound of my laughter, unhinged with giddy disbelief.

I had survived a double murder, I had survived an interview with the killer, I had survived a sure beating by a redneck whom I had insulted. I ought to have felt some measure of relief, but a churning dread burned away at my stomach. I had survived only that moment, and plenty more moments were coming.

Chapter 7

N
O ONE ELSE
was in the car yet, which was some small comfort since it was a two-door and I hated being crowded into the backseat. In the months since I’d signed up, I’d become Bobby’s biggest earner, and that meant I received certain trivial privileges, like good pickup times and the moochiest neighborhoods.

“You don’t look so hot,” Bobby said. “You blank?”

I shook my head and then peered into the store to make sure we weren’t in any trouble. The Confederate had gone back to flirting with the counter girl, and appearances suggested I’d been more or less forgotten.

“No, I scored.” I opened my bag and handed Bobby the paperwork. “I almost got a double, but it didn’t pan out.”

Bobby smiled. “Hell, my man. You scored two days in a row. You’re on fire.” Pronounced, for sales motivation effect, “fie-yah.” “Just stay pos, keep thinking pos thoughts. It’s the pos attitude that will get you the double or triple tomorrow.”

Bobby was a big guy, big like a football player or more like an ex–football player. He had meaty arms and thick legs, no neck, but he also had a sizable gut that jutted out over his cloth belt. Bobby’s face was wide and boyish and almost preternaturally charismatic. I wanted to be too smart to be drawn in by Bobby’s charm, but I was drawn in all the same.

The fact was, I found it impossible not to like Bobby. He enjoyed everyone’s company, and he displayed a generosity beyond anything I had ever seen. Part of it was his command of the power of money. Bobby wanted always to demonstrate to his crew that he had cash, that cash was good, and that cash made you happy. He would buy us beer and lunch and, on occasion, a night out. During long drives, when we stopped for fast food, Bobby tipped the counter workers at McDonald’s and Burger King. He tipped tollbooth attendants and hotel clerks. He was, to use his word,
pos.

“You don’t have a check here,” Bobby said, waving my paperwork at me. He ran a hand through his short, almost military style hair. “You didn’t get green on me and forget again?”

I had scored a double my first day on the job. My first day. No one expected people to score their first day, so Bobby hadn’t yet talked me through the credit app, and consequently I hadn’t asked my buyers to fill one out. Bobby had then taken me over to both houses—and this was now after midnight and all lights were out—getting the people out of bed so they could sit around in their robes and fill out credit apps. I would rather have given up the sales, but Bobby worked himself up into a feverishly rotating tornado of sales energy, and he’d insisted. Then again, he knew he could get away with it. He had that chummy grin and inviting laugh and that way of saying hello that made strangers think they must have met him before and simply forgotten. I would have had the door slammed in my face, but Bobby had the wife at the second house making us all instant hot chocolate, the kind with the little marshmallows that melted into gooey clouds.

And he had motivation. I made $200 off each sale, Bobby made $150 each time I or anyone else in his crew scored. That’s why people wanted to be a crew boss. You made money for getting other people to do work.

The paperwork Bobby now held in his big hands belonged to Karen and Bastard. I had handed over the wrong sheets. The momentary relief I’d felt at escaping the redneck was now gone. I was back to the roller-coaster feeling of plummeting straight down.

“Sorry,” I said. I was bearing down, clenching my abdominal muscles, to keep the fear from seeping into my voice. It was like trying to stanch a gaping wound. I knew that the more time went by, the more time I could spend living a normal life, the less I would remember Karen lying on the floor, her eyes wide open, a jagged crater in her forehead, blood pooling around her like a halo. I’d forget the acrid and coppery smell in the air. I wanted it gone.

“That was the one I blew.” I fished around in my bag and got the paperwork from early that afternoon. The quiet little couple in the run-down green trailer. Their two kids and four dogs. The stench of unpaid bills. That had been a walk in the park.

Bobby looked it over, nodded definitively. “This looks pretty good,” he said before filing the papers in his own bag. “Shouldn’t be a problem passing.” I had missed out on commissions and bonuses because credit apps hadn’t passed. I’d even missed out on a big one, a huge one, because of credit apps. My third week on the job, I’d rung a doorbell and a skinny man, pale as cream cheese, wearing a bikini brief swimsuit, bald but for a wedge of hair no thicker than a watchband, had come to the door and grinned at me. “What are you selling?” he’d asked.

