The Ethical Assassin

“Excuse me, Mr. Lal, you’ve got a customer waiting for you, sir, so if you don’t mind, I’ll look out for Lemuel.”

The assassin walked toward us with an easy if slightly slouched gait. He had a spirited grin, and one hand was up in a half wave. Ro

“I’m Lemuel’s friend,” the assassin said to Sameen. “He’s okay now.”

“How do you know my name?” Sameen asked.

“It’s inscribed on your cricket bat.”

Sameen squinted with suspicion. “Can I leave you with him?” he asked me.

I nodded. I was afraid to do anything else.

Sameen nodded back. “You come see me if you have any more problems,” he said to me, and then went back to his office.

I liked that Sameen had come out to help me. I was grateful, even touched, but I’d never believed that this inoffensive, nearly invisible man, even with his bat, would be a match for Ro

The brief gust of relief I felt was gone in an instant. The assassin might get Ro

“What do you want?” Ro

“Just looking for Lemuel,” the assassin said. He put a hand on my shoulder and began to lead me toward the pool.

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to cling to something, to resist. But there was no resisting him, and I went.

“That your boyfriend?” Ro

I ignored them. But the assassin didn’t. He turned and cocked his thumb and index finger into a gun and fired invisible digit bullets at each of them.

How frightened should I be? I wondered. I had already known he was down here. I had been coming to the pool because he was there. And we were in public. For all that, however, I felt the chill of terror simply from his proximity.

As though he belonged, as though he were the host and I the visitor, the assassin led me to the throng of bookmen by the pool. For a criminal, he didn’t fear crowds much.

In my haze, I didn’t see her come up to us. But then there she was. “I’ve met your friend,” Chitra said, gesturing toward the assassin with her red-tipped fingers. She stood next to me, smiling warmly, even goofily, as if she’d started in on a beer that would be one too many. And talking to me- our first exchange of the weekend. For all my fear, I felt the thrill at hearing her voice, which was soft and high, the accent sort of British and sort of not. “He’s quite fu

I grabbed a tall boy, popped it open, and drank without tasting, trying not to gulp. “Yeah, he’s a great guy,” I said to Chitra. I then turned to the killer. “What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the trembling out of my voice, tried to hit the tone I would have used with anyone I knew who had turned up unexpectedly. I wildly missed the mark.

“Looking for you, Lemuel. Will you excuse me for a minute?”

“Of course,” Chitra said.

The assassin put his hand on my back, pushing me away from the crowd. I didn’t much care for him touching me in that way, in part because he was a killer, but also because people already were quick to label me as gay. Not that they really much contemplated my sexual proclivities, but the insult came easily to guys like Ro

The assassin stopped by the candy machine that rested between the two public bathrooms. The nauseatingly sweet scent of deodorizer wafted out.

“Why’d you go back to the trailer, Lemuel?” the assassin asked.

So there it was, the reason he had followed me here. I felt the whoosh of panic in my ears. I’d been caught. But caught at what, exactly? Maybe, I tried to tell myself, I should relax. Now that I knew what it was, I could deal with it. Maybe. On the other hand, a guy who resolved his problems by killing now had a bone to pick with me, and that was discouraging.

“I didn’t have a choice.” The words tumbled out, hasty and hollow. Nothing in the assassin’s body language suggested menace, but I had to believe that I was talking to save my life. “I accidentally handed the wrong credit app to my crew boss.” I explained the rest, how Bobby wanted to go back, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The assassin considered my explanation for only a matter of seconds. “All right,” he said. “But your pit boss didn’t see anything strange?”

I shook my head. “He just rang the doorbell and knocked, and then we took off.”

“Because it looked kind of fu

“Yeah, I know. But I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“I guess there’s no harm done, huh?” He gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “And I got to meet that nice girl.” He leaned closer. “I think she likes you,” he said in a stage whisper.

“Really? What did she say?” The absurdity of the question, of the conversation, descended on me at once, and I blushed.

“She said she thought you were cute. Which you are, in a timid sort of way.”

“Can I get my driver’s license back?” I wanted to hear more about what Chitra had said, I wanted to interrogate the assassin, get every detail of what she said, how she said it, how it came up, her body language, her expression. I almost began the interrogation, but I had to remember that this was not a friend, not someone with whom I could talk about a girl. I was also eager to change the subject from the very probably gay assassin’s evaluation of my cuteness.

He shrugged. “Okay.” He reached into his pocket and pulled it out. “But I’ve got your name and address memorized, so, you know, I can find you if you decide you want to be a jerk about this. But I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. And, hell. It’s one thing to frame someone for murder, kind of another to make him wait on line at the DMV.”

“As long as you have your sense of priorities in order.” I put the license back in my pocket, strangely comforted. The assassin was acting reasonable, so maybe I really didn’t need to worry. I couldn’t believe it, though. The fact that he wasn’t always, at every moment, homicidal didn’t change what he’d done, and it didn’t make me worry about him any less.

I was about to say something that I hoped would encourage his departure when I saw something in my mind, saw it in a cinematic flash. We’d been right there, cleaned up all around it, but there was something we missed. “Fuck,” I whispered.

The assassin raised one eyebrow. “Yes?”

“The checkbook.” It came out like a croak. “Karen wrote a check for the books, and she wrote a note in her checkbook. The receipt. I was the only one working that area. The cops will be able to figure out it was me.”

“Crap.” The assassin shook his head. “Why didn’t you think of that before?”

“I wasn’t exactly prepared for this,” I yelped. “I’m not a professional. I didn’t have a list of things to tick off.”

“Yeah, you’re right. You are right.” He stood for a moment, still, processing the new information. “Okay, Lemuel. We’ve got to go back.”

“What? We can’t.”

“Well, we have to. Otherwise you, my friend, are going to jail.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” I said in a quiet voice. “I can’t do it.”

“You want me to go by myself? To save your butt? That’s hardly fair.”

I thought to say that I wasn’t the one who’d killed Bastard and Karen in the first place, but I knew how the words would sound coming out of my mouth, absurd and petty all at once. And you just didn’t get petulant with a killer.