David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

This happened three years after Vegas, and when B.B. met with the top crew chiefs in the state, he knew one of them. A guy by the name of Kenny Rogers, called himself the Gambler. He didn’t recognize B.B., but B.B. recognized him. The Gambler was the thug who’d beaten B.B. with the broom handle in his Vegas apartment. B.B. down on the ground, hands over his head, the sounds of the neighbor’s dog barking, the neighbor’s TV turned up loud to pretend he couldn’t hear, and B.B.’s own sobbing filling his ears.

B.B. had been thinking only of revenge, of exorcising his demons, when he’d hired the Gambler. Let him work for B.B. Let him think he was doing a great job, in on the deepest secrets of the organization, part of the whole planning process. B.B. was keeping the Gambler close, figuring out where and how he would get even, make things right in the universe. As time went by, however, the revenge never happened. The Gambler made B.B. money, way too much money to remove him so thoughtlessly, and the greater truth was that if B.B. did take revenge, then he would no longer have the pleasure of anticipating the sweetness of payback. So B.B. had kept the Gambler where he was and occasionally thought about what he might do to him.

Things had gone so well for so long, he should have expected something like this.

“Can you get me the thing I asked for?” B.B. said. He tap tap tapped a pencil on the night table.

“I don’t know.” The Gambler kept his voice devoid of content. “Right now it’s missing.”

“Missing? Jesus Christ. Where’s, um, the guy who is supposed to have it?”

“He’s gone. Gone in a permanent and messy way, if you know what I’m saying.”

“What the hell is going on there? Who caused him to get gone?”

“No idea,” the Gambler said. “We’re working on it.”

“Yeah, you working on getting me my stuff, too?”

“We’re working on it, but right now we don’t have a whole lot to go on.”

“Am I going to have to come out there?” B.B. asked.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” the Gambler said. “We can take care of everything. I’ll keep you updated.”

B.B. hung up the phone. He’d keep them updated. Great, with their little “I spy with my little eye” games?

He turned to Desiree. “Get dressed. We’re going to Jacksonville,” he said.

She scrunched up her nose. “I hate Jacksonville.”

“Of course you hate Jacksonville. Everyone hates Jacksonville. No one goes to Jacksonville because they like it.”

“Then why do people go to Jacksonville?”

“To find their money,” B.B. said, “and to make sure their people aren’t trying to rip them off.” And maybe, he thought, to take care of the Gambler. If he’d lost the payment, then there was a pretty good chance he’d outlived his usefulness. Maybe even if he could find the money.

The Gambler hung up the phone. The asshole was going to come up here; he just knew it. The last thing he needed was B.B. and his freak-show girlfriend messing around with the business. Technically, of course, it was B.B.’s business, but that struck the Gambler as more a matter of happenstance than anything else. He’d stumbled into this deal. Met some people. Formed some alliances. Whatever. The money came in not because B.B. was so smart, but because people were willing to buy crank, crank was cheap to make, there wasn’t much competition for the market, and the cops were too busy chasing after cocaine cowboys to pay much mind to homemade meth. They could sell it out of ice-cream trucks- hell, they practically did- without the feds or local law taking notice. They had bigger fish to fry than some homemade bullshit that you could cook up out of over-the-counter asthma medicine.

The truth was that there was a lot more money to be made, and the Gambler was sick and fucking tired of baby-sitting this encyclopedia zoo. He wasn’t going to have the strength for it much longer, and he was ready to move on, to help expand the empire. He needed something less physically taxing, something that would enable him to sit and think. And make money. He’d told B.B. as much, though he left out the part about worrying about his strength. B.B. hadn’t been interested.

“Right now,” he’d said, “we’re all making money, the cops are oblivious, and everything is just fine. We get greedy, everything could fall apart.”

It was easy for B.B. to be happy with the status quo. He didn’t have to hang out with these door-to-door fuckos and assholes like Jim Doe. He didn’t have to perform for the sales monkeys twice a day. And he didn’t have to worry about the day coming- and it could be in a couple of years, maybe even next year- when he wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, when the medical bills would begin to pile in, when he would need the cash to make sure someone was taking care of him so he didn’t end up with psychopathic orderlies who would stick pins in his eyeballs just for the fun of it.

The Gambler had never been anything but effective and loyal, and he was getting sick of B.B.’s ingratitude. Not just ingratitude- there was something else. B.B.’s new residence in the land of oblivion. He was checked out. On another planet. That was no way to run this kind of operation. The Gambler had worked with guys in Vegas who could run six operations at one time, have three phone conversations, and handicap a weekend’s worth of football games- and give them all their full attention. Fucking B.B. couldn’t figure out if a yellow light meant speed up or slow down without fucking Desiree to tell him.

And sure, the money was good, but it wasn’t going to be enough- not when he began to decline.

He’d been forced to leave off working for the Greek in Vegas when the freezing started. He probably ought to have gone to a doctor right away. You’re in the middle of kicking someone’s ass and you just freeze, bat over your head, like you’ve turned into an action figure- that’s usually a sign to head for the doctor. But it was an isolated incident, a freak thing, so he forgot about it. Then it happened again three or four months later, out on a date with a showgirl. Ruined the whole thing. Then three months after that, this time while playing golf. Midswing- and frozen, just like that.

He’d been with the Greek that time, and the Greek had wanted to know, reasonably enough, what the fuck was going on.

Five doctors later, it was confirmed. ALS: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Lou Gehrig’s disease. A form of muscular dystrophy. He was now one of Jerry Lewis’s fucking kids. It could start in any number of ways- muscle spasms, loss of coordination, slurring of speech, clumsiness, and the Gambler’s own freakish freezes. It would progress until he was a complete physical nothing, unable to move, even to breathe or swallow on his own, while his mind, meanwhile, remained in perfect working order.

It could happen slowly or it could happen quickly. No one knew. In the Gambler’s case, the progress appeared to be slow, so that gave him time to get his shit in order. It wasn’t the death he feared. He knew that death wasn’t the end; he’d seen those pictures of ghosts, heard the recordings of voices from the other side, even been to a medium who let him speak to his dead mother. Knowing that the body was but a shell and the soul lived on had helped him in his enforcement work in Vegas. It’s not so hard to beat someone to death if you know you’re not doing any permanent damage. What scared him was the time leading up to death, when he was alone and helpless, and the only thing that was going to keep him from being abused and tormented was money. He needed money.

If he told B.B. the truth, B.B. would be sympathetic, understanding, and he would send him on his way. Maybe with a nice little bonus, but not nearly enough. The Gambler needed money, piles and piles of money, enough money to pay for the bills, to pay for a personal nurse and pay the nurse so well that she would do anything to keep him happy and healthy.