The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (15 page)

“Laurel, is that you, honey?”

More sobbing. “Jim. They’re dead.” It came out like a ghost’s whisper. “Bastard and Karen. They’re dead.”

“Christ,” he said. “Where’s the accident?”

“Not that,” she said. More crying. Crying, crying, crying. Jesus fucking hell, just spit it out. Of course you couldn’t say things like that, because people took offense, even if it was what they needed to hear. Even if they secretly wanted you to say it, you still couldn’t.

Doe was already thinking about the money. Maybe Karen a little, too, but mostly the money. Bastard had been over there again. He still couldn’t believe that Bastard was stepping in on Karen. He knew,
knew,
Doe had been fucking her, and he’d moved in anyhow. Doe had seen it for himself tonight. And he’d seen Karen see him, too. Just like he planned. Let her know she was in trouble. That stupid encyclopedia kid went in there, and he figured she’d kept him inside, as if that would keep Doe from trying anything.

None of that mattered as much as the fact that Bastard had just come back from doing his collections, and he ought to have damn close to $40,000 to hand over. That was a lot of cash, and if Bastard was dead, would Doe be able to find the money? What if it had been in the car and was scattered to the winds? What if he’d hid it somewhere and now they’d never find it?

Doe told himself to slow down. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe he was only dying. Fucking stupid Laurel. No one was dead, he was willing to bet. Dying, maybe, but not dead. Doe could get there on time, kneel down while Bastard raised up one bloodied hand to his shoulder, pulling him close so he could whisper his dying whisper: “It’s in the toolshed.” Or something. Not the toolshed. Bastard didn’t have a toolshed.

He rubbed his uneven teeth back and forth like a pair of opposing hacksaws. “Where’s the accident, Laurel? I’ll come on over.” He sucked down the rest of his drink.

Sobbing. Endless sobbing punctuated by a kind of heaving and then a bit of a groan. And then more sobbing. The phone stretched far enough that he could make it to the little refrigerator/freezer unit and grab a fresh bottle of Yoo-hoo. He swallowed enough to make some room in the bottle, then, cradling the phone between his ear and his shoulder, he funneled in about four shots’ worth of Yell. He got back in his chair and put his feet up.

Finally: “Not an accident,” she said. “In Karen’s trailer. They’ve been shot.”

Doe swung out of his chair. Sudden movement turned out to be a terrible mistake. A stab of electric pain shot out. “You there now?”

“Yuh-yuh-yuh,” she said.

“Stay there and don’t call anyone.” He slammed down his phone and knocked over the Yoo-hoo bottle. It gushed brown all over his desk, all over his pants. Now he’d have to change into his uniform—stress out his balls again. This was turning out to be one fucking disaster of a week.

The cruiser crunched onto Karen’s driveway, its headlights illuminating Laurel, who stood puffy-eyed with her hands over her mouth. Doe shut off the lights instantly. He normally loved to flash his police lights, let the world know who made the rules, but this time something told him to keep it quiet and low-key. Bastard was dead and $40,000 was missing.

Only a couple of steps in toward Laurel, and she lunged forward and threw her arms around him. She was heaving like she’d been doing on the phone, only now he had to feel her wet tears streaming down his neck, and he felt obligated to put his arm along her back, which was all jutting bone and flesh, like wet clay wrapped in a cloth. He’d fucked her when she’d been an exciting older woman. Now she was just old, probably fifty-five, and she still dressed like a whore, even though everyone could see her tits were shaped like salamis hanging above a deli counter.

“C’mon, baby,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

He knew he was in for it, so her heaves and sobs didn’t piss him off too much. She finally pulled it together enough to speak.

“My casserole dish. I lent her my casserole dish last Thanksgiving. And I have company this weekend.”

Doe had seen this before, and he couldn’t stand it. The blubbering, the talking nonsense.

“I called her this morning. I asked if I could come by and she said I could and I wanted to come by earlier but I had to get my hair done and that took longer than I thought.”

