The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 14

THE PHONE CALL came in the middle of the night. B.B. never answered the phone himself; that wasn’t his thing. But he liked to keep the phone near his bed. It was one of those office phones with a shrill office phone ring and the multiple buttons so you could see which line was in use. They had only one line, but he liked the idea of having several.

And he liked to keep an eye on when the line was in use. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Desiree. Of course he did. He trusted her more than anyone, but why take chances?

The TV was on, but there was only snow. B.B. looked over at the digital clock: 4:32. A phone call at that hour couldn’t be anything good. He sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, which was shaped like a giraffe reaching up to eat leaves. The shade was over the tree. B.B. sat still, staring at the blue and pink of the rococo wallpaper until he heard the light tap at the door.

“Who is it?”

The door opened a crack. “It’s the Gambler.”

“Fuck.” He picked up the handset and punched the button to switch over to the right line. He always kept the phone on one of the dead lines, since he liked the feeling of pushing the button when he took a call. It made him feel like he was an executive. Which he basically was, just an unconventional sort of executive.

“So, what’s the status?” he asked the Gambler. “Everything in line?”

There was a pause. It was the sort of pause that B.B. did not much like.

“Not really.” The voice was flat. “Wouldn’t be calling now if it were.”

“What does that mean?” He looked over at Desiree, who was leaning against the door with her arms folded, studying him. She wore a white bathrobe and probably nothing else underneath. A lot of guys, scar or no, would find that pretty sexy, he figured. And the fact that it might be kind of sexy seemed, for an instant, kind of sexy. Then the feeling passed.

“It means,” the Gambler told him, “that there’s a serious problem, the sort I may not be able to get resolved.”

B.B. hated having to talk in code on the phone, but even though there was no evidence the feds gave the slightest shit about his dealings, you had to assume they were listening, which meant you had to spend a lot of time talking around the issue, and that got awkward when you didn’t even know what the issue was.

Who needed these hassles? Wasn’t all of this supposed to be hassle free? Not really, but it was supposed to be easy, and he guessed it was. B.B. had inherited his hog lot outside Gainesville from his father’s father, a red-faced old man with wisps of white hair that stuck out of his head as though they’d been rammed in by a vengeful enemy. He was so ornery that he was like a parody of an ornery old man, cursing and spitting tobacco in a rage and slapping away kind hands, grandchildish hugs, bologna sandwiches- anything anyone might offer. Visits to the farm had been an unrelenting torment. The old man would put him to work shoveling hog shit, mopping up pools of hog piss, dragging dead hog carcasses by their hooves.

If he even gestured toward an expression of complaint, his grandfather would tell him to shut the fuck up and smack him in the head, sometimes with his hand, a few times with a mostly empty sack of feed, once with an old-fashioned metal lunchbox. There were other punishments, too, in the empty barn, when B.B. broke “the farmer’s code,” a fluid list of regulations that had been omitted from the Poor Richard’s Almanac. B.B. never learned the code, understood its rules or parameters, but a few times a year his grandfather would come up on him, looking especially tall and dirty. He’d spit a wad of dip in B.B.’s direction and tell him he’d broken the farmer’s code and he needed to be mentored in the old barn. He had no idea what the word meant, had no idea what it was to mentor a boy. He was a monster, and by the time B.B. became old enough to make decisions for himself, he vowed never to see the old man again.

Then, ten years ago, the old man died. He’d reached ninety-seven, kept alive by free-floating Achilles-like wrath and a similarly quasi-divine hatred of do-gooders, women, television, politicians, corporations, changing fashions, and a world turning ever more youthful while he turned ever older. B.B.’s own father had died long before in a drunken and coke-fueled motorcycle accident, the helmetlessness of which smacked of suicide. After his grandfather’s death came the registered letter from the lawyer telling him he’d inherited the farm, and at just the right time, too, since things had not been going so well for B.B. in some of the various careers he’d been trying on, including car salesman, unlicensed real estate agent, landscaper, security guard, and a stint as a Las Vegas poker player.

