The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 1

IT WAS FRIDAY EVENING, just after seven o’clock, and still bright as noon. In Florida, August is perpetual, relentless, refusing to unclench its fist, and despite the looming sunset it was close to a hundred degrees. The heat settled in my body, dull and enervating, and it accentuated the smell that hung in the air- a stink both tangible and elusive, like the skin of grease on a cold bowl of stew. It was more than a smell, but a thing, heavy enough to weigh like cotton balls shoved into the back of your throat. A putrid miasma whirled and eddied through the streets of the trailer park. I don’t mean hot-garbage-by-the-curb smells- rotting chicken carcasses and old diapers and potato peelings. No such luck. It smelled like a prison camp outhouse. Worse.

I stood there on the spiderwebbed concrete step leading up to the mobile home, propping open the screen door with my shoulder. Sweat trickled down my side and clung to my overworked undershirt. I’d been at it since a little after lunch, and I was in a haze now, an automaton lost in the blankness of ringing doorbells, delivering my pitch, lurching forward again. I glanced left and right at the faded white mobile homes and thought it both amusing and profoundly sad that I couldn’t remember coming down this street.

I wanted nothing more than to make it inside someone’s home, to get out of the heat. The trailer’s window-unit air conditioner hummed and rattled and almost bucked, trickling condensation into an eroded gully of white sand. I was overdressed for the heat, and every few hours I needed a blast of AC, like an antidote, in order to keep up the fight. I’d chosen my attire not for comfort but to look smart and to do business: tan chinos, wrinkles smoothed out by the humidity, a thickly striped blue-and-white shirt, and a square-cut, knit turquoise tie, maybe three inches wide. It was 1985, and I thought the tie looked pretty cool.

I knocked again and then jammed my thumb into the glowing peach navel of the doorbell. No answer. The muted hum of a television or maybe a stereo barely pierced the door, and I saw a slight rustle of the slatted blinds, but still no answer. Not that I blamed them, whoever they were, squatting behind their sofa, pantomiming Shhhh with fingers pressed to lips. I was on their stoop, a teenager in a tie, trying to sell them something, they would think- rightly so- and who needed that? Then again, who needed them? It was a self-selecting system. I’d been doing this for only three months, but I knew that much already. The ones who came to the door were the ones you wanted to come to the door. The ones who let you in were the ones you wanted to let you in.

The heavy brown leather bag, which my stepfather had given me reluctant permission to borrow from its mildewing box in the garage, dug a trench into my shoulder. Touching the thing always made me feel dirty, and it smelled like split-pea soup. He hadn’t used the bag in years, but my stepfather had still thought it important to act put-upon before he reluctantly agreed to let me clean out the mouse droppings and polish it with leather restorer.

I adjusted the strap to lessen the pain and plodded down the steps and along the old walkway that bisected the lawn- really just an ocean of sand peppered with a few islands of crabgrass. At the street I looked in both directions, unsure which way to go, which way I’d come from, but down to my left I saw a flyer flapping lazily against the corner mailbox, affixed with a long swath of dull silver duct tape. The missing cat flyer. I’d seen- what?- two or three of those that day? Maybe twice as many missing dog flyers. Not all the same dog or cat, either, and I was sure I’d passed by this one already. It had a photocopied picture of a white or tan tabby with dark splotches across its face, its mouth open, tongue barely visible. Anyone seeing a plump kitty named Francine should call the number below.

I headed away from the flyer. I was sticking to the same side of the street, passing a vacant lot to get to the next trailer. My legs, defying the demand for pep from my brain, moved slowly, shuffling almost. I looked again at my watch, which hadn’t much budged since just before I rang the bell. At least four hours to go, and I needed to rest. I needed to be able to sit still for a while, but that wasn’t really it. What I needed was relief from thinking about the job, even a good night’s sleep, as if such a thing were possible, but I could give up all hope of sleep. It wouldn’t happen on the road, when I worked all day and half the night. Not at home, on my one day off, when there were errands to run and friends and family to see before the cycle began again. I’d been operating on less than four hours a night for three months now. How long could I do it? Bobby, my crew boss, said he’d been doing it for years, and he seemed okay.

