The Ethical Assassin

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been looking over the application material for Columbia. Maybe this isn’t the best time, but I don’t see how you can afford it. Even with the financial aid and the loans, you’re going to need another seven thousand dollars a year. That’s almost thirty thousand dollars. Where are you going to get that?”

I looked at the floor. “You said you’d help me out.”

“And I have, haven’t I?” I didn’t ask how, since it would invariably turn into a “food on the table, clothes on my back” kind of thing, and I wasn’t interested. “Come on now, Lem. I’m not your father. Your father is off smoking wacky weed and chasing topless natives. Uga buga,” he added, bulging his eyes. “Maybe he should pay for it. Have you even asked him?”

“I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”

“So, you want me to pay for you when you haven’t even asked your father?”

“You said you would help,” was the best I could manage. It was my graduation, and Andy dropped this bomb as if he’d been saving it for the maximum effect.

“Come on, now. University of Florida is fine.”

“I’m not going there,” I said, trying to keep the whine out of my voice. “I’m going to Columbia.”

Andy smiled and shook his head. “Then I guess you have a lot of money to make this summer, don’t you?”

The next day I called the admissions office at Columbia and arranged for a deferment. And then I began doing research. How was I going to save $30,000 in a year? It didn’t take me long to realize sales was my best bet. And encyclopedias looked like just the thing to make it happen.

Chapter 11

THAT’S REALLY ODD,” Melford said. “Just not the sort of thing you expect.”

Death and darkness hid her features, but I could tell the third person was an older woman with a short, fiercely coiled perm. She wore tight jeans and an open blouse, which seemed to me the same color as the darkness. Her heavy tongue protruded from her gaping mouth, like a cartoon creature caught in midstrangle. From the marks on her neck, I guessed that strangling was the way it happened.

“Who is she?” I managed.

“Beats me. But I’m thinking that this is the woman we saw when we drove by before.”

“Well, what happened?” I hated how it came out like a whine, but I thought myself entitled. It was bad enough to have witnessed two murders that day, to have been close enough to smell the blood as it came out of Bastard’s and Karen’s respective heads. Now here was another. I wasn’t built for this sort of thing, and the truth was that I had to work very hard if I was going to keep from falling apart. I didn’t even know what falling apart would constitute, but I was pretty sure I’d know it when I saw it.

Melford shook his head. “I’m guessing the cop killed her.”

“What?”

“Who else? We saw him with her. Now she’s dead, just a few feet away from where it happened. Why would the cop leave her alone at the crime scene, where the murderer might get her? And since we know the murderer didn’t get her, we have to assume the cop did.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense.”

Melford was about to say something, but he stopped himself when we both heard the sound of wheels on dirt outside and the hum of a motor and then the cutting of a motor.

He shut off the penlight and moved over to the window. “Boogers,” he whispered. He then turned to me. “Okay, listen up. The bad news is that there’s two guys out there, and one of them is the cop. Out of uniform, but the cop. Now, don’t panic. They’re in a pickup, and they came with their headlights off, so I doubt this is official police business. We hide, and everything will be fine.”

My four beers churned violently, grappling back up to my throat with little acid hooks.

I let Melford pull me by the arm into the smaller bedroom and then to a closet against the far wall- the kind with the folding slatted doors. And it faced out to the kitchen, so we had a decent view of the action. But that wasn’t what I noticed about this bedroom. What I noticed was that there was nothing in here but boxes. Some had old shirts and torn jeans sticking out, some were file boxes, but most of them were sealed shut. One of them had OLDHAM HEALTH written along the side with a thick black marker. The walls were bare except for a two-year-old puppies and kittens calendar stuck on October.

This wasn’t a kid’s room. This wasn’t even a room that had once been a kid’s room and now was something else. No kids lived here. So why had Karen and Bastard lied to me?

The back door banged open, and I could see, obstructed by the slats, two figures enter, one of them swinging a small flashlight around. It was too dark to see much more than that.

For a moment I felt a fresh wave of panic. What if they had come to look for something- something that might just as well be in a closet as anywhere else? The thought made me have to piss fiercely, and I clenched my teeth as I tried to force back the urge to void my bladder.

At least there was Melford. Melford still had his gun. Melford wouldn’t let us get taken. That was the measure of how much my life had changed in the past twenty-four hours. I was now depending on someone to shoot my enemies for me.

“Fucking hell,” one of the guys said. “You’ve got a lot of dead people in here, Jim.”

“I know it.”

“Jesus, look at them. It was some cold mother that took them down.”

“Looks like.”

“And you’ve got no ideas?”

“I ain’t got the first fuck of an idea. I mean, it’s gotta be about the money. But who? Shit, don’t no one know nothing about it but us, those of us in on it. Bastard’s been talking, which is the only thing I can figure.”

“I guess. But, hell.”

“That’s about right.”

“Shit. Fucking Bastard. With Frank taking off last month, you’re fresh out of chemists. B.B. isn’t going to like that.”

“Yeah, I’m working on it. But I ain’t go

“Jim, what the fuck was Bastard doing over here anyhow?”

“I don’t know.” There was something hard in the voice.

“You figure he was boffing that skank? Shit, maybe a couple of years ago, but she was like a fucking corpse, man, all that crank she was doing. I’d sooner fuck some old grandma.”

A pause. Then, “Just shut the fuck up, and help me with this shit.”

“Uh-oh.” A laugh. “You weren’t dipping your wick with that, were you? I’ll tell you what. I got a couple of grandmas I could introduce you to.”

“You want to stand around talking shit all night, or you want to get this done?”

I had been watching through the slat, totally absorbed, as though I were not in a mobile home closet, but in a theater watching the most compelling movie I’d ever seen. I felt strangely calm, outside of myself. And then I didn’t feel calm at all. I didn’t feel like I was in a theater. I felt hot and cramped and about as terrified as I’d ever felt in my life.

It was because I realized I knew both men. The cop, Jim, was the guy I’d seen at the convenience store, the one who’d given me a hard time about the ginger ale, the same bucktoothed man from the Ford who’d been hassling me outside the trailer. With the possibility of being arrested for murder, I’d managed to anger the crooked chief of police.

The other guy- I couldn’t see him well enough to take a look, but I knew the voice. I was sure I knew the voice. From somewhere. I knew that other man.

I watched as they laid out a sheet of plastic on the floor and then picked up the body of the older woman and rolled her up. The cop grabbed one end, the familiar man the other, and they hauled her out of the house.

We listened to the near silence punctuated only by the occasional grunt or curse and then the thud of something heavy landing on a flatbed. They were back in a few minutes.