The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 12

EARLIER THAT NIGHT, Jim Doe had been in the police trailer, waiting for nothing in particular, but something bad all the same.

“How’s the gonads feeling?”

Pakken sat across from Doe. His feet were up on the desk, and he was drinking from a mammoth Styrofoam cup of gas station coffee. He’d been working at it for two or three hours now, and it had to be cold as shit.

The question was apropos of nothing, since they’d both been largely still for hours. Pakken was working at one of the word finder books he liked, his pen hovering over the oniony pages. Doe was flipping through a Sports Illustrated, not much paying attention to an article on the Dolphins. He was still out of uniform, in his jeans and black T-shirt. Sometimes he felt like relaxing in the police trailer, was all.

Doe could tell that Pakken had just found a hard word. He liked to start a conversation after he found one. He’d talk about anything, really, but sooner or later he’d try to bring it around. “I just found ‘substantial,’ ” he’d say with little-kid pride. These interruptions were annoying as hell under the best of circumstances, but even more so now that Pakken’s favorite topic was Doe’s testicles.

It had been Pakken who’d found Doe after his unfortunate run-in with that Miami bitch, Pakken who’d gone looking when Doe had not shown up the next day. It was Pakken who’d taken a guess at what might have happened, knowing about where the chief liked to take the ladies- and not a bad bit of police work for such a moron. Doe had still been passed out when Pakken had found him in the early morning. He’d peered into the car’s window, a grin stamped onto his flat, wide face capped off by a single massive eyebrow and a caveman cranial ridge. Doe had fluttered his eyelids and said, “My balls. She crushed my balls.”

“What happened, Chief?”

His balls were swollen and angry. It hurt even to move his legs. “Bitch attacked me,” he mumbled.

Pakken let out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s good. She attacked you.”

Doe struggled to his feet and pain shot through his balls, but he bit his lip and climbed out of the car. Then he smacked Pakken in the face. Hard. “The fuck you laughing at?”

Pakken gingerly poked an index finger to his cheek. “Why’d you do that?”

“A woman was speeding, you dipshit,” Doe said. “Risking her life, the lives of others, and now she’s assaulted a police officer. You think that’s funny?”

Pakken was still poking at the reddening spot on his face. “Hell. There I was thinking you was just trying to get a blow job off of her.”

Now, almost a week later, they sat in the trailer, Pakken with his cold coffee while Doe leaned back in his chair and sipped at his bottle of Yoo-hoo and Rebel Yell. It was kind of a ritual, the two of them lazing around, talking or not talking, but Doe didn’t want to look at Pakken’s drooping idiot face. His balls were still swollen, still tender. A little bit better. He was nearly certain they were better today than yesterday. He reached into his pants with a tentative hand, and the pressure against his scrotum hurt, hurt like living shit, but maybe a little less than the last time he’d checked. And Pakken had laughed at him. It was a disrespectful thing to laugh at an officer injured in the line of duty. What kind of a sick asshole laughed?

He guessed that Pakken wasn’t really sick, just young. His uncle, Floyd Pakken, had been the mastermind behind Meadowbrook Grove. He’d come up with the name, even though they didn’t have a meadow, brook, or grove, but it sounded a lot better than Pigshit-Smelling Trailer Park. It had been Floyd’s idea to convert the trailer park into an independent municipality, to lower the speed limit, and to watch the cash flow in. And it did. All the residents got free gas and electric, which was no small thing during the summer months of hard-humping air-conditioning. They got free water, free basic phone service. Three or four big barbecues a year, a carnival in the spring, a Halloween shindig for the kids, a Fourth of July party with an up-and-coming country star or two. They were happier than pigs in shit, which, ironically, they had to put up with to get all this. Or, more accurately, they had to put up with the smell of pigs in shit, since the city also incorporated the hog lot on Doe’s adjoining family land.

Every year the Office of the Mayor, which consisted, basically, of the mayor, issued a report that detailed income from traffic violations and expenditures in taxes, services, and salaries, and everything just balanced out nice and neat. Maybe a few dollars to roll over to the next year. Why not? No one ever much looked at the report, and no one, near as Doe could tell, bothered to find out if it was bullshit or not. But of course it was bullshit.