“Uh-huh.” Doe tapped the tip of his shoe against a small rock.

“I said I would come by earlier, but I came by a little later. I was just going to slip in and get it, not bother her. I didn’t think it would matter, but when I went into the trailer—”

What happened in the trailer he’d have to find out for himself, since all he got from her was a long wail, then more sobbing and heaving. What a mess.

“My baby,” Laurel was saying. “My only baby.”

Baby my ass. Karen was a grown-up whore. And it wasn’t like she and Laurel were best friends or anything. Half the time they couldn’t stand each other. A few months back, he’d heard they’d gotten into a fistfight when Laurel caught Karen taking money out of her purse. Now she was going off with this “my baby” garbage.

The trailer’s door hung open, so Doe pushed himself away from the lamenting whore and walked up the steps. It was all gray darkness inside but one step was all he needed.

There they were, deader’n shit. Bastard the fuck. Dead. Karen the slut. Dead. What a mess. More than a mess, because Doe didn’t know who had done it, which made him uncomfortable. The whole point of their business was that things like this didn’t happen.

He stepped outside, where Laurel held a cigarette in one palsied hand. Her eyes widened, waiting for his professional diagnosis. Maybe she thought that somehow he could make it all disappear. As a law enforcement officer, he’d be able to tell her that they weren’t really dead at all. Those were dummies. Actors. A trick of the light.

Fat chance. Doe wasn’t going to make it better for her. He knew pretty clearly what was going to happen, even if he hadn’t thought it through. There wasn’t time for thinking it through, just for doing it.

“You call anyone else?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“No one else knows?”

She shook her head again.

“How long was Bastard seeing Karen?”

Laurel stared at him. She didn’t answer.

“How long?” he said again, raising his voice.

“Was there something between you and Karen, Jim?” she asked softly.

Jesus fucking Christ. She was about to make this personal. “Laurel, this is police work. I need to know. How long were they seeing each other?”

Laurel shrugged. “Two or three months, I guess. This time. But they been together before.”

“Piece of shit,” he said. He almost hit her right there. She would have deserved it, too.

He could tell she knew. He could tell by the way she was looking at him. She knew he’d been fucking her daughter, and she was jealous. He didn’t have time for this crap.

Doe went back into the trailer. He walked over to Bastard and, for the fun of it, gave him a good kick in the ass. Body was kind of heavy for a skinny guy. He looked at Karen. Her head was all messed up. It had been messed up pretty good anyhow, he thought, and then tried not to laugh. Well, cheating whores get what they have coming to them. That was one thing everyone knew for a fact.

Doe let out a sigh. He nodded to himself, the signal that it was okay, and then turned toward the door.

“Laurel! Jesus! Get in here, quick! Karen’s still breathing! She’s alive. Holy shit, I think she’s going to be okay.”

Laurel came running in, right up to the bodies. Doe had stepped out of the way, in the shadow of the wall separating the kitchen from the living area. She ran up to Karen and went down on her knees, something she knew how to do all right, and put a hand to Karen’s cheek.

She did not get what she had hoped for—warmth and color and movement. The cheek would have been cold and rubbery now, and even in the dark she could see that Karen’s eyes were wide open, staring into the nothing that comes after life.

She started to turn toward Doe. “But. She’s not—”

It was as far as she got before the handle of Doe’s gun came smashing down into the side of her head, knocking her over onto her daughter’s dead body. Her hand slipped into a congealed pool of blood.

No way Doe was going to keep hitting her in the head. Sometimes people went fast, or so he had heard, but not in his experience. Doe knew you might have to hit a person five or six times—good hits, too—before they’d shut the fuck up. Instead, he took advantage of her daze and wrapped his hands around her scrawny neck, her turkey neck, and pressed in good and tight. He shoved his thumbs into her bobbing throat.

She struggled. Sure she did, but not nearly so much as he expected. It was like she’d given up, she knew it was too late. More than that, Doe knew what she was thinking, and for some reason it bothered him. He wanted to clear the record.

