The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 6

THERE I WAS, survivor of a double homicide, in the Kwick Stop’s public bathroom. Halfway to the store I realized I needed to piss and piss badly, so badly that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t pissed myself during the shootings. It was all I could do to keep from ducking behind a tree and taking a whiz under the canopy of stars; but public urination, even obscured public urination, seemed a bad idea. What if I had been caught? What if the cops picked me up and found evidence? Hairs and fibers and that sort of thing? My knowledge of police investigations came from a pastiche of television and movies, so I had no idea how it worked in real life.

When I walked into the store, I spotted the bathrooms in an instant- in the door-to-door book trade, you grow skillful at quickly finding the toilets in convenience stores- and rushed back without even the pretense of calm. In general, I didn’t like to act as though I needed the bathroom; it embarrassed me that complete strangers should know about my body functions.

In this case, however, I was in no frame of mind for the casual shop, a pantomime of interest in beef jerky and then a rub of palm against palm, like, Oh, I sure could do with a hand washing, before a calm stroll into the bathroom.

When I looked up from the urinal, I realized I must have already pissed since nothing was coming out and the crampy, stretched feeling had faded into a tranquil fatigue. I zipped up and washed, checking in the mirror for signs of blood. Nothing in my hair or on my hands or clothes. It all looked okay. I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that’s what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry? Not that soap stockholders would gain much here; the inverted pear-shaped dispenser contained only encrusted pink dregs of soap gone by. Nothing in the way of towels- only one of those rotating towel machines, where someone else’s dirt gets pressed or washed or just permanently affixed before it comes back around again. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper from a loose roll propped above the dispenser and then dabbed it gently against my face.

The bathroom smelled like shit and piss and sickly floral deodorizers struggling to beat down the stench of crap and piss. My hands trembled violently, and I felt the need to puke. The problem with puking was that I would have to get on my hands and knees to do it, and the floor was covered with a deep coat of gummy dried urine, and there was a fuzzy lump of gray shit in the toilet. My reptile brain had no intention of letting me mark territory already well scented up by creatures more powerful and less hygienic than I.

Instead, I reached into my pocket for the check, the check Karen had written so that she could buy books for her now orphaned daughters. “Karen Wane,” it said in the top left corner. It seemed odd that she and her husband wouldn’t share the same account.

If I were worried about them passing the credit app, it might be worth considering, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. I tore up the check and dropped the pieces in the horrifically unflushed toilet. One of the shreds fell into a viscous pool by the toilet’s side, and I had to pick it up by its tiny dry corner and then daintily drop it in. I flushed, using the toe of my shoe so I wouldn’t have to touch anything, and then went to wash my hands again.

Should I have flushed the check in two different toilets? Of course, it wasn’t as if cops were going to don hazmat suits and go wading through treatment plants in search of check fragments. Still, I had to pound down that feeling of nausea again, a process that involved closing my eyes and trying hard to think of nothing. In about a minute I felt sure I wouldn’t puke, so I pushed open the door and got out of there.

The convenience store was a couple of miles from the motel. I could easily have walked it, would have preferred to, but that wasn’t the way it worked. I had to wait for Bobby, so I grabbed a sixteen-ounce ginger ale from one of the wall-length refrigerator displays in the hopes it would settle my stomach. Then I stood on line behind a guy wearing jeans and a black T-shirt.

I couldn’t see the man’s face, and all but a few strands of hair were hidden under a baseball cap with a glittery Confederate flag emblazoned along the front, but I could tell he was probably in his thirties or forties, and he was chatting with the girl at the counter, a teenager, plenty young but not very pretty. She had a long-faced, horsey look to her, with an upside-down U-shaped mouth that seemed never to close entirely; the whole package ended up resembling nothing so much as an Easter Island statue. No matter, as the man in the Confederate hat liked her plenty, and his eyes rested with particular interest on her large, squishy-looking breasts, which flashed out of a short-sleeved blouse one or two buttons past modesty. The Confederate laughed at something and slapped the counter and peered into the girl’s shirt unapologetically.

“Oh shit,” he said. “I think I must have dropped my quarter in there. Let me just get it out.” He raised his hand like it was getting ready to slide into the cleavage.

“Jim,” the girl said through a fan of splayed fingers, “you stop that.” She glanced at me as though trying to decide something, then looked back at the Confederate. “You’re so bad.”

On the radio, an eager voice encouraged everyone to “Wang Chung” tonight, which was one of the many confusing songs I figured I’d understand when I knew more of the world. Sort of like the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the comprehension of which I assumed required a familiarity with European arts and music. An educated person would know precisely what a scaramouch was and why he ought to do the fandango.

The unnaturally bright fluorescent lighting in the store made me feel as if I were onstage or caught in a police searchlight, which was a particularly unhappy metaphor. Getting out of there, escaping the lights, the bad pop, the freakish customer and clerk, took on a kind of urgency. I would gladly have stolen the ginger ale if I’d thought I might get away with it. The Kwick Stop, never the sort of place where I felt comfortable, now seemed too small, and it was getting smaller. I didn’t want to leave the ginger ale, and I didn’t want to say anything to the counter girl. It also seemed a foregone conclusion that the man with the Confederate hat wouldn’t much like a kid with a northern accent and a tie telling him he had to hurry it up. But I was thirsty and my stomach lurched violently, so I twisted open the cap and took a drink. It did make me feel a little better. Less like puking, anyway.

