The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 17

HE’D BEEN DREAMING about the bodies, about moving them, which was why he believed you should never do anything too unpleasant right before going to sleep. It always stuck with you. In his dream, Doe had Karen’s body, thin and light, like a department store mannequin, draped over his shoulder. Next to him, with Bastard in tow, was not the Gambler but Mitch Ossler, that fat bumbler. In the dream, Doe was just waiting for him to drop Bastard. And he would have. He’d have dropped the body and it would have come out of its impromptu bedsheet shroud, and it would have rolled away from them, even though they were on flat ground.

Mitch Ossler was like that. He’d taught the other guys how to cook meth, and he knew his stuff. No doubt about it. Mitch could cook fast, and he could cook reliably. He had his ear to the ground and came up with new recipes. He was the one who found out how to turn crankhead piss back into meth. But Mitch never had a mind for the details, little things like safety and staying alive. No one had been surprised, really surprised, when the accident happened. Something like that was bound to happen, and Mitch was exactly the sort of guy it would happen to. The asshole had been setting up a new lab; he let a batch get too hot, and it vomited out a violent blast of vapor right in his face.

No one else had smelled anything, but Mitch, whose face had gone all red and puffy from the wallop of heat, said it was mustard gas. Invisible, almost odorless, and in about twelve hours his organs would start to rupture. He had to go to a hospital.

Thing was, Doe couldn’t let Mitch go to the hospital, couldn’t let him make up some bullshit story about how he got exposed to mustard gas. It wasn’t exactly like he could have been defending his trench against an offensive by the Germans. So they’d burned down the new lab, and Mitch had been the first guy to end up in the waste lagoon. Too bad, because he knew a lot of useful things.

Doe was up earlier than he would have liked and later than he should have been. He forced himself out of bed and hobbled around his bedroom, moving from closet to dresser and back again, keeping his legs wide apart to ease the pain. He wasn’t going to look at his balls anymore. He’d decided he would just not look. He’d wait a week and then look again, surprise himself by seeing a normal sack. That was much better than checking them every day like some sort of hypochondriac.

No one would have guessed from looking at his trailer, from looking at the stuff in his trailer, that he had a fat and fast-growing account in the Caymans, and that was just how he liked it. Sure, his trailer was a little bit bigger than most of the others in Meadowbrook Grove, a little bit more nicely kept. He had a girl come twice a week to pick up for him, so he didn’t need to bother with crap like laundry and putting away dishes. That’s why most people lived badly. They had to choose between the freedom of laziness and the tyranny of neatness.

Doe knew that a cleaning girl was the third way. In his case, he had a chunky sixteen-year-old with bad acne and droopy eyes. Her mother said she was slightly retarded, and Doe had no problem believing it, the way she hulked around, mumbling cheerfully to herself. But she cleaned with a thoroughness that bordered on obsession, and she didn’t steal or nose around. Even better, he almost never felt the urge to fuck around with her, ugly thing that she was. One time he thought about throwing her down and shoving it right into her asshole, purely on principle, because he could get away with it. Give her a cookie or a lollypop or something, and she’d be all right. But the phone rang or someone knocked on the door, and he was distracted.

First thing that morning, he staggered into the shower, angling himself so the water didn’t hit his balls. He stayed in there for a long time, maybe too long, but finally forced himself out, and after a cursory pass with the towel, he stumbled into loose-fitting jeans and a Tampa Bay Bucs T-shirt. With breakfast in hand, a bag of Doritos and a Pepsi from the fridge, he hit the truck.

Bastard was dead, and that was going to be a problem. Now he had to see to it that there were no other problems. He needed to do the rounds, make sure everything looked normal. Bastard had a family emergency, he might say. He had to take off, visit his dying mother, fuck his dying sister, it didn’t matter. Bastard found out he had colon cancer and had to go off for treatment. That might be good. Serves the fuck-stick right for messing with Karen. He deserved to have the world thinking he had ass cancer.

Meanwhile, Doe would have to get someone else real soon, because if production dried up, there was going to be trouble. Even if Doe understood in principle how to cook, he wasn’t about to risk getting an organ-melting blast of mustard gas. So until they could recruit a new cook, it would be business as usual. A great deal of the distribution went through the encyclopedia kids- those two assholes the Gambler kept close- so that wouldn’t be a problem. Same as always, they’d come to town once a month, go into neighborhoods, pass off to their dealers. Nice and neat. Cops didn’t look at them twice.

They weren’t the problem. The problem was the extracurricular product that the Gambler and B.B. didn’t know about. Things had been growing lately, and Doe had begun to move beyond the cover of bookmen. There were other distributors now, and if they didn’t get what they wanted, they’d whine. If their tweaking crankhead buyers didn’t get what they wanted, they’d do more than whine. They’d make trouble, they’d break into houses and knock off convenience stores and old ladies in the street to get their ten fucking dollars for their fix. They would get themselves arrested, and once these assholes were sitting across the interrogation table from the cops, too stupid to ask for a lawyer, they’d talk.

Doe drove out to the hog lot and parked his truck out back. He was alone, no chance he wasn’t, but even so he looked around carefully. He saw nothing but the pines, the undulating waste lagoon, a few egrets passing overhead, and a waddling trio of ducks- the ugly kind with gnarled red knobs on their beaks. An enormous toad, almost the size of a dinner plate, sat glumly in his path. It was low and fat and sprawled out as though its own size had been a horrible mistake. Doe gauged the distance to the waste lagoon. It might be possible, just possible, to punt it all the way over there, watch it splash into a shitty death. But he didn’t do it. Letting it live was punishment enough.

