David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

“Piece of shit,” he said. He almost hit her right there. She would have deserved it, too.

He could tell she knew. He could tell by the way she was looking at him. She knew he’d been fucking her daughter, and she was jealous. He didn’t have time for this crap.

Doe went back into the trailer. He walked over to Bastard and, for the fun of it, gave him a good kick in the ass. Body was kind of heavy for a skinny guy. He looked at Karen. Her head was all messed up. It had been messed up pretty good anyhow, he thought, and then tried not to laugh. Well, cheating whores get what they have coming to them. That was one thing everyone knew for a fact.

Doe let out a sigh. He nodded to himself, the signal that it was okay, and then turned toward the door.

“ Laurel! Jesus! Get in here, quick! Karen’s still breathing! She’s alive. Holy shit, I think she’s going to be okay.”

Laurel came running in, right up to the bodies. Doe had stepped out of the way, in the shadow of the wall separating the kitchen from the living area. She ran up to Karen and went down on her knees, something she knew how to do all right, and put a hand to Karen’s cheek.

She did not get what she had hoped for- warmth and color and movement. The cheek would have been cold and rubbery now, and even in the dark she could see that Karen’s eyes were wide open, staring into the nothing that comes after life.

She started to turn toward Doe. “But. She’s not-”

It was as far as she got before the handle of Doe’s gun came smashing down into the side of her head, knocking her over onto her daughter’s dead body. Her hand slipped into a congealed pool of blood.

No way Doe was going to keep hitting her in the head. Sometimes people went fast, or so he had heard, but not in his experience. Doe knew you might have to hit a person five or six times- good hits, too- before they’d shut the fuck up. Instead, he took advantage of her daze and wrapped his hands around her scrawny neck, her turkey neck, and pressed in good and tight. He shoved his thumbs into her bobbing throat.

She struggled. Sure she did, but not nearly so much as he expected. It was like she’d given up, she knew it was too late. More than that, Doe knew what she was thinking, and for some reason it bothered him. He wanted to clear the record.

“I didn’t kill them,” he told her, looking right into her bugging eyes. “I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t me. The only person I’m killing today is you.”

He pressed in even tighter so that his hands hurt, and he sort of liked the throbbing warmth of her throat against his hands. For an instant, he wondered if he should stop, let her up, tell her it was all a joke. He hadn’t flashed his lights, but maybe people had seen them together, seen her crying. Still, what did it matter? A mother standing outside her daughter’s trailer, crying. Happened every day. No one would even think twice, he told himself, and under his hands he felt something like a chicken bone snap.

DESIREE SAT ON HER BED, cross-legged, wearing only her panties and her bikini top, a gray copy of the I Ching in her lap. For the past three weeks, she’d been coming to the same symbol again and again. No matter how she asked the question, no matter how she sought her answer, she kept coming back to the hsieh .

She drew it on the back of her left hand with a Sharpie so she would think about it constantly. Meditate on it. When it finally faded away in the slow tide of flaking skin, she would redraw it. Last week, she had passed a tattoo parlor on Federal Highway, and she thought about having it placed on her hand permanently, but she decided there was no point being permanent with a symbol of change.

B.B. saw it on her hand and said it looked like a bunch of lines, and she guessed they all did, but this pictogram, she knew, derived from the image of two hands holding on to the horns of an ox. It signified transformation, addressing and fixing a problem. It was her symbol. She had to fix the problem, and the problem was her life with B.B.

She was now twenty-four, and she’d been with him for three years, fixing his meals and driving his car, organizing his calendar, reserving his tables in restaurants. She bought his groceries and paid his bills, answered his door, mixed his drinks. He needed her, and she knew that, she loved that. She felt grateful, too. She’d been about as lost as you could get when he’d taken her in. He’d done it for his own reasons, to exorcise his demons, but he’d still done it.

Those first few days, weeks, even months, she’d slept lightly, watching the door handle, waiting to see B.B. slink in under cover of darkness and claim his due. Maybe not that first day, when her stench had been so bad that even she had had to breathe through her mouth not to gag, but once she’d cleaned up, got off the crank, bought some new clothes- different story then. Her old face started to come back in the mirror. Flesh grew on bone, cheeks reddened and rounded, her nose became less narrow, less sharp, her hair less brittle. She had become herself.

B.B. had told her that no matter what happened, no matter how clean, how happy, she became, she’d never stop wanting to use. The crank would always call to her. It would be a shadow that would haunt her; it was a rope tethered to her neck that would never stop tugging.

He was wrong. He was wrong because Desiree already had a shadow, she already had a tether. The crank had obscured it, hidden it- and God help her, that was what she had loved about it at first. But when she was clean, as she lay in the bed in B.B.’s Coral Gables house, staring at the endless rotation of the ceiling fan, listening to the distant sound of lawn mowers and car alarms, she found her way back to her sister.

Aphrodite had died during the procedure that had separated them. The girls hadn’t reached their second birthday when they’d performed the operation, which her mother had known was complicated, which risked the lives of both girls. The doctor had urged her on, however, telling her that his university would cover the costs. It was a great opportunity for the children and for science.

They’d separated the girls, who were linked from shoulder to hip, in what the doctors referred to as a “minor” omphalopagus. Yes, the girls were joined, but mostly by muscle and vascular tissue. Of the organs, only the liver was shared, and they believed they could separate the livers with a chance that both girls would live. The doctor had been clear: It was possible that they would both live, likely one would die, and unlikely neither would make it.

Aphrodite died. During the operation, not afterward, which maybe, the doctors had said, was better since it spared her days of painful lingering. But the prognosis for Desiree was quite good. She would have a scar for the rest of her life, and quite a large scar at that, but she would have a normal life.

Desiree learned that it was all a matter of what you called normal. Jeering in school locker rooms, every year settling into the role of de facto freak, fear of wearing a bathing suit, for example? Were these things normal? They were not, of course, beyond-the-pale odd. Lots of fat, ugly, and misshapen children had similar experiences, and they weren’t ready for the sideshow, but the whole world knew about Aphrodite. They knew Desiree had been a Siamese twin. Kids at school, for as long as she could remember, would pull back their eyes with their index fingers and sing that cat song from Lady and the Tramp. Somehow, inevitably, they learned Aphrodite’s name and asked after her as though she were still alive, still joined to Desiree. Every single year of middle and high school there was always at least one pair of kids- and once as many as four- who came for Halloween as conjoined twins.