The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 36

DOE SAUNTERED OVER TO THE CAR, licking his lips. He was enjoying this. He peered at the cabbie for a minute. “You know you were speeding?”

“No sir, I wasn’t. I know this is a forty-five zone, and I was going forty-five.”

“You were going forty-seven,” Doe said.

The cabbie laughed. “Two miles an hour. You’re gonna write me up for that?”

“Don’t matter,” said Doe. “That’s the limit. The limit ain’t a rough estimate. It’s the limit. It’s the speed over which you don’t ever go, not a speed you try to stick to.”

“That ain’t right,” the cabbie said.

“Take it to court.” He grinned at the driver.

He went back to his car and wrote up the ticket. He returned and handed it over. “I’ll advise you not to speed anymore in my town.”

The cabbie said nothing.

“Oh, and by the way,” Doe said, “you know you got a wanted criminal in the backseat?” He rapped on the window with his knuckles. “Hey there, friend. You’re under arrest.”

This time, at least, he didn’t bother with the handcuffs. He just put me in the back of the car. The whole thing had been a disaster. I kept telling the cabbie to call the police, and the cabbie kept saying that this guy was the police. “The county,” I said. “Call Officer Toms at the sheriff’s department and tell her that this guy arrested me.”

“Look, I don’t know what you want,” the cabbie said while Doe led me away.

“I just told you what I want,” I shouted, but after Doe locked me away he went back for a few more words to the cabbie, and I somehow didn’t think the message would get through.

Now, in the back of Doe’s police car, which smelled of stale French fries, Yoo-hoo, and sweat, I glanced out the window, watching the bleak scrub brush on the empty lots pass by. I could hardly feel the air-conditioning in the back, and the sweat was rolling down my sides.

Not that my comfort much mattered, since I might very well be dead soon. I considered this idea with a measured calm, though calm might be putting it too strongly. Resignation, maybe. I ran over all the possibilities I could think of- Doe would arrest me, question me, hand me over to the Gambler, torture me, let me go, all of it- but I kept coming back to one inevitable conclusion: It seemed pretty likely that Doe would kill me. Sure, there were reasons why it would be ill-advised. Aimee Toms had her eye on the situation and all that sort of thing. But if Doe killed me and hid the body, it would look like I’d just taken off. It was what I’d been planning on doing anyhow. As long as they never found a body, Doe would be off the hook.

So, it wasn’t as though I were trying to convince myself that everything would be all right. I didn’t believe everything would be all right. I thought it extremely unlikely that everything would be all right. But there was a calm nevertheless, like I imagined what a soldier must feel before he went into a hopeless battle, or a fighter pilot on realizing that he’d been critically hit and that he was going down with the plane. So, here I was. Crashing.

Doe drove to the hog lot. No surprise there. He parked the car around the back, where it would be invisible to any but the most diligent search party, and then he shoved me, still unhandcuffed, toward the pig warehouse.

Maybe I should make a break for it, I thought. I’d already outrun Doe once, and he walked like a man who had trouble moving- legs wide apart, ambling, slow. But there was too much open space, and we were too far from anyone who might see or hear my efforts to escape. Doe would have an easy shot at me if he wanted. A more heroic man might have tried to overpower the cop, but I knew that would only end badly, if not laughably. So I allowed myself to be pushed forward, and I waited for an opportunity and hoped for a lucky break, or at least the ability to comport myself in a respectable way.

Doe took out a set of keys and shoved one into the padlock on the door. It opened, blasting us in the face with heat and stench. I winced but watched as Doe didn’t. He was used to it, I thought. Or he just didn’t care.

Doe pushed me inside the building and through the narrow corridors separating the pens. I had seen it before, of course, but now, in the dim light of the pig warehouse, with the low and despairing grunts of the animals around me, I felt a new and sharper sense of pity. Maybe it was identification. The pigs backed away from us, and the slow movement of the exhaust fans strobed their movements.

Toward the middle of the room, one of the pens contained a wooden chair, the sort of thing you might see in an old schoolhouse, the kind that had been standing since the fifties or longer. I had seen such things at my own high school, weird aberrations among the metal-and-plastic hybrids that dominated, alone and out of place like a Neanderthal among Cro-Magnons.

Doe opened the gate and shoved me inside, then latched it closed again with me inside. There was something comical in this. The gate wasn’t four feet high, and it wouldn’t have taken much of an effort to get out, but then it was latched for the pigs. Somehow I was troubled by the indignity of his thinking I required no more safeguards than the pigs.

“All right, then,” he said. “Looks like you ain’t going anywhere for a while, so I figure we can have ourselves a little talk.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed. My voice wavered, but under the circumstances I thought I did the tough-guy thing pretty well. There was even a kind of pleasure, a satisfaction, in acting tough, in projecting swagger even while still. I understood now why people did it.

Doe studied me for a moment. “What you probably know, what you probably don’t need me to say, is that I want to know where my money is.”

