The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (23 page)

“It sure doesn’t look that way, Jim. I’m going to have to bring you up on charges.”

But she didn’t move. She didn’t go to cuff him. Instead, she smiled thinly and stared at him, waiting to see how he planned to take it.

“Is this because I wouldn’t fuck you?” he asked. “Is that what this is about? It’s just that I don’t like women without titties.”

“Unless you have something useful to say that would make me view this matter in a better light, I’m going to have to take you over to the station.”

I didn’t know I was going to say it until it came out. “I don’t want to press charges.”

The cop turned to me so fast, I was surprised her hat stayed on her head. “Why in hell not?”

I shrugged. “I don’t want any trouble. I don’t live near here, and I wouldn’t be able to come back for the trial or anything. And I guess I was trespassing, even if he got a little mean about it. I’d just as soon forget the whole thing.”

Doe grinned at me as though we were co-conspirators. Or something else. As though he hadn’t been appeased, and this effort to get on his good side would only hurt me in the end.

Still, it was the right move. Best to let the whole thing disappear. Get the cops and the courts and maybe the media involved, I might end up in jail. Way things were now, it might just turn out okay. It was a long shot, but it was something to hope for.

“You sure about that?” she asked.

I nodded.

She turned to Doe. “This is your lucky day. Why don’t you get on out of here.”

“Why don’t I get on out of here?” he asked, scratching his head. “Let me think about that one. How about this? Because it’s my fucking land. How about you get out of here?”

“Do us both a favor and take a hike. And let me be clear about something. If anything happens to this boy, Jim, anything at all, I’m coming after you, so I suggest you be careful.”

“I ain’t never seen a woman with such small titties,” he answered, and then got into his car. The engine came on with an angry growl, and the car pulled out at about fifty miles an hour.

The county cop watched it go. “I ought to give him a speeding ticket,” she said. “See how he likes it.” The she looked over at me. “So, what
were
you doing here?”

“Just like I said,” I told her. “I was wandering. I sort of plan to quit selling encyclopedias when I get home, and I didn’t have the energy to work today. So I was walking along, and I came here.”

“Come on, there must be more to it than that. You smoking pot or something? I don’t care. I just want to know.”

I shook my head. “Nothing like that. I was walking is all.”

She shook her head. “Fine. Let me give you a ride.”

I thought about the offer for a minute. Melford was back there somewhere, but what had he done for me but hang me out to dry? Either he hadn’t seen what was going on, which showed he couldn’t be trusted to watch my back, or he had and decided not to help me. Either way, I figured I ought to have no problem washing my hands of him.

For want of anyplace else to go to, I asked her to give me a ride to the motel, then I climbed into her car, fully aware that sitting in a cop car, front seat or back, was just about the last place I wanted to be. As we pulled out along the pine-lined road, and I caught a glimpse of Jim Doe’s car hidden behind a few trees, I knew taking the ride had been the smart move.

The cop, Officer Toms according to her badge, decided the silent treatment was the best way to go. She handed me a tissue for my nose, which had already stopped bleeding, but I dabbed at it anyhow because it seemed the polite thing to do. Finally, without turning to look at me—though she might have given me a sidelong glance behind her mirrored sunglasses—she said, “You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you.”

“Not anymore.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“What makes you think that?” I tried to keep my voice steady.

“Because you were the victim of an asshole cop’s brutality, and now you’re happy to forget it ever happened. In my experience, only people who are afraid of the law are content to look the other way when a cop steps over the line.”

I shrugged, and then the lies started flowing. I’d never been a saintly paragon of truth, but I wasn’t a habitual liar, either. Still, it was getting to be pretty easy. “I’m scared of the guy. I’d rather he forgot I exist. I’ve got nothing to gain by trying to beat him in some legal contest. All I wanted was to get away from him, which I did thanks to you.”

“What’s he up to, anyhow?”

She had a distant tone in her voice. I knew she wasn’t talking to me, so I didn’t have to tell her that he was up to hiding dead bodies and searching for a whole bunch of money.

“We’ve been trying to get a search warrant on that lot for months,” she told me, “but I think he’s got connections at the courthouse. The judges keep telling us there’s no probable cause. But I sure as hell don’t think he’s doing nothing more than raising hogs.”

I was about to say something nondescript, like “I wouldn’t know about that,” but I thought better of it. Instead I opted for a Melfordian strategy. “Well, what do you think he’s up to?”