Floyd had been a sharp fellow to devise this scam and to put himself at the helm. Doe had always figured that Floyd had something going on other than his mighty generous salary, which everyone knew about since he’d done such a good job of giving back to the city. Doe had suspected, and he’d been the obvious choice for mayor and police chief after Floyd had got himself killed, along with a couple of fourteen-year-old Cuban whores, in an explosive rollover. Two weeks into the job, looking at the records and following the money trail, Doe couldn’t stop his perpetual eulogy to Floyd’s genius. By two months into the job, he’d been laughing at Floyd for thinking too small. Floyd put twenty or thirty thou a year aside. Good for him. Bless his little heart. Three years later, Doe was tripling that. Easy. And it would be getting even better.

Play it right, be patient, don’t be stupid, Doe could be pulling in a hundred thou a year. When he had a million put away, he’d say it was time to retire. He’d head to the Cayman Islands, where his current $130,000 sat nicely nestled. Buy himself a big house and spend the rest of his days drinking strawberry daiquiris and fucking tourists. A man could do worse for himself.

Everything had been going perfectly. The scam with the tickets, the deal with B.B.- all of it. Until now. He couldn’t stand waiting around to see if the reporter from Miami turned up. The fact was- and Doe knew this from experience- most women wouldn’t say shit about what happened to them. They had this kind of programming, like a robot or something, that the worse you treated them, the less they would do about it. You could overdo that, like he’d done with his ex-wife; but mostly they’d take it, because they knew what would happen if they didn’t.

How many of them really wanted to bring this thing to the courts? They knew what would happen.

Tell the truth now. You found His Honor, Mayor Doe, rather handsome, didn’t you?

Yes, at first. But-

And you were at least on some level flattered that he wanted to have sex with you, weren’t you?

Yes, it was flattering, but-

And at any time during your interactions did you enjoy the sensation of having his unusually massive penis in your mouth? Remember, you are under oath.

I never asked for it.

Did you enjoy it? Answer the question!

Yes! Yes! I’m so ashamed, but I loved it.

Where was the woman who wanted to put herself through that? But Doe had a bad feeling about this reporter. She’d gotten away before she’d had a chance to really get into it. That she’d pounded Doe’s nuts might tend to make some folks believe that she really hadn’t wanted to suck him off. Plus she was a Miami reporter, and nothing would make her happier than a story on these country bumpkins up here with their speed trap trailer park.

The morning after the incident, after he’d gone home and showered- angling his body to keep the water from hitting his ’nads, keeping his head up so he wouldn’t have to look at the purple, swollen horror- he’d managed to get dressed, although the underwear and pants were a bit of trouble, and had gone back to the police trailer and called up the Florida Highway Patrol.

“This is Jim Doe. I’m chief of police and mayor over here at Meadowbrook Grove.”

“Is that so?” said the voice on the other end of the phone. Then there was a snicker, half-hidden. They all knew about Meadowbrook Grove.

“Yeah. Look here, this is kind of embarrassing, but I was ticketing this woman last night-”

“I’ll alert the media,” the smart-ass said.

“I was ticketing this woman last night,” Doe continued, “and I guess I let my guard down. She was young and seemed harmless, and, well, she kind of caught me by surprise. She knocked me down with her car door and took off before I could get back up. But I still got her license and registration.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, it’s so. I don’t know why she would take off that way, but she must be hiding something, I figure.”

“You worked that out, huh?”

“And she knocked me down. She assaulted a police officer.”

“She assaulted you and a police officer?”

“Now look here. I don’t have no beef with you, and I’m sure if it were a highway patrolman she knocked down, you’d have the helicopter dragnet out right now.”

“A highway patrolman wouldn’t have got knocked down,” he said.

“I’m just trying to report a dangerous person. She knocked me down, maybe she takes a gun at one of you boys. I don’t know. You telling me I shouldn’t have called this in?”

He let out a long sigh. “Fine. Give me the info.”

Doe read off the information to them and hung up. He says she tried to get away. She says he tried to attack her. If necessary, he’ll concede that it is possible that she might have, for whatever reason, believed he was going to attack her, and he’d be okay with her getting off with a warning this time. But now he’d made it so it was her word against his. That had to be worth something since, days later, he hadn’t heard a thing.

