David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

And there was something else, something that made no sense. “They weren’t married,” I said aloud.

“What?”

“The people you killed. Bastard and Karen. They weren’t married. And they didn’t have kids.”

“Yeah, well, I could have told you that,” Melford said.

“So why did they lie to me?”

“I don’t know. Something crazy is going on. Something bigger than I realized.”

“Why would the cop be hiding the bodies you killed? And what were they talking about? Bastard’s business on the side? What is that? And the missing money?”

“Dunno,” Melford said.

“What about Oldham Health?” I asked. “They had some mugs and stuff. Bastard told me he didn’t know anything about it, but I kind of got the sense he was lying.”

Melford shook head. “I don’t know anything about it.”

I looked over at him. Melford was lying, too. I couldn’t say how exactly I knew, but I knew. We’d been talking about some heavy stuff all night, but there was something in Melford’s voice that I hadn’t heard, some kind of tension. Whatever Bastard had been involved with, Melford knew exactly what it was.

“The other guy who was with the cop,” Melford said. “I wonder who that was.”

I didn’t say anything. My heart pounded and my head throbbed. I felt the urge to confess, as if it were all somehow my fault, but I kept it quiet.

“Probably just some goon.” Melford saved me by answering his own question. “I’ll tell you what, though. We have to find out who that woman was, the third body.”

“Why do we care?” I asked.

“Because if things don’t go our way and they decide they want to risk bringing the law into all of this and the cop finds us and wants to arrest us, we’re going to want some leverage. If we can expose them, then maybe we can reach some sort of understanding.”

“You want to figure out who that woman was so we’re in a position to blackmail the criminally insane cop?”

“Pretty neat, huh?”

EARLIER THAT NIGHT, Jim Doe had been in the police trailer, waiting for nothing in particular, but something bad all the same.

“How’s the gonads feeling?”

Pakken sat across from Doe. His feet were up on the desk, and he was drinking from a mammoth Styrofoam cup of gas station coffee. He’d been working at it for two or three hours now, and it had to be cold as shit.

The question was apropos of nothing, since they’d both been largely still for hours. Pakken was working at one of the word finder books he liked, his pen hovering over the oniony pages. Doe was flipping through a Sports Illustrated, not much paying attention to an article on the Dolphins. He was still out of uniform, in his jeans and black T-shirt. Sometimes he felt like relaxing in the police trailer, was all.

Doe could tell that Pakken had just found a hard word. He liked to start a conversation after he found one. He’d talk about anything, really, but sooner or later he’d try to bring it around. “I just found ‘substantial,’ ” he’d say with little-kid pride. These interruptions were annoying as hell under the best of circumstances, but even more so now that Pakken’s favorite topic was Doe’s testicles.

It had been Pakken who’d found Doe after his unfortunate run-in with that Miami bitch, Pakken who’d gone looking when Doe had not shown up the next day. It was Pakken who’d taken a guess at what might have happened, knowing about where the chief liked to take the ladies- and not a bad bit of police work for such a moron. Doe had still been passed out when Pakken had found him in the early morning. He’d peered into the car’s window, a grin stamped onto his flat, wide face capped off by a single massive eyebrow and a caveman cranial ridge. Doe had fluttered his eyelids and said, “My balls. She crushed my balls.”

“What happened, Chief?”

His balls were swollen and angry. It hurt even to move his legs. “Bitch attacked me,” he mumbled.

Pakken let out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s good. She attacked you.”

Doe struggled to his feet and pain shot through his balls, but he bit his lip and climbed out of the car. Then he smacked Pakken in the face. Hard. “The fuck you laughing at?”

Pakken gingerly poked an index finger to his cheek. “Why’d you do that?”

“A woman was speeding, you dipshit,” Doe said. “Risking her life, the lives of others, and now she’s assaulted a police officer. You think that’s funny?”

Pakken was still poking at the reddening spot on his face. “Hell. There I was thinking you was just trying to get a blow job off of her.”

Now, almost a week later, they sat in the trailer, Pakken with his cold coffee while Doe leaned back in his chair and sipped at his bottle of Yoo-hoo and Rebel Yell. It was kind of a ritual, the two of them lazing around, talking or not talking, but Doe didn’t want to look at Pakken’s drooping idiot face. His balls were still swollen, still tender. A little bit better. He was nearly certain they were better today than yesterday. He reached into his pants with a tentative hand, and the pressure against his scrotum hurt, hurt like living shit, but maybe a little less than the last time he’d checked. And Pakken had laughed at him. It was a disrespectful thing to laugh at an officer injured in the line of duty. What kind of a sick asshole laughed?

He guessed that Pakken wasn’t really sick, just young. His uncle, Floyd Pakken, had been the mastermind behind Meadowbrook Grove. He’d come up with the name, even though they didn’t have a meadow, brook, or grove, but it sounded a lot better than Pigshit-Smelling Trailer Park. It had been Floyd’s idea to convert the trailer park into an independent municipality, to lower the speed limit, and to watch the cash flow in. And it did. All the residents got free gas and electric, which was no small thing during the summer months of hard-humping air-conditioning. They got free water, free basic phone service. Three or four big barbecues a year, a carnival in the spring, a Halloween shindig for the kids, a Fourth of July party with an up-and-coming country star or two. They were happier than pigs in shit, which, ironically, they had to put up with to get all this. Or, more accurately, they had to put up with the smell of pigs in shit, since the city also incorporated the hog lot on Doe’s adjoining family land.

Every year the Office of the Mayor, which consisted, basically, of the mayor, issued a report that detailed income from traffic violations and expenditures in taxes, services, and salaries, and everything just balanced out nice and neat. Maybe a few dollars to roll over to the next year. Why not? No one ever much looked at the report, and no one, near as Doe could tell, bothered to find out if it was bullshit or not. But of course it was bullshit.

Floyd had been a sharp fellow to devise this scam and to put himself at the helm. Doe had always figured that Floyd had something going on other than his mighty generous salary, which everyone knew about since he’d done such a good job of giving back to the city. Doe had suspected, and he’d been the obvious choice for mayor and police chief after Floyd had got himself killed, along with a couple of fourteen-year-old Cuban whores, in an explosive rollover. Two weeks into the job, looking at the records and following the money trail, Doe couldn’t stop his perpetual eulogy to Floyd’s genius. By two months into the job, he’d been laughing at Floyd for thinking too small. Floyd put twenty or thirty thou a year aside. Good for him. Bless his little heart. Three years later, Doe was tripling that. Easy. And it would be getting even better.

Play it right, be patient, don’t be stupid, Doe could be pulling in a hundred thou a year. When he had a million put away, he’d say it was time to retire. He’d head to the Cayman Islands, where his current $130,000 sat nicely nestled. Buy himself a big house and spend the rest of his days drinking strawberry daiquiris and fucking tourists. A man could do worse for himself.