“I figured that out,” I said.

“I bet you did. So, where is it?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head.

“The thing about pigs,” Doe said, “is that they’ll eat anything. And they love the taste of blood. They just love it. And these here pigs haven’t been fed so good lately, so they’re mighty hungry. If I tied your leg to that there chair and cut it open, those pigs are gonna be on you like a bunch of sharks. They’re gonna be sticking their snouts in the wound, pushing it open, lapping it up. Next thing you know, that whole leg is gone, but they’re gonna keep eating. They’re like piranhas on land. You ever wonder if you’d even be able to feel pigs eating your nuts if you’d already had to live through them eating your leg?”

“I never wondered that,” I said.

“I have- wondered what it would be like to watch it happen. I might just find out, too, if I don’t get my money.”

I took a deep breath. “Listen, I don’t really know what’s going on here. I know you had something going on with the Gambler and probably Bastard and the guy in the linen suit-”

“Sounds to me like you know a whole hell of a lot.”

“But that’s about it. And, look. I know that Bastard is dead and the Miami Vice guy is dead. I’m guessing your money is lost or there’s only one person who might have it: the Gambler.”

Doe thought about that for a minute. “It crossed my mind, but he says you told him I was hanging around before Bastard got killed. I think you wanted him to figure I took the money, and that means you’ve been running some sort of scam on us.”

“Listen to me. I don’t have anything to do with this. I’m just trying to make it through this weekend. I have no interest in turning you in or anything like that. Just let me go.”

Doe laughed. “Ain’t no chance of that until I find out what happened to the money. So, tell me this. What was going on with you and Bastard?”

“Me? Nothing. I never met him before I knocked on his door the other night.”

Doe shook his head. “I don’t buy it. There was something with the two of you. And you been asking about him. Even those morons at County think you had something to do with him. You’d still be there if I hadn’t convinced one of Karen’s neighbors to call in and say they were still alive.”

Doe had called. At the time, I had thought it was Melford who’d rescued me, but it was Doe. “Well, gosh. Thanks.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you knew him and had something going with him. Something to do with that missing money. Now, you want to tell me the rest?”

And that was when I realized that all of this was because of Melford. Melford had planned it all along. The fingerprints on the gun, which he claimed he would never use. Sending me to ask questions about Bastard in Meadowbrook Grove, so witnesses would report that I’d been hanging around, asking questions about a guy the cops suspected had been killed. Had he even somehow arranged for me to sell encyclopedias at Karen’s house? I couldn’t see how such a thing would be possible, but Melford was a mastermind. Anything was possible.

I’d thought he was my friend for trying to help me get the checkbook back, but Melford was so meticulous, he would have gotten rid of the checkbook after he’d killed his victims. The budding friendship with Desiree now struck me as implausible, too. They’d hit it off immediately, despite the fact that she worked for B. B. Gunn. Now I realized it wasn’t despite the fact, it was because of it. He kept telling me to forget about the money, and now I knew why- because he had it himself. I had been an idiot. All the talk of prison riddles and animal rights and ideology had been a smoke screen. Why hadn’t I listened to Chitra? She’d seen it, and I hadn’t.

Something shifted inside of me. I was willing to be dignified in the face of adversity when I was the victim of a psycho cop, but not when I was the victim of a double cross. There was no way I was going to let Melford get away with it. Doe might have been disgusting, but Melford, I now saw, was diabolical.

“All right,” I said. “I think I have it figured out. I think I finally understand. There’s this guy, a strange-looking tall guy with white hair named Melford Kean. He set this whole thing up. He killed Bastard and Karen and then took the money, and for the past two days he’s been making it look like I did it. But it was him. The whole time, it had to have been him. Look, I don’t like you, and I don’t want to help you, but this guy has screwed me over, and I’ll help you get him and your money. All you have to do is let me go.”

“So, this guy Melford Kean has the money,” Doe said.

“That’s right.”

“And you’ll help me find him.”

“I will.”

“And when I find him, I’ll get my money?”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t think it’s that hard to understand.”

“It ain’t hard to understand your words,” Doe said. “Just why I should be expected to believe such a bullshit story.”

“Why can’t you believe it?” I asked, almost pleaded. I was sure I would be able to save myself with this, or at the very least buy some time in which Aimee Toms might save me or I might think of something.

“Mostly,” Doe explained, “because Kean’s been working with me.”

And there he was, walking out of the shadows, grinning at me.

“Do you really think I’m strange looking?” Melford asked. “First you tell people I’m gay, and then you tell them I’m funny looking. That’s hurtful.”

And in the dimness of the pig barn, under the flashing vents, he looked more than strange: He looked vampiric. His hair stood out, his face was long and pale, and his eyes were wide- not childlike wide, but insane wide. How had I not noticed it before?

“How could you do this to me?” I cried out. I felt the urge, almost unbearable, to leap up and rush him, but Doe’s gun kept me in place.

