The Ethical Assassin

Besides, B.B. wanted her around, valued her, deferred to her opinions. She owed him her life, so she could turn a blind eye to the pleasure he took from setting his hand on a boy’s shoulder, from the way his eyes lit up when he saw one of his charity cases in a bathing suit. She could live with being his beard, his disguise to the world.

Then things took a sharp turn. Last month, they’d been driving back from a di

The meeting went badly, and both he and Desiree didn’t like the Georgia guy, didn’t feel they could trust him. Desiree felt relieved, and she suspected B.B. did as well. It was almost as though he were looking for a way to celebrate, and when they saw a kid walking along the beach, something shifted visibly in B.B.’s face.

The boy looked maybe eleven, cute, clean-cut but staggering. As if he were drunk- maybe for the first time. He had a stupid, happy grin on his face, and he sang something boisterous to himself, occasionally breaking into air guitar as he walked.

“Why don’t you stop the car,” B.B. said. “Let’s give that boy a lift.”

Desiree didn’t want to stop, but the light turned red and there was no choice. “Where do you want to give him a lift to?”

B.B. gri

Desiree kept her eyes straight ahead. “No.”

“No?”

“No. I’m not going to let it happen.”

B.B. bit on his lip. “What exactly are you not going to let happen?”

“B.B., let’s just forget it. Go home.”

“If I say we give the kid a lift, then that’s what we do.” His voice had turned loud. “You don’t tell me no, and he doesn’t tell me no. No one tells me no. Stop the car and sweet-talk that kid into the car, or you’ll be on the street tomorrow and whoring for crank in a week.”

“All right,” she said softly. She chose her words deliberately, because his cruelty demanded treatment in kind, and she wanted him to think, if only for a second, that he had won. “Okay, fine.” The light turned green, and she sped past the boy.

The next morning, her packed suitcase and gym bag were met with flowers and chocolates and an envelope with cash. He didn’t apologize, didn’t say he was sorry he’d tried to turn her into a pimp, but she knew he was sorry. For all it mattered. She knew she would stay, but as she unpacked, Aphrodite made it clear that this was a reprieve, not a stay. Desiree didn’t resist or disagree or shrug it off, because it wasn’t a suggestion. It was fact.

They both saw it. The urge inside B.B. was coming out, and sooner or later bad things were going to be happening under her roof. Maybe she could keep him in check, but for how long? Forever? It seemed unlikely. What frightened her, however, was not the thought that B.B. would give in to his worst self, that he would become the monster he had resisted; it was that she would lack the strength to fight him. She would convince herself that it would be worse if she wasn’t around, that she helped him from hurting even more boys. She would help him with this, like she helped him with his business. How long could a person participate in evil without becoming evil herself? Or had she been guilty the moment she’d accepted B.B.’s charity, the moment she’d chosen to stay after learning who and what he was?

She had to get out. She had to move on. Aphrodite whispered it to her in a mantra so perpetual, it was like the sound of breath. Even the I Ching couldn’t stop telling her so.

That B.B. would panic if she left hardly mattered. That she had nowhere to go hardly mattered. She had what she needed. She had money she’d saved- enough money that she could live for a year or two while she figured things out. And she had information on B.B.’s trade. Not that she wanted to extort him or threaten him, but she had a feeling that once he realized she wasn’t coming back, once he realized she was gone for good, B.B. was going to be very, very angry.

And when a man is very angry, and he has a bunch of people like Jim Doe and the Gambler working for him, things can get tricky.

Chapter 14

THE PHONE CALL came in the middle of the night. B.B. never answered the phone himself; that wasn’t his thing. But he liked to keep the phone near his bed. It was one of those office phones with a shrill office phone ring and the multiple buttons so you could see which line was in use. They had only one line, but he liked the idea of having several.

And he liked to keep an eye on when the line was in use. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Desiree. Of course he did. He trusted her more than anyone, but why take chances?

The TV was on, but there was only snow. B.B. looked over at the digital clock: 4:32. A phone call at that hour couldn’t be anything good. He sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, which was shaped like a giraffe reaching up to eat leaves. The shade was over the tree. B.B. sat still, staring at the blue and pink of the rococo wallpaper until he heard the light tap at the door.

“Who is it?”

The door opened a crack. “It’s the Gambler.”

“Fuck.” He picked up the handset and punched the button to switch over to the right line. He always kept the phone on one of the dead lines, since he liked the feeling of pushing the button when he took a call. It made him feel like he was an executive. Which he basically was, just an unconventional sort of executive.

“So, what’s the status?” he asked the Gambler. “Everything in line?”

There was a pause. It was the sort of pause that B.B. did not much like.

“Not really.” The voice was flat. “Wouldn’t be calling now if it were.”

“What does that mean?” He looked over at Desiree, who was leaning against the door with her arms folded, studying him. She wore a white bathrobe and probably nothing else underneath. A lot of guys, scar or no, would find that pretty sexy, he figured. And the fact that it might be kind of sexy seemed, for an instant, kind of sexy. Then the feeling passed.

“It means,” the Gambler told him, “that there’s a serious problem, the sort I may not be able to get resolved.”

B.B. hated having to talk in code on the phone, but even though there was no evidence the feds gave the slightest shit about his dealings, you had to assume they were listening, which meant you had to spend a lot of time talking around the issue, and that got awkward when you didn’t even know what the issue was.

Who needed these hassles? Wasn’t all of this supposed to be hassle free? Not really, but it was supposed to be easy, and he guessed it was. B.B. had inherited his hog lot outside Gainesville from his father’s father, a red-faced old man with wisps of white hair that stuck out of his head as though they’d been rammed in by a vengeful enemy. He was so ornery that he was like a parody of an ornery old man, cursing and spitting tobacco in a rage and slapping away kind hands, grandchildish hugs, bologna sandwiches- anything anyone might offer. Visits to the farm had been an unrelenting torment. The old man would put him to work shoveling hog shit, mopping up pools of hog piss, dragging dead hog carcasses by their hooves.

If he even gestured toward an expression of complaint, his grandfather would tell him to shut the fuck up and smack him in the head, sometimes with his hand, a few times with a mostly empty sack of feed, once with an old-fashioned metal lunchbox. There were other punishments, too, in the empty barn, when B.B. broke “the farmer’s code,” a fluid list of regulations that had been omitted from the Poor Richard’s Almanac. B.B. never learned the code, understood its rules or parameters, but a few times a year his grandfather would come up on him, looking especially tall and dirty. He’d spit a wad of dip in B.B.’s direction and tell him he’d broken the farmer’s code and he needed to be mentored in the old barn. He had no idea what the word meant, had no idea what it was to mentor a boy. He was a monster, and by the time B.B. became old enough to make decisions for himself, he vowed never to see the old man again.