Half an hour after the last inquiry. “How’s the family jewels?” Pakken asked.

“Whyn’t you go and get some speeders?” Doe said.

“I’m off duty, that’s why.”

“You ain’t got no initiative.”

“Maybe so, but I got ‘initiate,’ ” he said, turning his book so that Doe could see the word ovaled in red ink.

“Get some tickets or go home.”

Pakken must have figured out this meant that Doe wanted to be alone, so the kid grumbled a bit and took his time collecting his worthless shit, but finally he made it out the door ten minutes later. Doe rose to his feet and hobbled, legs wide apart, to the counter, where he took out what he thought of as his law enforcement funnel and added some more bourbon to his Yoo-hoo. He made it back to his desk- with no one around, he didn’t have to try to walk as though everything were fine- and put his feet up, spread his legs, gave the injured parties a little room to breathe.

The phone rang. It was probably fucking Pam again; she’d been calling him twice a day to bitch at him about forgetting Jenny’s birthday. He’d told her he hadn’t forgotten, he’d been involved in some serious police work and hadn’t been able to get away. Somehow that argument hadn’t convinced her.

Best to let it ring, but he had responsibilities to the community, so he yanked it from the cradle.

“Meadowbrook Grove police.”

“I’m looking for Chief Doe. This is Officer Alvarez with the Florida Highway Patrol.”

“This is Doe.” Name like Alvarez, Doe figured he’d have an accent or something, but the guy habloed ingles pretty well.

“Yeah, we’re following up on that report you filed. Listen, we spoke to the woman in question. She said you let her off with a warning and that was the end of it.”

“What?” Doe swung his legs too quickly, and he had to control the urge to yelp into the phone.

“Yeah, she says you stopped her, gave her a warning, and let her go.”

When the fuck have I ever let anyone off with a warning? It almost came out, but he checked himself. “So, is that it?”

“Well,” Alvarez said, “sounds to me like one of you isn’t telling the truth.”

“Now wait a minute,” Doe began. Just then the other line began to ring. The pain in his balls, the ringing of the other line. He was going to lose his fucking mind.

“No, you wait a minute,” Alvarez was saying. “One of you isn’t telling the truth. We can open an investigation if you like, or we can let the matter sit. What do you want to do?”

How was he supposed to know what he wanted to do with his balls aching and the phone ringing? It was on something like its twelfth ring now. Who was it that wouldn’t give up?

But the thing was, the woman didn’t want to press charges. Maybe that meant she was saving her thunder for her own report. But no, that wouldn’t work. She had denied to the state police that there had been an incident. To make public allegations now would be to set herself up as a liar. She’d shut herself and her story down.

“Just drop it, then,” Doe said.

“You sure, Chief? I hear an officer of the law was assaulted.”

“You heard me, señor.” Doe figured he was done with this asshole, so he hung up by slamming his finger into the blinking light of the endlessly ringing line. “Meadowbrook Grove police. What’s so freaking important?”

A sob and then a pause. “Jim?… Jim, is that you?… Oh, Jesus. Jim.”

The voice was all broken and messed up, choking and crying. A car accident, maybe. If it happened on their turf, it was their problem, which always pissed him right off. Maybe he should buy a tow truck, have a towing service on the side, so at least accidents might be worth a few dollars. Or better yet, haul the cars over the city limits line. Let the county handle it.

Then he placed the voice: Laurel Vieland. Shit, he hadn’t spoken to her for five or six years, probably. Not since she went and moved to Tallahassee. But her daughter. Now, that was something else. Karen had been fine a few years back, before the crank. And if she hadn’t wanted to give it up back then, she sure had no problems nowadays. No inhibitions at all.

Laurel and Karen were the only mother-daughter team that Doe had ever fucked. Not at the same time- and now he sure as shit wouldn’t want to. Still, it was something. And Karen had that daughter. The girl lived with her father up north somewhere, and he knew that the father didn’t even let her see Karen, not since Karen went crazy with the crank a couple years back. But there’d be a family reunion one day. Girl would come on home to Meadowbrook Grove, thirteen or fourteen, and Doe would work his magic on her. Then he would have fucked three generations of one family. He didn’t know anyone who could say he’d done that.

“ Laurel, is that you, honey?”

