The Ethical Assassin

by David Liss

  “A lot of shelters have deals with places like this. They send over unclaimed strays. But the truth is, labs have backdoor deals with animal abductors. People will steal pets and sell them to a place like this for fifty bucks a pop. You can make decent cash if you don’t have scruples.”

  Desiree put down the camera. “Melford, we can’t leave them here. They would at least have a chance if we could let them out in the woods.”

  “We can’t do it,” he said. “How are we going to herd twenty or thirty dogs out of here without alerting the guards?”

  “I’m not leaving them,” she said.

  “You are,” he told her. “If we all go to jail, we won’t do any good. You want to walk this path, you have to harden yourself. You can’t blow up every Burger King you drive past. You can’t liberate all tortured animals from all the factory farms. You want to, but you can’t, and it drives you crazy sometimes because everything you do is just a drop in the bucket. This isn’t a fight for the moment or a year or even a decade. This is a battle that will be resolved over generations. And right now we have to make choices. We do what we can and we stay free and keep going and chip away at the edifice. Our getting arrested and those dogs being sent back to their cages isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

  “Doesn’t choosing who lives and who dies make us as morally suspect as the people who put these animals here?”

  “No,” Melford said. “They put the animals here, not us. And we’re doing the best we can- which right now is to bear witness.”

  “We’re taking one,” I said. “We can take one, can’t we?”

  “How do you choose which one?” he asked.

  I pointed. It was a black poodle. It wasn’t Rita, Vivian’s black poodle, but it was a black poodle, and I knew that Vivian would take care of it. I knew that she would regard it as some sort of divine compensatory gesture. Maybe the idea was silly, but I believed it. I believed that dog could have a home and someone to love it. This was no longer abstract, no longer theoretical.

  “We’re taking this dog,” I said. “If you don’t like it, you can leave without me.”

  ***

  Melford swore but didn’t say anything else. Desiree, however, nodded at me. “If Lem knows someone who’ll take the dog, we can’t leave it here to feast on Black Flag.”

  “She’s a poodle,” Melford said. “She’ll bark.”

  “I don’t believe this.” I could feel myself getting agitated. “Melford Kean, with ice water in his veins, is afraid to do the right thing?”

  “It’s a matter of being practical. I don’t want to fight a battle that will lose the war.”

  “It’s one dog,” Desiree said, her voice hard. “We’ll keep her quiet. And I’m with Lem. We’re taking the dog whether you help or not.”

  Maybe it was that he didn’t think he could dissuade her, but I had the sense that it was because he liked the fact that she felt so adamant. “Boogers,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  He went over to the cage and began to open it very carefully. I suspected he knew enough to suspect that a dog that had been mistreated the way this one had might well turn on him, but she came out docilely and licked his hand. I figured that was a good sign.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s try to pull this off.”

  But when we turned around, we saw the guard standing at the door.

  ***

  Melford didn’t see it, but I did. Desiree reached into her back pocket and removed a switchblade. She didn’t open it, but she balanced it in her palm. She might believe that Melford was committed to nonviolence, but she clearly had not yet signed off on that part of the Animal Liberation Front manifesto. Maybe the two of them belonged together.

  “Can I help you?” Melford asked. He had found a leash and was in the process of attaching it to Rita’s collar. He hardly even bothered to look at the guard.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He was in his forties, overweight to the point that he had trouble walking. He stared at us with dark and heavily bagged eyes.

  “I’m Dr. Rogers,” he said. “And these are my two students, Trudy and André.”

  The guard stared at us. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m running a 504-J,” Melford said.

  From the puzzled look on the guard’s face, it seemed pretty clear to me that Melford had just made up the 504-J.

  “How come I didn’t get any word that anyone was going to be here?”

  “Do you really think I would know the answer to that?” Melford asked.

  “You have your ID card?”

  “I’ll show it to you on my way out,” Melford said. “In the meantime, you can see I’m doing something. Are you new here? Because you’re supposed to know that you must never disturb the staff when they’re handling animals.”

  The guard stopped to think for a minute. “I’ve been here all day. How come I didn’t see you come in?”

  This question must have stumped Melford, because he paused.

  “Right,” the guard said. “I’m calling Dr. Trainer, and if he doesn’t know what you’re doing here, I’m calling the cops. Now put the dog back in the cage and come with me.”

  “No, wait,” Melford said. “Let me show you something first.” He handed the poodle’s leash to me and walked over to his black bag. I stood frozen with fear. Desiree had her knife out, and now Melford was going to take a gun and kill this guard, just for doing his job. This wasn’t some nefarious force of evil, like he claimed Karen and Bastard were. This was some poor working asshole.

  I tensed, ready to dart forward, but when Melford took his hand out of the bag, he didn’t have a gun. He had a stack of money. They were twenties, and I couldn’t tell how many, but there was easily $500 there.

  “I don’t know what they pay you to keep guard over this house of horrors,” Melford said, “but you have to know what goes on here is wrong. So I’ll make you a deal. You take this cash and let us walk out with this dog. It’s one dog. No one will miss her. No one will know we were here. Anyone asks, you say you have no idea. Simple as that.”