I had no plans of doing it for years. Just one year, that was all, and that was plenty. I was pretty good at the job- more than pretty good- and I made money, but there I was, seventeen years old, and I could feel myself aging, feel soreness accumulating in my joints, feel a beleaguered rounding in my shoulders. My eyes didn’t seem to work as well, my memory had begun to frazzle, my bathroom habits were irregular. It was the lifestyle. I’d gone to sleep at home, just outside Ft. Lauderdale, the night before. The alarm had jerked me out of bed at six so I could get to the local office by eight, where I’d sat in pep meetings until we all hopped in the car and headed out to the Jacksonville area, checked into a motel, and got to work. Another standard weekend gets under way.

Tires rumbled behind me, and I instinctively veered over toward the empty lot, careful to avoid the nests of fire ants and the prickly weeds that would find their way to my dark gray gym socks, which only a seventeen-year-old could convince himself passed for respectable as long as no one saw the sporty stripes.

Keeping over to the side was the smart thing in places like this. Locals wouldn’t have to look at me twice to see that I was way out of my element. They would throw mostly empty beer cans or swerve at me, half-playful and half-homicidal. They would shout things, and I thought it a pretty good guess they were withering insults, insults that would sting like salt in my eyes if I could hear them, but they’d be garbled against the whoosh of a speeding truck and the crackling speakers blasting 38 Special. I didn’t know if the other guys had to put up with the same crap, but I doubted it.

A dark blue Ford pickup rolled to a stop. It looked freshly washed, and its paint glistened like a tar pit in the glare of the almost setting sun. The passenger-side window lurched down, and the driver, a guy in his thirties with a black T-shirt, learned over toward the window. He looked handsome in an odd way, like the debonair guy in a cartoon out to steal the hero’s girl, but like a cartoon character, he was oddly distorted. He was puffy. Not fat or heavy or anything. Just puffy, like a corpse beginning decomposition or a man suffering from an allergic reaction.

The puffiness was weird, sure, but what I mostly noticed was his hair. He kept it sheared to almost a military cut, but in the back it came down in a straight fan to his shoulders. Today they call this style a mullet. In 1985 I’d never seen a mullet before, had no idea what a mullet was, what it was called, or why someone might choose to endure such a thing except for the simple thrifty pleasure that comes from having two haircuts on one head. All I knew was that it looked monumentally stupid.

“Where you going?” the guy asked. His voice buckled under the weight of his syrupy accent, uniquely Florida. Half pecan pie, half key lime. We were about thirty miles outside of Jacksonville, and heavy accents were par for the course.

I’d lived in Florida since the third grade and had long been afraid of just about everyone outside a major urban center. In no way did I consider this cowardice, but common sense. Despite the popular belief that big cities like Ft. Lauderdale and Jacksonville and Miami were nothing but suburbs of New York or Boston, they were, in reality, dense with longtime Florida natives, a vocal minority of whom included Confederate flag wavers, “ Dixie ” hummers, and cross burners. These cities were also full of transplants from all over the country, so things balanced out reasonably well. Step out to the boonies, and the flavor became considerably less cosmopolitan.

I now stood, as far as I was concerned, in the boonies, which meant that the iridescent KICK MY JEW ASS sign on my forehead, visible only to those who preferred Hank Williams Jr. to Sr., began to throb and fire off sparks. I conjured a polite smile for the pickup driver, but the smile turned out badly, crooked and sheepish.

For an instant, I considered giving the guy my line, about how I was in the neighborhood to speak with parents about education, but I knew instantly it was a bad idea. Puffy Guy with his weird hair and his pampered pickup radiated a low tolerance for bullshit. My crew boss, Bobby, could probably get away with the pitch. Hell, Bobby would probably score off the guy, but I was not Bobby. I was good, maybe the best guy in Bobby’s crew- maybe the best guy Bobby had found in a long while. But I wasn’t Bobby.

“I’m selling,” I said with a startling realization, like the flip of a switch, that I wasn’t merely uneasy, I was afraid. Even in all that heat, I felt cold, and my muscles had begun to tense. “Door-to-door,” I added. I took the bag off my shoulder and set it down between my black dress sneakers.

