The Ethical Assassin

by David Liss

  “You can leave us alone now,” the Gambler said to Bobby.

  “Okie.” Bobby bounced on his feet, almost a heel-clicking salute, and then walked out.

  The Gambler continued to peer at the paperwork, gazing over his perched glasses. What were they there for if not for reading?

  “How have you been, Lem? Everything all right?”

  “Terrific,” I said, though I didn’t sound terrific. I sounded like I knew I was in trouble.

  “Terrific, huh? I guess we’ll see.” He stared at me until I looked away. “You know, Bobby says you’re a born bookman. A real power hitter. You got that grand slam that fell through a while back, didn’t you?”

  “That was me.”

  “Shame about it. I mean, you do good work, you should get your reward, right? A more experienced bookman might have seen those guys for deadbeats, but you can’t blame yourself for not knowing what only years on the job can teach you.”

  “I guess not.” I hadn’t been blaming myself, and I couldn’t think of what a more experienced bookman might have picked up on. Sure, Galen had lived in a relatively run-down place, but he’d had a pretty nice truck, his wife had some decent jewelry. His friends all looked okay, too. None of them were going to be extras on Knots Landing, but nothing suggested that they were off to the welfare office the next day, either.

  “But I’m more concerned about this,” the Gambler said. He now held up a credit app: Karen’s. Not that I could read it from across the room. But I knew what it was. “Bobby tells me you got all the way through and they balked at the check. Is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That shouldn’t happen.”

  “I know.”

  “You get that far, you should close. You should have been closing the minute you walked through that door. The check should have been a formality, not a deal breaker. You understand what I’m saying?”

  The Gambler’s voice remained calm through all of this, but there was an urgency there, too, a kind of growing gravity. And anger, too, maybe.

  “I understand what you’re saying. The words, the ideas behind the words. The whole thing.” I had the distinct feeling that I was talking too much, but I didn’t know what he wanted from me, and my mouth switched into running mode.

  “If you understood,” the Gambler answered, “then we wouldn’t be having a talk about this bullshit, would we?” He smiled thinly. “So I want you to tell me what happened with these people. You had them, they filled out the app, they were ready to go, and then what?”

  “They balked.” I sounded a little shrill, so I looked at my hands to hide my embarrassment. And my fear. This Gambler, the Gambler in front of me, had nothing to do with the old-time revival preacher who sermonized to us about selling. This was not the supersalesman Gambler. This was the Gambler who disposed of corpses in the middle of the night.

  “They balked. Tell me something I don’t know. Why? Why the fuck did they balk?”

  Maybe anger wasn’t the right way to go when speaking to an accessory to murder, but there it was. Besides, I was myself an accessory to murder, so I had to figure that leveled the playing field. “Look, Bobby told you I’m a power hitter, and I am. I sell a lot of books. I’ve never had people balk at the check before, and there’s no reason to think it’s going to happen again. It was just one of those things.”

  “Just one of those things, huh? Well, how about we don’t do anything about it, Lem, and then it becomes two of those things and then three of those things? How about you tell me how many sales you have to blow before I’m supposed to care about it? How many? Tell me.”

  I let it hang in the air for a moment before I spoke. “More than one.” I wanted to look away, but I told myself to keep my eyes steady. This was his problem, not mine.

  “More than one? Okay. More than one. But I don’t want it to be more than one. I want it to be less than one. It’s a little late for that, I know, but I’m thinking- and maybe I’m crazy here- I’m thinking it might be better to stop this in its tracks so you don’t sit in someone’s house for three fucking hours, have them fill out the app, and then fuck up the close. That’s what I’m thinking, Lem. So tell me what happened.”

  I bit my lip. This wasn’t the principal’s office. I wasn’t in danger of my mother getting a phone call. I was in danger of being executed, like Bastard and Karen. I had seen it. I knew what it meant, and I had to come up with something.

  Based on the conversation I’d overheard, I could feel reasonably confident that the Gambler had known Bastard and Karen, knew something of their personalities, so whatever story I came up with would have to sound plausible.

