The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (5 page)

Could I trust him? He’d barged into my life, murdered a pair of prospects in front of my eyes, and then set me up to take the blame. I nodded.

“Fab,” the assassin said. “Now, I’d say it was time for you to be getting out of here.”

Leaving seemed to be a pretty good idea. More than I could have hoped for. I stood on wobbling legs, held on to the table until I could support myself properly, and began a sideways shuffle toward the front door, careful to keep an eye on the killer at all times.

“Lemuel,” the assassin said, “I hope you’ll consider the back way. Secrecy and all.”

Vaguely humiliated, I went into the living room and unlocked the back door. I stepped out into the yard, where the heat and the dank, outhouse-stench humidity startled me out of my fear for a moment. I had seen people killed just feet away from me, I had sat at the table with their killer, and I had made it out alive. I was not going to be killed.

Now I just had to get away from there before the cops showed up.

It would be easy to cut over to the neighbor’s property, so I closed the door behind me and stepped out into the dank darkness. The ghost of the moon was glowing behind a heavy blanket of clouds. The crickets chirped their near screeching chorus, and nearby, an unfathomable tropical frog bellowed its equatorial song. A mosquito dive-bombed my ear, but I ignored the explosive buzz. Instead I trudged forward, vaguely aware as I walked that the lights in Bastard and Karen’s trailer went metaphorically out.

Bastard and Karen. He irritating and vaguely sinister. She jagged and beaten down. Dead. The two of them dead. Their kids, off somewhere, were now orphans and had no idea. Their young lives, as they had lived them, were finished. And I had been a party to it. I had witnessed the unspeakable horror of their deaths and then sat with their killer and, I realized, found him strangely charming. It wasn’t as though I could have saved Bastard and Karen, but I told myself I could do something now. I could go to the police, and go fast, maybe in time for them to catch the assassin while he was still in the trailer. And even if they didn’t get there in time, no one would believe that I had killed them.

Then again, they might.

The assassin, when not assassinating, acted like a reasonable guy. It could be that he believed, really believed, that Bastard and Karen deserved it. But did anyone deserve it? Did I live in a world in which bad people were killed by righteous assassins? Nothing in my life told me it was so, but then again, this night had been in my life.

The first two trailers I passed were dark, though I heard an angry dog’s sonorous barking in the middle distance. I came out onto a street, though not the one on which Bastard and Karen lived, which somehow made me feel better. It was a little less than a mile to the Kwick Stop, and only a couple of cars passed me, speeding by in automotive oblivion. I told myself over and over again that I just might get away with this, I just might get my life back.

Chapter 5

T
HE
C
UTTING
B
OARD
lacked music. It was a large restaurant, with a moderately unfortunate name, composed of a series of interlinked wood-paneled rooms filled out with white-clothed tables and heavy wooden chairs. Yet it lacked music, and that disappointed B.B. He liked music, soft music, trickling in so quietly that he could hardly hear it. Ambient as a distant highway, but still evanescently there, adding texture to the meal, a little heft if the conversation lagged, a touch of the cinematic sound track. Classical was fine, the soft sort of classical, not the loud stuff with horns and kettledrums, but the truth was that B.B. liked elevator music. He knew everyone got a kick out of trashing elevator music, and let them have their laugh, but in the end they had to agree there was something reassuring about these songs everyone already knew, maybe in a more raucous form, handed back all soft and powdery, prechewed, going down so smooth that you didn’t even know there was something in your throat.

This restaurant skipped the music. And no fish tank. He liked a fish tank. B.B. wasn’t one of those guys who took cruel pleasure picking which fish gets to die—he had to make cruel decisions enough for work—but he liked to look at fish. He liked to watch them swim, especially the big goldfish with the bulging eyes, and he liked the bubbling in the tank.

The Cutting Board had palm trees, though—a few small groves of plastic palms stuck here and there to give the place a touch of class. Palm trees were important for obscuring views. He didn’t want to be seen, and he didn’t want to see. The glory of a fine restaurant was its semiprivacy. Pillars could work, too, but he liked the palm trees since the fronds added extra cover. The restaurant was also into low, ambient lighting, so in the end, the dark and the plastic trees made it acceptable despite its other drawbacks. B.B. would return at some point. It would never be on his A-list, but he would put it on rotation. In any case, he didn’t like to visit a place more than once every six months. The last thing you want is for the waiters to start to recognize you, recognizing that the last time you were in it was a different boy, and the time before that, too.

It was a little steak-and-seafood place near the Ft. Lauderdale airport, far enough away from Miami that he wouldn’t just happen to bump into anyone he knew, and catering largely to the old and retired set, so that his sort of people—the nonwithered, the surgically nonwithered, the power-golf players, the Rolex wearers, and the convertible drivers—would never be caught dead in a place like this. B.B. believed firmly in picking places that drew the old and the retired. A man could be a prince in the eyes of a waiter simply by not sending back the drinking water for being the wrong temperature.