“You want me to explain myself to you when you were just about to sell me out? That’s pretty hypocritical, don’t you think? Look, I went to Jim when I realized there was money missing, and he and I have been tracking it since yesterday. And our efforts led us to you. I thought you were clean at first, but then all the evidence pointed to your outsmarting me and getting the money out of the trailer. I think you’d better start talking.”

Melford somehow believed, truly believed, that I had the money. Maybe he thought the encyclopedia business was all bullshit, or maybe he found out that I hadn’t told him about the Gambler. Maybe because he played and manipulated and lied, he thought everyone else did as well, and that my complaints and fears and hesitation had all been in the service of tricking him. And maybe he’d killed Bastard and Karen for no more complicated reason than he wanted money, and now he was willing to kill me to get it, too.

I hadn’t wanted to see it before, but there it was. It was ideology. The one thing about which Melford hadn’t lied. We see what we think is there, not the truth. Never the truth.

“This is bullshit,” I said with a kind of indignation I didn’t know I could summon. But it was bullshit. That was the thing. It was unadulterated, cosmic bullshit.

Doe studied me for a moment and then turned to Melford. “You come to me. You tell me you can hook me up. Now I better not find out that you’ve been fucking with me.”

“I’d never fuck with you, Jim.”

“Don’t sweet-talk me, asshole.”

“Then how about this? I want my cut, so I’ve got no reason to fuck with you.”

“You sure he’s got it?”

“Can’t be sure of anything in this crazy world. Some people think the lunar landing was a hoax. Of course, that wasn’t really in this world.” He paused and observed Doe’s expression. “I’m pretty sure he’s got it.”

“Okay,” Doe said. “Let’s take it outside.”

“What happened to feeding him to the pigs?” Melford asked.

“I have a better idea.”

With the glare of the sun in my eyes, they marched me toward the waste lagoon. I could barely breathe for the fear and the stench, and I thought that I did not want to die with the smell of shit in my nostrils. I didn’t want to die at all, but I knew that as options tightened, goals grew more meager.

I knew Doe and the gun were maybe ten feet behind me, I could hear him walking with his wide, awkward gait. Melford was between the two of us, I suspect because whatever deal he and Doe had struck, there was no trust there.

Doe told me to stop at the lagoon’s edge, where the stakes in the dry earth marked the perimeter and the flies buzzed a greedy, manic hum. A single black mangrove tree, its roots gnarling into the pond, provided a modicum of shade.

Doe told me to turn around. The two men stood next to each other, but only for an instant. Doe gestured at Melford with his gun. “Go stand over there a little ways. I want to be able to keep my eye on you.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Fucking shit, no. I’ll trust you when I got my money and I never hear from you again. Until then, I figure you’re about to double-cross me. That’s how you survive in this game.”

“Does that mean I should figure you’re about to double-cross me as well?” he asked.

“Just stand on over there and stop pissing me off.”

“Always good advice when talking to an armed man at the shore of a waste lagoon,” Melford said. He took a few long strides over toward where Doe had been gesturing, so now he was the third point of an equilateral triangle. Doe probably figured he could keep an eye on Melford from there, but not shoot him accidentally if he needed to fire at me. Something like that.

I tried to resist making eye contact with Melford. The powerless rage I felt at that moment was so great that I couldn’t endure looking at the source of those feelings. I had broken into a criminal’s hotel room, I had gone snooping around Jim Doe’s backyard, I’d been in a raid on an animal test facility, I’d faced Ronny Neil Cramer, and I’d gotten the girl. I had, in short, faced down powerless Lem and replaced him with a new Lem, one who took charge of his own life. And now I was being held at gunpoint on the shore of a sea of shit, betrayed by a man I should never have trusted in the first place.

Despite my wishes, I made eye contact anyhow. A flash of something impish crossed his face. And he winked at me and with one finger pointed toward the ground.

I felt the thrill of exaltation. A sign, though an unclear one. The wink I understood- a universal sign, after all. But what did the ground mean? What did any of it mean? Had Melford screwed me over or not? If he hadn’t, what was I doing here? What was he planning on doing about Doe? No, I could not assume this was anything but a trick, a ruse to put me off my guard. But to what end?

“How you like that shithole?” Doe asked me.

“Compared to other shitholes, or compared to, I don’t know, an orange grove?”

“You think you’re mighty tough, don’t you?”

I had to stifle the urge to laugh. Doe was buying the tough thing. That was something. Not much, but something. “I’m trying to make the best of a difficult situation,” I said.

Melford cocked his head slightly. The impish look, the winking companion, was gone. He looked like a bird studying human commotion from a distance, studying it with an amalgamation of curiosity and obliviousness. In the sunlight, he looked slightly less hellish than he’d appeared in the pig shed, but only slightly. Now he was only cadaverous and mean.

“I always wanted to see someone drown in a pool of shit,” Doe said. “Ever since I was a little kid.”

“You also wanted to see someone get eaten by pigs. I guess life is all about making choices.”