This last had involved long and delirious runs under casino lights that obscured the difference between night and day, drunkenness and sobriety, winning and losing. He now remembered hyperbolic laughing, raking piles of chips toward his chest, and he remembered that the next day he’d mysteriously have no money. But those weren’t the memories that came to him most often. When he thought of Vegas, he thought of the shirtless Greek he owed (and still owed) $16,000 sending a thug to beat him so hard with a broom handle that his ribs still ached when he sneezed more than ten years later. He thought of his shameful retreat from town, sitting on a bus and disguised as an Eastern Orthodox priest, the only plausible costume he could get on short notice. It was that or flee town as a pirate or a mummy.

With no other options, he took on hog farming. It paid the bills, though barely, but it stank and filled him with a vile repulsion toward animals, animals that stank and shat and demanded food and bellowed in pain and misery and deserved to die as punishment for being alive. And the land itself- that god-awful farm with its memories of his fucking grandfather, for whose sake alone he sincerely hoped there was such a place as hell. The barn by its simple proximity so disturbed his sleep that he convinced a trio of potbellied and thick-forearmed locals to take it down for him. He paid them in beer and a whole roasted pig.

Going back to the farm, working his grandfather’s lots, had been degrading, a waking nightmare, but he’d been broke, beyond broke, and the farm kept him afloat. There was money for food and a roof over his head and occasionally the wines he’d learned to love in Vegas.

Then this guy he almost knew- spoken to a few times in a local bar, a friend of one of the men who had taken down the barn- a biker in a gang called the DevilDogs, came to see him one night. How would he feel if a couple of the boys set up a small lab on the property? No one would know, since the smell of the pigs would hide the smell of cooking meth. B.B. wouldn’t have to do anything except keep quiet, and he’d get $1,000 a month.

It was a good deal. After a month or so of not wanting to know about it, B.B. began to hang out with the meth cooks, learn how they did it, learn how easy it was to turn a few hundred dollars’ worth of over-the-counter cold medicine into speed so potent that it made coke look like a watery cup of Maxwell House. Then the guys who worked the lab were busted while distributing. He figured they’d roll on him, but they never did. He figured other guys from the operation would come by and take over the lab, but they never did. There it was, a fully operational moneymaking machine on his property. He’d be crazy to ignore it.

The problem was, B.B. hadn’t known the first thing about distributing drugs. Had no idea how to go about it. He couldn’t see himself on the corner, wearing a trench coat, pssting to any skinny, trailer-trashy redneck with an oversize shirt and a dull look in his eyes. He continued to make the meth- not large quantities, only an ounce or two a month while he got the hang of it. It seemed like a good idea to keep the quantities small, since making meth when you didn’t know what you were doing was like holding a jar of nitroglycerin on a roller coaster.

He made it and he stored it. Just a hobby, really, like putting ships in a bottle. It took only a couple of days of work, and then there it was, this lovely yellow powder. He got better, more confident, made more, learned how to dispose of the waste, which was so toxic that it ate through the ground. Within a year, he had thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff and no idea how to unload it.

When he read in the business section of a local newspaper that Champion Encyclopedias was looking for someone to run an operation in the state, it all began to come together for him. He convinced them he was an entrepreneur, that he could run the book business as well as he ran his “agricultural concern”- his term. But enthusiasm was wasted on them. They cared no more for his acumen than his crew chiefs cared for the acumen of new bookmen. You hire everyone you can, you cast them to the waves, and you see who’s still floating.

This happened three years after Vegas, and when B.B. met with the top crew chiefs in the state, he knew one of them. A guy by the name of Kenny Rogers, called himself the Gambler. He didn’t recognize B.B., but B.B. recognized him. The Gambler was the thug who’d beaten B.B. with the broom handle in his Vegas apartment. B.B. down on the ground, hands over his head, the sounds of the neighbor’s dog barking, the neighbor’s TV turned up loud to pretend he couldn’t hear, and B.B.’s own sobbing filling his ears.

B.B. had been thinking only of revenge, of exorcising his demons, when he’d hired the Gambler. Let him work for B.B. Let him think he was doing a great job, in on the deepest secrets of the organization, part of the whole planning process. B.B. was keeping the Gambler close, figuring out where and how he would get even, make things right in the universe. As time went by, however, the revenge never happened. The Gambler made B.B. money, way too much money to remove him so thoughtlessly, and the greater truth was that if B.B. did take revenge, then he would no longer have the pleasure of anticipating the sweetness of payback. So B.B. had kept the Gambler where he was and occasionally thought about what he might do to him.