Mitch had designed the door to the lab so that it was practically invisible from the outside if you didn’t know where to look- just slats in the corrugated metal exterior of the hog lot. Doe slid his fingers inside and pulled the hidden latch outward. The door swung open and a blast of cool air hit him hard. He always winced. Always. Like the cool air might contain the same toxic cloud that killed Mitch. But it was just the AC, cranking hard. Unlike the hog lot proper, which he kept just cool enough to keep the hogs alive, the lab was downright chilly. If it went over sixty-five degrees, alarms went off to warn them. He had a special receiver in his house, in his car, in the office. It seemed like a good idea because of all the shit they had in there; if it got too hot, the place would erupt into a toxic mushroom cloud. So he kept it under sixty-five degrees.

Christ, he hated the place, and he avoided it as best he could. Bastard had made it easy. Piece of shit though he was, he had been good at his job, had been able to make sure everything went as it should, and he could cook quickly and safely. All of that freed Doe from having to do more than the occasional spot visit. Say good-bye to that for a while. He’d be practically living in this shithole until he felt he could trust their new cook- as soon as they could find one.

After the cool, the first thing that hit him was the stench. An impressive trick considering that he’d been walking along the shore of the waste lagoon. But that was what the waste lagoon was for- it disguised the stink, the gripping, knife-sharp, gut-churning stink like cat piss that rammed through his eyes and up into his brain the instant he crossed the threshold. Doe grabbed at one of the face masks, the kind favored by workers removing asbestos, hanging near the door. It helped a little, but he could still smell it, and he could hear, softly through the wall, the low, pathetic grunting of hogs.

The cooking gear lay everywhere- empty containers of stove fuel, starting fluid, ammonia, iodine, lye, Drano, propane, ether, paint thinner, Freon, chloroform, and sinisterly marked containers of hydrochloric acid, more skull-and-bones symbols than a pirate hideout. There were open boxes of cold and asthma medicine, crap they bought by the caseload from Mexico. In one corner were hundreds of empty wooden matchboxes, and scattered around lay thousands, maybe millions, of little wooden sticks whose red phosphorus Bastard would spend hours scrapping into a metal mixing bowl while listening to Molly Hatchet. Every once in a while, he was supposed to destroy as much of this stuff as he could, take it somewhere out of town and burn it. Holy Jesus, they didn’t risk dumping it, but it looked like Bastard might have been a little lax on that point of late. That he had been lax about the trash suggested he’d been lax about other things, and that was about as disturbing a thought as you could reasonably have.

Doe walked around a large wooden table with three hot plates, half a dozen coffeemakers, and a huge, tipped-over box of rock salt. He maneuvered around the pit- a hole ten feet in diameter, maybe eight feet deep, dug right into the dirt floor, where they poured the used lye and acid. Then he made his way back past the hulking old ice machine. The cooling process demanded a lot of ice, and Doe had decided it was too suspicious to keep buying their own. He’d heard about a couple of guys in California, where the cops were starting to pay attention to crank, who got nabbed because they bought a twelve-pack of beer and twenty bags of ice to go with it. A sharp-eyed cop saw the transaction, figured something was up, and followed them to their lab. So Doe had bought this used machine out of state. One more reason why he would last while the others fell before his mighty empire.

Behind the ice machine, which he wheeled aside, he found the spot on the particleboard covering of the wall. A quick push and the flap opened, revealing the safe. Two thoughts shot through Doe’s mind. One was that he would find the money in there, that Bastard had been keeping the money in the safe, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to keep cash and product together. The other thought was that the safe would be entirely empty. Neither turned out to be true.

Inside the safe he found a brown Publix shopping bag filled with dozens of little plastic bags of yellowish powder. All in all, about a pound of nicely diluted meth. Without factoring in overhead, it had cost a couple of hundred dollars in ingredients to cook. He would be able to sell it for close to five thousand.

Doe did another quick pass-through. He wanted to make sure nothing was cooking, nothing hot, nothing in the works when Bastard had got himself killed.

That was the problem with this stuff. It was gold, pure profit, and the cops didn’t give a shit about it. But it could explode if you looked at it funny. You made the stuff by soaking over-the-counter cold medicine in toxic chemicals, reducing the ephedrine out of it; and the process required- and produced as by-products- shit so deadly that you could fight a war with it. He’d heard countless stories- meth labs exploding, the cooks all found dead or worse than dead from acid and lye burns, searing chemicals in their lungs that made them pray for a bullet in the brain.

Everything looked turned off, cool, and nonexplosive- no frothing chemical reactions, no smoke or burning smell or hiss of seeping chemicals. Doe got out of there, got out right quick, shut off the light, and didn’t take off the mask until he was outside and could breathe in the pure shit stench of the waste lagoon.

Back in the truck, he predicted he could have everything taken care of within a few hours. Drive off to Jacksonville, unload the product to the distributors. At a couple of places, he would need to pick up twenty-gallon containers of urine. It had been Mitch, stupid dead Mitch, who had discovered that crankheads processed meth very badly, and you could recycle their urine. They’d been giving good deals to anyone who provided a healthy quantity of the stuff, and there was a certain pleasure in getting people hooked on meth and then harvesting their own piss to keep them hooked.

Bastard had loved that part. Now the asshole was dead. Doe didn’t know what it proved, but he was sure it proved something.