The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 27

AT THAT MOMENT, I believed my best option would be to run away. Away from Melford, away from Jacksonville – away from all of it. At least I told myself it was the smart thing, since I found it easy to ignore all of the difficulties bound up with fleeing. It didn’t matter, anyhow. I was beyond smart. Way beyond smart. I was well into pissed off.

I went over to the car and rapped on the driver’s side. Melford rolled down the window. “How’d it go?”

“You fucking shit,” I said.

His eyes widened. “That bad?”

“You were supposed to wait for me.”

“And I did. Right here.”

“No, you were supposed to wait for me in the trailer park.”

Melford’s face crinkled in puzzlement. “Why would I do that? I would just be drawing attention to myself. We agreed to meet here.”

That wasn’t how I remembered it at all, but Melford recalled the conversation with such conviction that I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. He, after all, was the one used to formulating covert plans, cooking up schemes. Maybe I’d heard what I’d wanted to hear since I didn’t like the idea of him leaving me all alone.

“What’s this?” I asked, gesturing with my head toward Desiree, who had been smiling agreeably at me the whole time.

“You remember Desiree,” Melford said.

“Of course I remember her. What’s she doing here? What are the two of you doing sitting so cozily together?”

“Excuse us,” Melford said to her. He got out and led me about fifteen feet away, over toward a pair of newspaper vending machines. “So, what did you learn?”

I figured I would hold off for the moment with the Desiree issue, since arguing with Melford probably wouldn’t get me anywhere. I told him what Vivian had said, that the older woman was likely Karen’s mother.

“It looks like she went over there at the wrong time,” Melford said. “Doe clearly had his reasons for wanting to keep the deaths secret, so he killed her as well.”

“What reasons are that?”

“Drugs.” Melford shrugged, as though the topic bored him. “Doe’s got some sort of scheme going on, and he’s more afraid of an investigation that will unearth his operation than he is of linking himself to homicides. And that, my friend, is good news.”

“Tell me how a crazy cop who deals drugs is good news.”

“Look, Doe and his friends hid those bodies. They don’t seem so bright, and I’m sure they left an evidence trail a mile long. If the bodies do show up, the evidence will lead back to them, not to us. At that point they can’t very well say that no, they didn’t kill Karen and Bastard, it was probably a salesman who did that- they only buried them. Doe and his friends have plenty to lose. And what that means, Lemuel, is you are in the clear.”

“What are you saying? That I can just walk away from this?”

“That’s what I’m saying. I’m going to give you a ride back to wherever you want, and as far as I’m concerned, you can go back to your life. You keep quiet about everything you saw, stay away from that cop, and all will be fine.”

“But what about this money they’re all looking for?” I asked. “They’re not going to forget about it, and as long as they think I have something to do with it, aren’t they going to keep after me?”

“Forget the money,” he said, not for the first time. “It doesn’t matter. They sent Desiree to follow you, but she’s going to tell them you have nothing to do with the money. Trust me. She’s on our side, and even if she weren’t, she’d have no reason to tell them you ripped them off when you didn’t. They’ll have to look somewhere else.”

I sucked in air through my teeth. Could it really be true? Had these assholes, for stupid and ill-advised reasons of their own, protected us from scrutiny, all to conceal their sordid little drug deals? I could hardly believe it.

If I were honest with myself, I would have admitted that my relief was marbled with disappointment. I hadn’t liked the terror of being arrested, I hadn’t liked being slapped around by Doe, but I liked the feeling of being a part of something, and Melford had made me feel it was something important, something more than murder. In a couple of days I would be home, I would quit selling encyclopedias, and everything would be back to where it was. And I would still need $30,000 to get to Columbia next year.

Desiree stepped out from the passenger side of the car. She was wearing the same jeans as before, but instead of the see-through shirt and dark bra, she wore a butter yellow bikini top.

She had a nice body, there was no denying it, voluptuous and trim all at once, and under normal circumstances my biggest problem would be how to avoid staring at her breasts. But right now I had to figure out how to avoid staring at her scar. It was huge, unlike anything I’d ever seen before, running from her shoulder, down her side, and disappearing into her pants. It covered most of her side under her arm and nearly half her back.

