The Ethical Assassin: A Novel by David Liss Read Free Book Online

strings of cotton that come out of an aspirin bottle. Then, acting as if he’d suddenly remembered where he was, he opened the back door and climbed in. He was careful to leave the door nice and open, since there was no inside handle, and if it closed, they’d both be trapped back there. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped with an ugly horse like Lisa. He sat next to her and traded the evil grin for a smile he knew to be charming. “What’d you say you do, now?”
    “I work for Channel Eight in Miami,” she said after a moment of sobbing.
    Channel Eight? She sure as hell wasn’t on the TV, not with her mushy face. “That right? What you do there? Some kind of a fancy secretary? Is that it? You sit on the boss’s lap and take dictation? I could use me some dick-tation.”
    She looked down and didn’t answer, which struck Doe as rude. Someone was talking to her, and she didn’t answer. What, did she think she was Miss Universe or something? She needed to look in a mirror sometime, see what she really was. And now that he was close, he could see things were worse than he’d realized—acne scars covered with makeup, a pale but discernible mustache. Lisa had no business taking an attitude with him. To make this point clear, he put his hand flat against her forehead, very gently, really, and then gave it a little shove.
    She didn’t make a noise this time, but the waterworks were going, streaming down her face. “Please let me go,” she said.
    “Let you go? Hell, this ain’t Russia. We have laws here. Procedures that have to be followed. You think you can just talk your way out of paying your debt to society?” He bobbed his head for a moment, like he was agreeing with someone somewhere, some words the woman couldn’t hear. Then he turned to her. “So,” he said, “a dog-face like you would probably be pretty grateful for a chance to suck cock, don’t you think?”
    “Oh God,” she murmured. She tried to squeeze herself away from him, which was what they did, but there was nowhere to go. This was the backseat of a Ford LTD, for Christ’s sake. But that’s what they did. They tried to get away.
    Doe loved this part. They were so scared, and they’d do whatever he said. And they loved it, too. That was the crazy thing. He knew they’d be getting off on remembering it. Sometimes he got phone calls late at night—hang-ups—and he knew what was going on. It was women he’d had in the back of the cruiser. They wanted some more, they wanted to see him again, but they were also embarrassed. They knew they weren’t supposed to want it. But they did. All this Oh God, no -ing was just part of a script.
    The truth was that it also made him a little bit sad on Jenny’s account, because she was probably going to end up a dog-faced whore like this one. His own daughter, a dog-faced whore. In high school she’d be sucking dick in the bathroom because that would be the only way she’d get boys to like her, which they wouldn’t, but it would take her a couple of years of getting smacked around to figure that out. He knew a couple of high school girls like that right now. He felt bad for them and all, but there wasn’t much to be done about it, so there was no point in avoiding their company, now, was there?
    And here was Lisa, squirming, crying, wiggling like a toad under a shovel. Meanwhile, he had a telephone pole in his pants. He unzipped himself and pulled it out. “Look at that, Lisa. You look at that. Now, you be a good girl and do your job, and we’ll see what we can do about dropping the charges. Be a good girl, we’ll have you back in your car in fifteen minutes. Quarter hour from now, you’ll be cruising down the highway, heading back to Miami.”
    That always helped. You give them something real to hold on to, put them in the future. Just get it over with, and they could go. Which they could. He wasn’t a monster or anything.
    He saw that he had her. She turned to him slowly. Her little