Somehow I’d sensed that it wasn’t the right time for the usual line, so I’d said, straight out, that I was selling encyclopedias. “Come on back, then,” the man had said. “Let’s see what you can do.”

Galen Edwine, my host, was in the midst of a barbecue with about eight or nine other families. While the kids splashed around in the moochie aboveground pool, I pitched them all—nearly twenty adults. They drank beer, they ate burgers, they laughed at my jokes. I was like the hired entertainment. And when it was all over, I’d sold four of them. Four. A grand slam. Grand slams happened, but rare enough that they were legendary. That day there was a $1,000 bonus for a grand slam, so I racked up $1,800 for a day’s work.

Except I didn’t because none of the credit apps passed. Not a single one. It had happened to me before and it had happened since, and it never ceased to piss me off, but the tragedy of that day really got to me. I
had
a grand slam, and then it turned to dust. Still, the reputation stuck, and even if I hadn’t earned the commissions, I’d earned a certain respect.

“So,” Bobby pressed, “what happened here?” He held up Karen and Bastard’s app.

I shook my head. “They balked at the check.”

“Shit, Lemmy. You got inside and you couldn’t close? That’s not like you.”

I shrugged in the hopes that this conversation might simply go away. “It just sort of worked out that way, you know?”

“When was all this?”

Maybe I should have lied, but it didn’t occur to me. I didn’t see where he was going with this. “I don’t know. Tonight. A few hours ago.”

He glanced at the credit app for a minute, as if he were looking for some forgotten detail. “Let’s go back there. If this was only a few hours ago, I bet I can work them.”

I put a hand on the car for support. I shook my head. There was no way I wanted to return to the scene of the crime. “I don’t think it will do any good.”

“Come on, Lem. I can work them. What, you don’t want the money? You don’t want the bonus? Commission and bonus, so we’re talking about another four hundred in your pocket.”

“I just don’t think it will help. I don’t want to go.”

“Well, I want to try. Where’s Highland Road?”

“I don’t remember.” I looked away.

“Wait here. I’ll go in and ask.”

Bobby moved to go into the Kwick Stop. I figured asking for directions, especially from a guy who seemed already to want to kick my ass, a guy who had seen me go into Karen and Bastard’s house, and
then
going would be worse than just going. I let out a sigh and told Bobby that I now remembered the way, and we drove back to the trailer. It was just a few minutes along the quiet streets, but the ride seemed to go on forever, and it seemed all too short. Bobby parked the car along the curb and got out, slamming the door hard enough to make me wince.

The trailer looked quiet. Freakishly quiet, a beacon of stillness in the ocean of shrill insect sounds. No trailer had ever looked as still as this one. Somewhere, not too far away, a dog barked—an urgent bark that dogs saved for when a murder suspect lurked nearby.

Bobby walked over to the trailer, up the three cracked concrete stairs, and rang the bell.

I looked back and forth compulsively. A beat-up Datsun trawled past on a perpendicular street half a block down. Did it slow down to look at us? Hard to say.

Bobby rang the doorbell again, and this time he pulled back on the screen door and pounded softly, if pounding can ever be soft, just below the eyehole. I caught myself thinking that they were never going to write that check if they were pissed off at being pulled out of bed.

From the steps, Bobby leaned over to peer into the kitchen window. He pressed hard against the thin glass, and I was sure he would go crashing through.

“Christ,” he said. “Either they’re not home or they’re dead.”

I laughed and then realized Bobby hadn’t said anything funny, so I stopped. Together we walked back to the Cordoba, where I slouched in the front seat, breathing in fear and indescribable relief while we headed out for the next pickup.

The inadequate air-conditioning washed over me, and I tried to recede into the freshly washed leather. I wanted to pass out and I wanted to weep and, on some level, I wanted Bobby to hug me. But Bobby busied himself by fiddling with the radio stations, finally settling on Blue Öyster Cult, but somehow the song’s insistence that I refrain from fearing the Reaper didn’t make me feel much better.

“A single isn’t bad,” he said, maybe thinking that I probably needed a good pep talk. “Not bad for a day’s work. You’re still in the game, but a double’s better, right? . . . Huh? But you’ll get a double tomorrow. You’re a power hitter, Lem. You’re doing great.”

