The Ethical Assassin_ A Novel Part 32

"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 p.i.s.s 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 s.h.i.t 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 f.u.c.k in there. I wanna see him sink into that s.h.i.t."

"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 s.e.x 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 G.o.d," 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 f.u.c.king 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 cla.s.s, 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.a.l.l.s, so I could only a.s.sume that he'd pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 s.h.i.t!" 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 f.u.c.k," he said. "Jesus f.u.c.k, Jesus f.u.c.k, Jesus f.u.c.k."

"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 s.h.i.t and p.i.s.s 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 s.h.i.t 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-c.r.a.p!"

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 b.l.o.o.d.y, their eyes wide with rage. The ground shook against their pent-up anger, their fear, the mad porcine l.u.s.t of their freedom. They were demons, red-tumored, ungainly, slack-mouthed, plump demons, the pigs of the d.a.m.ned, 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 s.h.i.t 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 sh.o.r.es 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 a.s.sumed.

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 b.u.t.ton-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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 a.s.sa.s.sin. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 exhigh school football player, beat him to death with a football helmet-just for the h.e.l.l 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 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 bulls.h.i.t 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." 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 bulls.h.i.t 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen."

"There was no other way, Lem. Just like today with Doe. It was him or you. With b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 a.s.sa.s.sinating 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. b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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."