The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (31 page)

B.B. felt as though something from the highway had soiled his suit, so he dusted himself and headed out the door, up the stairs, and around back, where he found the room. Somewhere in the distance, he heard electronic pop from someone’s room. Assholes needed to learn to keep it down. But Carl’s room was mostly quiet. The curtains were drawn, but he could see a light on inside and vaguely hear a television droning. Before knocking, he took out the note and read it once more, making sure he had the room right and that he hadn’t misunderstood the boy’s intentions. No, there could be no misunderstanding. He’d been invited.

B.B. knocked firmly yet kindly. At least he hoped it sounded firm but kind. In the distance he heard a voice say that he should come in. He tried the handle and found it unlocked, so he pushed it open.

On the bed he saw a yellow toy tractor, so he knew he was in the right place. But no sign of Carl and, inexplicably, sheets of translucent plastic were covering the carpet. “Hello,” he called out.

“I’ll be right there,” came the voice, high and childish. B.B. felt himself smiling for just an instant. He took another step inside and looked around. It was like every other motel room, but strangely neat for a place where two boys had been alone all day. The bed was made, no clothes around, no toys but the tractor. Most of the lights were off, and the TV, which was tuned to a sitcom, flashed blue into the gloom. The laugh track erupted as someone did something, and B.B. took a step closer to see what was so funny.

Then it struck him. The voice that called to him, it didn’t sound like the boy from the pool. That boy hadn’t sounded quite so young, quite so childish. In fact, the more he thought about it, the less that voice had sounded like a child’s. It sounded like someone imitating a child.

Then he heard the door close behind him.

B.B. spun around and saw one of the Gambler’s assholes sitting there. The fat one. A rank odor like piss wafted up. The kid’s piggy eyes were wide with excitement, and he had a kind of openmouthed grin, as though he’d just issued the coup de grâce to a piñata. And B.B. knew, he fundamentally knew, that this grinning asshole was the least of his worries.

He turned and saw the other one, Ronny Neil. Ronny Neil also had a good-size grin going on. In addition, he had a wooden baseball bat with a fair number of dents in it, dents that suggested it had been used for something other than drives to left field.

“You sick fucking pervert,” Ronny Neil said.

The baseball bat arced high over his head, and B.B. raised his hands to protect himself, knowing even as he did it that his hands weren’t going to do him one bit of good.

Chapter 32

T
HE WALK TO THE
K
WICK
S
TOP
took a little over fifteen minutes at a brisk pace. I was certain I’d seen an
OPEN
24
HOURS
sign out front, and when I got there I bought a flashlight, batteries, and a large coffee to go.

I sat out front and loaded up the flashlight. The coffee was lukewarm, burned, and too thick, but I drank it quickly, and within five minutes I was ready to go again.

I didn’t much like the idea of wandering around Meadowbrook Grove after dark. I would be in Jim Doe country, and if the cop found me, I had no doubt that I’d be in trouble. Serious trouble. The kind of trouble from which you don’t ever return.

But I was close to that kind of trouble now. Wasn’t that what I’d learned from Melford, what I’d learned to put into practice that night with Ronny Neil? It wasn’t really a matter of how much trouble you were in, but how you tried to get out of it. I had to do something other than sit in the motel room. I might have done that last week, but not any longer.

I stayed off the roads. I tried to stick to backyards, ignoring the itch of insects and the various crawling, hopping, scurrying, and slithering noises of the animals I startled from either sleep or their rounds. I had to be careful of domestic animals, too. Frantic barking would draw attention. I knew from my late night rambles selling books, those long hours after dark when I was trying desperately to bag one more shot at a sale before it was time to go home, that dogs barked and owners ignored them. At least they did at nine-thirty. But at close to two in the morning, they might pay a bit more attention to furious barking.

When I turned onto Bastard and Karen’s street, I stuck close to the trailers, trying to keep out of the light. It had been there all along: the box of files in the trailer with “Oldham Health Services” written along the side. It held the key to everything—to why Melford had killed them and what he was hiding from me.

I felt a strange, almost giddy excitement. Once I read through those files, I would finally know. I would finally know who Melford really was, what he was after. And I would know if he really intended to let me out of all this unharmed.

I looked around the back of the trailer and saw that the door leading to the kitchen was open. No sign of a car or of flashlight beams inside. I went up to the door to listen. No sound.

It was stupid. Idiotic. I knew it, but I went inside anyhow, because I had to see.

I turned on the flashlight for a quick scan. It was cheaply built, and the light slouched out anemically, but I still caught a glimpse of something on the kitchen floor.