“I didn’t kill them,” he told her, looking right into her bugging eyes. “I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t me. The only person I’m killing today is you.”

He pressed in even tighter so that his hands hurt, and he sort of liked the throbbing warmth of her throat against his hands. For an instant, he wondered if he should stop, let her up, tell her it was all a joke. He hadn’t flashed his lights, but maybe people had seen them together, seen her crying. Still, what did it matter? A mother standing outside her daughter’s trailer, crying. Happened every day. No one would even think twice, he told himself, and under his hands he felt something like a chicken bone snap.

Chapter 13

D
ESIREE SAT ON HER BED,
cross-legged, wearing only her panties and her bikini top, a gray copy of the
I Ching
in her lap. For the past three weeks, she’d been coming to the same symbol again and again. No matter how she asked the question, no matter how she sought her answer, she kept coming back to the
hsieh.

She drew it on the back of her left hand with a Sharpie so she would think about it constantly. Meditate on it. When it finally faded away in the slow tide of flaking skin, she would redraw it. Last week, she had passed a tattoo parlor on Federal Highway, and she thought about having it placed on her hand permanently, but she decided there was no point being permanent with a symbol of change.

B.B. saw it on her hand and said it looked like a bunch of lines, and she guessed they all did, but this pictogram, she knew, derived from the image of two hands holding on to the horns of an ox. It signified transformation, addressing and fixing a problem. It was her symbol. She had to fix the problem, and the problem was her life with B.B.

She was now twenty-four, and she’d been with him for three years, fixing his meals and driving his car, organizing his calendar, reserving his tables in restaurants. She bought his groceries and paid his bills, answered his door, mixed his drinks. He needed her, and she knew that, she loved that. She felt grateful, too. She’d been about as lost as you could get when he’d taken her in. He’d done it for his own reasons, to exorcise his demons, but he’d still done it.

Those first few days, weeks, even months, she’d slept lightly, watching the door handle, waiting to see B.B. slink in under cover of darkness and claim his due. Maybe not that first day, when her stench had been so bad that even she had had to breathe through her mouth not to gag, but once she’d cleaned up, got off the crank, bought some new clothes—different story then. Her old face started to come back in the mirror. Flesh grew on bone, cheeks reddened and rounded, her nose became less narrow, less sharp, her hair less brittle. She had become herself.

B.B. had told her that no matter what happened, no matter how clean, how happy, she became, she’d never stop wanting to use. The crank would always call to her. It would be a shadow that would haunt her; it was a rope tethered to her neck that would never stop tugging.

He was wrong. He was wrong because Desiree already had a shadow, she already had a tether. The crank had obscured it, hidden it—and God help her, that was what she had loved about it at first. But when she was clean, as she lay in the bed in B.B.’s Coral Gables house, staring at the endless rotation of the ceiling fan, listening to the distant sound of lawn mowers and car alarms, she found her way back to her sister.

Aphrodite had died during the procedure that had separated them. The girls hadn’t reached their second birthday when they’d performed the operation, which her mother had known was complicated, which risked the lives of both girls. The doctor had urged her on, however, telling her that his university would cover the costs. It was a great opportunity for the children and for science.

They’d separated the girls, who were linked from shoulder to hip, in what the doctors referred to as a “minor” omphalopagus. Yes, the girls were joined, but mostly by muscle and vascular tissue. Of the organs, only the liver was shared, and they believed they could separate the livers with a chance that both girls would live. The doctor had been clear: It was
possible
that they would both live, likely one would die, and unlikely neither would make it.

Aphrodite died. During the operation, not afterward, which maybe, the doctors had said, was better since it spared her days of painful lingering. But the prognosis for Desiree was quite good. She would have a scar for the rest of her life, and quite a large scar at that, but she would have a normal life.