“It looks to me like I’m going to get at least one wish. Now, before we even start negotiating, I want you to step on in there. Wade in until you’re about waist deep. Waist deep in the waste.” He laughed at that.

I looked at the lagoon. I wanted to stay alive, unpunctured by bullets, but there was no way I was going in there. No way. Besides, once I did, I was nothing more than the walking dead. I’d never be able to escape. I had to get away, but if I did that now, I’d be dead in seconds. The determination to die on the run faded like a drop of food coloring in a still lake. I would go along with what they asked. I would stall for what time I could get, and each second I would hope for something, some miracle, maybe in the form of a county police car or a helicopter or an explosion or something.

“Come on,” Doe said. “Move.”

“Wait a second,” Melford interjected. “Let’s give him a chance to answer some questions first.”

Doe whipped around to look at Melford. For an instant, I thought fists would fly. “You getting soft on me?” He narrowed his eyes, daring Melford to piss him off.

“It’s not my softness you want to worry about,” Melford explained, “it’s the bottom of the lagoon. It’s all settled shit in there, and there’s not going to be a solid bottom. It could suck him in before we know what happens, and then we get no answers. No answers, no money.”

“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” He gestured toward me with the gun. “Now get the fuck in there. I wanna see him sink into that shit.”

“But that’s exactly why I shouldn’t go in there,” I said, making a lame stab at deploying my sales technique. Doe only looked back at me with disgust.

I looked at the waste lagoon, seething and clotted, as devoid of life and light as a black hole. I needed to go to Columbia, I needed to have sex with Chitra, I needed to live outside of Florida. I couldn’t die in a pool of pig excrement; it was too pathetic. Yet the only way I could think of was a tactic from the book of a third-grade prankster. It was absurdly stupid, but it was all I had, so I took a crack at it.

“Thank God,” I said, pointing to behind Doe. “It’s the county cops.”

Doe spun his neck around, studied the emptiness. I didn’t have time to turn to see what Melford was doing because I was already charging Doe. I had no idea what I was going to do even if my charge was successful. If I managed to knock Doe down and took his gun, I’d still have Melford to deal with. I would face Melford, I decided, when I had to face Melford. I’d have to get that far.

I guessed I was ten long strides from Doe, and I had covered two of them before Doe realized how idiotically he’d been duped. He turned and looked at me. He began to draw his pistol.

At three steps he was raising it. I was going to be shot. I wouldn’t even be halfway toward tackling him before I was gunned down. It had been a foolish plan, but at least I wasn’t going to die in the waste lagoon. At least I would die with dignity.

Stride four, and the gun was aimed. But it wasn’t aimed at me. I managed a quick glance over my shoulder and saw Melford looking at Doe and raising his own pistol.

The wink had been real. The rest had been a masquerade. Melford hadn’t betrayed me. Not really. I still had no idea what all of this was about, why everything had happened, but I knew that Melford was not my enemy and that he was going to save me.

Then I heard the crack of gunfire, and the explosion came not from Melford’s weapon, but from Doe’s. I had come to believe so strongly in Melford’s magic that it hadn’t occurred to me that Doe might win the draw. Once Melford entered the battle, I had never doubted he would win.

Six steps in, and I dared another look behind me. I saw a flash of blood spraying up toward the burning rage of the sun in a cloudless sky. Melford, arms up in the air, falling back, staggering against the mangrove tree root, falling into the waste lagoon.

Doe flared his nostrils with rage. “I fucking knew-”

But that was as far as he got, because, I think for the first time, he saw me coming at him, now only three long paces away.

In his irritation at Melford and his complacency toward me, Doe skipped a beat before he began to level his gun at me. Then he moved it toward me, but it was off center. I knew, I had seen, that Doe was a good shot and a fast shot, but I would force him to become a desperate shot, and hopefully that would be enough.

Two steps now stood between us. I stretched out with an aching, hip-stretching stride, and I saw Doe squint his right eye. I saw the twitch in his wrist.

I shifted to my left. Doe hadn’t fired, so I hadn’t dodged a bullet. But now I was off my balance and the advantage was his. I lurched forward now. One more long step, and then I was in the air. I had never played football in my life other than the brutal touch football games I’d been drafted into during PE class, and I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about tackle theory. I didn’t know how to hit or where, but I knew what to do now. Melford hadn’t been pointing at the ground when he’d winked. He’d been pointing toward his crotch, and it wasn’t his crotch he wanted me to think of, it was Doe’s.

I aimed myself with instinct and impulse and a paucity of physics. I landed with my shoulder, and I landed low and hard, jamming my weight into his testicles.

We collapsed together onto the hard ground. I let out a loud groan, but Doe let out a howl so warbly that it sounded almost like tribal music. I hadn’t thought I’d hit him nearly hard enough. I could feel the power of the blow diffuse, go to waste, as though something had been left behind, but Doe curled into the fetal position. His hands, including the one holding his gun, folded over his crotch.