It wasn’t just that it was unusual. I remembered what Bobby had told me: The Gambler’s boss, Gunn, had a woman with an enormous scar working for him. Desiree worked for B. B. Gunn. Melford had been sitting companionably in his car with a woman who worked for the enemy- the big enemy.

Not looking at the scar was incredibly difficult. It was as though it had its own gravity, pulling in my eyes. I decided to conceal my discomfort by asking about it.

“Can you tell me about your scar?” I said.

I regretted the words the minute they came out. This was life and death, here. She wasn’t just an attractive woman with large breasts, a butter yellow bikini, and a scar the size of a hand towel. She was some sort of agent of evil. Wasn’t she?

She looked over at me and smiled. “Thank you for asking.” Her voice was sweet and vaguely vulnerable. “Most people think it’s polite to ignore it, pretend they don’t see it. This is where my sister was before they separated us.” She ran her left hand along the scar, grazing it with the tips of her unpolished fingernails. “She died.”

“I’m sorry.” I felt stupid saying it.

Desiree smiled sweetly again. “Thanks. You’re very kind. You and Melford are both very kind.”

“So,” I said, rubbing my hands together, “what can we do for you this time?”

“Mostly,” she said, “I came to see Melford. I want to hear more about helping animals.”

I sat in the backseat, sidekick status withdrawn, instantly converted to third wheel. I felt sullen and rejected- and cramped, shoved back there as I was into the too small space designed for Japanese children, not American teens and a library load of tattered paperback books. When I asked where we were going, he explained, not very helpfully, that we were driving around. He wanted to keep me busy and away from Doe until my pickup time.

It was hard to hear everything from the back, but I could see that Melford had Desiree enthralled. She sat up front beaming at Melford as if he were a rock star, as though she had a crush on him. I didn’t like her fawning all over him, and I didn’t like that I didn’t like it. I recognized that churning, uneasy feeling working its way through my chest as jealousy, but jealous of what? Did I want the sexy half Siamese twin, or did I hate having to share Melford?

Once again, I felt I was missing something, maybe everything. Why didn’t Melford want to know more about her before inviting her into the car? It seemed to me that the superassassin might be less detail oriented in his work than it had at first seemed.

After about twenty-five minutes on the highway, Melford pulled off and stopped at a 7-Eleven, saying he was thirsty and had to wash up. When he walked away, I felt a sickening panic set in. I didn’t want to be left alone with Desiree. I had no idea who Desiree really was, other than an employee of B. B. Gunn. I didn’t know what she wanted.

But Desiree showed no signs of finding the situation awkward. She turned around and grinned at me conspiratorially. “I think he’s so sexy.”

I fidgeted with an empty plastic cassette holder I’d found on the floor. “I’m not sure you’re his type. Being female and all.”

“You don’t think he’s gay, do you?”

“Well, I did kind of assume it. But look, that’s not important. Who are you, anyhow?”

“Why do you think he’s gay? Because he’s a vegetarian?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t care if he’s gay or he isn’t. I was just letting you know that you may not be his type. But we can discuss that once you tell me why you’re following us around. Melford might not care, but I do.”

“It’s so wrong,” Desiree said, “to just assume things about people, to label them based on appearances. I’ve worked so hard at trying to understand my real self. I’ve been reading about auras and reincarnation and using the I Ching. And you? Boom. You decide he’s gay.”

“Look, it’s not a big deal to me. I was just saying.”

“Have you even asked him?”

“No, I haven’t asked him, because I don’t care.” My tone was growing increasingly shrill. “I haven’t asked him what his favorite color is, either.”

“Why are you getting so worked up about this?” Desiree asked.

Melford came out of the store, a bottle of water in one hand, his keys in the other.

“Lem thinks you’re gay,” she told him when he opened the door.

Melford settled behind the wheel and pivoted around to me. He grinned broadly. “A lot of people think that, Lemuel. I wouldn’t sweat it. But you don’t have anything against gay people, do you?”

“No,” I blurted. “That’s not the point. I want to know who Desiree is and what she’s doing following us around.”

“What does that have to do with my sexual orientation?” Melford asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I.” My voice came out high-pitched.

Melford glanced over at Desiree. “Lem has a valid question. Who are you, and why are you following us around?”