The man leaned a little farther toward me and grinned a mouth full of haphazardly arranged teeth. The two front ones, in particular, were long like a rabbit’s, but widely spaced and moving in opposite directions. Their crookedness stood out all the more for their unusual, even radiant, whiteness. I wished I hadn’t seen them, because now I had to try not to stare.

“You got a permit for that?” He yanked at something between his legs and came up with a nearly full bottle of Yoo-hoo, which he put to his lips for a good ten seconds. When he set it down again, the bottle was now more than half-empty. I suppose an optimist would say it was half-full.

A permit. I’d never heard of such a thing. Did I need a permit? Bobby hadn’t said anything about it; he’d merely dropped me off and told me to hit the trailer park hard. Bobby loved trailer parks.

I had to stay focused, act confident, presume this guy wouldn’t try anything too crazy, not in the middle of the street, albeit a sinisterly deserted street. “My boss told me to sell here,” I said, looking at the pavement rather than his teeth.

“I didn’t ask who told you to do nothing,” the guy said, shaking his head with sadness at the poor state of things. “I asked if you had a permit.”

I tried to tell myself I shouldn’t be so afraid. Nervous, sure. Anxious, guarded, alert- you bet. But this was like being ten years old again, caught in the nasty neighbor’s yard or messing around with your friend’s father’s power tools. “Do I need one?”

The guy in the pickup fixed his gaze on me. He curled his upper lip into a half pucker, half scowl. “Answer the question, boy. You stupid?”

I shook my head, partly in disbelief and partly in answer to his question. “I don’t have a permit,” I said. I tried to look away again, but his eyes were bearing down on me.

Then the redneck burst into a huge, crooked-tooth grin. “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t need one, then, ain’t it?”

It took me a minute to understand what had happened, and then I forced a nervous attempt at an I’m-a-good-sport laugh. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“You listen up. You best stay out of trouble. You know what happens to people caught breaking the law round here?”

“They’re asked to squeal like pigs?” I tried to keep it from coming out, but despite my fear it slipped through my grasp and got away from me. It could happen to anyone.

The redneck’s dark eyes went narrow over his long nose. “You being a smart-ass?”

What the hell kind of question was that? Could there be any explanation for what I’d said other than smart-assedness? I decided not to point that out.

When people say that they had the metallic taste of fear in their mouth, that metal is generally copper. My mouth tasted like copper. “Just keeping things light,” I managed, along with a forced expression of calm and affability.

“What’s a smart-ass like you doing out here, anyhow? Why ain’t you in your college?”

“I’m trying to earn money for college,” I told him, hoping my industry would impress him.

It didn’t. “Ain’t you something, college boy? Am I going to have to come out of here and smack you in the pussy?”

There was, of course, no dignified way to answer that question. Maybe Bobby would be able to shrug it off, crack some self-effacing joke to make the guy in the pickup like him. Next thing you know, they’d be laughing like old friends. Not me. The only thing I could think of was groveling- or to imagine an alternate universe version of me, the Lem who would walk over to the open window and pound the guy in the face until his nose burst and his stupid haircut was matted with blood. The Lem in this universe didn’t do that sort of thing, but it always seemed to me that if I could do it once, if I could be the sort of person who might beat the living shit out of a jerk giving me a hard time, then that fact would be written on my body, my face, in my walk, and I wouldn’t be, once again, under the thumb of a bully high on his own power over me.

“I don’t think so,” I said at last. “I don’t think a pussy slapping is, in the most technical sense, necessary.”

“You’re a little doofus, you know that?” the guy said, and he rolled up his window, thick arms rotating as he cranked the handle. He took a clipboard from the passenger seat and began looking over some papers. After licking his thumb and index finger as if they were lollipops, he pushed back a few sheets. His two wild front teeth protruded from his mouth and began to rake in his lower lip.

Doofus. Not the worst thing I’d ever been called, but it stung in its banality. On the positive side, however, the redneck rolled up his window, so my fear began to abate a little until it became a low throb. I had been dismissed, and it was time to get going, though the creepy redneck was still keeping an eye on me.