  “When the wife was filling out the app, the husband was making trouble. He was kind of a clown, you know, trying to distract her, insult her, insult me. With him carrying on, I could see the wife was having problems. She looked nervous. She started talking about money.”

  “What money?” the Gambler demanded. “How much money?”

  I knew I’d hit a nerve. He and the police chief had been looking for money. From what I could tell, a lot of money. I took a deep breath and concentrated on acting as though I had no idea what he was talking about. “Just money. You know. Then when it came time for the check, she said she didn’t want to do it.”

  “Yeah?” the Gambler said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

  I felt pretty sure I was bombing. “So I, uh, tried again. I went over all the stuff they’d seen, I told them about how I had asked them to let me know if they weren’t interested. I did all the things we’ve talked about in training, but she still wouldn’t budge. I guess the husband got angry, and then I knew it was pretty much lost.”

  “This is bullshit,” he said. “Why the fuck would they want encyclopedias?”

  I stared at him. “Um, I don’t know,” I said. “Why would anyone want encyclopedias? I mean, they’re great books and all-”

  “Spare me the bullshit. What did you do then?”

  I shrugged. “I left.”

  “You left?” the Gambler repeated. “You just walked out of there? Did you say, ‘Hell, I don’t need two hundred dollars. I made me that already, so I don’t need it again.’ Is that what you told them?”

  “Do you think that would have been helpful?”

  His face reddened, but he didn’t say anything. It was clear now that the Gambler wanted some other kind of information, information he didn’t know how to excavate. So I bit back my irritation. The thing to do, I realized, was to use his confusion, his desperate fishing. I needed to figure out a way to make all of this work for me.

  “I didn’t know what else to do. I got the feeling they wanted me to leave, like I was getting on their nerves. I didn’t know how to turn it around.” I sighed. “So, can you tell me what I should have done?”

  “What?” the Gambler sneered at me, astonished at the audacity of the question.

  “I mean, if this is about keeping me from losing them at the check ever again, I need to know how to handle it. How would you have handled it?”

  The Gambler’s eyes narrowed, and his face pinched inward. “You tell me, Lem. You think about it for a while, then you come back and tell me. Right now I’m more interested in what you did. So you left? Were they doing anything when you left?”

  I felt like I was gaining some ground, so I pushed it further. “Why? What does that have to do with my having lost the sale?”

  “Just answer the question, would you?” The Gambler looked away.

  “I don’t think so. They were sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, too angry with each other to talk.”

  He stared at me blankly. Then I felt the smack of inspiration. Ideally, I would have had more time to think it through to be certain it wasn’t an amazingly stupid idea, but I didn’t have time, and I decided to run with it.

  I paused and peered away as if in thought. “Before I went in there, I saw this creepy guy hanging around.”

  The
Gambler now sat up straight. “What creepy guy?”

  I shrugged, as if the story were no big deal. “Just a guy who stopped me, wanted to talk to me. He drove a dark Ford pickup and he had a strange haircut- short all over, but longish in the back. He had weird teeth, too. I think he might also have been the guy who was hanging around in the dark outside the trailer when I left, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see whoever it was lurking around the trailer, but it was just a feeling I had, you know?”

  I tried to look more puzzled than pleased with myself. The Gambler and this other guy, Doe, were clearly working together on this- and had been working with Bastard and Karen. Now I had the Gambler suspecting Doe. If I could cook up enough Treasure of the Sierra Madre tension between the two of them, they’d forget all about me and the check that never got written.

  “All right,” the Gambler said. “Get out of here.”

  I stood up and started to walk toward the door. “I won’t let it happen again,” I chirped like a good little bookman.

  The Gambler didn’t even look up. “That’s just fucking great.”

