David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

The assassin pointed the gun toward the ceiling, unscrewed the silencer, and then ejected the clip and removed a bullet from the firing chamber. Keeping his eye on me, he placed these accessories in his backpack and then set the gun on the table. I stared at it. We didn’t have guns in my family. We didn’t have firearms or knives or even baseball bats under the bed. We didn’t handle weapons. If there were mice in the house, we called an exterminator and let him touch the traps and the poison. I came from a background of squeamishness, and I’d been raised to believe as a matter of faith that if I handled anything with the capacity to do harm, it would turn on me like a mutinous robot and destroy its master.

Now, there it was, right in front of me: the gun. Just like in the movies. I understood the pistol wasn’t loaded, but for a moment I thought I should grab it, do something heroic. Maybe I could smack the assassin with the gun. Pistol-whip him or something tough guy-ish like that. While I pondered my options, however, the assassin took another gun out of his backpack, so pistol-whipping became less of an option.

Once again, he sort of aimed his firearm at me, less at me than in my direction, not to terrify me, but to make sure I kept my head, remembered who stood where in the hierarchy. “Give me your wallet.”

I didn’t want to give up my wallet. It had my money, my driver’s license, the credit card my stepfather had reluctantly handed over, which I was allowed to use only in absolute emergencies, and even then I could expect to get yelled at. On the other hand, if the assassin wanted my wallet, I told myself, maybe he really wouldn’t kill me. It would be easy to take a wallet off my dead body. So I reached into my back pocket, maneuvered it out- not so easy since it and my pants were moist with sweat- and handed it over. The assassin deftly thumbed through it, unimpeded by his black gloves, and then removed my driver’s license, in which I looked unspeakably dorky and was wearing a velour shirt, which surely must have seemed like a good idea at the time, though now the decision mystified me.

The assassin studied it briefly. “I’ll keep this, if you don’t mind, Lemuel.”

He wanted to take my license. That meant something significant; it portended of terrible things to come, though I couldn’t quite shape the ideas in my mind.

“Now, pick up the other gun. Come on. I promise if you cooperate, you’re not going to get hurt.”

I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. And what would happen if I did? Would he shoot me, claim self-defense, claim I’d shot Bastard and Karen? Picking up the gun was insanity, but so was not picking it up, so I slowly wrapped my fingers around the handle and lifted. It was both heavier and lighter than I imagined, and it trembled in my hand.

“Aim it at the refrigerator,” the assassin said.

Beyond the point of making trouble or arguing, I did as I was told.

“Squeeze the trigger.”

Though I knew he’d taken out the clip, which I understood meant the gun was unloaded, I still winced as I followed the order. I pressed down hard, expecting the rich boom of a TV shot report, but I got nothing except a hollow click. I kept my arm out. The gun continued to shake.

“Good job, Lemuel. Now put the gun down on the table.”

I did.

“So, here’s the deal,” the assassin said. “Your fingerprints are now on the murder weapon. Bad for you, good for me, but let me be clear about this. You leave here, you keep quiet about what you saw, and no one will ever find this gun, no one will know you were here, and there will be no problem for either of us. I’m not looking to frame you, just to keep you from reporting to anyone what you saw. So if you decide you want to go to the police, they’ll get an anonymous tip about you, Lemuel Altick, and discover the hidden location of this gun, which will mark you as the killer. On the other hand, if you accept that there are bigger things at play here than you can understand- and accordingly keep quiet- the police will never link you to what happened here today. Now, you can see I’m being fair about this, so keep that in mind if you have any moral qualms. Believe me, these were bad, bad people, and they had it coming. So, are we cool here?”

I nodded slowly, thinking for the first time that the assassin was probably gay. He wasn’t effeminate or anything like that, but there was something about him, about the way he moved and spoke, that seemed full of unarticulated significance. Then a little voice inside me said that it didn’t matter if he was gay. It didn’t matter if he liked to do three-ways with proboscis monkeys. I had to stay focused if I was going to avoid getting killed. And now I had a new problem: Maybe he really would let me live, but only so he could frame me for murder.

I looked up, and he was shaking his head. “I really wish you hadn’t stumbled into this. What’s a clean-cut kid like you doing selling encyclopedias? You going to college?”

I swallowed hard. “I’m raising money. I got in, but I can’t afford it, so I deferred.”

He pointed at me. “Quick! What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?”

I couldn’t believe I was even having this conversation. “I’m not sure. Twelfth Night, maybe.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really kind of cruel and creepy. The play’s villain is the guy who’s actually just trying to restore order.”

“Interesting.” He nodded thoughtfully. Then he waved a hand in the air. “Who cares, anyway, right? Shakespeare’s overrated. Now Milton. There’s a poet.”

The fear, which I had done a reasonable job of pushing back for a while, was now so intense that it flashed around me like electricity in a Tesla ball. Crazy people ranted like this before they killed you, didn’t they? That’s what I’d learned from the movies. Even if I was misreading those signals, I had just seen two people killed. Every time my attention shifted to something else, every time I tried to comfort myself with the realization that the assassin probably wouldn’t strike again, that knowledge came back with a gruesome thump. Two people were dead. Forever. Whatever Bastard and Karen had done, they didn’t deserve to be gunned down like animals.

Even so, with the sadness that crept over me at the thought of the indelible cruelty of murder, I felt the beginnings of something- admiration, maybe, though that wasn’t quite right- for the man who had done the killing. The assassin terrified me, but I also wanted his approval. I knew it made no sense, but I felt I had to earn his trust, which was why I spoke out.

“There’s something else,” I said with deliberate slowness, a hopeless effort to control the trembling in my voice. “Besides Shakespeare, I mean. A guy saw me go in here.”

He arched an eyebrow. “What sort of guy?”

“Just a guy. A creepy redneck.”

“When?”

“Three hours ago, I guess.”

The assassin waved his hand dismissively. “Forget it. He won’t remember who you are, what you were doing here, any of that. He’s not going to give you trouble. And if he does bring in the cops, tell them that you tried to sell them some books, it didn’t fly, and you took off. There’s nothing to link you to these guys, to suggest you had a motive. Nothing like that.”

“I don’t know.”

“If the cops come to see you, say you were in and out without luck, saw nothing unusual- except maybe this creepy redneck- and that’s all you have to say. They’ll be off your case in no time and on that redneck’s. Can you trust me on that?”

Could I trust him? He’d barged into my life, murdered a pair of prospects in front of my eyes, and then set me up to take the blame. I nodded.