Melford had been right. My tackle should have hurt Doe, but not floored him. I recovered my own balance, squatting and tense, ready to spring. Next to me, powerless to do harm, Doe rocked back and forth, his mouth open, though he made no noise. Tears streamed from his eyes. I reeled my arm back and with all the force of rage and anger and frustration I could muster, I rammed my fist into the space directly between his legs.

I pulled back to do it again, then stopped. Doe had opened his mouth to let out another yelp, but he hadn’t made it. The color drained from his face, his eyes rolled up, and he was still.

I found it very hard to believe I’d killed him from a blow to the balls, so I could only assume that he’d passed out. I took the gun, heavy and sickening, from his slack hands and rose. I gave him a couple of hard taps with my foot to make sure he was out, and then, remembering Melford, I spun around.

I was just in time to see his form sink under the greasy skin of the waste lagoon.

I didn’t know if he was dead before he hit the surface. I didn’t know if he was already drowned. All I knew was that he hadn’t betrayed me, and he had saved my life. I had to try to save his.

I darted to the shore of the lagoon, by the mangrove, only half-aware of what I had in mind. On the surface, above where he’d sunk, there was a slight indentation, as though he were dragging down the mass of the pool with him. I looked right and left- for what, I didn’t know. Maybe some hope, some option that would save me from doing what I did not want to do. But I had to do it.

I set down the gun by the shore, took a deep breath, and tensed my muscles. Then I froze. I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. Everything about me- my mind, my heart, my stomach, the cells that composed my body- screamed that I could not, under any conditions, do what I was proposing. The core of my being rebelled against it. The very stuff of life, millions of years of primate genetic memory, rebelled against it.

I did it anyhow. I jumped in.

The first thing I thought was that it felt more like jumping on a mattress, a hot, horribly rotten mattress, than jumping in water. The next thing I thought was that I was dead. Ghastly, congealed blackness rose up all around me, sucking me down, pulling as though weights were tied to my feet. It was up to my waist and then, in an instant, my chest. Panic stormed the gates of my consciousness, and I knew I had one chance before I lost myself in death and despair.

I struggled, straining my muscles, to reach up with one hand. I gritted my teeth and finally forced the arm out of the muck and felt it break the surface- I felt the relative cool of the air against it. Somehow I found one of the outstretched roots of the mangrove tree. I clutched it tight, feeling its sharp bark bite into my slick skin. With the other hand, still under the surface, I began to probe, moving around in a circular motion and then downward. It was shallow and deep in the lagoon all at once. I waved my hand as best I could, as far as it would go. I stretched as far as I could go, afraid of losing my grip, because if I did, I would fly into the lagoon and I would be lost.

The heavy, slow-moving waves smacked against my face. I could taste the filth in my mouth, smell its already drying crust in my nose. Mosquitoes, like tiny buzzards, had begun to buzz around me. The strength of the sludge pulled against me with a grotesque sucking sensation, and then, all at once, my mouth was under the surface. Then my nose.

Everything in my being cried for me to pull myself out, but I stretched farther, went deeper under. Then I felt something hard- the rubber and canvas of a Chuck Taylor. I leaned forward to make sure I grabbed shin instead of shoe, and I began to pull with my other hand at the mangrove root.

I broke the surface and gasped for air. It turned out to be a horrible move, since the waste slid into my mouth, and my stomach lurched violently. I wasn’t going to vomit. Not yet. I needed to stay in control.

With my free hand, I clawed at the earth and gained purchase on the root. Another few inches, and then another few, and then it became easier. My whole upper body was out, and after that I had one knee up on the ground, then the other. I was out. Somehow I was out, and I was pulling Melford along after me onto the shore, where I let go and sat next to him.

He looked much the way I must have, like a man made of wet chocolate- I kept telling myself chocolate, hoping it would keep the nausea at bay. I couldn’t see the details of his form well enough to see how injured he was. I couldn’t see if he was alive. I couldn’t see blood. And then there was the flicker of something.

His eyes opened wide, spheres of brightness against the darkness of his feces-covered form. His eyes lurched this way and that, and there was a moment of stillness in the air. Then, in an instant, he grabbed the gun and fired off a shot, and once more I heard Doe scream.

“Holy shit!” I shouted. “Stop shooting people.”

The smell of gunpowder danced in the air, only to be instantly subsumed by the foul, head-throbbing stench of my lagoon-covered body. Fifteen feet away from us, Doe lay on the ground once more, this time clutching his knee, from which blood flowed copiously.

“He was coming right at us,” Melford said. He was now standing- dark and wet and gelatinous as a swamp creature. I supposed I was too. “And don’t you want to ask if I’m okay?”

I was still staring at Doe, listening to his whimpers. “Yeah,” I said. “But I’m kind of getting the feeling you are.”