On the other side of B.B.’s candlelit table, Chuck Finn sat in concentration as he worked a breadstick with a waxy slab of butter. He’d have it under control for a second or two before it slipped out from under his knife, and Chuck would lurch in sudden and astonishingly ungraceful motions to regain his grip on it. And each time he would smile at B.B., flash those slightly crooked teeth in sophisticated self-deprecation, and then go back to his business. The third time, B.B. had been forced to reach across the table to keep the boy from knocking his goblet of Saint-Estèphe onto the tablecloth. At $45 a bottle, he wasn’t about to let any of it tip over, particularly when the boy had taken his first sip, probably his first sip of wine ever, and nodded with knowing appreciation. At a steakhouse, a man drinks a nice Bordeaux. It doesn’t get much more complicated than that. Most of the other boys, maybe all of the other boys, had taken a sip, grimaced, and asked for a Coke. Chuck had half closed his eyes in pleasure and let the tip of his very pink tongue tickle his upper lip. Chuck got it, and B.B. began to suspect that he had on his hands not only a boy willing to be mentored, but one ready to be mentored.

He’d taken only one sip, and then somehow the glass was covered with greasy boy-fingerprints. B.B. understood that’s what it was to be a boy. Boys made messes. They almost knocked over wine. Sometimes they did knock over wine, and unless you were eager to keep from drawing attention to yourself, you didn’t much care because you didn’t keep boys from being boys. That wasn’t a mentor’s job. A mentor turned a boy in the right direction so that at some future date, when the time was right, he’d become a man. That’s how you mentored.

“Be graceful, Chuck,” B.B. said in what he hoped was his most mentorly tone. “Grace is poise, and poise is power. Look at me. You want to be like me when you grow up.”

B.B. pointed at himself when he spoke, as if he were exhibit A. If you pointed at yourself, people looked, and he had no reason to mind that. He had turned fifty-five this year—a bit on the mature side, though still in his prime—but people mistook him for forty, forty-five max. Partly it was the Grecian Formula, the use of which he had elevated to an art, and partly it was the lifestyle. An hour with the Nautilus machines three times a week wasn’t much of an investment for youth. Then there were the clothes.

He dressed, and there was no other term for it,
Miami Vice.
He’d been considering linen suits and T-shirts before the show came on the air, but once he saw those guys strutting around in those clothes, B.B. knew it was the look for him. It was the right look for a man of hidden but smoldering power. And that show—God bless it—was single-handedly transforming Miami from a necropolis of retirees, marbled with pockets of black or Cuban poverty, into someplace almost hip, almost fabulous, almost glamorous. The smell of mothballs and Ben-Gay drifted off, replaced by the scent of suntan lotion and titillating aftershave.

B.B. watched as Chuck continued to work the butter, and the breadstick was now glossy and slick and, though it might have been a trick of the light, even starting to sag a little.

“I think that’s enough butter.” He said it in a mentorly tone—sympathetic but firm.

“I like a lot of butter,” Chuck said with naïve cheer.

“I understand you want it, but there’s such a thing as discipline, Chuck. Discipline will make you a man.”

“Can’t argue with that.” Chuck set the butter knife, with its half-used pat still clinging, onto the tablecloth.

“Place the butter knife on the bread plate, where it belongs, young man.”

“Good point,” Chuck observed. He set the breadstick on the bread plate as well, wiped his hands on the heavy linen napkin on his lap, and then took another sip of the Saint-Estèphe. “That’s really good. How did you get to know so much about wine?”

Working as a waiter in Las Vegas, trying to make it through my shift so I could go lose even more money I didn’t have, get into it even deeper with a bodybuilding, shirtless Greek loan shark
would not have suited as an answer, so B.B. offered a knowing shrug, hoping it would impress.

He had selected boys before, boys from his charity, the Young Men’s Foundation. These were special boys he thought would be able to dine with him, spend a few hours alone in his company, and mature from the experience. He looked for calm and steadiness in the boys, but he also looked for the ability to keep a secret. These dinners were special, and because they were special, they weren’t any of the world’s business. The dinners were only for those very exceptional boys worthy of extra mentoring, but in the three years he had been taking boys out to eat, a thought had always nagged at him—that he selected his dining companions for their ability to keep a secret rather than for their readiness to be mentored.

Now, here was Chuck—quiet, slightly introverted if not antisocial, trashy-novel-reading, journal-writing, obliviously-badly-haircutted Chuck—who knew how to keep a secret but had a sense of humor, had an intuitive appreciation for complex wines, obedient and pliable, but with an impish resistance. B.B. felt an excited tingle shoot out from the center of his body like a miniature supernova. Here, he dared to speculate, might well be the boy he’d been looking for, the special mentee, the reason he had wanted to help boys in the first place.

What if Chuck was everything he appeared? Smart, interested, full of soft-clay potential? Could B.B. arrange to spend more time with him? What would the boy’s worthless mother say? What would Desiree say? Nothing could work without Desiree, and he knew, without quite admitting it to himself, that Desiree would not be happy.

Chuck now turned his attention to the breadstick. He picked it up and was readying himself to take a bite when B.B. reached out with one hand and gently encircled Chuck’s wrist. Normally he didn’t like to touch the boys. He didn’t want them or anyone else to think that there was something not right about his mentoring. Nevertheless, sometimes when two people were together there was going to be a certain amount of touching. Life worked that way. They might accidentally brush up against each other. B.B. might put an affectionate hand on a boy’s shoulder or tousle his hair, press a hand to his back, give him a pat on the butt to hurry him along. Or it might be something like this.