I supposed I ought to be getting used to death, but the sight of the body hit me like a punch in the gut. I took a staggered step back and hit the kitchen counter.

I turned the feeble light on the figure again to be sure. But there was no mistaking it. In the distorting yellow of the flashlight beam, I saw the face of the man who’d been in the Gambler’s room, the one in the linen suit, the one who’d looked as though he hadn’t been paying much attention. The one I believed to be B. B. Gunn.

His face was well bloodied, but I couldn’t tell how he had been killed. In fact, I was largely past concerning myself. I turned to rush out the door, but a flashlight, much brighter than my own, hit my eyes. I couldn’t say I was particularly surprised. In a way, it seemed inevitable.

I stopped in my tracks. The light was too bright for me to see who held it, but I knew. It could be only one person.

“Well, well, if it ain’t the hirer of private detectives,” Jim Doe said.

I stared at him. How could he have known that?

“You stupid fucking shit,” he said with a slight cackle. “You go to find out a thing or two about B.B., and you hire a buddy of mine to do it. Didn’t you think for a minute that a guy who lives in Meadowbrook Grove might know me? But I guess it don’t matter, because it seems to me like you are under arrest for murder.”

There was a second, maybe two seconds, before I acted, but I thought of lots of things in those couple of seconds. I thought about how unlikely it was that Doe would shoot me, an unarmed encyclopedia salesman. Doe wanted to keep attention away from himself, not draw attention closer. Considering that our earlier encounter had been observed by Aimee Toms, the county cop—the county cop who had warned Doe to stay away from me—a shooting now would only draw the kind of scrutiny Doe could not afford. On the other hand, Doe might easily shoot me and make me disappear. And if that happened, I would never see Chitra again.

So I ran.

Chapter 33

T
HE PUNK RAN.
Well, what had Doe expected? That he would sit there and say, “I guess I got no choice but to come with you and probably get killed”? He was a fast runner, too. Doe wasn’t about to chase after him. Christ, with the pain in his nuts he could barely walk, let alone run. He tried to pursue, made it maybe a hundred feet before he had to stop. As it was, he felt like he might faint. Or puke.

Well, let him go. It wasn’t like Doe
needed
to arrest someone for B.B.’s murder. He could just toss the body in the waste lagoon. Probably better that way, anyhow.

Now, bent over, breathing in hard, painful bursts, hands on his knees, Doe spent a minute just trying to clear his head, get the swirling black things out of his vision. The problem now was going to be getting rid of B.B., and it was pretty much Doe’s problem alone. Earlier that night his phone had rung, and on the other end a disguised voice, his second of the day—but Doe had known without a doubt that it was the Gambler’s punk asshole Ronny Neil—had told him he’d better get over to Karen’s trailer. There was a surprise waiting there.

He couldn’t fault the little shit for being dishonest. B.B.’s dead body was a surprise all right. He’d been worked over good, too—beaten so that his legs were like jelly and his head half caved in. One of his eyes, bulging wide open, was half out of its socket. They’d killed him good and proper.

No message, no instruction, but Doe didn’t need to be told what it meant or what he needed to do. The Gambler had taken B.B. out, which was only right. If anything, Doe was relieved that the Gambler had stepped up to the plate. Like he’d said before, there were bigger things involved here, certainly bigger than his ego. There was money, and even if B.B. hadn’t been fucking with the Gambler, he’d been slipping up right good. Still, this body presented some real problems, the first being that the freaky cunt would think that Doe had done it. They’d dumped the body on Doe’s turf just to make trouble for him, to make sure he knew this was the Gambler’s show.

Doe didn’t care. Doe didn’t care who called the shots as long as the shots got called and as long as the money came with it. The Gambler thought he had some tough-guy shit to prove, that was just fine. He thought he needed to put the pressure on Doe, say come up with the money or an explanation, that was fine, too. Doe didn’t get to where he was by not being able to deal with the pressure.

He’d do what the Gambler wanted as a show of good faith, so he’d get the message that things were working and there was no point in messing up an orderly system. The Gambler would have to understand that this operation worked because it was under the radar. It worked because no one was paying attention to them. That had always meant small crews, limited exposure, and no bloodbaths. Four people had died this weekend, and that was plenty. No way the Gambler was going to take him out. Even so, he might get cut out or cut back or slighted. Begging to remain in good graces might be beneath his dignity, but if it meant cash, then Doe would deal with it for now.

