David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

“Fuck.” He picked up the handset and punched the button to switch over to the right line. He always kept the phone on one of the dead lines, since he liked the feeling of pushing the button when he took a call. It made him feel like he was an executive. Which he basically was, just an unconventional sort of executive.

“So, what’s the status?” he asked the Gambler. “Everything in line?”

There was a pause. It was the sort of pause that B.B. did not much like.

“Not really.” The voice was flat. “Wouldn’t be calling now if it were.”

“What does that mean?” He looked over at Desiree, who was leaning against the door with her arms folded, studying him. She wore a white bathrobe and probably nothing else underneath. A lot of guys, scar or no, would find that pretty sexy, he figured. And the fact that it might be kind of sexy seemed, for an instant, kind of sexy. Then the feeling passed.

“It means,” the Gambler told him, “that there’s a serious problem, the sort I may not be able to get resolved.”

B.B. hated having to talk in code on the phone, but even though there was no evidence the feds gave the slightest shit about his dealings, you had to assume they were listening, which meant you had to spend a lot of time talking around the issue, and that got awkward when you didn’t even know what the issue was.

Who needed these hassles? Wasn’t all of this supposed to be hassle free? Not really, but it was supposed to be easy, and he guessed it was. B.B. had inherited his hog lot outside Gainesville from his father’s father, a red-faced old man with wisps of white hair that stuck out of his head as though they’d been rammed in by a vengeful enemy. He was so ornery that he was like a parody of an ornery old man, cursing and spitting tobacco in a rage and slapping away kind hands, grandchildish hugs, bologna sandwiches- anything anyone might offer. Visits to the farm had been an unrelenting torment. The old man would put him to work shoveling hog shit, mopping up pools of hog piss, dragging dead hog carcasses by their hooves.

If he even gestured toward an expression of complaint, his grandfather would tell him to shut the fuck up and smack him in the head, sometimes with his hand, a few times with a mostly empty sack of feed, once with an old-fashioned metal lunchbox. There were other punishments, too, in the empty barn, when B.B. broke “the farmer’s code,” a fluid list of regulations that had been omitted from the Poor Richard’s Almanac. B.B. never learned the code, understood its rules or parameters, but a few times a year his grandfather would come up on him, looking especially tall and dirty. He’d spit a wad of dip in B.B.’s direction and tell him he’d broken the farmer’s code and he needed to be mentored in the old barn. He had no idea what the word meant, had no idea what it was to mentor a boy. He was a monster, and by the time B.B. became old enough to make decisions for himself, he vowed never to see the old man again.

Then, ten years ago, the old man died. He’d reached ninety-seven, kept alive by free-floating Achilles-like wrath and a similarly quasi-divine hatred of do-gooders, women, television, politicians, corporations, changing fashions, and a world turning ever more youthful while he turned ever older. B.B.’s own father had died long before in a drunken and coke-fueled motorcycle accident, the helmetlessness of which smacked of suicide. After his grandfather’s death came the registered letter from the lawyer telling him he’d inherited the farm, and at just the right time, too, since things had not been going so well for B.B. in some of the various careers he’d been trying on, including car salesman, unlicensed real estate agent, landscaper, security guard, and a stint as a Las Vegas poker player.

This last had involved long and delirious runs under casino lights that obscured the difference between night and day, drunkenness and sobriety, winning and losing. He now remembered hyperbolic laughing, raking piles of chips toward his chest, and he remembered that the next day he’d mysteriously have no money. But those weren’t the memories that came to him most often. When he thought of Vegas, he thought of the shirtless Greek he owed (and still owed) $16,000 sending a thug to beat him so hard with a broom handle that his ribs still ached when he sneezed more than ten years later. He thought of his shameful retreat from town, sitting on a bus and disguised as an Eastern Orthodox priest, the only plausible costume he could get on short notice. It was that or flee town as a pirate or a mummy.

With no other options, he took on hog farming. It paid the bills, though barely, but it stank and filled him with a vile repulsion toward animals, animals that stank and shat and demanded food and bellowed in pain and misery and deserved to die as punishment for being alive. And the land itself- that god-awful farm with its memories of his fucking grandfather, for whose sake alone he sincerely hoped there was such a place as hell. The barn by its simple proximity so disturbed his sleep that he convinced a trio of potbellied and thick-forearmed locals to take it down for him. He paid them in beer and a whole roasted pig.

Going back to the farm, working his grandfather’s lots, had been degrading, a waking nightmare, but he’d been broke, beyond broke, and the farm kept him afloat. There was money for food and a roof over his head and occasionally the wines he’d learned to love in Vegas.

Then this guy he almost knew- spoken to a few times in a local bar, a friend of one of the men who had taken down the barn- a biker in a gang called the DevilDogs, came to see him one night. How would he feel if a couple of the boys set up a small lab on the property? No one would know, since the smell of the pigs would hide the smell of cooking meth. B.B. wouldn’t have to do anything except keep quiet, and he’d get $1,000 a month.

It was a good deal. After a month or so of not wanting to know about it, B.B. began to hang out with the meth cooks, learn how they did it, learn how easy it was to turn a few hundred dollars’ worth of over-the-counter cold medicine into speed so potent that it made coke look like a watery cup of Maxwell House. Then the guys who worked the lab were busted while distributing. He figured they’d roll on him, but they never did. He figured other guys from the operation would come by and take over the lab, but they never did. There it was, a fully operational moneymaking machine on his property. He’d be crazy to ignore it.

The problem was, B.B. hadn’t known the first thing about distributing drugs. Had no idea how to go about it. He couldn’t see himself on the corner, wearing a trench coat, psst ing to any skinny, trailer-trashy redneck with an oversize shirt and a dull look in his eyes. He continued to make the meth- not large quantities, only an ounce or two a month while he got the hang of it. It seemed like a good idea to keep the quantities small, since making meth when you didn’t know what you were doing was like holding a jar of nitroglycerin on a roller coaster.

He made it and he stored it. Just a hobby, really, like putting ships in a bottle. It took only a couple of days of work, and then there it was, this lovely yellow powder. He got better, more confident, made more, learned how to dispose of the waste, which was so toxic that it ate through the ground. Within a year, he had thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff and no idea how to unload it.

When he read in the business section of a local newspaper that Champion Encyclopedias was looking for someone to run an operation in the state, it all began to come together for him. He convinced them he was an entrepreneur, that he could run the book business as well as he ran his “agricultural concern”- his term. But enthusiasm was wasted on them. They cared no more for his acumen than his crew chiefs cared for the acumen of new bookmen. You hire everyone you can, you cast them to the waves, and you see who’s still floating.