“I think so,” he said. Slow moving avalanches of pig waste rolled off his body and pooled around his feet. “The bullet just nicked my shoulder. I don’t even think it’s bleeding very much, but the surprise of it made me trip, and once I hit the lagoon, I got sucked in. Right now, I figure we have to worry more about things like dysentery and cholera.”

Cheerful thoughts. Doe, meanwhile, was trying to pull himself up into a one-kneed crawl, trying hard to pull himself away from us. “Jesus fuck,” he said. “Jesus fuck, Jesus fuck, Jesus fuck.”

“Remember when I told you being shot in the knee would hurt?” Melford asked me. “I wasn’t kidding, was I? I mean, look at that guy. Ouch.” He shook off his hands. “I could really use a shower.”

It would be wrong to say that I enjoyed seeing Doe laid low or that I was even used to this sort of thing by now. But he’d had it coming. There was no doubt about it, and my being covered in pig shit and piss because of his crimes tended to diminish whatever sympathy I might have had. Still, it was hard to say if what I felt was satisfaction or relief. I was as disgusting as a healthy human being could possibly hope to be, but I was alive and Melford was alive, and he had never betrayed me.

“You couldn’t have shot him in the hog lot?” I asked him. “You had to scare the shit out of me like that?”

“I was hoping to avoid shooting him at all,” Melford said. He inspected his wound with a probing finger. “Out of consideration for you, I was hoping to not have to shoot him because I know you frown on that sort of thing. Anyhow, I wanted to get him out of the lot since rescuing you is only part of what we’re doing here.” He looked over toward the hog warehouse. “I was planning-Crap!”

I didn’t even have time to look before Melford grabbed my arm and yanked me into a run. Enough had happened over the past couple of days that I had my feet moving and was following Melford’s lead before I glanced over toward the lot. And when I did, what I saw made me gasp.

Pigs. Dozens and dozens of pigs running toward us. No, running not toward us- toward Doe. Their hooves galloping, their mouths open and bloody, their eyes wide with rage. The ground shook against their pent-up anger, their fear, the mad porcine lust of their freedom. They were demons, red-tumored, ungainly, slack-mouthed, plump demons, the pigs of the damned, running toward Doe, who lay on the ground, screaming, trying to pull himself away. He grabbed at the dry earth, at the weeds, at white fossilized shells, trying to pull himself crazily, pointlessly, like an ill-timed desert wanderer trying to escape the blast of a nuclear test.

His fingers dug deep into the soil as he tried to raise himself onto his one good leg, but the pain outmatched the fear, and he went down again. He turned to look at the waste lagoon, and for an instant I saw it in his eyes- he was thinking about crawling in there. He would try to swim through the pig shit to escape the pigs. And if he could do it, I thought, there would be some sort of redemption in that, surely.

Then he was gone from our sight. The pigs blocked our view before they descended on him, and for an eerie instant there was only galloping and grunting. And then there was Doe’s shrill scream, more surprised than afraid. The sound of his screams was nearly drowned out by the stampede sound of galloping pigs trying to make their way to Doe’s body. They oinked furiously. An oink oink here and an oink oink there.

Melford led me around in a wide loop, and we came back toward the lot in time to see the pigs clustered around the scream. The ones in the back were now still and disoriented, as though they’d just awoken. Then, after a minute, there was quiet. The pigs remained motionless, perhaps confused, and then began to wander away from the shores of the waste lagoon. As if waking up from a sleepwalk, they made their way from the lot and toward the trees.

Melford and I turned around to see Desiree coming out of the lot. She wore pink jeans and a green bikini top. Her body was slick with sweat, and her scar looked like a wound, raw and fresh. “Sorry,” she called. “I didn’t really mean for that to happen. They got away from me. Hey, what happened to you two?”

“We had an accident,” Melford shouted back to her.

“Okay. Look, I need a few more minutes. There’s a garden hose around the other side, near the car. Maybe you two could wash off?”

The various changes of clothes Melford kept in the back of his car now came in handy. It was too hot for sweats, but that was all he had that fit me, and once I was washed off and out of my waste-ruined clothes, I was willing to take the heat until I could get back to my room and have a proper shower with soap.

Melford rinsed himself off carefully. The bullet wound on his shoulder was about two inches long but hardly deep at all. Ideally he would have gone to the hospital, but he had antibiotic ointment in his car’s first-aid kit. He applied it liberally and then had me use duct tape to strap down a heavy dose of gauze. After that, he collected our clothes in a plastic garbage bag, grabbing them from the inside out so he wouldn’t have to touch them. He tied it tightly and then placed that in a second bag. To contain the smell, I assumed.

With all that done, there was nothing to do but wait for Desiree to finish up whatever she was doing. The two of us leaned against the car, me in the sweats, he in a spare set of black jeans, white button-down, and navy Chuck Taylors. If his hair hadn’t been wet, there would have been no way to know he’d just been through a staggeringly disgusting ordeal.

“They ate him?” I whispered at last, breaking what had been silence other than necessary procedural discussion.

