The Ethical Assassin

Had she been flirting? Probably, the whore. She put out her hand and gently, really with just the nails, scraped along the skin of his forearm, barely even disturbing the tightly coiled black hairs.

It was all the excuse Doe needed. Technically, he didn’t need any excuse at all, but he liked to have one. Let them think it was something they did. Let them think later on, If only I hadn’t touched him. Better they should blame themselves.

The touch was all he was looking for. Doe took a step back and pulled his gun from his holster and pointed it at the woman, not two feet from her head. He knew what it must look like to her- this big, dark, hot, throbbing thing shoved right in her face. “Never touch a police officer!” he shouted. “You are committing assault, a felony. Put your hands on the wheel.”

She shrieked. They did that sometimes.

“Hands on the wheel!” He sounded very much like a man who believed his own life to be in danger, like he needed her to do this to keep from shooting her. “Hands on the wheel! Now! Eyes straight ahead! Do it, or I will shoot!”

She continued to shriek. Her little eyes became wide as tiny saucers, and her curly blond hair went fright wig. Somehow despite her screaming she managed to move her hands halfway up her body, where they did a little spaz shake, and then she got them up to the wheel.

“All right, now. Lisa, you do what I say and no one needs to get hurt, right? You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer.” He grabbed the door handle, pulled it open, and took a quick step back, as though he expected molten rock to come pouring out.

It was better to play it like it was real. If you did the cocky cop thing, they might despair or they might get full of righteous anger, and then you could really have a problem on your hands. If, on the other hand, you acted like you were afraid of them, it gave them a strange sort of hope, like the whole misunderstanding could still get straightened out.

With the gun still extended, he reached out and pulled one hand behind her back, then the other. Holding them firmly in place, he put the gun back in the holster and placed the cuffs on her wrists. Too tight, he knew. They would hurt like hell.

Her ugly face got uglier as he shoved her toward his cruiser. Cars slowed down along the road- practically a highway at this stretch, with more than five miles between lights- to watch, figuring her for a drug dealer or who knows what. But they weren’t thinking that all she’d done was speed and then whine about it. They saw her in cuffs and they saw his uniform and they knew who was right and who was wrong.

Doe shoved her into the back of the cruiser, behind the passenger seat, and then went around to the driver’s side. He waited for a break in the traffic and then pulled out onto the road.

They had gone less than a quarter of a mile before she managed to get any words past her sobbing. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“I guess you’ll find out,” he told her.

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Then you don’t have to worry. Isn’t that the way the law works?”

“Yes,” she managed. No more than a whisper.

“There you go, then.”

Doe turned off the road just before they got near the hog complex. It smelled something terrible from the waste lagoon, which was what they called it. A fucking shithole for a bunch of pigs that needed to be killed before they could die on their own, was what he called it. Smelled like shit, too. Worse than shit. Like the worst shit you could ever imagine. Rancid rotting shit. It smelled like the shit that shit shits out its asshole. Some days you couldn’t hardly smell it at all unless you got close, but when it was humid, which was a lot of the time, and when there was a good easterly wind, all of Meadowbrook Grove stank like frothing, wormy, bubbling, fermented shit. But that’s what the hog complex was there to do. To smell bad. So no one could smell that other smell, that moneymaking smell.

And that pig shit smell had some other useful features, which was why Doe liked to bring his girls there. Not just because it was isolated and no one ever came down this road, but also because he knew what that smell did. They’d get the feeling even before they realized they were smelling it. It crept up on them, like their terror.

Doe pulled the car a good quarter mile up the dirt road through the haphazard pines to just around a bend. He had to get out to unlock the flimsy metal gate, there as a line pissed in the sand rather than as real security. Then he went back in to pull the car through, out again to lock up, and back behind the wheel one last time. But safety first was his motto. They were pretty well shaded by the cluttered growth of trees, and he’d be able to see someone coming, in the unlikely event that some lost driver decided to head that way.

In the clearing, the hog lot stood like a massive metal shack, and behind that was the waste lagoon. Doe turned off the motor, and as he did so he realized he was gri

“So, Lisa. You got a job?” He leaned back in his seat, settling into that familiar good sensation- hard and light at the same time. He finished off his bottle of Yoo-hoo. The bourbon had kicked in strong, and he felt just about right. Nothing but bourbon, either. He knew that people, people in the know, figured he was doing crank, but he didn’t touch the stuff. He knew what it did. Shit, just look at Karen. Turned her all skank. Look at Bastard. Turned him half-incompetent.

The woman in the back pivoted her head, checking out her surroundings for the first time, perhaps, noticing that they were in a clearing in the middle of nowhere. Her nose wrinkled, and then her whole face creased as she got a whiff of the waste lagoon. “Where are we?”

“Things are kind of busy down at the station. I thought we’d do our interrogation right here. More comfortable, don’t you think?”

She struggled a bit, as though that would get her anything but more metal slicing into her skin. “I want to get out of here. I want to call a lawyer.”

“A lawyer? What for, honey? You said before you didn’t do nothing wrong. Lawyers are for criminals, ain’t they?”

“I want to see a lawyer. Or a judge.”

“Judge is just a fancy lawyer, in my book.”

Doe got out of the car, taking his time, taking a minute to admire the blue of the sky, the long wisps of clouds like the strings of cotton that come out of an aspirin bottle. Then, acting as if he’d suddenly remembered where he was, he opened the back door and climbed in. He was careful to leave the door nice and open, since there was no inside handle, and if it closed, they’d both be trapped back there. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped with an ugly horse like Lisa. He sat next to her and traded the evil grin for a smile he knew to be charming. “What’d you say you do, now?”

“I work for Cha

Cha

She looked down and didn’t answer, which struck Doe as rude. Someone was talking to her, and she didn’t answer. What, did she think she was Miss Universe or something? She needed to look in a mirror sometime, see what she really was. And now that he was close, he could see things were worse than he’d realized- acne scars covered with makeup, a pale but discernible mustache. Lisa had no business taking an attitude with him. To make this point clear, he put his hand flat against her forehead, very gently, really, and then gave it a little shove.

She didn’t make a noise this time, but the waterworks were going, streaming down her face. “Please let me go,” she said.