Things had gone so well for so long, he should have expected something like this.

“Can you get me the thing I asked for?” B.B. said. He tap tap tapped a pencil on the night table.

“I don’t know.” The Gambler kept his voice devoid of content. “Right now it’s missing.”

“Missing? Jesus Christ. Where’s, um, the guy who is supposed to have it?”

“He’s gone. Gone in a permanent and messy way, if you know what I’m saying.”

“What the hell is going on there? Who caused him to get gone?”

“No idea,” the Gambler said. “We’re working on it.”

“Yeah, you working on getting me my stuff, too?”

“We’re working on it, but right now we don’t have a whole lot to go on.”

“Am I going to have to come out there?” B.B. asked.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” the Gambler said. “We can take care of everything. I’ll keep you updated.”

B.B. hung up the phone. He’d keep them updated. Great, with their little “I spy with my little eye” games?

He turned to Desiree. “Get dressed. We’re going to Jacksonville,” he said.

She scrunched up her nose. “I hate Jacksonville.”

“Of course you hate Jacksonville. Everyone hates Jacksonville. No one goes to Jacksonville because they like it.”

“Then why do people go to Jacksonville?”

“To find their money,” B.B. said, “and to make sure their people aren’t trying to rip them off.” And maybe, he thought, to take care of the Gambler. If he’d lost the payment, then there was a pretty good chance he’d outlived his usefulness. Maybe even if he could find the money.

The Gambler hung up the phone. The asshole was going to come up here; he just knew it. The last thing he needed was B.B. and his freak-show girlfriend messing around with the business. Technically, of course, it was B.B.’s business, but that struck the Gambler as more a matter of happenstance than anything else. He’d stumbled into this deal. Met some people. Formed some alliances. Whatever. The money came in not because B.B. was so smart, but because people were willing to buy crank, crank was cheap to make, there wasn’t much competition for the market, and the cops were too busy chasing after cocaine cowboys to pay much mind to homemade meth. They could sell it out of ice-cream trucks- hell, they practically did- without the feds or local law taking notice. They had bigger fish to fry than some homemade bullshit that you could cook up out of over-the-counter asthma medicine.

The truth was that there was a lot more money to be made, and the Gambler was sick and fucking tired of baby-sitting this encyclopedia zoo. He wasn’t going to have the strength for it much longer, and he was ready to move on, to help expand the empire. He needed something less physically taxing, something that would enable him to sit and think. And make money. He’d told B.B. as much, though he left out the part about worrying about his strength. B.B. hadn’t been interested.

“Right now,” he’d said, “we’re all making money, the cops are oblivious, and everything is just fine. We get greedy, everything could fall apart.”

It was easy for B.B. to be happy with the status quo. He didn’t have to hang out with these door-to-door fuckos and assholes like Jim Doe. He didn’t have to perform for the sales monkeys twice a day. And he didn’t have to worry about the day coming- and it could be in a couple of years, maybe even next year- when he wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, when the medical bills would begin to pile in, when he would need the cash to make sure someone was taking care of him so he didn’t end up with psychopathic orderlies who would stick pins in his eyeballs just for the fun of it.

The Gambler had never been anything but effective and loyal, and he was getting sick of B.B.’s ingratitude. Not just ingratitude- there was something else. B.B.’s new residence in the land of oblivion. He was checked out. On another planet. That was no way to run this kind of operation. The Gambler had worked with guys in Vegas who could run six operations at one time, have three phone conversations, and handicap a weekend’s worth of football games- and give them all their full attention. Fucking B.B. couldn’t figure out if a yellow light meant speed up or slow down without fucking Desiree to tell him.

And sure, the money was good, but it wasn’t going to be enough- not when he began to decline.

He’d been forced to leave off working for the Greek in Vegas when the freezing started. He probably ought to have gone to a doctor right away. You’re in the middle of kicking someone’s ass and you just freeze, bat over your head, like you’ve turned into an action figure- that’s usually a sign to head for the doctor. But it was an isolated incident, a freak thing, so he forgot about it. Then it happened again three or four months later, out on a date with a showgirl. Ruined the whole thing. Then three months after that, this time while playing golf. Midswing- and frozen, just like that.