  Chapter 17

  HE’D BEEN DREAMING about the bodies, about moving them, which was why he believed you should never do anything too unpleasant right before going to sleep. It always stuck with you. In his dream, Doe had Karen’s body, thin and light, like a department store mannequin, draped over his shoulder. Next to him, with Bastard in tow, was not the Gambler but Mitch Ossler, that fat bumbler. In the dream, Doe was just waiting for him to drop Bastard. And he would have. He’d have dropped the body and it would have come out of its impromptu bedsheet shroud, and it would have rolled away from them, even though they were on flat ground.

  Mitch Ossler was like that. He’d taught the other guys how to cook meth, and he knew his stuff. No doubt about it. Mitch could cook fast, and he could cook reliably. He had his ear to the ground and came up with new recipes. He was the one who found out how to turn crankhead piss back into meth. But Mitch never had a mind for the details, little things like safety and staying alive. No one had been surprised, really surprised, when the accident happened. Something like that was bound to happen, and Mitch was exactly the sort of guy it would happen to. The asshole had been setting up a new lab; he let a batch get too hot, and it vomited out a violent blast of vapor right in his face.

  No one else had smelled anything, but Mitch, whose face had gone all red and puffy from the wallop of heat, said it was mustard gas. Invisible, almost odorless, and in about twelve hours his organs would start to rupture. He had to go to a hospital.

  Thing was, Doe couldn’t let Mitch go to the hospital, couldn’t let him make up some bullshit story about how he got exposed to mustard gas. It wasn’t exactly like he could have been defending his trench against an offensive by the Germans. So they’d burned down the new lab, and Mitch had been the first guy to end up in the waste lagoon. Too bad, because he knew a lot of useful things.

  Doe was up earlier than he would have liked and later than he should have been. He forced himself out of bed and hobbled around his bedroom, moving from closet to dresser and back again, keeping his legs wide apart to ease the pain. He wasn’t going to look at his balls anymore. He’d decided he would just not look. He’d wait a week and then look again, surprise himself by seeing a normal sack. That was much better than checking them every day like some sort of hypochondriac.

  No one would have guessed from looking at his trailer, from looking at the stuff in his trailer, that he had a fat and fast-growing account in the Caymans, and that was just how he liked it. Sure, his trailer was a little bit bigger than most of the others in Meadowbrook Grove, a little bit more nicely kept. He had a girl come twice a week to pick up for him, so he didn’t need to bother with crap like laundry and putting away dishes. That’s why most people lived badly. They had to choose between the freedom of laziness and the tyranny of neatness.

  Doe knew that a cleaning girl was the third way. In his case, he had a chunky sixteen-year-old with bad acne and droopy eyes. Her mother said she was slightly retarded, and Doe had no problem believing it, the way she hulked around, mumbling cheerfully to herself. But she cleaned with a thoroughness that bordered on obsession, and she didn’t steal or nose around. Even better, he almost never felt the urge to fuck around with her, ugly thing that she was. One time he thought about throwing her down and shoving it right into her asshole, purely on principle, because he could get away with it. Give her a cookie or a lollypop or something, and she’d be all right. But the phone rang or someone knocked on the door, and he was distracted.

  First thing that morning, he staggered into the shower, angling himself so the water didn’t hit his balls. He stayed in there for a long time, maybe too long, but finally forced himself out, and after a cursory pass with the towel, he stumbled into loose-fitting jeans and a Tampa Bay Bucs T-shirt. With breakfast in hand, a bag of Doritos and a Pepsi from the fridge, he hit the truck.

  Bastard was dead, and that was going to be a problem. Now he had to see to it that there were no other problems. He needed to do the rounds, make sure everything looked normal. Bastard had a family emergency, he might say. He had to take off, visit his dying mother, fuck his dying sister, it didn’t matter. Bastard found out he had colon cancer and had to go off for treatment. That might be good. Serves the fuck-stick right for messing with Karen. He deserved to have the world thinking he had ass cancer.