He shrugged. “We didn’t plan it that way. If anything, we planned, somewhat humanely, to do this without hurting anyone. We wanted to free the pigs, free you, and let B.B., the Gambler, and Doe work out their own problems. With a little help from the law, maybe.”

I didn’t know why, but I thought it best to keep quiet about B.B. being dead. Maybe Melford knew and maybe he didn’t. “So was freeing the pigs part of the plan from the beginning?” I asked. “You told me Bastard and Karen didn’t have anything to do with the pigs.”

Melford smiled. “You’ve been through a lot, but you’re still not ready to know. You’re not ready to hear it all.”

I bit my lip, half-full of pride and half-full of resentment that I had to present this information like an English schoolboy conjugating Latin verbs. “We have prisons,” I announced, “not despite the fact that they turn criminals into more skillful criminals, but because of it.”

Melford looked at me. “I think I underestimated you. Go on.”

I thought of George Kingsley, the bright young teen Toms had shown me, the good kid who had turned into a hardened criminal. A promising mind once set on turning his energy to reform and change, now stripped of its promise and ambition, turned to a felon’s life.

“Criminals are people who, for the most part, come from the fringes of society, those who have the least to gain from our culture as it is. They have the most to gain from changing society or even destroying it and replacing it with a new order that favors them. Maybe a better order, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. So, because they are on the fringes they end up hanging out with those who break laws, who teach them to break laws. Maybe they go to prisons and learn how to break even more important laws. The next thing you know, these potential revolutionaries are now criminals. Society can absorb criminals fairly easily, revolutionaries less so. Criminals have a place in the system, revolutionaries do not. That’s why we have prisons. To turn misfits into murderers. It may harm society, make it less pleasant, but it doesn’t destroy it.”

“Wow.” Melford studied me with wonder. “You got it exactly right.”

“How do you know?”

Melford looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you are enveloped by ideology, too, right? So how come you’re right and everyone else is wrong? How can you know it?”

He nodded. “I can’t. Which makes you doubly right. But I have confidence in me. You too, now. So you get to hear everything.”

With Desiree still somewhere in the barn, Melford started up the car and turned on some raucous music, which he played at low volume. He stared at the warehouse, and I could see he worried about Desiree the way I worried about Chitra, and that made me like him more, feel I understood him better. Whatever insane things he’d done, whatever unspeakable principles by which he ran his life, he seemed to me just then gentle and familiar.

He had done terrible things, things I could never condone- yet despite the moral gulf that lay between us, we were linked by this emotion, this love we felt for someone special and bold. In that, we were not so different: bookman and assassin. Maybe, he would argue, it linked us as clearly as I’d been linked with those pigs who had been in the warehouse, who had known torment and imprisonment and terror and then known freedom and revenge.

“It was the dogs and cats,” I said by way of getting him started. “You came here to investigate a story about missing pets. You found out Bastard and Karen were abducting them and selling them to Oldham Health Services for medical research.”

“That’s right,” Melford said. “Very good. You know, I grew up with a cat- a big tabby named Bruce. My best friend then, maybe the best friend I’d ever had. When I was sixteen, he was in a neighbor’s yard, and this guy, who was a big, drunk ex-high school football player, beat him to death with a football helmet- just for the hell of it. He didn’t like me, thought I was weird, so he killed my cat. Bruce was as much of a person as anyone. If there’s such a thing as a soul, he had one. He had desires and preferences and people he loved and disliked and things he liked to do and things that bored him. He might not have been able to balance a checkbook or understand how electric lights work, but he was still a sentient being.”

“That’s awful,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“I was about as devastated as I’ve ever been. My relatives and friends kept saying, ‘It was just a cat,’ as though somehow his being a cat diminished how I should feel about this living, feeling creature being murdered. I went to the cops and I got a lot of ‘It’s terrible, but it’s your word against his; his parents will swear the cat leapt at him, tried to claw his eyes out.’ That sort of thing. I kept pushing, but people started getting angry. The parents of the kid who killed my cat complained to my parents about my being a pest, and my parents never pushed back. Instead, they scolded me and then finally offered to buy me a new cat, like he was a typewriter- one works just as well as another. Maybe a new one works even better.”

“Is that when you became interested in being a vegetarian?”

“No, I’d been one for years. I’d made the connection long before that. If Bruce was like a person, then so was the animal that my steak came from- it’s just that I’d never met that person. But when Bruce was killed it made me determined to stop being quiet about it. My mother always told me that I shouldn’t tell people not to eat meat. That it was rude. But how is it rude to ask people to stop their immoral behavior? It’s like saying that the police are rude for arresting criminals.”

“So, when you found out about Bastard and Karen, you went after them?”

“More complicated than that. I’ve been engaged in guerrilla actions for years now.”

“The drunk football player?”

Melford shook his head. “Died tragically, actually. Had too much to drink one night and fell into a pond and drowned. Very sad business.”