She turned her head, but her eyes were invisible behind the glasses, so her face was illegible to me. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just making conversation with the nice police officer who rescued me.”

“Good for you,” she said.

“Good for me what?”

“Police ‘officer.’ Mostly I get police ‘woman,’ like I’m Angie Dickinson or something.”

“True equality can only be achieved through gender-sensitive language,” I told her.

She glanced at me again. “Right you are.”

I’d never seen a car drive away skeptically before, but that’s how Officer Toms did it. One last dubious glance, and she eased her cruiser away. And there I was, back at the motel. It was a few minutes before two now, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Then a remarkable idea occurred to me. I could sleep. I could go back to my room, sleep for hours, and then wake up in time to hoof it over to the Kwick Stop and claim to have blanked. I could make the tedium of the day disappear, get some sleep,
and
remain hidden from rednecks, crooked cops, and compassionate assassins. Opportunities like that didn’t come along every day.

I climbed the stairs to my room, already full of sleepy satisfaction. I passed Lajwati Lal, Sameen’s wife. She wheeled her cleaning cart along the balcony, her face impassive, hard, and lined. But she smiled at me when I passed by, giving her a little wave.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Lal,” I said, thinking myself enlightened because I cast a friendly greeting at an immigrant busy toiling over a stranger’s bed.

She nodded agreeably in my direction. “I hope you’re staying out of trouble.”

My stomach flipped. What could she know? “Trouble,” I said, my voice a rasp.

“My husband told me about those very wicked boys,” she said with a sympathetic smile.

I let out my breath. “He was great to help me.”

“Oh, yes. He fancies himself a real hero with his cricket bat,” she said. “But I think he only wanted an excuse to teach those fellows a lesson.”

I asked her to thank him again for me. Once inside my room, I turned up the air conditioner and sat on the edge of the newly made bed. The stillness, the dark of the room with its reddish orange curtains drawn—all of it felt too luxurious for words. I would at last sleep.

After splashing water on my face and rubbing off the last of the blood, I was happy to see I didn’t look like someone who had been beaten up. A little red but nothing more. I lumbered over to the bed and lay down, fully dressed, arms stretched, ready to fall asleep. Then I sat upright. How could I afford to sleep when I was a potential murder suspect? If I were arrested, tried, and convicted and had to spend the rest of my life in jail, I’d spew curses at myself forever for having squandered this time. Time I could have used for . . . For what, exactly?

For trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I supposed. Melford seemed absorbed by the mystery of the third dead body, but that bothered me less than it did him. I was more troubled by the Gambler’s involvement in all of this. Of course, I
knew
about the Gambler’s involvement and Melford did not. Best not to think about Melford too much, since for all I knew he was sitting in the back of Jim Doe’s police car with a bloody nose and his hands cuffed tight behind his back.

I, however, was at the motel, and the Gambler was not. It occurred to me that being here at the motel presented a golden opportunity.

I stood up and headed out of my room, very slowly. Down the hall I saw Lajwati’s cleaning cart and no sign of Lajwati herself. I walked slowly along the balcony, trying to look anything but furtive and probably failing miserably. When I got to the cart, I saw that luck was on my side—or perhaps fate was simply setting me up for an even greater tumble. There, hanging on a hook on the side of the cart, were the extra pass keys, the ones Ronny Neil and Scott had stolen in order to wreak havoc. I could take one and Lajwati would never notice—or, at the very least, never suspect me.

I heard the sound of running water coming from the open room, and when I peered in, there was no sign of Lajwati herself—except for one small, white-sneakered foot protruding from the bathroom. She was in there, scrubbing with the water running. With a casual swipe, I took one of the keys and kept on walking.

I went around to the side of the motel to the Gambler’s room. There was no one around and no sign of lights on in the room. To be safe, I knocked and then ducked around the corner to watch. But the door didn’t open. I went back, looked both ways, and stuck the key in the door.

It worked. I’d been half hoping it wouldn’t. If the key had failed me, I could tell myself I’d done my level best but the black bag operation simply wasn’t in the cards. Now I had no choice but to go forward. I sucked in my breath and pushed open the door.

And that was it. I’d broken into the room of a dangerous criminal. I couldn’t imagine having done this twenty-four hours earlier, but twenty-four hours earlier I’d been a different person, living a different life.

