The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (14 page)

“You want to figure out who that woman was so we’re in a position to blackmail the criminally insane cop?”

“Pretty neat, huh?”

Chapter 12

E
ARLIER THAT NIGHT,
Jim Doe had been in the police trailer, waiting for nothing in particular, but something bad all the same.

“How’s the gonads feeling?”

Pakken sat across from Doe. His feet were up on the desk, and he was drinking from a mammoth Styrofoam cup of gas station coffee. He’d been working at it for two or three hours now, and it had to be cold as shit.

The question was apropos of nothing, since they’d both been largely still for hours. Pakken was working at one of the word finder books he liked, his pen hovering over the oniony pages. Doe was flipping through a
Sports Illustrated,
not much paying attention to an article on the Dolphins. He was still out of uniform, in his jeans and black T-shirt. Sometimes he felt like relaxing in the police trailer, was all.

Doe could tell that Pakken had just found a hard word. He liked to start a conversation after he found one. He’d talk about anything, really, but sooner or later he’d try to bring it around. “I just found ‘substantial,’ ” he’d say with little-kid pride. These interruptions were annoying as hell under the best of circumstances, but even more so now that Pakken’s favorite topic was Doe’s testicles.

It had been Pakken who’d found Doe after his unfortunate run-in with that Miami bitch, Pakken who’d gone looking when Doe had not shown up the next day. It was Pakken who’d taken a guess at what might have happened, knowing about where the chief liked to take the ladies—and not a bad bit of police work for such a moron. Doe had still been passed out when Pakken had found him in the early morning. He’d peered into the car’s window, a grin stamped onto his flat, wide face capped off by a single massive eyebrow and a caveman cranial ridge. Doe had fluttered his eyelids and said, “My balls. She crushed my balls.”

“What happened, Chief?”

His balls were swollen and angry. It hurt even to move his legs. “Bitch attacked me,” he mumbled.

Pakken let out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s good. She attacked you.”

Doe struggled to his feet and pain shot through his balls, but he bit his lip and climbed out of the car. Then he smacked Pakken in the face. Hard. “The fuck you laughing at?”

Pakken gingerly poked an index finger to his cheek. “Why’d you do that?”

“A woman was speeding, you dipshit,” Doe said. “Risking her life, the lives of others, and now she’s assaulted a police officer. You think that’s funny?”

Pakken was still poking at the reddening spot on his face. “Hell. There I was thinking you was just trying to get a blow job off of her.”

Now, almost a week later, they sat in the trailer, Pakken with his cold coffee while Doe leaned back in his chair and sipped at his bottle of Yoo-hoo and Rebel Yell. It was kind of a ritual, the two of them lazing around, talking or not talking, but Doe didn’t want to look at Pakken’s drooping idiot face. His balls were still swollen, still tender. A little bit better. He was nearly certain they were better today than yesterday. He reached into his pants with a tentative hand, and the pressure against his scrotum hurt, hurt like living shit, but maybe a little less than the last time he’d checked. And Pakken had laughed at him. It was a disrespectful thing to laugh at an officer injured in the line of duty. What kind of a sick asshole laughed?

He guessed that Pakken wasn’t really sick, just young. His uncle, Floyd Pakken, had been the mastermind behind Meadowbrook Grove. He’d come up with the name, even though they didn’t have a meadow, brook, or grove, but it sounded a lot better than Pigshit-Smelling Trailer Park. It had been Floyd’s idea to convert the trailer park into an independent municipality, to lower the speed limit, and to watch the cash flow in. And it did. All the residents got free gas and electric, which was no small thing during the summer months of hard-humping air-conditioning. They got free water, free basic phone service. Three or four big barbecues a year, a carnival in the spring, a Halloween shindig for the kids, a Fourth of July party with an up-and-coming country star or two. They were happier than pigs in shit, which, ironically, they had to put up with to get all this. Or, more accurately, they had to put up with the smell of pigs in shit, since the city also incorporated the hog lot on Doe’s adjoining family land.

Every year the Office of the Mayor, which consisted, basically, of the mayor, issued a report that detailed income from traffic violations and expenditures in taxes, services, and salaries, and everything just balanced out nice and neat. Maybe a few dollars to roll over to the next year. Why not? No one ever much looked at the report, and no one, near as Doe could tell, bothered to find out if it was bullshit or not. But of course it was bullshit.