More sobbing. “Jim. They’re dead.” It came out like a ghost’s whisper. “Bastard and Karen. They’re dead.”

“Christ,” he said. “Where’s the accident?”

“Not that,” she said. More crying. Crying, crying, crying. Jesus fucking hell, just spit it out. Of course you couldn’t say things like that, because people took offense, even if it was what they needed to hear. Even if they secretly wanted you to say it, you still couldn’t.

Doe was already thinking about the money. Maybe Karen a little, too, but mostly the money. Bastard had been over there again. He still couldn’t believe that Bastard was stepping in on Karen. He knew, knew, Doe had been fucking her, and he’d moved in anyhow. Doe had seen it for himself tonight. And he’d seen Karen see him, too. Just like he planned. Let her know she was in trouble. That stupid encyclopedia kid went in there, and he figured she’d kept him inside, as if that would keep Doe from trying anything.

None of that mattered as much as the fact that Bastard had just come back from doing his collections, and he ought to have damn close to $40,000 to hand over. That was a lot of cash, and if Bastard was dead, would Doe be able to find the money? What if it had been in the car and was scattered to the winds? What if he’d hid it somewhere and now they’d never find it?

Doe told himself to slow down. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe he was only dying. Fucking stupid Laurel. No one was dead, he was willing to bet. Dying, maybe, but not dead. Doe could get there on time, kneel down while Bastard raised up one bloodied hand to his shoulder, pulling him close so he could whisper his dying whisper: “It’s in the toolshed.” Or something. Not the toolshed. Bastard didn’t have a toolshed.

He rubbed his uneven teeth back and forth like a pair of opposing hacksaws. “Where’s the accident, Laurel? I’ll come on over.” He sucked down the rest of his drink.

Sobbing. Endless sobbing punctuated by a kind of heaving and then a bit of a groan. And then more sobbing. The phone stretched far enough that he could make it to the little refrigerator/freezer unit and grab a fresh bottle of Yoo-hoo. He swallowed enough to make some room in the bottle, then, cradling the phone between his ear and his shoulder, he funneled in about four shots’ worth of Yell. He got back in his chair and put his feet up.

Finally: “Not an accident,” she said. “In Karen’s trailer. They’ve been shot.”

Doe swung out of his chair. Sudden movement turned out to be a terrible mistake. A stab of electric pain shot out. “You there now?”

“Yuh-yuh-yuh,” she said.

“Stay there and don’t call anyone.” He slammed down his phone and knocked over the Yoo-hoo bottle. It gushed brown all over his desk, all over his pants. Now he’d have to change into his uniform- stress out his balls again. This was turning out to be one fucking disaster of a week.

The cruiser crunched onto Karen’s driveway, its headlights illuminating Laurel, who stood puffy-eyed with her hands over her mouth. Doe shut off the lights instantly. He normally loved to flash his police lights, let the world know who made the rules, but this time something told him to keep it quiet and low-key. Bastard was dead and $40,000 was missing.

Only a couple of steps in toward Laurel, and she lunged forward and threw her arms around him. She was heaving like she’d been doing on the phone, only now he had to feel her wet tears streaming down his neck, and he felt obligated to put his arm along her back, which was all jutting bone and flesh, like wet clay wrapped in a cloth. He’d fucked her when she’d been an exciting older woman. Now she was just old, probably fifty-five, and she still dressed like a whore, even though everyone could see her tits were shaped like salamis hanging above a deli counter.

“C’mon, baby,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

He knew he was in for it, so her heaves and sobs didn’t piss him off too much. She finally pulled it together enough to speak.

“My casserole dish. I lent her my casserole dish last Thanksgiving. And I have company this weekend.”

Doe had seen this before, and he couldn’t stand it. The blubbering, the talking nonsense.

“I called her this morning. I asked if I could come by and she said I could and I wanted to come by earlier but I had to get my hair done and that took longer than I thought.”

“Uh-huh.” Doe tapped the tip of his shoe against a small rock.

“I said I would come by earlier, but I came by a little later. I was just going to slip in and get it, not bother her. I didn’t think it would matter, but when I went into the trailer-”

What happened in the trailer he’d have to find out for himself, since all he got from her was a long wail, then more sobbing and heaving. What a mess.