“So you go around killing people who kill animals? That’s crazy.”

“It’s justice, Lem. I don’t hurt people who raise animals for food. They don’t believe they’re doing anything wrong. I agree with the movement that our job is to reeducate. But sometimes people hurt animals when they know they are doing something wrong. So, when I got the story over the wire, just a throwaway paragraph, about all the missing animals here, I came to look into it. Not really thinking about resolving the problem myself, but thinking to expose it. Then I got the same problems here that I had with Bruce. The cops didn’t want to know about it. They gave me a lot of bullshit about no proof. You know what they didn’t tell me- that Oldham Health Services buys stray animals, no questions asked. You show up with an animal, say it’s a stray, you get fifty bucks. And Oldham is a big employer for this area. A lot of jobs and a lot of revenue are tied up in its well-being. So, maybe they don’t have evidence that pets are being abducted for animal research, but maybe they don’t want to have that evidence, either.”

“So you decided to kill Bastard and Karen.”

“There was no other way, Lem. Just like today with Doe. It was him or you. With Bastard and Karen- I tried to do the right thing, but if I had left without acting and even more animals had been tortured and killed, how could I have lived with that?”

I paused for a minute. “The thing is, Melford, we’re talking about animals, not people. You may have a bond with an animal, but that doesn’t make it the same as a person.”

“We’ve been at this long enough for me to get the sense that you’re coming over to my side,” Melford said. “So, do you think it’s wrong for them to take animals away from the people who love them, to visit torture and death on the pets and sadness and pain on their owners? You think that doing that simply to make money is acceptable?”

“Of course I don’t, but-”

“No buts. It’s wrong to abduct animals and ship them off to be the subject of unnecessary torture. We’ve established that. Okay, so if I knew they were killing cats and I went to the authorities and the authorities weren’t interested, what should I do then?”

“I don’t know. You’re a reporter. You could have written a story.”

“That’s true, I could have. I even did, but my editor didn’t want to run it. Said I hadn’t proved anything. I even got my father to lean on them, but no deal. So, ultimately what we’re talking about is the choice between stopping them or simply shrugging it off with a feeling that I gave it my best.”

“But this can’t be the right way to do things. There has to be a better way than assassinating the people who don’t share your values.”

“A lot of people would agree with you, even virtually everyone involved in the underground animal rights movement. They won’t so much as consider my methods even though their enemies perpetrate cruelties on a scale never before imagined in human history. I respect the principles of the pacifists. I even envy them. But someone has to pick up the sword, and that someone is me. And it’s not as though what I’m doing is wrong- it is simply outside the margins of what ideology will allow. Look at the great heroes of the Civil War for the South. Robert E. Lee. There’s a guy who led thousands upon thousands of men to their deaths, led them to kill thousands upon thousands of men, for what? So that people whose ancestors came from Africa could remain slaves. And they name high schools after this guy.”

“It’s not the same thing. I understand, Melford. I really do. I just can’t get past the idea that it is wrong to kill a person for the sake of an animal. It doesn’t ring true to me.”

“Because you’re not trying to get out of the system. Your mind is trying to pull away, but you get too far and the tendrils of ideology reach up and pull you back. You’re not struggling hard enough. Remember the hog lot? Remember how you looked at it, and while you were looking at it you told me that it couldn’t be true? Your mind rebelled against your senses because your senses gave you information that didn’t mesh with what you are supposed to believe.”

“Because I hadn’t yet broken free of ideology?”

“You’ll never break free. Maybe none of us ever will. But I’m not going to stop trying. I will do what I believe to be right for as long as I can, and if I go down for it, I’m willing to face the consequences. Bastard and Karen had to be stopped, and no one was willing to do it, so I did it. That’s what I do.”

I shook my head. “But you don’t have to do it.”

“Of course not.” Melford nodded. “Just tell yourself that, and the rip in the fabric of reality will mend itself. Soon you’ll even doubt you ever met me. Everything in your experience will tell you that I must have been a figment of your imagination, and reality will swallow up poor Melford into the oblivion of bills and TV commercials and a weekly paycheck.”

“I’ll miss you,” I said, “but I’m kind of looking forward to it, too.”

When I looked up I saw Desiree running toward us. Her scantily covered breasts swung wildly, and she was gesturing with her hands. I didn’t know what it meant, but it looked significant.

She threw open the back door and jumped in. “Drive fast,” she said to Melford.

He put the car into gear and slammed down on the gas. It was an old car and didn’t respond exceptionally well, but it still responded, and we were off the farm and on the dirt road, heading toward the highway, before Melford even had a chance to ask.

“It’s the lab,” she said. “I rigged it to blow, but I’m not sure how much time we have. I figured it would be best to make sure we were away from the explosions and toxic fumes.”

There’s no arguing with good logic, I thought. Still, her panic proved unnecessary, and we were a good three or four miles away before the thick cloud of black smoke rose behind us. We never heard the blast, just the long serenade of police sirens.