The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 34

I HAD NEVER BEEN, by track team standards, an especially fast runner. I did better in longer races, but even in those I’d win only rarely. Still, I would do well once in a while with the five-hundred-meter. With half marathons the point wasn’t to win, but to finish. But if I hadn’t been the fastest runner in the county, or even at my own school, I was a hell of a lot faster than an aging, out-of-shape, crooked cop with a bad haircut.

I cranked my legs into the darkness, spinning them wildly until I felt like a cartoon character whose lower half was just a blurry wheel beneath the torso. Sometimes at the end of long runs I liked to push it, and I marveled that my legs could do such things, that I could move so fast and with such force without paying attention to how my feet hit the ground.

I’d never punched it like this in near total darkness with a cop on my trail. It didn’t matter. I ran, and I kept running until I was sure I’d gone two miles, maybe more. I was used to pacing myself, attuning my speed to my natural rhythms, but not now. Now there was only speed. Fast as I could go, and nothing else mattered.

I was now out of the trailer park and into an area of small, older homes. It was the sort of place where half-rebuilt, half-rusting cars sat in backyards, where lawns were crisscrossed with missing grass, where broken swing sets creaked in the wind.

And it was familiar. I was sure I’d been here before. I walked for a moment to catch my breath. Two miles wasn’t much, but I’d gone about as fast as I ever had. Then, while walking bent over, panting, I realized I had indeed been there before, I had sold books there.

I was just down the street from Galen Edwine, at whose barbecue I’d sold four sets of books- the fabled grand slam that had never paid off.

But Galen Edwine had taken a shine to me, the way customers sometimes did with bookmen. He’d told me to come back anytime. He’d said, Let me know if you ever need anything. I needed something now. I needed shelter and a place to rest where Jim Doe would never look for me.

It took about five minutes to find the house. I was sure it was the right place because of the garden gnomes that had so encouraged me that day. It was well after two in the morning now, and the house was entirely quiet and dark.

I rang the doorbell.

I rang it a couple of times to suggest urgency and to make certain that the unexpected chime didn’t simply fade into a dream. I saw a light go on in the bedroom, and I heard a scrape just outside the door.

“Who is that?” asked a panicked voice.

“Galen, it’s Lem Altick. Do you remember I tried to sell you some encyclopedias a couple of months ago? You told me if I ever needed anything…” I let it hang.

The door opened slowly, and Galen, wearing boxers and a T-shirt, stared at me with sleepy eyes that hung beneath a glossy slope of balding scalp. “I didn’t expect you to take me up on it,” he said, but there was nothing harsh in his voice. If anything, he seemed amused.

“I have kind of an emergency,” I told him. “I need a place to stay. Just for a few hours.”

Galen scratched his head with one hand and opened the door the rest of the way with the other. “Come on in, then.”

Lisa, Galen’s wife, came out in her robe, yawned a hello, and went back to sleep. If she found something unusual in a door-to-door salesman returning to their home in the middle of the night, she didn’t say anything about it. Galen and I went to the kitchen, where he put on some coffee and took out a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts. I looked at the ingredients, which included butter and milk and eggs. I passed.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

I told him. Not all of it. Not even most of it. Just enough. I told him that I’d run afoul of Jim Doe from Meadowbrook Grove and that Doe wanted to frame me for a murder that he had likely committed himself.

Galen shook his head. “Yeah, I know that guy. We all do around here. He’s bad news, Lem. But I’ll tell you, I know the sheriff’s people have their eye on him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI did, too. He won’t get away with it. Go to the county and tell them everything. Believe me, they’ll treat you like a hero.”

I nodded and tried to look relieved, but his suggestion didn’t help me. I didn’t want to have to survive some long-term investigation that would eventually shift the blame from me to Doe. I just wanted to get out of there alive.

“Well,” Galen said after a few minutes, “maybe you can look up something useful in those encyclopedias I bought from you.”

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?”

“I mean,” I said, “you never got those encyclopedias.”

“Sure I did.”

“But the credit application never went through.”

“Sure it did. There’s nothing wrong with my credit.” Galen took me to the living room, where the entire set rested in the place of honor, on the bookshelves next to the television. The rest of the shelves were filled with knickknacks and photographs of his son and older people I assumed were his parents and in-laws. Not another book in sight.

“But they told me the credit app didn’t go through. I don’t get it.” But I did. I got it just fine. “What about your friends? Did they get theirs?”