“My baby,” Laurel was saying. “My only baby.”

Baby my ass. Karen was a grown-up whore. And it wasn’t like she and Laurel were best friends or anything. Half the time they couldn’t stand each other. A few months back, he’d heard they’d gotten into a fistfight when Laurel caught Karen taking money out of her purse. Now she was going off with this “my baby” garbage.

The trailer’s door hung open, so Doe pushed himself away from the lamenting whore and walked up the steps. It was all gray darkness inside but one step was all he needed.

There they were, deader’n shit. Bastard the fuck. Dead. Karen the slut. Dead. What a mess. More than a mess, because Doe didn’t know who had done it, which made him uncomfortable. The whole point of their business was that things like this didn’t happen.

He stepped outside, where Laurel held a cigarette in one palsied hand. Her eyes widened, waiting for his professional diagnosis. Maybe she thought that somehow he could make it all disappear. As a law enforcement officer, he’d be able to tell her that they weren’t really dead at all. Those were dummies. Actors. A trick of the light.

Fat chance. Doe wasn’t going to make it better for her. He knew pretty clearly what was going to happen, even if he hadn’t thought it through. There wasn’t time for thinking it through, just for doing it.

“You call anyone else?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“No one else knows?”

She shook her head again.

“How long was Bastard seeing Karen?”

Laurel stared at him. She didn’t answer.

“How long?” he said again, raising his voice.

“Was there something between you and Karen, Jim?” she asked softly.

Jesus fucking Christ. She was about to make this personal. “ Laurel, this is police work. I need to know. How long were they seeing each other?”

Laurel shrugged. “Two or three months, I guess. This time. But they been together before.”

“Piece of shit,” he said. He almost hit her right there. She would have deserved it, too.

He could tell she knew. He could tell by the way she was looking at him. She knew he’d been fucking her daughter, and she was jealous. He didn’t have time for this crap.

Doe went back into the trailer. He walked over to Bastard and, for the fun of it, gave him a good kick in the ass. Body was kind of heavy for a skinny guy. He looked at Karen. Her head was all messed up. It had been messed up pretty good anyhow, he thought, and then tried not to laugh. Well, cheating whores get what they have coming to them. That was one thing everyone knew for a fact.

Doe let out a sigh. He nodded to himself, the signal that it was okay, and then turned toward the door.

“ Laurel! Jesus! Get in here, quick! Karen’s still breathing! She’s alive. Holy shit, I think she’s going to be okay.”

Laurel came running in, right up to the bodies. Doe had stepped out of the way, in the shadow of the wall separating the kitchen from the living area. She ran up to Karen and went down on her knees, something she knew how to do all right, and put a hand to Karen’s cheek.

She did not get what she had hoped for- warmth and color and movement. The cheek would have been cold and rubbery now, and even in the dark she could see that Karen’s eyes were wide open, staring into the nothing that comes after life.

She started to turn toward Doe. “But. She’s not-”

It was as far as she got before the handle of Doe’s gun came smashing down into the side of her head, knocking her over onto her daughter’s dead body. Her hand slipped into a congealed pool of blood.

No way Doe was going to keep hitting her in the head. Sometimes people went fast, or so he had heard, but not in his experience. Doe knew you might have to hit a person five or six times- good hits, too- before they’d shut the fuck up. Instead, he took advantage of her daze and wrapped his hands around her scrawny neck, her turkey neck, and pressed in good and tight. He shoved his thumbs into her bobbing throat.

She struggled. Sure she did, but not nearly so much as he expected. It was like she’d given up, she knew it was too late. More than that, Doe knew what she was thinking, and for some reason it bothered him. He wanted to clear the record.

“I didn’t kill them,” he told her, looking right into her bugging eyes. “I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t me. The only person I’m killing today is you.”

He pressed in even tighter so that his hands hurt, and he sort of liked the throbbing warmth of her throat against his hands. For an instant, he wondered if he should stop, let her up, tell her it was all a joke. He hadn’t flashed his lights, but maybe people had seen them together, seen her crying. Still, what did it matter? A mother standing outside her daughter’s trailer, crying. Happened every day. No one would even think twice, he told himself, and under his hands he felt something like a chicken bone snap.