by David Liss
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 wa
nted 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?”
Could I trust him? He’d barged into my life, murdered a pair of prospects in front of my eyes, and then set me up to take the blame. I nodded.
“Fab,” the assassin said. “Now, I’d say it was time for you to be getting out of here.”
Leaving seemed to be a pretty good idea. More than I could have hoped for. I stood on wobbling legs, held on to the table until I could support myself properly, and began a sideways shuffle toward the front door, careful to keep an eye on the killer at all times.
“Lemuel,” the assassin said, “I hope you’ll consider the back way. Secrecy and all.”
Vaguely humiliated, I went into the living room and unlocked the back door. I stepped out into the yard, where the heat and the dank, outhouse-stench humidity startled me out of my fear for a moment. I had seen people killed just feet away from me, I had sat at the table with their killer, and I had made it out alive. I was not going to be killed.
Now I just had to get away from there before the cops showed up.
It would be easy to cut over to the neighbor’s property, so I closed the door behind me and stepped out into the dank darkness. The ghost of the moon was glowing behind a heavy blanket of clouds. The crickets chirped their near screeching chorus, and nearby, an unfathomable tropical frog bellowed its equatorial song. A mosquito dive-bombed my ear, but I ignored the explosive buzz. Instead I trudged forward, vaguely aware as I walked that the lights in Bastard and Karen’s trailer went metaphorically out.
Bastard and Karen. He irritating and vaguely sinister. She jagged and beaten down. Dead. The two of them dead. Their kids, off somewhere, were now orphans and had no idea. Their young lives, as they had lived them, were finished. And I had been a party to it. I had witnessed the unspeakable horror of their deaths and then sat with their killer and, I realized, found him strangely charming. It wasn’t as though I could have saved Bastard and Karen, but I told myself I could do something now. I could go to the police, and go fast, maybe in time for them to catch the assassin while he was still in the trailer. And even if they didn’t get there in time, no one would believe that I had killed them.
Then again, they might.
The assassin, when not assassinating, acted like a reasonable guy. It could be that he believed, really believed, that Bastard and Karen deserved it. But did anyone deserve it? Did I live in a world in which bad people were killed by righteous assassins? Nothing in my life told me it was so, but then again, this night had been in my life.
The first two trailers I passed were dark, though I heard an angry dog’s sonorous barking in the middle distance. I came out onto a street, though not the one on which Bastard and Kare
n lived, which somehow made me feel better. It was a little less than a mile to the Kwick Stop, and only a couple of cars passed me, speeding by in automotive oblivion. I told myself over and over again that I just might get away with this, I just might get my life back.
Chapter 5
THE CUTTING BOARD lacked music. It was a large restaurant, with a moderately unfortunate name, composed of a series of interlinked wood-paneled rooms filled out with white-clothed tables and heavy wooden chairs. Yet it lacked music, and that disappointed B.B. He liked music, soft music, trickling in so quietly that he could hardly hear it. Ambient as a distant highway, but still evanescently there, adding texture to the meal, a little heft if the conversation lagged, a touch of the cinematic sound track. Classical was fine, the soft sort of classical, not the loud stuff with horns and kettledrums, but the truth was that B.B. liked elevator music. He knew everyone got a kick out of trashing elevator music, and let them have their laugh, but in the end they had to agree there was something reassuring about these songs everyone already knew, maybe in a more raucous form, handed back all soft and powdery, prechewed, going down so smooth that you didn’t even know there was something in your throat.
This restaurant skipped the music. And no fish tank. He liked a fish tank. B.B. wasn’t one of those guys who took cruel pleasure picking which fish gets to die- he had to make cruel decisions enough for work- but he liked to look at fish. He liked to watch them swim, especially the big goldfish with the bulging eyes, and he liked the bubbling in the tank.
The Cutting Board had palm trees, though- a few small groves of plastic palms stuck here and there to give the place a touch of class. Palm trees were important for obscuring views. He didn’t want to be seen, and he didn’t want to see. The glory of a fine restaurant was its semiprivacy. Pillars could work, too, but he liked the palm trees since the fronds added extra cover. The restaurant was also into low, ambient lighting, so in the end, the dark and the plastic trees made it acceptable despite its other drawbacks. B.B. would return at some point. It would never be on his A-list, but he would put it on rotation. In any case, he didn’t like to visit a place more than once every six months. The last thing you want is for the waiters to start to recognize you, recognizing that the last time you were in it was a different boy, and the time before that, too.