“Me?” she said. “Some very bad people asked me to keep an eye on you, Lem, find out if you were up to anything improper.”

“And is he?” Melford asked.

“Not as near as I can tell. But I’ll have to keep following him to be sure. Unless”- she glanced at Melford-“someone distracts me.”

Information came out slowly over a leisurely drive up and down the highway. Desiree worked, as I’d already suspected, for B. B. Gunn, who was centered near Miami and who used both the hog trade and the encyclopedia business as some sort of front for selling drugs. Desiree seemed eager to avoid getting too specific. She made it clear that she wanted to leave B.B., but while she didn’t want to betray him, she’d reached the conclusion- thanks, in part, to the I Ching and in part to Melford- that she needed to make amends for her involvement in such an enterprise. For some time now she’d been looking for something, she said, some kind of meaning, and at the Chinese restaurant she’d become increasingly convinced that Melford’s interest in kindness to animals might be what she sought. I had no idea if her conviction would strengthen or waver when she discovered the project involved killing people.

“So, what do animal rights people do?” she asked. “Blow up slaughterhouses and things?”

Melford shook his head. “For the most part, no. The principal arm of the movement is a loose affiliation of activists collectively known as the Animal Liberation Front. The thing that makes it work so well is that to be a member of this group, all you have to do is espouse its values, take action, and attribute that action to the ALF. No training camp, no indoctrination, no oath of loyalty. On a small scale, they generally vandalize fast-food restaurants or hunting shops, anything to throw a monkey wrench, even a tiny one, into the machinery of animal misery. But more sophisticated operations involve things like rescuing lab animals or breaking into research or farming facilities to take pictures and expose their cruelty.”

“I don’t know,” Desiree said. “It sounds sort of weak. Do you really want to dedicate your life to pestering people to stop doing what they’re never going to stop doing anyway? Maybe you should take stronger action. Beat up some fast-food executives or something.”

“The ALF believes that its people must never harm anyone, not even the cruelest of animal tormentors, since their core belief is that human beings can live their lives without harming any creatures.”

I tried not to react when I heard this.

“They can’t take down someone really nasty?” Desiree asked.

Melford shook his head. “Anyone who would do that, who would even be suspected of thinking about that sort of thing, would be shunned by the organization and the entire animal rights movement. They’re all about saving lives, even human lives. Though property is always a legitimate target.”

“I respect that,” she said.

“There are those, however,” Melford went on, “who take action when the ALF won’t, who believe that violence is, under extreme circumstances, a necessary evil. The core of the animal rights movement never condone this sort of thing, not even in private, I suspect.”

“That sounds about right to me,” Desiree said. “It doesn’t make any sense to support the idea of protecting the rights of all beings if you then start picking and choosing. Otherwise, we’re all like people in a restaurant, picking from the tank which fish we want to eat.”

Melford smiled. “That’s right.”

Desiree smiled at this lie, as if she were so happy to have Melford’s approval. The crazy thing was, I knew how she felt. And I knew he was lying to her. So what did that say about the ease with which I’d come to value his opinion? If I didn’t know from personal experience, the personal experience of seeing him kill two people, I would never suspect he was lying. I suddenly felt distinctly uneasy, like I wanted to get out of the car. Like I wanted to get away.

“Can I ask a question?” Desiree said.

“Of course.”

“What about medical research? I mean, it may be unpleasant to use animals as test subjects, but we get results. And isn’t it important to find cures for diseases?”

“Absolutely it’s important to find cures for diseases,” Melford agreed, “but using animals to do so is another matter. Look, there are two aspects to the answer- one ethical and the other practical. The ethical issue is that it may be expedient to torment and kill animals for our needs, but is it the right thing to do? If we could get better results by using prisoners or unwanted children or unlucky bastards picked by lottery, would that be okay? In other words, do the ends justify the means? Either the lives of animals are to be valued or they’re not, and if they are, then making exceptions because something is really, really important doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m not sure I buy it,” she said. “They’re animals, not people. Shouldn’t we have the right to take advantage of our position on the food chain? We don’t judge lions for eating zebras.”

