David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

The inadequate air-conditioning washed over me, and I tried to recede into the freshly washed leather. I wanted to pass out and I wanted to weep and, on some level, I wanted Bobby to hug me. But Bobby busied himself by fiddling with the radio stations, finally settling on Blue Öyster Cult, but somehow the song’s insistence that I refrain from fearing the Reaper didn’t make me feel much better.

“A single isn’t bad,” he said, maybe thinking that I probably needed a good pep talk. “Not bad for a day’s work. You’re still in the game, but a double’s better, right?… Huh? But you’ll get a double tomorrow. You’re a power hitter, Lem. You’re doing great.”

If I hadn’t been numb from having witnessed a double homicide, I felt sure that Bobby’s pos comments would have perked me up. I hated the way I lapped up Bobby’s praise, as if being a good bookman, selling a set of books to people who would never use them and couldn’t afford them, were worth a pat on the head. Good doggie, Lem. But I loved it. Two people dead, holes in their heads, blood and brains on the peeling linoleum, and I still sort of loved it.

The other three guys in the Ft. Lauderdale crew- Ronny Neil, Scott, and Kevin- piled one by one into the backseat, each at his own pickup stop. They all harbored resentment against me, since Scott was both fat and unimpressed by conventional ideas of personal hygiene, and he crammed the rest of them in tight. I, meanwhile, basked in legroom and relatively sweet air.

Kevin was a quiet guy, a bit short and stocky, but affable in a self-contained way. It was easy to forget he was around, even on long road trips. He laughed at other people’s jokes but never told his own. He always agreed when someone said he was hungry but probably would have starved to death before suggesting we stop to eat.

Ronny Neil and Scott, on the other hand, were not so retiring. They had joined up together and were like wartime buddies who enlisted from the same town and were assigned to the same platoon. Their friendship consisted, as near as I could tell, of Ronny Neil hitting Scott in the back of the head and calling him a fat asshole.

Ronny Neil thought of himself as being strikingly handsome, and maybe he was. He had a sharply detailed face with big brown eyes of the sort that I thought women were said to like. His straight, straw-colored hair came down to his collar, and he was deeply muscled without being bulky. Not like there was time to lift weights while we sold books, but I did on occasion catch him doing push-ups and sit-ups around the motel room. On those days that I managed to get up early enough to take in a run before the morning meeting, Ronny Neil would earnestly advise me to take up lifting weights instead of doing pussy exercises. But, he would muse, if there was one thing a Jew ought to know how to do, it was run fast.

Each time he picked someone up- at the designated convenience store- Bobby would take the guy around to the back of the car and open the trunk to shield their conversation from the rest of the crew. Once they entered the car, you couldn’t ask if they’d scored or blanked. You couldn’t ask how they did. You weren’t allowed to tell stories about anything that happened to you that day unless the story was in no way related to scoring or blanking. Bobby and the other bosses knew there was no way to keep people from talking about it. If someone hit a triple or a grand slam- sometimes even a double- everyone in all the crews would know by the next morning, but you couldn’t say anything in the car.

These rules appeared not to apply to Ronny Neil, who didn’t know how to shut up, about scoring or anything else. Ronny Neil was a year older than me and he’d gone to a high school across the county from mine, so I hadn’t known him, but the rumor machine had churned out some interesting details. By all accounts, he’d been a serviceable placekicker for the school’s football team, but he’d been convinced of his greatness and convinced that a football scholarship would be his for the taking. As it turned out, the only offer he received was from a historically black college in South Carolina that was interested in diversifying its student population. Ronny Neil had gone off in a huff and come back at the end of his freshman year with his scholarship revoked. Here details get fuzzy. He was kicked out either because he failed to keep his grades up, because he’d been involved in a drunken and sordid sex scandal that the university wanted desperately to keep quiet, or- and this was my personal favorite- he’d never quite gotten the hang of avoiding the word jigaboo , even when black students outnumbered him three hundred to one.

On the drives back to the motel, he’d tell us about how he’d scored, and he’d share with us some of the more implausible incidents from his colorful life. He’d tell us about how he’d filled in briefly for the bass player of Molly Hatchet, how he’d been asked to join the navy SEALs, how he’d finger-fucked Adrienne Barbeau after his cousin’s wedding- though it was never clear what a movie star was doing at his cousin’s wedding. He told these stories with such surety that they left me wondering if my own sense of the universe was hopelessly skewed. Was it possible that I lived in a world in which Adrienne Barbeau might let herself be finger-fucked by a moron like Ronny Neil Cramer? It hardly seemed likely, but how could I really know?

On the other hand, he bragged about things that were true, too. Like about how the last time we were in Jacksonville, when we’d stayed at the same motel, he’d stolen a passkey off the cleaning cart and slipped into half a dozen rooms, lifting cameras and watches and cash out of wallets. He’d laughed himself sick watching Sameen, the Indian man who owned the place, defending his wife- the hotel maid- from accusations of theft. He told us that the previous year, before the election, he’d put on a suit and tie and gone around soliciting donations for the Republican Party. He’d have people make out checks to “RNC,” and then he’d just write in the rest of his last name. Seedy check-cashing places on Federal Highway had no problem cashing his checks for R. N. Cramer.

Tonight he was going on about how some hot redhead had been begging for him while her husband watched, helpless to do anything about it.

“You sure it wasn’t the husband wanted you?” Scott asked, the words coming out as a high-pitched jumble of spit from his rather serious lisp.

“Yes, I’m thur,” Ronny Neil said. He flicked Scott in the ear. “You smell worse than a piece of shit, you tongue-tied dumb-ass.”

For someone who’d just been insulted, injured, and mocked for a speech impediment, Scott took it all in stride. I felt a sympathetic knot of outrage on behalf of a guy I couldn’t stand.

“How would you know what a piece of shit smells like,” he asked sagely, “unless you were going up to them and sniffing at them?”

“I know what a piece of shit thellths like, you fucking pussy, because I’m thitting next to one.” Still, Ronny Neil looked away, embarrassed that Scott had drawn blood with so cutting a zinger.

When we got back to the motel, we walked through its forlorn main parking lot, cradled between two parts of the two-storied L-shape. Here were the cars of the lost, the wandering, the short on gas, the long on fatigue, people who had left their dreams up north or out west and were now willing to let their lives take meaning from nothing more complicated than the absence of snow. In the light of day, the buildings were pale green and bright turquoise, a Florida symphony of color. At night it appeared desolately gray.

We filed into the Gambler’s room. His real name was Kenny Rogers, so the nickname had come with depressing inevitability, but we treated it as though it were the height of wit. As I understood it, the Gambler didn’t own the company that contracted with Champion Encyclopedias’ publisher, but he was high up. The chain of command was lost in interlinking strands of haziness, and I suspected intentionally so, but I knew one thing with absolute certainty: Every set of books that got sold meant money in the Gambler’s pocket.