  Meanwhile, Doe would have to get someone else real soon, because if production dried up, there was going to be trouble. Even if Doe understood in principle how to cook, he wasn’t about to risk getting an organ-melting blast of mustard gas. So until they could recruit a new cook, it would be business as usual. A great deal of the distribution went through the encyclopedia kids- those two assholes the Gambler kept close- so that wouldn’t be a problem. Same as always, they’d come to town once a month, go into neighborhoods, pass off to their dealers. Nice and neat. Cops didn’t look at them twice.

  They weren’t the problem. The problem was the extracurricular product that the Gambler and B.B. didn’t know about. Things had been growing lately, and Doe had begun to move beyond the cover of bookmen. There were other distributors now, and if they didn’t get what they wanted, they’d whine. If their tweaking crankhead buyers didn’t get what they wanted, they’d do more than whine. They’d make trouble, they’d break into houses and knock off convenience stores and old ladies in the street to get their ten fucking dollars for their fix. They would get themselves arrested, and once these assholes were sitting across the interrogation table from the cops, too stupid to ask for a lawyer, they’d talk.

  Doe drove out to the hog lot and parked his truck out back. He was alone, no chance he wasn’t, but even so he looked around carefully. He saw nothing but the pines, the undulating waste lagoon, a few egrets passing overhead, and a waddling trio of ducks- the ugly kind with gnarled red knobs on their beaks. An enormous toad, almost the size of a dinner plate, sat glumly in his path. It was low and fat and sprawled out as though its own size had been a horrible mistake. Doe gauged the distance to the waste lagoon. It might be possible, just possible, to punt it all the way over there, watch it splash into a shitty death. But he didn’t do it. Letting it live was punishment enough.

  Mitch had designed the door to the lab so that it was practically invisible from the outside if you didn’t know where to look- just slats in the corrugated metal exterior of the hog lot. Doe slid his fingers inside and pulled the hidden latch outward. The door swung open and a blast of cool air hit him hard. He always winced. Always. Like the cool air might contain the same toxic cloud that killed Mitch. But it was just the AC, cranking hard. Unlike the hog lot proper, which he kept just cool enough to keep the hogs alive, the lab was downright chilly. If it went over sixty-five degrees, alarms went off to warn them. He had a special receiver in his house, in his car, in the office. It seemed like a good idea because of all the shit they had in there; if it got too hot, the place would erupt into a tox
ic mushroom cloud. So he kept it under sixty-five degrees.

  Christ, he hated the place, and he avoided it as best he could. Bastard had made it easy. Piece of shit though he was, he had been good at his job, had been able to make sure everything went as it should, and he could cook quickly and safely. All of that freed Doe from having to do more than the occasional spot visit. Say good-bye to that for a while. He’d be practically living in this shithole until he felt he could trust their new cook- as soon as they could find one.

  After the cool, the first thing that hit him was the stench. An impressive trick considering that he’d been walking along the shore of the waste lagoon. But that was what the waste lagoon was for- it disguised the stink, the gripping, knife-sharp, gut-churning stink like cat piss that rammed through his eyes and up into his brain the instant he crossed the threshold. Doe grabbed at one of the face masks, the kind favored by workers removing asbestos, hanging near the door. It helped a little, but he could still smell it, and he could hear, softly through the wall, the low, pathetic grunting of hogs.

  The cooking gear lay everywhere- empty containers of stove fuel, starting fluid, ammonia, iodine, lye, Drano, propane, ether, paint thinner, Freon, chloroform, and sinisterly marked containers of hydrochloric acid, more skull-and-bones symbols than a pirate hideout. There were open boxes of cold and asthma medicine, crap they bought by the caseload from Mexico. In one corner were hundreds of empty wooden matchboxes, and scattered around lay thousands, maybe millions, of little wooden sticks whose red phosphorus Bastard would spend hours scrapping into a metal mixing bowl while listening to Molly Hatchet. Every once in a while, he was supposed to destroy as much of this stuff as he could, take it somewhere out of town and burn it. Holy Jesus, they didn’t risk dumping it, but it looked like Bastard might have been a little lax on that point of late. That he had been lax about the trash suggested he’d been lax about other things, and that was about as disturbing a thought as you could reasonably have.