So I hoisted the bag back onto my shoulder and walked to the next trailer, this one gray with green trim. The lot, like all the others, was a patch of sand and grass, weeds encroaching from the far borders. A sickly-looking palm tree hunched in the front yard with a medicinal cup thrust into the trunk like an old man’s corncob pipe. The front windows had pull-down shades, like civilized people put in bedrooms, but they weren’t extended all the way down. Even from the street I could see light inside and the flicker of television.

No lawn furniture, no toys, no garish welcome mat. There was nothing moochie. That was the bookman word, the word Bobby had taught us. The bookman loves moochie. Moochie is plastic kiddie crap scattered everywhere. Moochie is garden gnomes, wind chimes, excessive and early- or late- holiday decorations, anything that suggested that here lived people who liked to spend money they didn’t have on things they didn’t need. Spending money on things their kids didn’t need- well, that was about as moochie as it got. Driving his crew around, Bobby would sometimes do a sort of seated jig when he saw a house with an aboveground plastic swimming pool with an attached plastic slide. “A blind monkey could close those guys,” he’d announce. His big Moon Pie face, which was always radiant, would light up so you’d need to put on your sunglasses to look at the guy. “Man, that’s moochie.”

But this trailer before me had been untouched by mooch. If the pickup hadn’t still been parked there, I would likely have skipped the house. Bobby said never to skip. Knocking on the door of a loser doesn’t take but a minute, and you never know. More than once I’d sold at places without a hint of moochiness, but it was getting late now, and I was tired, and I wanted matching Big Wheels or a naked Barbie or a company of toy soldiers crawling prone through the Quang Tri province of the lawn- anything to make me feel I was on the right track.

In the absence of moochiness, however, I’d take sanctuary, so I propped open the screen door, feeling a few tablespoons of sweat drop from my armpit down to my midtorso. Two small green lizards sat motionless on the other side of the gray mesh; one bobbed up and down, its scarlet throat fan flashing warning or love or something.

I knocked while the lizards stared with their little bullet heads cocked. Then I heard a distant shuffle of movement, the slightest hint of sound to which this job had made me sensitive. It took a moment before a woman came to the door. She propped it open just a little, glanced at me, and then looked to the pickup in the street. “What is it?” she asked in a harsh half whisper that nearly knocked me back in its urgency and desperation.

She was young, but getting old in a hurry. Her face, pretty at least in theory, was splattered with light freckles and punctuated by a pert little nose, but her eyes, the brown of the redneck’s Yoo-hoo, were raked with deep crow’s-feet and underscored by extraordinarily dark rings. Her fine, beach-sand-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail that could be either youthful or haggard. There was something about her expression- she reminded me of a balloon from which the air was slowly leaking. Not so that you could see it deflate or hear its flatulence, but you’d leave that balloon looking fine and come back in an hour to find it drooping and slack.

I pretended I didn’t notice her misery, and I grinned. The grin hid my hunger, my thirst, my boredom, my fear of the bucktoothed redneck in the Ford pickup, my hopelessness in the absence of visible moochiness, my despair at the thought that Bobby would not come by the Kwick Stop to pick me up for another four hours.

At least I’d already scored that day, getting into a house in my first hour out. I’d made $200 right there, just like that, from those poor assholes. Not poor as in sad-sack, but poor as in ill-fitting clothes, broken furniture, leaking kitchen faucet, and a refrigerator empty but for Wonder bread, off-brand bologna, Miracle Whip, and Coke. Let me be absolutely clear about this. Not once, not one single time, no matter how happy I was to make a sale, did I ever do it without the acid tinge of regret. I felt evil and predatory, and often enough I had to bite back the urge to walk out halfway through the pitch, because I knew the prospects couldn’t afford the monthly payments. They would pass the credit app, I was almost sure of it, but when it came to paying the bills, they’d have to trade in the Coke for generic cola.