Floyd had been a sharp fellow to devise this scam and to put himself at the helm. Doe had always figured that Floyd had something going on other than his mighty generous salary, which everyone knew about since he’d done such a good job of giving back to the city. Doe had suspected, and he’d been the obvious choice for mayor and police chief after Floyd had got himself killed, along with a couple of fourteen-year-old Cuban whores, in an explosive rollover. Two weeks into the job, looking at the records and following the money trail, Doe couldn’t stop his perpetual eulogy to Floyd’s genius. By two months into the job, he’d been laughing at Floyd for thinking too small. Floyd put twenty or thirty thou a year aside. Good for him. Bless his little heart. Three years later, Doe was tripling that. Easy. And it would be getting even better.

Play it right, be patient, don’t be stupid, Doe could be pulling in a hundred thou a year. When he had a million put away, he’d say it was time to retire. He’d head to the Cayman Islands, where his current $130,000 sat nicely nestled. Buy himself a big house and spend the rest of his days drinking strawberry daiquiris and fucking tourists. A man could do worse for himself.

Everything had been going perfectly. The scam with the tickets, the deal with B.B.—all of it. Until now. He couldn’t stand waiting around to see if the reporter from Miami turned up. The fact was—and Doe knew this from experience—most women wouldn’t say shit about what happened to them. They had this kind of programming, like a robot or something, that the worse you treated them, the less they would do about it. You could overdo that, like he’d done with his ex-wife; but mostly they’d take it, because they knew what would happen if they didn’t.

How many of them really wanted to bring this thing to the courts? They knew what would happen.

Tell the truth now. You found His Honor, Mayor Doe, rather handsome, didn’t you?

Yes, at first. But—

And you were at least on some level flattered that he wanted to have sex with you, weren’t you?

Yes, it was flattering, but—

And at any time during your interactions did you enjoy the sensation of having his unusually massive penis in your mouth? Remember, you are under oath.

I never asked for it.

Did you enjoy it? Answer the question!

Yes! Yes! I’m so ashamed, but I loved it.

Where was the woman who wanted to put herself through that? But Doe had a bad feeling about this reporter. She’d gotten away before she’d had a chance to really get into it. That she’d pounded Doe’s nuts might tend to make some folks believe that she really hadn’t wanted to suck him off. Plus she was a Miami reporter, and nothing would make her happier than a story on these country bumpkins up here with their speed trap trailer park.

The morning after the incident, after he’d gone home and showered—angling his body to keep the water from hitting his ’nads, keeping his head up so he wouldn’t have to look at the purple, swollen horror—he’d managed to get dressed, although the underwear and pants were a bit of trouble, and had gone back to the police trailer and called up the Florida Highway Patrol.

“This is Jim Doe. I’m chief of police and mayor over here at Meadowbrook Grove.”

“Is that so?” said the voice on the other end of the phone. Then there was a snicker, half-hidden. They all knew about Meadowbrook Grove.

“Yeah. Look here, this is kind of embarrassing, but I was ticketing this woman last night—”

“I’ll alert the media,” the smart-ass said.

“I was ticketing this woman last night,” Doe continued, “and I guess I let my guard down. She was young and seemed harmless, and, well, she kind of caught me by surprise. She knocked me down with her car door and took off before I could get back up. But I still got her license and registration.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, it’s so. I don’t know why she would take off that way, but she must be hiding something, I figure.”

“You worked that out, huh?”

“And she knocked me down. She assaulted a police officer.”

“She assaulted you
and
a police officer?”

“Now look here. I don’t have no beef with you, and I’m sure if it were a highway patrolman she knocked down, you’d have the helicopter dragnet out right now.”

“A highway patrolman wouldn’t have got knocked down,” he said.

“I’m just trying to report a dangerous person. She knocked me down, maybe she takes a gun at one of you boys. I don’t know. You telling me I shouldn’t have called this in?”

He let out a long sigh. “Fine. Give me the info.”

Doe read off the information to them and hung up. He says she tried to get away. She says he tried to attack her. If necessary, he’ll concede that it is possible that she might have, for whatever reason, believed he was going to attack her, and he’d be okay with her getting off with a warning this time. But now he’d made it so it was her word against his. That had to be worth something since, days later, he hadn’t heard a thing.