I looked around the Gambler’s room. Lajwati had already cleaned here, too, which was good since it meant I didn’t have to worry about her barging in. It also meant that I didn’t have to be paranoid about putting everything back exactly as I found it. Things would have been moved anyhow, giving me the freedom to look around as I pleased.

But what was I looking for? Some clue to who the Gambler really was, why he would be involved in covering up a triple homicide.

His burgundy garment bag was entirely unpacked, but I went through it anyway. Nothing. He had a few shirts and pants hung up and a pile of dirty laundry shoved in the bottom of the closet. I poked at it with my shoe, in case his dirty underwear was meant to disguise something of consequence, but a little shifting around revealed nothing. I went through the drawers, carefully lifting the undershirts, T-shirts, briefs, and socks, but found nothing of interest there, either. Nothing under the newspaper on the nightstand. A whole lot of nothing.

In the bathroom, I discovered the Gambler used cheap disposable Bic razors, off-brand shaving cream, and Crest. But I discovered little else except that he took three prescription medicines, none of which I’d ever heard of.

This was turning out to be a big bust. But then I saw it, hiding in plain sight. Hell, it was so obvious that it was a miracle I saw it at all. Right in the middle of the glass table toward the back of the room, next to the clean ice bucket with fresh plastic liner. His date book.

It would have
everything
in there. It was one of those date books that was about as broad as a paperback novel and almost as long. It had a little clasp and pockets on the inside and outside jackets. The pages were disposable, to be replaced each year, and there were too many of them shoved into a small ring, which made it hard to turn them. As I flipped through, I began to see that this wasn’t the gold mine I’d been hoping for, it was a barely legible scribble mine. Each spread of two pages represented one week, and there was an entry for at least one day each week, generally more. The problem was that the entries didn’t mean anything to me. “Bill. 3:00. Pancake.” Somehow this tidbit didn’t exactly clarify things.

Then I noticed that one name appeared over and over again: BB. “Expect BB call PM.” “Get instructions BB.” “BB 9AM Denny’s.” This was surely something, I thought. I checked the back of the date book, which had an alphabetized section for addresses. It was pretty well maxed out, so I concentrated on the Bs but found nothing that looked right. Then I checked the front and back pockets, overflowing with business cards. Anything, I thought, with the initials B.B. But nothing. Salesmen, lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, appointment cards. It was all crap. I was putting them back, trying to remember the right order, when one card grabbed my attention. It read, “William Gunn, livestock wholesaler.”

Bobby had mentioned Gunn as the owner of Educational Advantage Media. So what was with the livestock? There was nothing else in the book to suggest that the Grambler had anything to do with livestock. Jim Doe, however, did. Then there was the name. William Gunn. B. B. Gunn, I thought. An inevitable nickname—as inevitable as the Gambler’s. I ran over to the desk, took out a motel pad and pen, and copied the information. I put everything back carefully, then did a quick run-through to make sure all was as I’d found it.

Nothing to do now but make a clean getaway and I’d be home free. I parted the curtains slightly and looked out as best I could. The angle left a lot of room for blind spots, but I felt moderately comfortable that I could escape unseen, so I opened the door and stepped into the light and heat.

As it turned out, there had been a pretty serious blind spot. Standing fifteen feet down the balcony, hands in his pockets, was Bobby.

Chapter 23

D
ESIREE STOOD BY THE PAY PHONE,
running her neatly manicured but unpolished thumbnail along the receiver. She really ought to have called in by now. B.B. would be waiting. He’d be wondering and very likely worried. He worried about her easily. If she was half an hour late, he’d be a wreck when she got back. She liked to think it was just need—he needed her, and if she’d been killed in a car accident, who was going to make his dinner? But it was more than that. In his own self-absorbed way, B.B. loved her. She knew he did. And that made it harder.

She hadn’t been following the kid and his friend since the Chinese restaurant. Why bother? It was clear to her she wasn’t going to tell B.B. anything. Aphrodite seemed to like them, she had that feeling from her long-dead twin, and she especially liked the friend, Melford. That just went to show that she and Aphrodite were agreeing on things more often, because Desiree liked him, too. Following them, giving B.B. what he wanted, would feel like a betrayal, and that meant that in the end she was going to have to betray someone.