He’d been with the Greek that time, and the Greek had wanted to know, reasonably enough, what the fuck was going on.

Five doctors later, it was confirmed. ALS: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Lou Gehrig’s disease. A form of muscular dystrophy. He was now one of Jerry Lewis’s fucking kids. It could start in any number of ways- muscle spasms, loss of coordination, slurring of speech, clumsiness, and the Gambler’s own freakish freezes. It would progress until he was a complete physical nothing, unable to move, even to breathe or swallow on his own, while his mind, meanwhile, remained in perfect working order.

It could happen slowly or it could happen quickly. No one knew. In the Gambler’s case, the progress appeared to be slow, so that gave him time to get his shit in order. It wasn’t the death he feared. He knew that death wasn’t the end; he’d seen those pictures of ghosts, heard the recordings of voices from the other side, even been to a medium who let him speak to his dead mother. Knowing that the body was but a shell and the soul lived on had helped him in his enforcement work in Vegas. It’s not so hard to beat someone to death if you know you’re not doing any permanent damage. What scared him was the time leading up to death, when he was alone and helpless, and the only thing that was going to keep him from being abused and tormented was money. He needed money.

If he told B.B. the truth, B.B. would be sympathetic, understanding, and he would send him on his way. Maybe with a nice little bonus, but not nearly enough. The Gambler needed money, piles and piles of money, enough money to pay for the bills, to pay for a personal nurse and pay the nurse so well that she would do anything to keep him happy and healthy.

The way things were going, the cause was in trouble. In the last six months, B.B. had been more distracted than ever. Business was falling off, and he didn’t seem to care. And Desiree, that sneaky bitch, was up to something. He was sure of it. Maybe she was planning a takeover, to cut out the Gambler entirely. But there was no way he was going to work for her, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let her get rid of him. If anyone was going to take over for B.B., it would be the Gambler.

Desiree kept her eyes straight ahead. Next to her, in the passenger seat, B.B. sat quietly, his head tilted slightly away from her. She couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not or maybe pretending. His tape of Randy Newman’s Little Criminals had finished playing a minute ago, and now there was only the hissing silence of the radio. She wanted more music, the radio, anything to help keep her awake. Her fatigue, the darkness of the highway, the glare of oncoming traffic, lulled her into a hypnotic stupor.

“You had a good time with Chuck?” she asked at last.

B.B. stirred. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you have a good time?”

“We had a productive dinner,” he said. “He’s a good kid. Bright. Ready for mentoring. Could be more if, you know, he’s willing to open himself up.”

She let that hang there. “Okay.”

They said nothing for a few more minutes. Desiree winced when they passed a pair of squashed raccoons in the roadside.

“I never wanted to be like this,” B.B. said.

Desiree felt herself suck in her breath. In a way, she’d been waiting for this, the big confession, and she’d been dreading it. Once he told her of his shame, of how his desires controlled him, of how he had been victimized as a boy- whatever it was that he would say- she was afraid she would feel pity and sympathy, and the will to leave would be lost in a tangle of guilt and obligation.

“I never wanted to be in this business, you know. It just happened to me.”

Relief passed over her. He didn’t want to talk about his thing for boys, he wanted to talk about being a supplier. “I’m in no position to judge anyone, B.B.”

“I never wanted to do this,” he said again. “I don’t like it. I’d live off the hogs if I could, except I’ve gotten used to the money now. But it’s like a stain on my soul, you know? It’s a blackness. I keep thinking that I want to get rid of it.”

“So walk away,” she said. “Just walk away. No one is stopping you.”

“I was thinking something else,” he said. “I was thinking that maybe someone could take over for me. That you could take over for me. I’d cut you in on the profits, and I could retire from it all, work at the Young Men’s Foundation full-time. Live a decent life.”

“That’s very flattering,” she said. “It’s really incredible that you trust me so much, B.B. But I need to think about it.”

“Okay,” he said. And he fell into silence again.

Desiree had no desire to think about it. B.B.’s idea of cleaning the stain off his soul was to hand the dirty work to someone else and just take the profits. Ever so slightly, she shook her head. She didn’t want him to see it, but she felt she needed to offer the universe a gesture. Her decisions were getting easier all the time.