David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

Doe drove out to the hog lot and parked his truck out back. He was alone, no chance he wasn’t, but even so he looked around carefully. He saw nothing but the pines, the undulating waste lagoon, a few egrets passing overhead, and a waddling trio of ducks- the ugly kind with gnarled red knobs on their beaks. An enormous toad, almost the size of a dinner plate, sat glumly in his path. It was low and fat and sprawled out as though its own size had been a horrible mistake. Doe gauged the distance to the waste lagoon. It might be possible, just possible, to punt it all the way over there, watch it splash into a shitty death. But he didn’t do it. Letting it live was punishment enough.

Mitch had designed the door to the lab so that it was practically invisible from the outside if you didn’t know where to look- just slats in the corrugated metal exterior of the hog lot. Doe slid his fingers inside and pulled the hidden latch outward. The door swung open and a blast of cool air hit him hard. He always winced. Always. Like the cool air might contain the same toxic cloud that killed Mitch. But it was just the AC, cranking hard. Unlike the hog lot proper, which he kept just cool enough to keep the hogs alive, the lab was downright chilly. If it went over sixty-five degrees, alarms went off to warn them. He had a special receiver in his house, in his car, in the office. It seemed like a good idea because of all the shit they had in there; if it got too hot, the place would erupt into a toxic mushroom cloud. So he kept it under sixty-five degrees.

Christ, he hated the place, and he avoided it as best he could. Bastard had made it easy. Piece of shit though he was, he had been good at his job, had been able to make sure everything went as it should, and he could cook quickly and safely. All of that freed Doe from having to do more than the occasional spot visit. Say good-bye to that for a while. He’d be practically living in this shithole until he felt he could trust their new cook- as soon as they could find one.

After the cool, the first thing that hit him was the stench. An impressive trick considering that he’d been walking along the shore of the waste lagoon. But that was what the waste lagoon was for- it disguised the stink, the gripping, knife-sharp, gut-churning stink like cat piss that rammed through his eyes and up into his brain the instant he crossed the threshold. Doe grabbed at one of the face masks, the kind favored by workers removing asbestos, hanging near the door. It helped a little, but he could still smell it, and he could hear, softly through the wall, the low, pathetic grunting of hogs.

The cooking gear lay everywhere- empty containers of stove fuel, starting fluid, ammonia, iodine, lye, Drano, propane, ether, paint thinner, Freon, chloroform, and sinisterly marked containers of hydrochloric acid, more skull-and-bones symbols than a pirate hideout. There were open boxes of cold and asthma medicine, crap they bought by the caseload from Mexico. In one corner were hundreds of empty wooden matchboxes, and scattered around lay thousands, maybe millions, of little wooden sticks whose red phosphorus Bastard would spend hours scrapping into a metal mixing bowl while listening to Molly Hatchet. Every once in a while, he was supposed to destroy as much of this stuff as he could, take it somewhere out of town and burn it. Holy Jesus, they didn’t risk dumping it, but it looked like Bastard might have been a little lax on that point of late. That he had been lax about the trash suggested he’d been lax about other things, and that was about as disturbing a thought as you could reasonably have.

Doe walked around a large wooden table with three hot plates, half a dozen coffeemakers, and a huge, tipped-over box of rock salt. He maneuvered around the pit- a hole ten feet in diameter, maybe eight feet deep, dug right into the dirt floor, where they poured the used lye and acid. Then he made his way back past the hulking old ice machine. The cooling process demanded a lot of ice, and Doe had decided it was too suspicious to keep buying their own. He’d heard about a couple of guys in California, where the cops were starting to pay attention to crank, who got nabbed because they bought a twelve-pack of beer and twenty bags of ice to go with it. A sharp-eyed cop saw the transaction, figured something was up, and followed them to their lab. So Doe had bought this used machine out of state. One more reason why he would last while the others fell before his mighty empire.

Behind the ice machine, which he wheeled aside, he found the spot on the particleboard covering of the wall. A quick push and the flap opened, revealing the safe. Two thoughts shot through Doe’s mind. One was that he would find the money in there, that Bastard had been keeping the money in the safe, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to keep cash and product together. The other thought was that the safe would be entirely empty. Neither turned out to be true.

Inside the safe he found a brown Publix shopping bag filled with dozens of little plastic bags of yellowish powder. All in all, about a pound of nicely diluted meth. Without factoring in overhead, it had cost a couple of hundred dollars in ingredients to cook. He would be able to sell it for close to five thousand.

Doe did another quick pass-through. He wanted to make sure nothing was cooking, nothing hot, nothing in the works when Bastard had got himself killed.

That was the problem with this stuff. It was gold, pure profit, and the cops didn’t give a shit about it. But it could explode if you looked at it funny. You made the stuff by soaking over-the-counter cold medicine in toxic chemicals, reducing the ephedrine out of it; and the process required- and produced as by-products- shit so deadly that you could fight a war with it. He’d heard countless stories- meth labs exploding, the cooks all found dead or worse than dead from acid and lye burns, searing chemicals in their lungs that made them pray for a bullet in the brain.

Everything looked turned off, cool, and nonexplosive- no frothing chemical reactions, no smoke or burning smell or hiss of seeping chemicals. Doe got out of there, got out right quick, shut off the light, and didn’t take off the mask until he was outside and could breathe in the pure shit stench of the waste lagoon.

Back in the truck, he predicted he could have everything taken care of within a few hours. Drive off to Jacksonville, unload the product to the distributors. At a couple of places, he would need to pick up twenty-gallon containers of urine. It had been Mitch, stupid dead Mitch, who had discovered that crankheads processed meth very badly, and you could recycle their urine. They’d been giving good deals to anyone who provided a healthy quantity of the stuff, and there was a certain pleasure in getting people hooked on meth and then harvesting their own piss to keep them hooked.

Bastard had loved that part. Now the asshole was dead. Doe didn’t know what it proved, but he was sure it proved something.

EVERY TIME WE WENT OUT on the road, we ended up in a motel near a Waffle House. Maybe Florida law stated that motels had to be built near a Waffle House. Anything, I was coming to understand, might be as true as anything else. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I thought I should eat something, so after I got out of the Gambler’s room I headed over. It was probably where most of the bookmen would be eating- including, I hoped, Chitra, who I had not forgotten seemed to think I might be cute.

The Waffle House sat on the other side of the highway off-ramp, and to get to it you had to cross an empty lot full of sandy dirt and thorny weeds and huge, undulating fire-ant mounds. Fat crickets and toads the size of my thumbnail hopped out of my way as I walked slowly, making certain I didn’t step in anything that would bite me. Litter from the highway punctuated the field, and there were piles of broken green and brown beer bottle glass, and a run-down wooden shack about as long and as wide as three Jiffy Johns placed side by side. I decided to plot a course far around it in case a derelict had set up camp there.