What Melford had said about sitting by idly, about winking at evil because it was easy to do so—it had felt like he was talking about her. Like he knew about B.B., what he did, what he was likely to do when the pretense of mentoring could no longer keep his desire caged; like he knew how she’d been helping B.B. peddle crank, the same poison that had nearly killed her. Of course, he didn’t know. He was talking about how he wanted to make the world safe for little lambs and piggies, and that was sweet, naïvely sweet. She’d been surrounded by the taint of crime and drugs and human destruction for so long now, the thought of involving herself in something as kind and hapless as helping animals might be just what she needed.

B.B. might not bloody his hands directly, but she knew—and she’d known all along—that his little empire had left more than a little carnage. Lives ruined, pain and suffering and death, all in the service of meth. That he’d been kind to her might make it easier to sympathize, to care, to have feelings, but it didn’t mean that what he did was right or that she ought to help him.

“Hey there, sweetness. I like what you’re wearing.”

Desiree looked over. Standing no more than three feet away was a wide man in his forties, longish beard and hair, jeans, and boots of a biker. He cradled a six-pack of Old Milwaukee under his arm.

“You about done with that phone?” he asked her. “Because I need to call my mama and tell her that I’m in love.”

“Do I look like I’m your private peep show?” Desiree said. Her voice was calm, almost absent.

“Whoa there,” he said, taking only half a step back. He raised one hand defensively and flapped up the other, since the arm was still primarily committed to holding the beer. “Don’t be so uptight, baby. Can’t a man tell you he thinks you’re pretty?”

She was out of the booth and facing him, her switchblade out, the blade extended, before she even had time to think about it. “No,” she said. “He can’t.”

“Jesus. All right.” He took another couple of steps back and gave a half shrug to tell anyone who might have witnessed the exchange that it didn’t bother him.

Desiree watched to make sure he was gone. Then she picked up the phone and started to dial the motel. She hung up before it rang. The time had come to sever ties with B.B.—now, not some point in the near future. She’d been guilty and complicit too long.

That’s what their fight last month, over the boy at the roadside, had really been about. She’d been asked to draw a line. For as long as she’d been with him, there had been a line somewhere on the horizon, and now she’d come to it, stood over it. And once you get there, she thought, you can see what’s on the other side, and you can see what you’ve left so far behind that it’s lost in the blur.

No more. She had hardly exchanged more than a few sentences with him, but she was sure that Melford had come to tell her that. Things happened for a reason, accidents were part of the order of things, coincidence a manifestation of cosmic design. It was time to move on, and maybe, she thought, to make up for her mistakes, too. There had to be balance in the universe. She’d done harm, and now she had to do good. But what, exactly? Hurt B.B.’s business, slow down his crank trade? That didn’t feel right. B.B. was what he was, and he’d helped her. She would have to find something else. She would figure it out. Or maybe she could get some help.

For the second time that day, B.B. picked up the phone with his heart pounding. In his mind he’d always imagined having a hand in the Gambler’s destruction, but in the end he would almost certainly have to skip that. Why not turn things over to the mechanisms so readily available?

The ringing ended. “Meadowbrook Grove police.”

It wasn’t him. “Chief Doe,” B.B. barked in a staccato voice, base and forceful, entirely unlike his own.

“Hold on.”

There was a brief pause. “This is the chief.”

“Chief Doe,” B.B. said in his disguised voice, “I am calling to warn you. Ken Rogers, the Gambler, is setting you up. He had your meth cook killed to frame you. He is out to get you and take over your cut for himself. You’ve been warned.”

“Yeah? Who is this?”

“Someone who works with him,” B.B. said.

“And why are you telling me this?”

The question stumped B.B. Why
would
someone tell Doe? “Because,” B.B. said, deciding to stick to the truth, “the Gambler’s a fucking asshole who deserves what he gets.”

“Can’t argue with that logic,” Doe said.

B.B. hung up the phone. Now things would follow their course. Doe was a ruthless bastard, and he wouldn’t hesitate to take out the Gambler. He’d deny it to B.B.’s face, but that was okay. In the vacuum, Desiree would step in, and B.B. would be able to toast his success with Chuck Finn over a glass of Médoc.

Doe slowly hung up the phone.

“Who the heck was that?” Pakken asked him.

“A guy who was disguising his voice.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Pakken said. “What’d he want?”

“To tell me the Gambler is going to fuck me over.”

“You think it’s true?”

Doe pushed himself down into his chair. “I don’t think so. I mean, he would if he could, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on right now. But I’ll tell you that whatever is going on, it is highly fucked up because a disguised voice don’t mean shit to me. I recognized him.”