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

piggy eyes were red and narrow and pinched with fear, but he saw something like hope there, too. That grim determination to suck and bear it. And the twinkle in her eye, like she knew she was lucky to have a man like Jim Doe force himself on her. Maybe this wasn’t how she’d always dreamed of it, but she’d dreamed of it just the same.
    “Okay,” she whispered. Softly. To herself, mostly, he guessed. She had to get herself together. Why, he didn’t know. She’d sucked cock before. And if some pretty little thing locked him in a backseat and told him to eat her pussy, you wouldn’t see Doe having to talk himself into it. But he supposed everyone was different.
    “Okay,” she said again, this time more to him. “You’ll let me go?”
    “I told you I would,” Doe said urgently. With all this talk he was losing his momentum, starting to get soft. “Now get to sucking, girl.”
    “Okay,” she said again. “But you have to take off my cuffs, first.”
    “Nice try, Lisa.”
    “Please,” she said. “They hurt. I’ll be good.”
    I’ll be good. Like she was a little kid. Well, why not? He’d done it before. Sometimes they just needed to feel a little easy, and he knew this girl wasn’t going to get all funny on him. She was broken.
    “All right, sugar,” he said. “But nothing tricky. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
    He reached around and unlocked her cuffs, wincing at the sound of the click and then the girl’s sigh of relief.
    “Thank you.” She sniffed in a big honking snort of boogers, which he didn’t much like, since who wanted to get head mixed with a mess of snot? But fuck it, he reasoned.
    “Now I done something for you,” he said. “I think you owe me a little favor.”
    His first thought was that she was coming in a little fast. His second was, Holy Christ! The fringes of his vision went red with agony, the unbearably sharp, but also dull, thud of pain in his balls that spread like an electric alien fungus to his hips and down his thighs and up his spine. And then again. It hurt so much that he couldn’t even make sense of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind he understood. She was punching him in the balls. Not just punching him, pummeling him. Wind up and release like a rocket.
    He tried to back away from her, out the door, but his back was to the car seat, and in the thud, thud, thud of her fist against his ’nads, he was in a free fall of pain, up became down, left became right. He couldn’t figure out which way to go. Instead, he started to reach for his gun.
    On some level he knew that shooting her in the back of his LTD with his dick out, on his own property, when who knew how many people had seen him stop her, and with her car still sitting by the side of the road, was a bad idea. On the other hand, he had this vague notion that if he could put a bullet in her stupid ugly face, she would stop and the pain would be gone. The pain was somehow linked to her being alive. It didn’t make sense, and he even knew it didn’t make sense, but he didn’t care.
    The problem was that he didn’t have the gun. Everything was hazy and distorted, and he was feeling around for his belt, but he couldn’t find it. The other thing was that while the pain was still there, the thudding had stopped. That was an improvement.
    But not much. Lisa had managed to get his belt off him, the tricky fucking whore, so she had his keys, his nightstick. And she had his gun. The pain heaved back and forth below his waist, and he hoped to Christ she hadn’t crushed his balls. The horizon shifted, and he understood that he was on his side in the back of the seat. She was standing in front of him, the car door open, her T-shirt disheveled and wet from tears or perspiration, her hair all wild like some crazed fuck bunny in a porn movie.
    “You goddamn prick,” she said.
    The gun was pointed at him, which he didn’t like, but even in his agony he could see that she didn’t know how to hold a