The Ethical Assassin: A Novel Read Free Page B

reasonable.
    I guess she did, too. She glanced again over to the Ford and then back to me. “Fine.” She pressed open the screen door. The lizards held their ground.
    I followed her inside, the fear of the redneck now almost forgotten in the excitement of a looming commission. I had not been doing this long, not compared with Bobby’s five years, but I knew getting inside the house was the hardest part. I might go days without anyone letting me in, but I’d never once made it in without making the sale. Not once. Bobby said that was the sign of a real bookman, and that’s what I was turning out to be. A real bookman.
    I stood in the trailer. Me, this desiccated woman, and her still unseen husband. Only one of us was going to walk out of there alive.

Chapter 2
    I NSIDE, THE SMELL OF OLD CIGARETTES replaced the stench of garbage and filth. Everyone in my family smoked cigarettes, every last relative with the exception of my stepfather, who smoked cigars and pipes. I’d always hated the odor, hated the way it seeped into my clothes, my books, my food. When I was young enough to still bring a lunch to school, my turkey sandwich would smell like Lucky Strikes—my mother’s improbable brand.
    The woman, who also smelled of cigarettes and had nicotine stains on her fingers, told me her name was Karen. The husband looked younger than she did, but also like he was aging faster, and I could see his balloon would be out of air before hers. Like Karen, he was unusually thin, with a hollowed-out look to him. He wore a sleeveless Ronnie James Dio shirt that showed bony arms insulated with layers of wiry muscles. Straight reddish hair fell to his shoulders in a southern-fried rock cut. He was good-looking in the same way as Karen, which was to say he might have been more appealing if he didn’t give the impression of someone who hadn’t eaten, slept, or washed in the better part of a week.
    He came in from the trailer’s kitchen, holding a bottle of Killian’s Red by its neck as though he were trying to strangle it. “Bastard,” he said. Then he switched the bottle to his left hand and held out his right for shaking.
    I wasn’t sure why he would call me a bastard, so I held back.
    “Bastard,” he repeated. “It’s my name. It’s a nickname, really. It ain’t my real name, but it’s my real nickname.”
    I shook with what I considered an appropriate amount of skepticism.
    “So, where’d you find this guy?” Bastard asked his wife. It came out just a little too fast, a little too loud, to be good-natured. With a tic of the neck, he flung back his longish hair.
    “He wants to ask us some questions about the girls.” Karen had wandered into the kitchen, separated from the living room by a short bar. She gestured with her head toward me, or maybe toward the door. The two of them were jerking their heads around as if they were in a Devo video.
    Bastard stared. “The girls, huh? You look too young to be a lawyer. Or a cop.”
    I attempted a smile to mask the kudzu creep of alarm working over me. “It’s nothing like that. I’m here to talk about education.”
    Bastard put his arm around my shoulder. “Education, huh?”
    “That’s right.”
    The arm came off almost right away, but the inside of the trailer was beginning to feel more dangerous than outside. I’d seen some weird stuff inside people’s homes— Faces of Death videocassettes mixed in with the Mickey Mouse cartoons, a jar of used condoms on a coffee table, even a collection of shrunken heads once—but this weirdly intimate moment put me on my guard. I didn’t leave, though, because the redneck was surely still out there, and that made it a lose-lose deal. Might as well stay where there was a chance of closing a deal.
    Not much of a chance, though. I took a guarded look at the trailer; it was the kind of place that warded off salesmen the way garlic warded off vampires. They had no toys scattered around, no empty cases from kids’ videos or