The Ethical Assassin

“They balked.” I sounded a little shrill, so I looked at my hands to hide my embarrassment. And my fear. This Gambler, the Gambler in front of me, had nothing to do with the old-time revival preacher who sermonized to us about selling. This was not the supersalesman Gambler. This was the Gambler who disposed of corpses in the middle of the night.

“They balked. Tell me something I don’t know. Why? Why the fuck did they balk?”

Maybe anger wasn’t the right way to go when speaking to an accessory to murder, but there it was. Besides, I was myself an accessory to murder, so I had to figure that leveled the playing field. “Look, Bobby told you I’m a power hitter, and I am. I sell a lot of books. I’ve never had people balk at the check before, and there’s no reason to think it’s going to happen again. It was just one of those things.”

“Just one of those things, huh? Well, how about we don’t do anything about it, Lem, and then it becomes two of those things and then three of those things? How about you tell me how many sales you have to blow before I’m supposed to care about it? How many? Tell me.”

I let it hang in the air for a moment before I spoke. “More than one.” I wanted to look away, but I told myself to keep my eyes steady. This was his problem, not mine.

“More than one? Okay. More than one. But I don’t want it to be more than one. I want it to be less than one. It’s a little late for that, I know, but I’m thinking- and maybe I’m crazy here- I’m thinking it might be better to stop this in its tracks so you don’t sit in someone’s house for three fucking hours, have them fill out the app, and then fuck up the close. That’s what I’m thinking, Lem. So tell me what happened.”

I bit my lip. This wasn’t the principal’s office. I wasn’t in danger of my mother getting a phone call. I was in danger of being executed, like Bastard and Karen. I had seen it. I knew what it meant, and I had to come up with something.

Based on the conversation I’d overheard, I could feel reasonably confident that the Gambler had known Bastard and Karen, knew something of their personalities, so whatever story I came up with would have to sound plausible.

“When the wife was filling out the app, the husband was making trouble. He was kind of a clown, you know, trying to distract her, insult her, insult me. With him carrying on, I could see the wife was having problems. She looked nervous. She started talking about money.”

“What money?” the Gambler demanded. “How much money?”

I knew I’d hit a nerve. He and the police chief had been looking for money. From what I could tell, a lot of money. I took a deep breath and concentrated on acting as though I had no idea what he was talking about. “Just money. You know. Then when it came time for the check, she said she didn’t want to do it.”

“Yeah?” the Gambler said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

I felt pretty sure I was bombing. “So I, uh, tried again. I went over all the stuff they’d seen, I told them about how I had asked them to let me know if they weren’t interested. I did all the things we’ve talked about in training, but she still wouldn’t budge. I guess the husband got angry, and then I knew it was pretty much lost.”

“This is bullshit,” he said. “Why the fuck would they want encyclopedias?”

I stared at him. “Um, I don’t know,” I said. “Why would anyone want encyclopedias? I mean, they’re great books and all-”

“Spare me the bullshit. What did you do then?”

I shrugged. “I left.”

“You left?” the Gambler repeated. “You just walked out of there? Did you say, ‘Hell, I don’t need two hundred dollars. I made me that already, so I don’t need it again.’ Is that what you told them?”

“Do you think that would have been helpful?”

His face reddened, but he didn’t say anything. It was clear now that the Gambler wanted some other kind of information, information he didn’t know how to excavate. So I bit back my irritation. The thing to do, I realized, was to use his confusion, his desperate fishing. I needed to figure out a way to make all of this work for me.

“I didn’t know what else to do. I got the feeling they wanted me to leave, like I was getting on their nerves. I didn’t know how to turn it around.” I sighed. “So, can you tell me what I should have done?”

“What?” the Gambler sneered at me, astonished at the audacity of the question.

“I mean, if this is about keeping me from losing them at the check ever again, I need to know how to handle it. How would you have handled it?”

The Gambler’s eyes narrowed, and his face pinched inward. “You tell me, Lem. You think about it for a while, then you come back and tell me. Right now I’m more interested in what you did. So you left? Were they doing anything when you left?”

I felt like I was gaining some ground, so I pushed it further. “Why? What does that have to do with my having lost the sale?”

“Just answer the question, would you?” The Gambler looked away.

“I don’t think so. They were sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, too angry with each other to talk.”

He stared at me blankly. Then I felt the smack of inspiration. Ideally, I would have had more time to think it through to be certain it wasn’t an amazingly stupid idea, but I didn’t have time, and I decided to run with it.

I paused and peered away as if in thought. “Before I went in there, I saw this creepy guy hanging around.”

The Gambler now sat up straight. “What creepy guy?”

I shrugged, as if the story were no big deal. “Just a guy who stopped me, wanted to talk to me. He drove a dark Ford pickup and he had a strange haircut- short all over, but longish in the back. He had weird teeth, too. I think he might also have been the guy who was hanging around in the dark outside the trailer when I left, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see whoever it was lurking around the trailer, but it was just a feeling I had, you know?”

I tried to look more puzzled than pleased with myself. The Gambler and this other guy, Doe, were clearly working together on this- and had been working with Bastard and Karen. Now I had the Gambler suspecting Doe. If I could cook up enough Treasure of the Sierra Madre tension between the two of them, they’d forget all about me and the check that never got written.

“All right,” the Gambler said. “Get out of here.”

I stood up and started to walk toward the door. “I won’t let it happen again,” I chirped like a good little bookman.

The Gambler didn’t even look up. “That’s just fucking great.”

Chapter 17

HE’D BEEN DREAMING about the bodies, about moving them, which was why he believed you should never do anything too unpleasant right before going to sleep. It always stuck with you. In his dream, Doe had Karen’s body, thin and light, like a department store ma

Mitch Ossler was like that. He’d taught the other guys how to cook meth, and he knew his stuff. No doubt about it. Mitch could cook fast, and he could cook reliably. He had his ear to the ground and came up with new recipes. He was the one who found out how to turn crankhead piss back into meth. But Mitch never had a mind for the details, little things like safety and staying alive. No one had been surprised, really surprised, when the accident happened. Something like that was bound to happen, and Mitch was exactly the sort of guy it would happen to. The asshole had been setting up a new lab; he let a batch get too hot, and it vomited out a violent blast of vapor right in his face.