So why did I keep doing it? In part because I needed the money, but there was something else, something bigger and more seductive than money, drawing me in. I was good at sales, good at it in a way I’d never been good at anything in my life. Sure, I’d done well in school, on my SATs, that sort of thing. But those were solitary activities, this was public, communal, social. I, Lem Altick, was getting the best of others in a social situation, and let me tell you, that was new, and it was delicious. I would look at the prospects slouching into their sofa, people who’d never done anything to hurt me, and I had them. I had them, and they didn’t even know it. They’d hand over the check and shake my hand. They’d invite me back, ask me to stay for dinner, ask me to meet their parents. Half the people I tricked into buying told me if I ever needed anything, if I ever needed a place to stay, I shouldn’t hesitate. They lapped up everything I served, and, evil or not, it felt good. It made me ashamed, but it still felt good.

Now I wanted another one. The company offered a $200 bonus for a double, and I wanted to rack up another score before I saw Bobby again. Of course I wanted the money; $600 for the day would be pretty satisfying. And I’d done it before, my very first day on the job, in fact- an act that had all but anointed me the new boy wonder. The truth was, I loved the look on Bobby’s face- the happy surprise, the sheer giddiness of his expression. I couldn’t have said why Bobby’s approval was so important; it even troubled me that I cared so much. But I did care.

“Hi there. I’m Lem Altick,” I told the gaunt, sort-of-pretty-sort-of-bitter woman, “and I’m in your neighborhood today talking to parents, trying to get some feedback on how they feel about the local schools and the quality of education. Do you by any chance have children, ma’am?”

She blinked at me a couple of times- appraising sorts of blinks. The lizards were blinking, too, but more slowly, and their eyelids came up from the bottom. “Yeah,” she said after a moment to think. Her gaze went right past mine and toward the blue pickup, which was still parked alongside the road. “I got kids. But they ain’t here.”

“And may I ask how old they are?”

She blinked again, this time more suspiciously. It had been only a couple of years since a boy named Adam Walsh had disappeared from a mall in Hollywood, Florida. His head had been found a couple of weeks later a few hundred miles to the north. Nobody had ever again looked the same way at kids or at strangers who showed an interest in kids.

“Seven and ten.” Her hand gripped the side of the door more tightly, and her fingers went white around her chipped fuchsia-polished nails. She was still looking at the Ford.

“Those are great ages, aren’t they?” Not that I knew. I’d never spent much time around kids since being one myself, and in my experience, those ages were as unredeemably rotten as the rest. Still, parents liked to hear that sort of thing, or at least I figured they did. “So, if your husband is home, I was hoping I might be able to take just a few minutes to ask you some questions for a survey. Then I’ll be out of your hair. You’d like to answer a few questions about your ideas on education, wouldn’t you?”

“You with him?” she asked, gesturing toward the pickup with a flick of her first two fingers.

I shook my head. “No, ma’am. I am here in your neighborhood to talk to parents about education.”

“What are you selling?”

“Not a thing,” I told her. I feigned a slight, almost imperceptible surprise. Me? Ask you to buy something? How very silly. “I’m not a salesman, and if I were, I’d have nothing to sell you. I’m just asking some questions about the local educational system and your level of satisfaction. The people I work for would love to hear what you and your husband have to say. Wouldn’t you like to tell us what you think of the local schools?”

She pondered this for a moment, clearly unfamiliar with the idea that anyone could possibly care what she had to say. I’d seen the look before. “I don’t have the time,” she said.

“But that’s exactly why you should talk to me,” I said, using a technique called “the reverse.” You told the prospect that why they couldn’t do it or why they couldn’t afford it was exactly the reason they could. Then you dug deep and came up with a reason that it was true. “You know, studies show that the more time you dedicate to education, the more free time you have.” I made that up, but I thought it sounded reasonable.

I guess she did, too. She glanced again over to the Ford and then back to me. “Fine.” She pressed open the screen door. The lizards held their ground.

I followed her inside, the fear of the redneck now almost forgotten in the excitement of a looming commission. I had not been doing this long, not compared with Bobby’s five years, but I knew getting inside the house was the hardest part. I might go days without anyone letting me in, but I’d never once made it in without making the sale. Not once. Bobby said that was the sign of a real bookman, and that’s what I was turning out to be. A real bookman.

I stood in the trailer. Me, this desiccated woman, and her still unseen husband. Only one of us was going to walk out of there alive.