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

gun—she had it in both hands like a cop on some dumb-ass show. If he had to guess, he’d say she’d never fired one, probably hadn’t taken the safety off. Not that he wanted to take the chance she’d figure it out if she needed to, since she’d already proved herself clever. Still, she might be the cleverest ugly bitch in the world, but if he’d been able to move his body below his waist, he would have gotten up, taken that thing away from her, and broken her potato of a nose with it. That’s what he would have done.
    “You wanted to know what I do for Channel Eight. I’m a reporter, you asshole. Get ready for camera crews.”
    She kicked the door shut, trapping him into the back of his car.
    The smell of pig shit from the waste lagoon washed over him like an insult, like a big ugly laugh, like a tax audit, like a dose of VD. Doe was trapped. He was in pain. His balls were smashed. The Yoo-hoo and bourbon churned menacingly in his stomach and then came up onto the seat, onto his chest, his face, his arms. He felt himself passing out, and he stayed passed out until the next morning when his deputy finally found him and woke him with a series of delicate and mocking taps of his nightstick against the window.

Chapter 4
    M Y HEART POUNDED, and a clenched coil of fear hardened in my chest. I had witnessed the death of two people. I would be next. I was going to die. Everything was cold and icy and slow, unreal and so achingly, physically, undeniably real as to be a new state of consciousness.
    I never decided to turn and face the killer, but it happened. I pivoted my neck and saw an unusually tall man standing behind me, holding a gun pointed in my general direction, if not exactly at me. The lunar eclipse of his head blocked the overhead naked bulb, and for an instant he was a dark, wild-haired silhouette. The gun, which I could see clearly, had a longish black cylinder at the tip, which I recognized from TV shows as a silencer.
    “Crap!” the man said. He moved and came into view, looking not raging or murderous, but puzzled. “Who are you ?”
    I opened my mouth but said nothing. It wasn’t that in my terror I’d forgotten my name or how to make the sounds come out; it was more that I knew my name would mean nothing to him. He wanted some sort of description that would place me in context, something that would help him decide if he should let me live or not, and I wasn’t up to the task.
    With the gun still pointed toward me, the man gazed at my confused face with an expression of patience both coolly reptilian and strangely warm. He had blond hair, white really, that spiked out Warholishly, and he was unusually thin, like Karen and Bastard, but he didn’t look sickly and drawn the way they had. In fact, he seemed sort of fit and stylish in his black Chuck Taylors, black jeans, white dress shirt buttoned all the way up, and black gloves. A collegiate-looking backpack dangled insouciantly over his right shoulder. Even in the smoky light of the trailer, his emerald eyes stood out against the whiteness of his skin.
    “Stay calm,” he said. He had the demeanor of a man totally in control, but in the tiniest fraction of a second, his composure appeared to crack and then reassemble itself, going from statue to rubble to statue again.
    He took a step to his left and then to his right, a truncated sort of pacing. “You might have noticed that I haven’t killed you, and I can pretty much tell you that I’m not planning on killing you. I’m not a murderer. I’m an assassin. Worst that will happen, if you do something stupid and piss me off, I’ll shoot you in the knee. It will hurt like hell, might leave you crippled, so I don’t want to do it. Just be cool, and do what I say, and I promise you’re going to be just fine.” He looked around and then let out a breath of air so that his lips vibrated. “Crap. I was so hopped up on adrenaline, I didn’t even see you until I took them down.”
    I continued to