David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

“And we just waltz onto this property and start digging around through pig crap and no one will mind? Is that it?”

“No one will be there. There’s no Old MacDonald. There’s no oink oink here and oink oink there. The evil brilliance of these things is that they require virtually no maintenance. Just someone to stop by once a day to make sure the animals are fed.”

“How do you know that the guy who feeds them won’t be there?”

Melford shrugged. “Because I killed him yesterday.”

I sucked in a breath. I felt the painful jolt of realization. “Is that why you killed Bastard? Because he worked at a pig farm?”

“Relax. I’m nowhere near that arbitrary. That had nothing to do with it. I feel sorry for most of the employees at these places- they’re exploited just like the animals are. They earn low wages and labor for employers who neglect their health and safety. They’re victims. The owners deserve to die, not the workers. No, this is a coincidence.” He paused thoughtfully. “Sort of.”

Melford pulled off the main road and drove behind the trailer park, then made a sharp right onto a dirt road that I might never have noticed even if I’d passed by a dozen or more times. It cut through a dense wood of scraggly pine and wayward Florida shrubs and white rock. We followed this path for a good mile or so, and all the while the thick stench of sulfur and ammonia became stronger until it felt as if someone had fashioned an ice pick out of bad smells and was shoving it into my sinuses.

We arrived at a fence and Melford stopped the car, hopped out, and removed a key from his pocket, which he used to open a padlock. When he got back in the car, he was still grinning.

“Where did you get the key?” I asked.

“I have my methods.”

Back in the car, and after a little more wood-lined road, we pulled out into a clearing and I could see in front of us a large, flimsy-looking building with no windows. It was maybe two stories high and made out of what appeared to be aluminum sheets. The thing vaguely resembled a warehouse, but a nightmarish one, all alone in the clearing like it was. Or maybe it resembled a prison. I figured Melford must be getting to me.

He parked behind some pines so it wouldn’t be visible if someone happened by- better safe than sorry, Melford explained- and we got out and began to walk toward the building. I thought it smelled bad in the car, thought I was getting used to it, but it grew stronger, harsher. The stench in front of us was like a physical weight in the air. Walking into it was like walking against the force of a wind tunnel. How could anyone work here? How could people stand to live nearby? And the pigs themselves- but I decided not to consider that. I had bigger things to worry about, and I was determined that Melford’s obsession would not become my own.

Around the back of the warehouse, the grass and brush faded into a thick black dirt from which sprigs of grass shot upward intermittently. This beach extended maybe thirty feet, and then the lagoon began abruptly- so abruptly that I thought it must not only be man-made, but concrete lined. It was smaller than I imagined, the word lagoon suggesting tropical excess, lush green, misting waterfalls, flocks of shrill tropical birds exploding into flight. Waste lagoon turned out to be a euphemism, and when your euphemism has the word waste in it, you’re starting from a pretty bad place. I found not a lagoon but a ditch, the worst, most horrible ditch I could ever have imagined, maybe three hundred feet in diameter. Nothing grew near except a scattering of the most ragged of weeds- and the strangely miraculous exception of a single black mangrove tree, whose gnarled roots looped in and out of the soil and into the lagoon.

I expected to get mud on my shoes as we approached, but the dirt was as dry and crumbly as a moonscape. With each step, however, the stench grew worse, impossibly and exponentially worse. The stink, to my surprise, seemed to possess mind-altering qualities. My head grew light, my steps unbalanced. I held out my hands to keep my balance.

I kept my eye on the lagoon, as though a monster might emerge to devour us. At first I had thought it was a trick of the sunlight, but the contents were not merely shaded, they were brown. It was a brown pond of viscous sludge that undulated its bloated waves against the slick shoreline. Pond is to waste lagoon, I thought, my mind lapsing into SAT analogy, as human being is to zombie. A seething nimbus of insects hovered above, buzzing with mutant menace.

Melford stopped outside the perimeter, marked by a series of metal rods around the pond, linked by string with Day-Glo plastic ribbons that fluttered sickly in the mild breeze. “They’re probably in there,” he said, gesturing toward the pond.

“So that’s a waste lagoon?”

Melford nodded.

“That is all pig shit and pig piss?”

Melford nodded again.

“They all this vile?”

“Probably. I’ve never seen one close up before.”

I stared at him. “You’ve never seen one?”

“Never. It’s worse than I thought it would be. Bigger. More impenetrable.”

“It looks like a good place to hide bodies,” I said. “So, how do we find them?”

Melford shrugged. “We don’t. This was a stupid idea.”

“I’m sorry about the waste lagoon business,” he said. “It seemed like a reasonable plan when I came up with it.”

I shrugged, not quite sure what to say when a thoughtful assassin apologizes for the fact that his scheme to exhume the one body he didn’t kill has ended up so badly.

Toward the far side of the warehouse, we approached a pair of large double doors, imposingly sturdy against the rest of the building, which close up looked as if it had been made from punched tin. A massive padlock held the doors together.

“Next stop,” Melford said. He took out a key chain and opened the lock.

“How do you get these keys?” I asked.

He shook his head without looking up from the lock. “Lemuel, Lemuel, Lemuel. Have you not yet learned that Melford is a man of wonders? All doors yield to Melford.”

He pulled open a door, hung the lock on the latch, and gestured for me to enter.

I didn’t want to go inside. It was dark- not pitch dark, but gloomy. The building had no windows, and the only lights came from four or five naked bulbs that dangled from the ceiling. They were interspersed with slow-moving fans, which created a disorienting strobe effect, turning the space into a nightmarish nightclub of the damned. It smelled far worse than anything outside, worse than the lagoon, worse than a hundred lagoons. It was a different smell- mustier and muskier, thicker and more alive. A blast of cool air wafted from inside- not cool, really, but cooler than the scorching temperature outside. And there was the noise.

It was a low chorus of moans and grunts. I had no idea how many pigs were in there, but it had to be a great deal- dozens, hundreds, I had no idea.

Then Melford took out his pocket flashlight and pointed it forward, looking suddenly like Virgil in a Gustave Doré illustration from The Inferno.

I still couldn’t see very well, but I could see enough. Dozens and dozens of small pens were staggered from the entrance to the far end of the warehouse. Each pen could hold four or five animals comfortably, contained fifteen, possibly twenty. I couldn’t be certain because of how tightly they were packed. I watched the pen where Melford pointed his light. One pig was trying to move from one end of the pen to the other. As it pushed its way forward, it created a space that another pig had to fill. It was like a Rubik’s Cube. Nothing went in or out, and if one was going to move, it had to trade spaces with another animal. The floor was slotted to let their urine and feces pass through to a drainage system that would flush it to the lagoon, but the slots were too big, and the pig’s hooves kept getting caught. I saw one animal squeal as it yanked its leg free, and then it squealed again. Even in the gloom the blood on its hoof was clearly visible.