Desiree learned that it was all a matter of what you called normal. Jeering in school locker rooms, every year settling into the role of de facto freak, fear of wearing a bathing suit, for example? Were these things normal? They were not, of course, beyond-the-pale odd. Lots of fat, ugly, and misshapen children had similar experiences, and they weren’t ready for the sideshow, but the whole world knew about Aphrodite. They knew Desiree had been a
Siamese
twin. Kids at school, for as long as she could remember, would pull back their eyes with their index fingers and sing that cat song from
Lady and the Tramp.
Somehow, inevitably, they learned Aphrodite’s name and asked after her as though she were still alive, still joined to Desiree. Every single year of middle and high school there was always at least one pair of kids—and once as many as four—who came for Halloween as conjoined twins.

Then there was her mother, who always claimed to have favored Aphrodite. Even before she was out of elementary school, Desiree had begun to wonder if it was true, if it was just something hurtful to say, but wondering that, even believing that, didn’t diminish the sting. Her mother loved to cry, to hold her head in her hands and say, “Oh, why wasn’t Aphrodite spared?”

And there was Aphrodite herself. Desiree started hearing her voice around her twelfth birthday. Her mother was out of town that week, gone to Key West with a new boyfriend, though the relationship—big surprise—never went anywhere but the emergency room. Even calling it a voice was suggesting too much, she supposed. Aphrodite was there, a presence, a sensation, a compulsion, even a stream of intuitive information. When she met someone and she took an instant like or dislike, she could feel her twin’s push or pull.

At first it had been welcome, a balm in the loneliness of her life, but by the time she was fifteen, things had begun to change. She met people who didn’t care about her scar, who wanted to hang out, listen to tunes, smoke cheeb. Aphrodite didn’t like these people, but they liked Desiree plenty. Then Desiree discovered that crank made Aphrodite’s voice quiet. It stung at first, made her nose burn with such incendiary pain that she snorted up water and blew it out like a whale. The next time it didn’t burn so much. The time after that, if it burned, she didn’t notice.

That was how it went until B.B. had found her. Or she had found him. He was driving on the Ft. Lauderdale strip, stopped in his Mercedes at a light with the top and windows down and Randy Newman blasting as if it were Led Zeppelin.

This guy had what she needed: cash. She needed cash because she needed to shoot up so fucking bad that it killed her. Once it had jolted her from the normal world to a place of power where she could do anything, say anything. She felt whole and finished, no longer subject to the whims of her mother or teachers or dead twin.

Now it was something else. The crank still lifted her up, no doubt about it, but not to such heights. And the lows—the lows were more than she could ever have imagined. Under the earth lows, buried under your grave so you were scratching the bottom of your own casket lows. She was dry and evacuated, a squeezed-out and tattered sponge, and she would do anything to get back up, if only she could begin the cycle again. Even go over to a stranger on the Ft. Lauderdale strip. Whatever restraints had once governed her routines had been eroded by endless fatigue and sleeplessness, as far back as she could remember, which wasn’t very far since her memory didn’t work so well in those days. A low level of panic hummed perpetually just under her consciousness. Her mouth felt dry no matter how much she drank, and she never felt hungry no matter how little she ate.

For all that, she’d never done anything quite like this before. She fucked and sucked for crank, but always guys she knew; but the more she thought about it, the more she saw that it didn’t matter. It was just a few minutes. Of what? Sex? Big deal. They tried to make a big deal of sex, but it was nothing. A few minutes, and she’d have some money and she could score.

Even then, with the pound of need and terror in her ears, she could hear her sister’s muffled voice. She couldn’t make it out, but she knew it was there, a distant pleading. But the guy, he seemed like he would go for it. He was nicely dressed, hair neatly combed, neatly dyed. He had a few pieces of tasteful but expensive jewelry—her time in the pawnshops had taught her to tell the difference. He didn’t look like just another rich Florida doctor or lawyer or real estate developer in a convertible. He was that other kind. He had the mark, the sign, the vibrating tone audible to crankheads and dogs. He lied on his tax return, cheated on his wife, fucked over his partners. Something. The guy in the Mercedes was crooked, and he had money.

