The Ethical Assassin

by David Liss

  “Fifty-seven. Christ. I mean, come on. I can’t believe you would even stop me for going two miles above the limit.”

  “Well,” he said, taking off his hat again and giving his forehead a wiping, “way I see it, the speed limit is the limit. That don’t mean it’s the speed you want to be sort of near. It means that’s the fastest you can go. The limit. Now, if you have a water heater and it says that you can’t put your water over two hundred degrees or it will explode… what you gonna do? Let it get to two hundred and two and then say you were only two degrees over? I think if it gets to one ninety-five, you’re going to do everything you can to put things right. Speed limit’s the same, in my view.”

  “Don’t those radar detectors have a margin of error to within a few miles per hour?”

  “I guess they might,” Doe told her, “but it happens that within the limits of Meadowbrook Grove, the speed limit is forty-five miles per hour. It’s clearly posted on the roads, ma’am. So you were not just over the limit, you were well over.”

  “Christ,” she said. “Meadowbrook Grove. What the hell is that?”

  “It’s this municipality, Lisa. You’re about half a mile into it, and it runs about another mile and a half east.”

  “It’s a speed trap,” she said. It came out in a jolt of understanding, and she made no effort to hide her contempt. “Your trailer park is a speed trap.”

  Doe shook his head. “It’s sad when people who are looking to keep folks safe are called all sorts of names. You want to get into an accident? Is that it? Take a couple of other people with you?”

  The woman sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Just give me the ticket.”

  Doe leaned forward, elbows on her rolled-down windows. “What did you say?”

  “I said to just go ahead and give me the ticket.”

  “You oughtn’t to tell an officer of the law what to do.”

  Something crossed her face, some sort of recognition, like when you’re poking a stick at a king snake, teasing it and jabbing at it, and you suddenly realize it’s not a king, but a coral, that it could kill you anytime it damn well wants. Lisa saw what she should have seen earlier. “Officer, I didn’t mean anything disrespectful. I just wanted to-”

  Had she been flirting? Probably, the whore. She put out her hand and gently, really with just the nails, scraped along the skin of his forearm, barely even disturbing the tightly coiled black hairs.

  It was all the excuse Doe needed. Technically, he didn’t need any excuse at all, but he liked to have one. Let them think it was something they did. Let them think later on, If only I hadn’t touched him. Better they should blame themselves.

  The touch was all he was looking for. Doe took a step back and pulled his gun from his holster and pointed it at the woman, not two feet from her head. He knew what it must look like to her- this big, dark, hot, throbbing thing shoved right in her face. “Never touch a police officer!” he shouted. “You are committing assault, a felony. Put your hands on the wheel.”

  She shrieked. They did that sometimes.

  “Hands on the wheel!” He sounded very much like a man who believed his own life to be in danger, like he needed her to do this to keep from shooting her. “Hands on the wheel! Now! Eyes straight ahead! Do it, or I will shoot!”

  She continued to shriek. Her little eyes became wide as tiny saucers, and her curly blond hair went fright wig. Somehow despite her screaming she managed to move her hands halfway up her body, where they did a little spaz shake, and then she got them up to the wheel.

  “All right, now. Lisa, you do what I say and no one needs to get hurt, right? You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer.” He grabbed the door handle, pulled it open, and took a quick step back, as though he expected molten rock to come pouring out.

  It was better to play it like it was real. If you did the cocky cop thing, they might despair or they might get full of righteous anger, and then you could really have a problem on your hands. If, on the other hand, you acted like you were afraid of them, it gave them a strange sort of hope, like the whole misunderstanding could still get straightened out.

  With the gun still extended, he reached out and pulled one hand behind her back, then the other. Holding them firmly in place, he put the gun back in the holster and placed the cuffs on her wrists. Too tight, he knew. They would hurt like hell.

  Her ugly face got uglier as he shoved her toward his cruiser. Cars slowed down along the road- practically a highway at this stretch, with more than five miles between lights- to watch, figuring her for a drug dealer or who knows what. But they weren’t thinking that all she’d done was speed and then whine about it. They saw her in cuffs and they saw his uniform and they knew who was right and who was wrong.

  Doe shoved her into the back of the cruiser, behind the passenger seat, and then went around to the driver’s side. He waited for a break in the traffic and then pulled out onto the road.

  They had gone less than a quarter of a mile before she managed to get any words past her sobbing. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “I guess you’ll find out,” he told her.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Then you don’t have to worry. Isn’t that the way the law works?”

  “Yes,” she managed. No more than a whisper.

  “There you go, then.”

  Doe turned off the road just before they got near the hog complex. It smelled something terrible from the waste lagoon, which was what they called it. A fucking shithole for a bunch of pigs that needed to be killed before they could die on their own, was what he called it. Smelled like shit, too. Worse than shit. Like the worst shit you could ever imagine. Rancid rotting shit. It smelled like the shit that shit shits out its asshole. Some days you couldn’t hardly smell it at all unless you got close, but when it was humid, which was a lot of the time, and when there was a good easterly wind, all of Meadowbrook Grove stank like frothing, wormy, bubbling, fermented shit. But that’s what the hog complex was there to do. To smell bad. So no one could smell that other smell, that moneymaking smell.

  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 wa
s 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

  MY 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?”