  The guard looked at the money and then around the room. Sure, there was no sign anyone had been here. We hadn’t vandalized the place. Many of the cages were empty anyhow, so no one would notice one more empty one. He didn’t know about the missing videotapes, so it seemed like a good deal.

  The guard snatched the money. “I’ll make my rounds again in half an hour,” he said. “If you’re still here, I’m calling the cops and I’ll deny you gave me anything.”

  “Fair enough,” Melford said. He turned around to grin at Desiree, who already had the knife back in her pocket.

  ***

  Most of the ride back went silently. We made a stop at a 7-Eleven and bought some doggie treats and water for the poodle, and she happily ate and drank in the backseat with me. She hardly made a noise. It was just one dog, I thought. One dog rescued from being forced to eat insecticide. We’d made some small difference.

  I told Melford where Vivian lived, and we stopped outside her trailer; he tied the dog to the door, rang the doorbell, and we drove off. We were halfway down the street when her door opened and we heard her muffled shriek of joy. What we didn’t hear was the subsequent disappointment. It wasn’t her dog. Her dog was gone, maybe dead. But it was a dog, and I had to think it would be some comfort.

  We were tired from what we had done and what we had seen, but I was lost in another thought. Why had Melford said he had no idea what Oldham Health Services was if he’d been keeping his eye on the place for who knew how long? And what was its connection to Bastard?

  It was just shy of eleven when Melford dropped me off outside the Kwick Stop. It was only after I was out of the car and it had driven away that I recalled that Melford had said I was done with him, that our business was over. Did that mean I would never see him again? Was he hurt that I hadn’t said good-bye? And did I really care if I hurt the assassin’s feelings?

  Not that it mattered. May
be it was because of everything that had happened in the last day, but I didn’t believe I was done with Melford, and I found it even harder to believe I was done with the Gambler, Jim Doe, and the rest. When I was back home, away from Jacksonville and bookmen, I’d believe it.

  I walked over to the pay phone just outside the Kwick Stop’s door. It was late to be making the call, but, surprisingly, Chris Denton picked up on the first ring.

  “Yeah,” he told me. “I’ve got your guy.”

  “And?”

  “And not much. He’s a Miami businessman, deals in livestock, and also deals with some door-to-door encyclopedia outfit. He also runs a charity. That’s about it. No record, no arrests, no stories in the media other than the usual business crap.”

  “That’s all you’ve got?” I asked.

  “What do you want me to do- tell you he’s a mass murderer? He’s just an asshole, like everyone else. Like you.”

  “I was hoping to get more for my money.”

  “Too bad,” he said. And he hung up.

  I stood there by the phone, letting disappointment wash over me. I don’t know what I had expected. Maybe some missing piece, something to help put it all in perspective. Maybe I wanted something that would have helped me feel safer.

  And I didn’t buy it. If B. B. Gunn was the head of some kind of drug and hog operation, whatever that would look like, he must have had some dealings with the law. An arrest that never went anywhere, unfounded allegations that made their way into the newspaper, something like that. Why had Denton come up empty?

  As it turned out, it was my fault. I never noticed that Chris Denton’s number was in the same exchange as the one Karen had put on her application. It was a Meadowbrook Grove exchange. And Chris Denton, I would later learn, knew Jim Doe.

  ***

  When I hung up the phone, I had the feeling someone was watching me. I looked up. There was Chitra, her eyes narrow and, I thought, judgmental.

  “Hi,” I said. “This is your pickup too?”

  “Yeah,” she told me. “You weren’t selling today, were you.”

  “Not selling?”

  “I’ve been here a while. I saw you get out of that car your friend was driving. Did you go swimming?”

  “What?”

  “That woman in the front was wearing a bikini.”

  That was about as far as our conversation got before Bobby pulled up in his Cordoba and she melted back into the store.

  ***

  Ronny Neil and Scott were already in the car, Ronny Neil in front, whispering conspiratorially to Scott in the back. Did that mean something? Bobby had been picking me up first for weeks.

  Why should I care who got to sit in which seats? I was planning on leaving and never coming back. I had bigger and more important things to worry about than whether or not Bobby considered me the best bookman in his crew. I was more interested in making certain I didn’t go to jail for murder or get killed by drug dealers.

  The Cordoba came to a stop in front of the store, and Bobby pushed himself out. The engine was still running, and from inside Billy Idol crooned about eyes without a face, whatever the hell that meant. Bobby grinned and came around to the back, flipping open the trunk with a flair of his wrist, as if he were a magician performing a trick. His blue oxford shirt was partially untucked, and he’d spilled something sodalike on his pants.

  “So, besides running errands for the Gambler, did you have any time to make money?”

  I shook my head. “I blanked.”

  Bobby sucked on his lower lip. “That was a pretty primo spot I gave you. Might have helped if you’d been there.”

  “I was out there most of the day. It just didn’t work out.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s not like I blanked on purpose,” I said, even though that’s exactly what I did.

  “So, what happened?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Bad luck.”

