The Ethical Assassin: A Novel Read Free

guys,” he’d announce. His big Moon Pie face, which was always radiant, would light up so you’d need to put on your sunglasses to look at the guy. “Man, that’s moochie.”
    But this trailer before me had been untouched by mooch. If the pickup hadn’t still been parked there, I would likely have skipped the house. Bobby said never to skip. Knocking on the door of a loser doesn’t take but a minute, and you never know. More than once I’d sold at places without a hint of moochiness, but it was getting late now, and I was tired, and I wanted matching Big Wheels or a naked Barbie or a company of toy soldiers crawling prone through the Quang Tri province of the lawn—anything to make me feel I was on the right track.
    In the absence of moochiness, however, I’d take sanctuary, so I propped open the screen door, feeling a few tablespoons of sweat drop from my armpit down to my midtorso. Two small green lizards sat motionless on the other side of the gray mesh; one bobbed up and down, its scarlet throat fan flashing warning or love or something.
    I knocked while the lizards stared with their little bullet heads cocked. Then I heard a distant shuffle of movement, the slightest hint of sound to which this job had made me sensitive. It took a moment before a woman came to the door. She propped it open just a little, glanced at me, and then looked to the pickup in the street. “What is it?” she asked in a harsh half whisper that nearly knocked me back in its urgency and desperation.
    She was young, but getting old in a hurry. Her face, pretty at least in theory, was splattered with light freckles and punctuated by a pert little nose, but her eyes, the brown of the redneck’s Yoo-hoo, were raked with deep crow’s-feet and underscored by extraordinarily dark rings. Her fine, beach-sand-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail that could be either youthful or haggard. There was something about her expression—she reminded me of a balloon from which the air was slowly leaking. Not so that you could see it deflate or hear its flatulence, but you’d leave that balloon looking fine and come back in an hour to find it drooping and slack.
    I pretended I didn’t notice her misery, and I grinned. The grin hid my hunger, my thirst, my boredom, my fear of the bucktoothed redneck in the Ford pickup, my hopelessness in the absence of visible moochiness, my despair at the thought that Bobby would not come by the Kwick Stop to pick me up for another four hours.
    At least I’d already scored that day, getting into a house in my first hour out. I’d made $200 right there, just like that, from those poor assholes. Not poor as in sad-sack, but poor as in ill-fitting clothes, broken furniture, leaking kitchen faucet, and a refrigerator empty but for Wonder bread, off-brand bologna, Miracle Whip, and Coke. Let me be absolutely clear about this. Not once, not one single time, no matter how happy I was to make a sale, did I ever do it without the acid tinge of regret. I felt evil and predatory, and often enough I had to bite back the urge to walk out halfway through the pitch, because I knew the prospects couldn’t afford the monthly payments. They would pass the credit app, I was almost sure of it, but when it came to paying the bills, they’d have to trade in the Coke for generic cola.
    So why did I keep doing it? In part because I needed the money, but there was something else, something bigger and more seductive than money, drawing me in. I was good at sales, good at it in a way I’d never been good at anything in my life. Sure, I’d done well in school, on my SATs, that sort of thing. But those were solitary activities, this was public, communal, social. I, Lem Altick, was getting the best of others in a social situation, and let me tell you, that was new, and it was delicious. I would look at the prospects slouching into their sofa, people who’d never done anything to hurt me, and I had them. I had them, and they didn’t