“Lions can’t choose not to eat zebras,” Melford said. “It’s not ethics for them. It’s what they’re designed to do. We can choose whether or not to harm animals, so we can be judged by that choice.”

“Okay, I accept that,” she told him. “But I don’t know that I accept that we should die of diseases rather than use animals to help us overcome them.”

“That’s a tough one. It may be the toughest one for people to get past. The ethical person can sacrifice hot dogs and hamburgers, but the question of animal testing seems to provide a real dilemma. So here’s something to keep in mind: Most animal testing is utterly worthless.”

“Come on,” I chimed in. “Why would they do it if it was worthless?”

“Don’t fool yourself. Medical labs may be full of well-meaning researchers, but they need funding to do their work. Researchers have to apply for grants, and grant proposals have to be written so that they are successful. And to get grants, researchers have to use animal research- it’s just that simple. Grant providers have come to believe in the efficacy of animal research, and no amount of scientific fact is going to sway them.”

“Maybe they believe in it because it works,” Desiree suggested.

“Most of the animals they use for research are mammals and are closely related to us, but that doesn’t mean they respond to diseases or to drugs the same way we do. Chimps are our closest relatives. They’re more closely related to us than they are to gorillas, but you know what happens if you give a chimp PCP- angel dust? It goes to sleep. PCP makes a great chimp tranquilizer. Think about that. A drug that turns us into monsters makes them sleepy, and they’re the nearest thing to humans out there. So if a drug works or doesn’t work on a chimp or a rat or a dog, what does that tell us about how it will go on humans? Ultimately, it tells us nothing.”

“Haven’t there been lots of breakthroughs that have come through animal research?”

“And there will probably be many more. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to go. Advocates of medical research ask if we’d rather live without the polio vaccine, since the polio vaccine would never have come about if there had been no animal research. It’s a false argument. Sure, we’re better off with a polio vaccine than without one, but human beings are clever and resourceful. There are alternatives, including using volunteers and lab tests. Some scientists are even beginning to work with models built entirely from computer software. To say that we would never be where we are without animal research is to assume that research would close down without animals. Of course it wouldn’t. We’d find new ways. Necessity is the mother of invention, so if we outlawed animal testing, we might have more advanced computers now because we’d need more sophisticated computer models to save lives. And because animal research is so unreliable, the better question to ask would be what we might have discovered if we didn’t rely on it. The defenders of vivisection like to suggest that it’s a choice between animals and disease or testing and cures, but what if just the opposite is true, and using unreliable biological models has set back medical science? Maybe without animal testing we’d have a cure for cancer by now.”

“I don’t know,” Desiree said absently. “You make a good case, but if I’m sick, I want them to do everything possible to cure me.”

“You want them to do everything possible, but not anything conceivable, whether it benefits you or not.”

“True.”

“And, as an ethical person, even if you want to allow for animal testing, don’t you think there should be some sort of standard of need? Maybe a tester should have to make a case for why it is necessary to sacrifice a monkey or a dog or a rat for a particular cause. Right now they are free to slaughter and torture however many thousands they like without oversight.

“And you know there’s a whole lot of animal testing that has nothing to do with health. Cosmetic companies subject millions of animals a year to torture to see if this new and improved nail polish remover does as much damage to a rabbit’s eyes as the old version. You’d think it would be enough to know that putting corrosive material in your eyes is a bad move, but these guys need to test it out.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Who knows why? Insurance liability or some nonsense like that. They just do it.”

“Come on,” Desiree said. “You’re telling me that big corporations pay who knows how much just to torture animals unnecessarily? I don’t believe it.”

“Really?” A strange sort of smile came over Melford’s face. “You don’t believe it? Lemuel, you don’t have to be at the pickup until what? Ten-thirty or eleven, right?”

“Right,” I said slowly.

“And you have nowhere you need to be before then?”

“Well,” I ventured, “it would be nice to go to a movie.”

“Nice try.”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I told him, “but I really don’t like it.”

“No,” he said, “you won’t like it. You won’t like anything about it.”

I guess we were already heading in the right direction because Melford hit the gas harder.

“Where are we going?” Desiree asked.

“Well, I wasn’t planning on doing this so soon, but I’ve already done the logistical work, so why not.” He grinned at her. “We’re going to visit a research lab.”