“Of course.”

It was Bobby. Good-guy Bobby was skimming from his own sales force. Telling us sales didn’t go through when they did, so he could take the commission for himself.

“They stole from you, didn’t they,” Galen said with unexpected gravity.

“Yeah,” I told him. “They did.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. Those operations aren’t always as honest as you want, and maybe yours is less honest than most. You know, the same weekend you were in town, a couple of boys came by my younger brother’s house, twelve miles or so from here, and they were selling books, using a lot of the same language that you used. My brother isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, so when he told them he didn’t want anything, they tried to sell him speed. One of them seemed kind of pissed off that the other one had brought it up, but my brother looks the part. He’s real skinny, long hair, tats. They must have thought he was a kindred spirit and decided to take a chance. You believe that?”

I nodded. I could believe it. Because that’s what all of this had been about. This whole thing was an excuse to distribute speed. That’s why Ronny Neil had said that Bobby didn’t know what was going on, why it was better to be with the Gambler than with Bobby.

Bastard had worked over at the hog lot. I got the impression he’d been in on the speed deal, but when he’d been shot, Jim Doe and the Gambler must have thought it was drug related. That’s why they got rid of the bodies. They didn’t want the county cops or the FBI getting involved, messing up the operation.

“Do you think I could trouble you for a ride in the morning?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I need to be at my motel before nine.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I plan to get a friend of mine, get the hell out of here, and never come back.”

Galen nodded. “That’s a good plan,” he said.

Thanks to the magic of utter exhaustion, I actually managed to get a few hours of sleep on Galen’s couch before morning came. I ate a strangely cheerful breakfast- actually, I just ate some fruit- with Galen, Lisa, and their six-year-old son, Toby. Then Galen told me he’d drop me off on the way to work.

I asked him to let me out behind the motel, and I thanked him profusely. Then I knocked on Chitra’s door.

She didn’t look as though she’d slept much, if at all. Her eyes were sunken and red, and she might even have been crying.

“Lem,” she gasped. She pulled me into the room and then pressed her whole body against mine and squeezed hard. Under the circumstances, it was just what I needed.

The downside was that it seemed to me an inopportune time for an erection, and there was no way she didn’t notice, but if she found it distasteful, she was kind enough to keep it to herself. “Tell me what is going on.”

I told her as much as I could in a rambling fashion. I told her about Jim Doe and the drugs and the pigs and murders, though I left Melford out of it. It seemed to me too much to explain how it was that I knew Melford was a killer and hadn’t turned him in, how I’d become friends with him. It made no sense, so it was best not spoken of, particularly since she didn’t much trust Melford.

“We need to go,” I told her. “The Gambler’s not going to be happy to see me, and neither is this guy Doe. Let’s just call a cab and get out of here. It doesn’t matter where. They don’t want me around, will probably hurt me if they see me, but they won’t come after us. They just want me gone, and I mean to give them what they want.”

“Do you want to come with me? To my house for a few days, just to make sure they don’t come looking for you at yours?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I want to go with you.”

We called the cab, and in ten minutes we went outside, determined to abandon whatever personal belongings- selling clothes and toiletries, mostly- were still in our rooms. Too bad for us. There was no way I was going back for that stuff.

Idling in front of the motel was a yellow Checker, but as we walked toward it, I caught the flashing lights out of the corner of my eye.

I saw in an instant, because I was getting good at that sort of thing, that it was a brown county car, not a blue Meadowbrook Grove car. And that was something. But it wasn’t much. I felt that jarring electric zap in my stomach. Not a loose wire zap, but a strapped to the electric chair with a black hood over your head sort of jolt. And for an instant I felt that I would start running, commanded by my feet and a base animal instinct; I would simply take off and be gone. But that never happened.

The woman from the day before, Aimee Toms, got out of the car. Her face was blank, impassive, strangely appealing in its authority. “I need to talk to you,” she said to me. “I want you to come with me.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“I just want to ask you some questions.”

I turned to Chitra. “You go,” I said. “Go to the bus station and go home. I’ll call you. I’ll come see you.”

“I’m not going without you,” she said.

“You have to. Believe me, I’m in way over my head, but you’re not in any real danger if I’m not around, and I’ll be better off if I don’t have to worry about you.”

She nodded. Then she kissed me. I couldn’t say exactly what the meaning was, but I can tell you that I liked it a whole hell of a lot.

And then Officer Toms led me into the back of the police car and drove me away.