David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

She liked the heat of his skin, the bulging under her palms, under her thighs. It was sexy, but not exactly sexual. It was powerful, and she liked that.

Desiree knew well that she had small hands, and they weren’t strong, even for their size. Surprise and the confines of the car worked in her favor, but Otto could escape her grip almost certainly if he tried, if he really tried; still, she had a few crucial seconds here, the advantage of his disorientation, and she planned to be well away from him before he even thought to struggle.

“Otto, we’ve done business together for a long time,” she said, “and it’s been good for everyone, but if you ever pull shit like this again, I’ll kill you. You try to humiliate B.B., try to make suggestions about him, use it as leverage, whatever- you’re going to disappear. You think you’re smarter than he is, and you think I’m cute, and maybe you are and I am. But don’t you ever forget what else we are.” She let go of his throat. “You don’t want to be his enemy.”

Otto coughed and put a hand to his Adam’s apple but was otherwise quiet and still.

An old couple strolled through the parking lot, staring unabashedly at the small white woman straddling the large black man in the car.

“I’ve got some phone calls to make,” Desiree said. She gave him a quick kiss, just a peck, really, but directly on his dry lips, and then slid off and opened the driver’s-side door. The old man had looked away, but the woman continued to stare over at her.

“You want to say something?” Desiree asked, and she turned her empty, judgmental eyes away.

Otto was just now rousing himself from his wounded surprise. He reached out to close his door, but he met her eyes as he did so, and, of all things, he offered her another of his grins. “Does this mean you don’t want the job, my darling?”

“Not at this moment.” She strolled over to B.B.’s Mercedes and shook her head softly. The thing was, Otto might have been a player and a schemer, and in his own way he might have been every bit as bad as B.B., but he had a sense of humor, and that alone made her hope she wouldn’t have to wrap her hands around his throat again.

THERE I WAS, survivor of a double homicide, in the Kwick Stop’s public bathroom. Halfway to the store I realized I needed to piss and piss badly, so badly that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t pissed myself during the shootings. It was all I could do to keep from ducking behind a tree and taking a whiz under the canopy of stars; but public urination, even obscured public urination, seemed a bad idea. What if I had been caught? What if the cops picked me up and found evidence? Hairs and fibers and that sort of thing? My knowledge of police investigations came from a pastiche of television and movies, so I had no idea how it worked in real life.

When I walked into the store, I spotted the bathrooms in an instant- in the door-to-door book trade, you grow skillful at quickly finding the toilets in convenience stores- and rushed back without even the pretense of calm. In general, I didn’t like to act as though I needed the bathroom; it embarrassed me that complete strangers should know about my body functions.

In this case, however, I was in no frame of mind for the casual shop, a pantomime of interest in beef jerky and then a rub of palm against palm, like, Oh, I sure could do with a hand washing, before a calm stroll into the bathroom.

When I looked up from the urinal, I realized I must have already pissed since nothing was coming out and the crampy, stretched feeling had faded into a tranquil fatigue. I zipped up and washed, checking in the mirror for signs of blood. Nothing in my hair or on my hands or clothes. It all looked okay. I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that’s what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry? Not that soap stockholders would gain much here; the inverted pear-shaped dispenser contained only encrusted pink dregs of soap gone by. Nothing in the way of towels- only one of those rotating towel machines, where someone else’s dirt gets pressed or washed or just permanently affixed before it comes back around again. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper from a loose roll propped above the dispenser and then dabbed it gently against my face.

The bathroom smelled like shit and piss and sickly floral deodorizers struggling to beat down the stench of crap and piss. My hands trembled violently, and I felt the need to puke. The problem with puking was that I would have to get on my hands and knees to do it, and the floor was covered with a deep coat of gummy dried urine, and there was a fuzzy lump of gray shit in the toilet. My reptile brain had no intention of letting me mark territory already well scented up by creatures more powerful and less hygienic than I.

Instead, I reached into my pocket for the check, the check Karen had written so that she could buy books for her now orphaned daughters. “Karen Wane,” it said in the top left corner. It seemed odd that she and her husband wouldn’t share the same account.

If I were worried about them passing the credit app, it might be worth considering, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. I tore up the check and dropped the pieces in the horrifically unflushed toilet. One of the shreds fell into a viscous pool by the toilet’s side, and I had to pick it up by its tiny dry corner and then daintily drop it in. I flushed, using the toe of my shoe so I wouldn’t have to touch anything, and then went to wash my hands again.

Should I have flushed the check in two different toilets? Of course, it wasn’t as if cops were going to don hazmat suits and go wading through treatment plants in search of check fragments. Still, I had to pound down that feeling of nausea again, a process that involved closing my eyes and trying hard to think of nothing. In about a minute I felt sure I wouldn’t puke, so I pushed open the door and got out of there.

The convenience store was a couple of miles from the motel. I could easily have walked it, would have preferred to, but that wasn’t the way it worked. I had to wait for Bobby, so I grabbed a sixteen-ounce ginger ale from one of the wall-length refrigerator displays in the hopes it would settle my stomach. Then I stood on line behind a guy wearing jeans and a black T-shirt.

I couldn’t see the man’s face, and all but a few strands of hair were hidden under a baseball cap with a glittery Confederate flag emblazoned along the front, but I could tell he was probably in his thirties or forties, and he was chatting with the girl at the counter, a teenager, plenty young but not very pretty. She had a long-faced, horsey look to her, with an upside-down U-shaped mouth that seemed never to close entirely; the whole package ended up resembling nothing so much as an Easter Island statue. No matter, as the man in the Confederate hat liked her plenty, and his eyes rested with particular interest on her large, squishy-looking breasts, which flashed out of a short-sleeved blouse one or two buttons past modesty. The Confederate laughed at something and slapped the counter and peered into the girl’s shirt unapologetically.

“Oh shit,” he said. “I think I must have dropped my quarter in there. Let me just get it out.” He raised his hand like it was getting ready to slide into the cleavage.

“Jim,” the girl said through a fan of splayed fingers, “you stop that.” She glanced at me as though trying to decide something, then looked back at the Confederate. “You’re so bad.”

On the radio, an eager voice encouraged everyone to “Wang Chung” tonight, which was one of the many confusing songs I figured I’d understand when I knew more of the world. Sort of like the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the comprehension of which I assumed required a familiarity with European arts and music. An educated person would know precisely what a scaramouch was and why he ought to do the fandango.