  “No such thing as bad luck, Lemmy. You make your own luck.” Bobby looked at me with a kind of seriousness I had never seen before, and I knew he didn’t want to hear my bullshit excuses. He gave his head a little sad shake and then shut the trunk. “You guys want to go behind my back, fuck me up, that’s your business. Get in the car.”

  I had to climb in the back with large, smelly Scott. When they picked up Kevin, there was no way Scott would scoot over to the middle, which meant I would be squished between them, breathing in the stink of Scott’s unwashed body all the way back to the motel.

  But, I told myself, it would all be over soon. Tomorrow would be the last day in town. Monday morning Bobby would head for home. We would stop on the road to sell, and I’d be back by two or three A.M. early Tuesday, and I would never have to sell books again. Just two more book-selling sessions and then freedom.

  A tinny Genesis tune was coming through the radio now, and I tried to concentrate on it. I’d read once that if you had a really bad headache, you could make it go away by thinking about some other part of your body instead. That’s what I was trying out. I figured if I listened to Genesis, if I concentrated on Phil Collins’s voice, I might not smell Scott quite so much.

  “I bet you blanked today,” Ronny Neil said from up front. “I didn’t. I got me a double.”

  This was where Bobby would tell him to be quiet, that they didn’t talk about how it went in the car. But Bobby didn’t say anything. He just stared ahead as he drove.

  “You ain’t gonna answer me?” Ronny Neil said.

  Scott shoved an elbow into my ribs. “I heard someone say something to you,” he told me. He scratched at a zit on his nose.

  I still didn’t say anything. I decided instead to nurse my indignation.

  “Well, did you blank or didn’t you?” Ronny Neil asked. “I thought you understood English so great.”

  “You know we’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  “I don’t hear Bobby complaining.”

  I paused to let Bobby chime in, but he didn’t say anything

  “We’re not supposed to talk about it,” I said again.

  “Shit, boy, you worry too much about what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. Me, I’m gonna celebrate in style. A double. With that bonus I got me six hundred dollars today, and I get me some pussy.”

  “Yeah,” said Scott.

  “Yeah what?” Ronny Neil asked his friend. “Yeah, your buddy is going to get some pussy? You know you ain’t. Who would get with a fat, lisping fuck like you?”

  Scott laughed.

  “How much money you think that Chitra will want for her to give me some of that pussy she got?” Ronny Neil asked. “How much you think?”

  “I think she’s giving it away,” Scott told him. “Those Indian girls are horny as shit. The dots they got on their heads make them horny. She don’t have a dot, but it’s the same thing.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Ronny Neil said. Then, on second thought, he added, “Horny as shit. I heard that, too.”

  ***

  Back at the motel, after everyone had piled out of the car, Bobby put a hand on my shoulder to hold me back. We watched as Scott and Ronny Neil walked off, with Kevin lagging behind good-naturedly, trying to stay in the conversation, not seeming to notice or mind that Ronny Neil and Scott didn’t give a damn about him.

  “Wait a minute,” Bobby said. “I want to talk to you.”

  I sighed. “I’ll do better tomorrow,” I said, though I knew I wouldn’t. I’d blank again tomorrow because I wouldn’t try again tomorrow. It was that simple.

  “It’s not that,” Bobby said. “I want to know what’s going on with you and the Gambler.”

  If it weren’t for the darkness, Bobby would have seen the cloud of fear pass over me. “It’s nothing,” I said, reaching for words that would comfort him and in no way encourage him to bring the conversation to the Gambler himself.

  “Don’t tell me it’s nothing. This morning the Gambler seemed ready to string you up. Now the
two of you are best buddies and he’s sending you on errands. Plus, he’s leaning on me to do whatever those two baboons, Ronny Neil and Scott, want. He told me to give them whatever spots they ask for, Lem. He told me to treat them like kings. I’m going to do what I’m told, but I want to know why.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Come on, Lem. I know your story. You want to go to college. A little more than a year from now you’ll be studying for midterms and trying to talk sorority girls into coming back to your dorm room. I’m still going to be here. This is my job, and I want to keep doing it. I like that I make money doing it. I’m good at it.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Yeah, then why are you screwing this up for me?”

  “Because I blanked?”

  “You know that isn’t it. The Gambler is angry with me, and I can’t figure out what his deal with you is. You’ve got to tell me what’s going on, because I don’t want to burn out here. I’ve put too many years into this. It took me two years to be a crew boss. I can move up in this organization, but not if the Gambler is angry at me. So, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Is it about the reporter? Have you talked to that reporter he mentioned?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Because you were asking those questions this morning.”

  “I was curious is all.”

  He waited a moment to see if there would be more coming. There wouldn’t be. “You won’t tell me?” he asked, his voice gone quiet now.

  “There’s nothing to tell, Bobby.”

  “Fuck!” He slapped his hand down on the back of the car. “I’ve been your friend. I’ve looked out for you, and I’ve helped you make a lot of money. And this is how you treat me?”

  “If I could tell you something, I would,” I said, almost whined.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Bobby said.

  I started back to the hotel, and I thought that the next two days were going to be the most miserable of my life. And that was saying a lot.