“You can’t drink that before you pay for it,” the Confederate man told me. He grinned broadly, exposing a mouth full of wild and white teeth. “It’s called stealing, and we got laws about that here.”

Only now did I recognize him. The guy from the Ford pickup outside of Bastard and Karen’s trailer. The split-level haircut was tucked under his hat, but it was the same guy. An icy terror burst in my chest and radiated out to my limbs. But what the hell was I going to do? Run? The guy had seen me go into a trailer where two people were murdered.

The nausea, I realized, most likely stemmed from my desire to suppress the one obvious fact in all of this- once those bodies were found, the cops were going to come looking for me. No matter what the assassin had told me, no matter what sweet lies he tried to conjure, I knew full well that I would be their prime suspect. It wasn’t a matter of maybes or ifs. They would want me. APB on Lem Altick. Take no chances with Lem Altick, boys, he’s probably armed and dangerous. The only question was if my being totally innocent would save me.

I walked up to the counter and put down a dollar. The soda was seventy-nine cents.

“Wait your turn,” the girl told me. “Can’t you see that there’s people ahead of you?”

“There aren’t people,” I said. My voice sounded edgy and nervous, and I wished I would shut up. “There’s person, and he’s not buying anything.”

“You being rude to this little girl?” the Confederate asked.

“Rude as in pushy?” I asked. “Or rude as in trying to stick my hand down her shirt?”

“Boy, you don’t know who you’re messing with,” the Confederate said.

But I did. I knew I was messing with a guy who wouldn’t give a second thought about sucker-punching me and kicking my head when I was down. Still, I was apt to run my mouth. The thing I’d learned over the years was that the only power I had against someone like this was in mouthing off. It didn’t keep me from getting my ass kicked. It might even promote an ass kicking, but at least I got to perpetuate the stereotype of weak kids being verbally dexterous.

But this wasn’t high school, and I’d already learned tonight that the stakes were higher than a few bruises and a dose of humiliation. It was time, I decided, to show some deference.

“I didn’t mean to be pushy,” I said quietly. “I just want to pay.”

“It ain’t time for you to pay. You think you go walking around here in your tie and your fancy briefcase and you don’t have to wait on line? You think you’re somehow better than us?”

The math, science, and language arts curricula had been pretty weak, but the one thing I’d learned back in middle school was that accusations of thinking I was better than someone else were a prelude to violence. Some asshole revving his engine, in the process of convincing himself or witnesses or God that the ass kicking he was about to unleash was utterly righteous.

I needed to cool things down, but it was hard to figure out my next move when my brain was spinning with terror. There was a tiny hamster wheel of fear clacking around, and I just couldn’t get my thoughts to settle. So I said what was probably the worst thing I could have. I said, “ ‘We.’ ”

The Confederate angled his head and stared. “What?”

It was an out-of-body experience. I saw myself speaking, and I had no power to stop.

“You meant, ‘You think you’re better than we.’ We is a subject. ‘We are here.’ Who is here? We are. Us, on the other hand, is an object, the recipient of action. ‘Bob gave the ball to us.’ Who gave the ball? Bob, the subject, did. To whom did he give it? Us, the object.”

A stupid smile flattened out across my face.

The Confederate stared as though I were a formaldehyde freak behind Coney Island glass. The girl behind the counter took a step back. Her eyes went wide and she half raised her hands as though to protect her face from the coming blast.

The blast never came. Outside the store, Bobby’s Chrysler Cordoba pulled gloriously, miraculously, into the parking lot. The most fortunate timing in the history of the world- far better luck than my nearly eighteen years had led me to expect or even hope for. “That’s my ride,” I said, as though we’d been hanging out, talking sports.

The Confederate didn’t say anything. I looked to the counter girl, but she would not meet my eyes. Nothing to do but forget the soda, so I put it down on a pile of Coors cases and began to head for the door.

“You leave now, and you’re stealing.” It was the counter girl. Her voice had grown small, and her hands, which now hung limp by her side, trembled just a little.

I stopped. “Then let me pay,” I said.

“You gotta wait your turn.” Her voice was just above a whisper.

Now the redneck bent toward me. He wasn’t unusually tall, just under six feet, and he had maybe an inch or so on me, but he bent forward like a giant stooping to offer advice to a midget. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked. “Correcting me?”

I turned away, hoping to God that Bobby could see me, would come to my rescue if he spotted trouble. Feeling the burn of the redneck’s eyes, I picked up the soda and took the dollar out from my pocket. I put it back on the counter. I didn’t care that they were assholes, and I didn’t care about the change. I cared only about getting out of there.

I turned away and pushed open the door, which chimed merrily along with the sound of my laughter, unhinged with giddy disbelief.

I had survived a double murder, I had survived an interview with the killer, I had survived a sure beating by a redneck whom I had insulted. I ought to have felt some measure of relief, but a churning dread burned away at my stomach. I had survived only that moment, and plenty more moments were coming.