Chuck had been an instant away from putting the breadstick in his mouth when B.B. saw the fingernails. Black dirt, packed into discrete geologic chunks, hibernating under the shelter of nails weeks overdue for trimming. Some things you could dismiss, put in the boys-will-be-boys category, look the other way. Some things, however, you could not. Some things were too much to ignore. If B.B. was a mentor, then he had to mentor.

He kept his grip gentle but the hand motionless. “I want you to put the breadstick down,” B.B. said, “and go wash your hands before you eat. Scrub those fingernails good. I don’t want to see any dirt under them when you get back.”

Chuck looked at his nails and then at B.B. He had no father, an impatient gnome of a mother, an older brother in a wheelchair as the result of a car accident—the impatient gnome of a mother had slammed her Chevy Nova into a sable palm a few years back, and B.B. suspected to the point of deep certainty that there’d been heavy drinking involved. Chuck slept on a tattered foldout couch with springs, he felt sure, as pliant and welcoming as upturned dinner forks. He did miserably in school because he tuned out his teachers and read whatever he felt like during class. He wasn’t the weakest kid around, but he got his share of ass kicking, and he gave his share, too.

Chuck had plenty of pride, and it was the frail and bitter pride of a desperate boy. B.B. had seen it often enough—these powerless boys growing red in the face, flashing their teeth like cornered lemurs, lashing out at their mentor because their pride demanded they lash out at someone, even if it was the only person in the world who truly wanted to help. B.B. understood it, anticipated it, knew how to defuse it.

This time, however, he did not get it.

Chuck studied his fingernails and then turned to B.B. with another of those self-deprecating smiles that made B.B. feel as though something in his body had just melted.

“They are pretty dirty,” he agreed. “I’ll go wash up.”

B.B. let go of the wrist. “You’re a fine young man,” he said. And then he watched Chuck walk away. The kid looked good, there was no denying that. He’d made an effort to clean his best clothes—a pair of green chinos and a button-down white shirt. He wore a cloth belt, his socks matched his brown shoes, and his brown shoes had been polished. It all meant one thing: The boy was letting himself be mentored.

He was back in under two minutes. He’d just scrubbed and returned. Hadn’t even taken the time to piss. Now he sat, took another drink of the wine, and nodded at B.B. as though they’d just entered into a contract. “Thanks for taking me out like this, Mr. Gunn. I really appreciate it.”

“It’s my pleasure, Chuck. You are an exceptional young man, and I’m happy to help you in any way I can.”

“That’s really nice of you.” Chuck held B.B.’s gaze with mature confidence.

The astronomical tingling was back, turning into B.B.’s own private cosmic event. It was almost as though Chuck were trying to tell him something, trying to let B.B. know that he was comfortable with the friendship between a young man and his mentor. B.B. looked at the boy with his thin frame, his face a little too round for his body, his tousled brown hair and strangely brilliant brown eyes. The boy
was
trying to tell him something, that he was ready for mentoring, whatever mentoring B.B. might wish to pursue, and the air at the table was electric.

Chuck finished his glass of wine, and B.B. poured him another. Then the boy bit into the breadstick with a ferocious clamp of his jaws. Crumbs sprayed out across the table, and the sound of it echoed halfway across the restaurant. Chuck looked up at his mentor, alarm preparing to settle on his face, but he saw B.B.’s amused smile, and he let out a little laugh. They both laughed. Several of the retirement zombies looked over with disapproving scowls. B.B. made eye contact with all of them, dared them to say anything.

When the black man approached their table, at first B.B. thought it might be the manager there to complain. Maybe one of the retirees had convinced them to initiate an effective-immediately no children policy. But the black man didn’t work for the restaurant. It was the darkness that kept B.B. from recognizing him right away. Otto Rose.

He wore a blue suit, and even in the dark B.B. could tell it was just a nudge short of electric blue, but the rest of the outfit was conservative and businesslike: richly polished oxfords, a white shirt, a rep tie crafted into a massive and artful four-in-hand. Otto hovered over the table with that imperial grace he loved to exude. He looked something like a cross between an actor and a third world dictator. Though barely thirty, which was irritating enough, he appeared hardly more than twenty, even with his head shaved. B.B. had been watching his hair thin with each year, maybe even each month, but Otto shaved his head and looked good doing it. The slick of his skin glowed from the candles of the surrounding tables.

The sudden and inexplicable appearance of Otto Rose was, by any standards B.B. could think of, bad news. Bad news because no one but Desiree was supposed to know where B.B. was. Bad news because Otto Rose was standing there, watching him mentor, watching him dine with an eleven-year-old boy in an expensive steakhouse, a bottle of Saint-Estèphe opened and two glasses, one for an underage boy. Bad news because Otto might be a business friend, but he was the kind of friend B.B. would love to shed. Bad news because there was no reason in the world why Rose should want to find him unless it was bad news.