She walked over, smiled at him. She used her best smile, which was radiant. At least it had been once. If she’d known how she looked—cancer thin, sunken eyes, thin lips, red welts on her face and hands—she never would have offered, never would have thought anyone would want her. But she didn’t know, so she smiled, and he turned to her.

“I’ll blow you for ten dollars, sweetie,” she said.

He started to roll up his window—a defense of minimum value with the convertible’s top down—and she pulled away from the rising glass, about to swear. Then he stopped. The window came back down.

“What are you using?”

“Fuck you,” she said, starting to turn away—but slowly. She knew they weren’t done.

He took out a twenty and showed it to her. “What are you using?”

She paused. She could hear Aphrodite, the voice that had been muffled and muted for years. She could hear it now, hollow and echoing, the trickle of distant water in a cave. A feeling so strong that she could almost sense the words:
Don’t tell him.
And that was why she told him. “Crank,” she said.

He studied her for a minute longer and then unlocked the doors with a flick of his finger. “Get in,” he said.

She got in. Why not? He was okay looking for an older guy. Probably clean, certainly rich. That other thing—the vibrating something that told her she might die, might end up dumped in a vacant lot, tossed off an airboat into the Everglades—that didn’t matter right now. The need called to her, the need. The need. Ripping her in half, pulling her, crushing her, knocking her off her feet and dragging her through the dirt. So she got in.

But the man in the Mercedes didn’t want a blow job. He wanted to clean her up.

B.B. never came for sex. After a couple of months, by which time Desiree had become a kind of live-in maid, it was clear that he wasn’t going to. He didn’t like women. He didn’t look at them when they passed on the street or in the mall, not the charming or the cute or the beautiful. The slutty and the sexy he looked at, but not with desire. It was more like a vague hostility, or maybe amusement.

At first she assumed he was gay, which was okay by her. She’d known plenty of queens on the street, and even if she hadn’t, she’d spent too much time as the object of derision to judge anyone for being in any way different or out of step with the idea of normal you got on TV. Still, it never rang true. B.B. didn’t much look at men, either. Not even those who were both beautiful and obviously gay.

It was entirely possible that he was asexual, but Desiree’s gut and Aphrodite’s voice doubted it. He was maybe asexual and maybe not, but he was something else, too. Something the twins could not put their respectively fleshly and ephemeral fingers on. There was a blankness to him. He seemed in a daze half the time. He’d rescued her, but he never acted like the sort of person who would rescue a drug addict. Only when he was doing charity work with one of his kids did he come fully alive. Or sometimes when he was watching a boy. They’d be in a restaurant or walking on the beach or shopping, and his pupils would dilate and his posture would grow straighter without getting stiff, and he would flush a healthy pink, as if he were in love. Each time he seemed to fall in love.

Once she brought it up. Only once. Because the thing of it was, there was something almost admirable about B.B.’s desire for boys. He wanted to be with them—she could see that. On the street, she’d seen men who went for boys, for girls, for children so young that they didn’t know what sex was. They were predators, monsters, and she regretted not having killed them all. B.B. was like them, but also not. He turned his desire into charity; he hid from the world, maybe even from himself. Instead, he helped them. If there was a way to be admirable in such a desire, surely this was it.

She’d been with him more than a year, made herself as much a part of his life as his limbs, when over dinner she decided it was time. It was B.B.’s birthday, and he’d taken a little too much of a few bottles of red he’d been saving. Maybe she’d had a little too much, too.

“About you and your boys,” she’d said.

“Yeah?” He chewed at a piece of perfectly rare choice triple-trimmed filet mignon that she’d grilled for him. On his plate, along with a pile of asparagus, were two pools of dipping sauce—a delicate au poivre and a garlic cream.

“I just wanted to let you know that I understand, okay? I know why you do what you do, B.B., and I think it’s very brave. If you need anything, any help, you can be honest with me.”