If I hadn’t been numb from having witnessed a double homicide, I felt sure that Bobby’s pos comments would have perked me up. I hated the way I lapped up Bobby’s praise, as if being a good bookman, selling a set of books to people who would never use them and couldn’t afford them, were worth a pat on the head. Good doggie, Lem. But I loved it. Two people dead, holes in their heads, blood and brains on the peeling linoleum, and I still sort of loved it.

The other three guys in the Ft. Lauderdale crew—Ronny Neil, Scott, and Kevin—piled one by one into the backseat, each at his own pickup stop. They all harbored resentment against me, since Scott was both fat and unimpressed by conventional ideas of personal hygiene, and he crammed the rest of them in tight. I, meanwhile, basked in legroom and relatively sweet air.

Kevin was a quiet guy, a bit short and stocky, but affable in a self-contained way. It was easy to forget he was around, even on long road trips. He laughed at other people’s jokes but never told his own. He always agreed when someone said he was hungry but probably would have starved to death before suggesting we stop to eat.

Ronny Neil and Scott, on the other hand, were not so retiring. They had joined up together and were like wartime buddies who enlisted from the same town and were assigned to the same platoon. Their friendship consisted, as near as I could tell, of Ronny Neil hitting Scott in the back of the head and calling him a fat asshole.

Ronny Neil thought of himself as being strikingly handsome, and maybe he was. He had a sharply detailed face with big brown eyes of the sort that I thought women were said to like. His straight, straw-colored hair came down to his collar, and he was deeply muscled without being bulky. Not like there was time to lift weights while we sold books, but I did on occasion catch him doing push-ups and sit-ups around the motel room. On those days that I managed to get up early enough to take in a run before the morning meeting, Ronny Neil would earnestly advise me to take up lifting weights instead of doing pussy exercises. But, he would muse, if there was one thing a Jew ought to know how to do, it was run fast.

Each time he picked someone up—at the designated convenience store—Bobby would take the guy around to the back of the car and open the trunk to shield their conversation from the rest of the crew. Once they entered the car, you couldn’t ask if they’d scored or blanked. You couldn’t ask how they did. You weren’t allowed to tell stories about anything that happened to you that day unless the story was in no way related to scoring or blanking. Bobby and the other bosses knew there was no way to keep people from talking about it. If someone hit a triple or a grand slam—sometimes even a double—everyone in all the crews would know by the next morning, but you couldn’t say anything in the car.

These rules appeared not to apply to Ronny Neil, who didn’t know how to shut up, about scoring or anything else. Ronny Neil was a year older than me and he’d gone to a high school across the county from mine, so I hadn’t known him, but the rumor machine had churned out some interesting details. By all accounts, he’d been a serviceable placekicker for the school’s football team, but he’d been convinced of his greatness and convinced that a football scholarship would be his for the taking. As it turned out, the only offer he received was from a historically black college in South Carolina that was interested in diversifying its student population. Ronny Neil had gone off in a huff and come back at the end of his freshman year with his scholarship revoked. Here details get fuzzy. He was kicked out either because he failed to keep his grades up, because he’d been involved in a drunken and sordid sex scandal that the university wanted desperately to keep quiet, or—and this was my personal favorite—he’d never quite gotten the hang of avoiding the word
jigaboo,
even when black students outnumbered him three hundred to one.

On the drives back to the motel, he’d tell us about how he’d scored, and he’d share with us some of the more implausible incidents from his colorful life. He’d tell us about how he’d filled in briefly for the bass player of Molly Hatchet, how he’d been asked to join the navy SEALs, how he’d finger-fucked Adrienne Barbeau after his cousin’s wedding—though it was never clear what a movie star was doing at his cousin’s wedding. He told these stories with such surety that they left me wondering if my own sense of the universe was hopelessly skewed. Was it possible that I lived in a world in which Adrienne Barbeau might let herself be finger-fucked by a moron like Ronny Neil Cramer? It hardly seemed likely, but how could I really know?

On the other hand, he bragged about things that were true, too. Like about how the last time we were in Jacksonville, when we’d stayed at the same motel, he’d stolen a passkey off the cleaning cart and slipped into half a dozen rooms, lifting cameras and watches and cash out of wallets. He’d laughed himself sick watching Sameen, the Indian man who owned the place, defending his wife—the hotel maid—from accusations of theft. He told us that the previous year, before the election, he’d put on a suit and tie and gone around soliciting donations for the Republican Party. He’d have people make out checks to “RNC,” and then he’d just write in the rest of his last name. Seedy check-cashing places on Federal Highway had no problem cashing his checks for R. N. Cramer.