All of which meant getting to the bottom of this shit. And that was fine, too, because Doe knew what was what now. He knew why the kid had squealed on him to the Gambler, and he knew where the money was. It was now that simple. Find the kid, find the money.

Chapter 34

I
HAD NEVER BEEN,
by track team standards, an especially fast runner. I did better in longer races, but even in those I’d win only rarely. Still, I would do well once in a while with the five-hundred-meter. With half marathons the point wasn’t to win, but to finish. But if I hadn’t been the fastest runner in the county, or even at my own school, I was a hell of a lot faster than an aging, out-of-shape, crooked cop with a bad haircut.

I cranked my legs into the darkness, spinning them wildly until I felt like a cartoon character whose lower half was just a blurry wheel beneath the torso. Sometimes at the end of long runs I liked to push it, and I marveled that my legs could do such things, that I could move so fast and with such force without paying attention to how my feet hit the ground.

I’d never punched it like this in near total darkness with a cop on my trail. It didn’t matter. I ran, and I kept running until I was sure I’d gone two miles, maybe more. I was used to pacing myself, attuning my speed to my natural rhythms, but not now. Now there was only speed. Fast as I could go, and nothing else mattered.

I was now out of the trailer park and into an area of small, older homes. It was the sort of place where half-rebuilt, half-rusting cars sat in backyards, where lawns were crisscrossed with missing grass, where broken swing sets creaked in the wind.

And it was familiar. I was sure I’d been here before. I walked for a moment to catch my breath. Two miles wasn’t much, but I’d gone about as fast as I ever had. Then, while walking bent over, panting, I realized I had indeed been there before, I had sold books there.

I was just down the street from Galen Edwine, at whose barbecue I’d sold four sets of books—the fabled grand slam that had never paid off.

But Galen Edwine had taken a shine to me, the way customers sometimes did with bookmen. He’d told me to come back anytime. He’d said, Let me know if you ever need anything. I needed something now. I needed shelter and a place to rest where Jim Doe would never look for me.

It took about five minutes to find the house. I was sure it was the right place because of the garden gnomes that had so encouraged me that day. It was well after two in the morning now, and the house was entirely quiet and dark.

I rang the doorbell.

I rang it a couple of times to suggest urgency and to make certain that the unexpected chime didn’t simply fade into a dream. I saw a light go on in the bedroom, and I heard a scrape just outside the door.

“Who is that?” asked a panicked voice.

“Galen, it’s Lem Altick. Do you remember I tried to sell you some encyclopedias a couple of months ago? You told me if I ever needed anything . . .” I let it hang.

The door opened slowly, and Galen, wearing boxers and a T-shirt, stared at me with sleepy eyes that hung beneath a glossy slope of balding scalp. “I didn’t expect you to take me up on it,” he said, but there was nothing harsh in his voice. If anything, he seemed amused.

“I have kind of an emergency,” I told him. “I need a place to stay. Just for a few hours.”

Galen scratched his head with one hand and opened the door the rest of the way with the other. “Come on in, then.”

Lisa, Galen’s wife, came out in her robe, yawned a hello, and went back to sleep. If she found something unusual in a door-to-door salesman returning to their home in the middle of the night, she didn’t say anything about it. Galen and I went to the kitchen, where he put on some coffee and took out a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts. I looked at the ingredients, which included butter and milk and eggs. I passed.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

I told him. Not all of it. Not even most of it. Just enough. I told him that I’d run afoul of Jim Doe from Meadowbrook Grove and that Doe wanted to frame me for a murder that he had likely committed himself.

Galen shook his head. “Yeah, I know that guy. We all do around here. He’s bad news, Lem. But I’ll tell you, I know the sheriff’s people have their eye on him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI did, too. He won’t get away with it. Go to the county and tell them everything. Believe me, they’ll treat you like a hero.”

I nodded and tried to look relieved, but his suggestion didn’t help me. I didn’t want to have to survive some long-term investigation that would eventually shift the blame from me to Doe. I just wanted to get out of there alive.

“Well,” Galen said after a few minutes, “maybe you can look up something useful in those encyclopedias I bought from you.”

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?”

“I mean,” I said, “you never got those encyclopedias.”

“Sure I did.”

“But the credit application never went through.”

“Sure it did. There’s nothing wrong with my credit.” Galen took me to the living room, where the entire set rested in the place of honor, on the bookshelves next to the television. The rest of the shelves were filled with knickknacks and photographs of his son and older people I assumed were his parents and in-laws. Not another book in sight.