Half an hour after the last inquiry. “How’s the family jewels?” Pakken asked.

“Whyn’t you go and get some speeders?” Doe said.

“I’m off duty, that’s why.”

“You ain’t got no initiative.”

“Maybe so, but I got ‘initiate,’ ” he said, turning his book so that Doe could see the word ovaled in red ink.

“Get some tickets or go home.”

Pakken must have figured out this meant that Doe wanted to be alone, so the kid grumbled a bit and took his time collecting his worthless shit, but finally he made it out the door ten minutes later. Doe rose to his feet and hobbled, legs wide apart, to the counter, where he took out what he thought of as his law enforcement funnel and added some more bourbon to his Yoo-hoo. He made it back to his desk—with no one around, he didn’t have to try to walk as though everything were fine—and put his feet up, spread his legs, gave the injured parties a little room to breathe.

The phone rang. It was probably fucking Pam again; she’d been calling him twice a day to bitch at him about forgetting Jenny’s birthday. He’d told her he hadn’t forgotten, he’d been involved in some serious police work and hadn’t been able to get away. Somehow that argument hadn’t convinced her.

Best to let it ring, but he had responsibilities to the community, so he yanked it from the cradle.

“Meadowbrook Grove police.”

“I’m looking for
Chief
Doe. This is Officer Alvarez with the Florida Highway Patrol.”

“This is Doe.” Name like Alvarez, Doe figured he’d have an accent or something, but the guy habloed ingles pretty well.

“Yeah, we’re following up on that report you filed. Listen, we spoke to the woman in question. She said you let her off with a warning and that was the end of it.”

“What?” Doe swung his legs too quickly, and he had to control the urge to yelp into the phone.

“Yeah, she says you stopped her, gave her a warning, and let her go.”

When the fuck have I ever let anyone off with a warning?
It almost came out, but he checked himself. “So, is that it?”

“Well,” Alvarez said, “sounds to me like one of you isn’t telling the truth.”

“Now wait a minute,” Doe began. Just then the other line began to ring. The pain in his balls, the ringing of the other line. He was going to lose his fucking mind.

“No, you wait a minute,” Alvarez was saying. “One of you isn’t telling the truth. We can open an investigation if you like, or we can let the matter sit. What do you want to do?”

How was he supposed to know what he wanted to do with his balls aching and the phone ringing? It was on something like its twelfth ring now. Who was it that wouldn’t give up?

But the thing was, the woman didn’t want to press charges. Maybe that meant she was saving her thunder for her own report. But no, that wouldn’t work. She had denied to the state police that there had been an incident. To make public allegations now would be to set herself up as a liar. She’d shut herself and her story down.

“Just drop it, then,” Doe said.

“You sure,
Chief
? I hear an officer of the law was assaulted.”

“You heard me, señor.” Doe figured he was done with this asshole, so he hung up by slamming his finger into the blinking light of the endlessly ringing line. “Meadowbrook Grove police. What’s so freaking important?”

A sob and then a pause. “Jim? . . . Jim, is that you? . . . Oh, Jesus. Jim.”

The voice was all broken and messed up, choking and crying. A car accident, maybe. If it happened on their turf, it was their problem, which always pissed him right off. Maybe he should buy a tow truck, have a towing service on the side, so at least accidents might be worth a few dollars. Or better yet, haul the cars over the city limits line. Let the county handle it.

Then he placed the voice: Laurel Vieland. Shit, he hadn’t spoken to her for five or six years, probably. Not since she went and moved to Tallahassee. But her daughter. Now, that was something else. Karen had been fine a few years back, before the crank. And if she hadn’t wanted to give it up back then, she sure had no problems nowadays. No inhibitions at all.

Laurel and Karen were the only mother-daughter team that Doe had ever fucked. Not at the same time—and now he sure as shit wouldn’t want to. Still, it was something. And Karen had that daughter. The girl lived with her father up north somewhere, and he knew that the father didn’t even let her see Karen, not since Karen went crazy with the crank a couple years back. But there’d be a family reunion one day. Girl would come on home to Meadowbrook Grove, thirteen or fourteen, and Doe would work his magic on her. Then he would have fucked three generations of one family. He didn’t know anyone who could say he’d done that.