“But they told me the credit app didn’t go through. I don’t get it.” But I did. I got it just fine. “What about your friends? Did they get theirs?”

“Of course.”

It was Bobby. Good-guy Bobby was skimming from his own sales force. Telling us sales didn’t go through when they did, so he could take the commission for himself.

“They stole from you, didn’t they,” Galen said with unexpected gravity.

“Yeah,” I told him. “They did.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. Those operations aren’t always as honest as you want, and maybe yours is less honest than most. You know, the same weekend you were in town, a couple of boys came by my younger brother’s house, twelve miles or so from here, and they were selling books, using a lot of the same language that you used. My brother isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, so when he told them he didn’t want anything, they tried to sell him speed. One of them seemed kind of pissed off that the other one had brought it up, but my brother looks the part. He’s real skinny, long hair, tats. They must have thought he was a kindred spirit and decided to take a chance. You believe that?”

I nodded. I could believe it. Because that’s what all of this had been about. This whole thing was an excuse to distribute speed. That’s why Ronny Neil had said that Bobby didn’t know what was going on, why it was better to be with the Gambler than with Bobby.

Bastard had worked over at the hog lot. I got the impression he’d been in on the speed deal, but when he’d been shot, Jim Doe and the Gambler must have thought it was drug related. That’s why they got rid of the bodies. They didn’t want the county cops or the FBI getting involved, messing up the operation.

“Do you think I could trouble you for a ride in the morning?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I need to be at my motel before nine.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I plan to get a friend of mine, get the hell out of here, and never come back.”

Galen nodded. “That’s a good plan,” he said.

Thanks to the magic of utter exhaustion, I actually managed to get a few hours of sleep on Galen’s couch before morning came. I ate a strangely cheerful breakfast—actually, I just ate some fruit—with Galen, Lisa, and their six-year-old son, Toby. Then Galen told me he’d drop me off on the way to work.

I asked him to let me out behind the motel, and I thanked him profusely. Then I knocked on Chitra’s door.

She didn’t look as though she’d slept much, if at all. Her eyes were sunken and red, and she might even have been crying.

“Lem,” she gasped. She pulled me into the room and then pressed her whole body against mine and squeezed hard. Under the circumstances, it was just what I needed.

The downside was that it seemed to me an inopportune time for an erection, and there was no way she didn’t notice, but if she found it distasteful, she was kind enough to keep it to herself. “Tell me what is going on.”

I told her as much as I could in a rambling fashion. I told her about Jim Doe and the drugs and the pigs and murders, though I left Melford out of it. It seemed to me too much to explain how it was that I knew Melford was a killer and hadn’t turned him in, how I’d become friends with him. It made no sense, so it was best not spoken of, particularly since she didn’t much trust Melford.

“We need to go,” I told her. “The Gambler’s not going to be happy to see me, and neither is this guy Doe. Let’s just call a cab and get out of here. It doesn’t matter where. They don’t want me around, will probably hurt me if they see me, but they won’t come after us. They just want me gone, and I mean to give them what they want.”

“Do you want to come with me? To my house for a few days, just to make sure they don’t come looking for you at yours?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I want to go with you.”

We called the cab, and in ten minutes we went outside, determined to abandon whatever personal belongings—selling clothes and toiletries, mostly—were still in our rooms. Too bad for us. There was no way I was going back for that stuff.

Idling in front of the motel was a yellow Checker, but as we walked toward it, I caught the flashing lights out of the corner of my eye.

I saw in an instant, because I was getting good at that sort of thing, that it was a brown county car, not a blue Meadowbrook Grove car. And that was something. But it wasn’t much. I felt that jarring electric zap in my stomach. Not a loose wire zap, but a strapped to the electric chair with a black hood over your head sort of jolt. And for an instant I felt that I would start running, commanded by my feet and a base animal instinct; I would simply take off and be gone. But that never happened.

The woman from the day before, Aimee Toms, got out of the car. Her face was blank, impassive, strangely appealing in its authority. “I need to talk to you,” she said to me. “I want you to come with me.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“I just want to ask you some questions.”

I turned to Chitra. “You go,” I said. “Go to the bus station and go home. I’ll call you. I’ll come see you.”

“I’m not going without you,” she said.

“You have to. Believe me, I’m in way over my head, but you’re not in any real danger if I’m not around, and I’ll be better off if I don’t have to worry about you.”

She nodded. Then she kissed me. I couldn’t say exactly what the meaning was, but I can tell you that I liked it a whole hell of a lot.

And then Officer Toms led me into the back of the police car and drove me away.