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

you were in and out without luck, saw nothing unusual—except maybe this creepy redneck—and that’s all you have to say. They’ll be off your case in no time and on that redneck’s. Can you trust me on that?”
    Could I trust him? He’d barged into my life, murdered a pair of prospects in front of my eyes, and then set me up to take the blame. I nodded.
    “Fab,” the assassin said. “Now, I’d say it was time for you to be getting out of here.”
    Leaving seemed to be a pretty good idea. More than I could have hoped for. I stood on wobbling legs, held on to the table until I could support myself properly, and began a sideways shuffle toward the front door, careful to keep an eye on the killer at all times.
    “Lemuel,” the assassin said, “I hope you’ll consider the back way. Secrecy and all.”
    Vaguely humiliated, I went into the living room and unlocked the back door. I stepped out into the yard, where the heat and the dank, outhouse-stench humidity startled me out of my fear for a moment. I had seen people killed just feet away from me, I had sat at the table with their killer, and I had made it out alive. I was not going to be killed.
    Now I just had to get away from there before the cops showed up.
    It would be easy to cut over to the neighbor’s property, so I closed the door behind me and stepped out into the dank darkness. The ghost of the moon was glowing behind a heavy blanket of clouds. The crickets chirped their near screeching chorus, and nearby, an unfathomable tropical frog bellowed its equatorial song. A mosquito dive-bombed my ear, but I ignored the explosive buzz. Instead I trudged forward, vaguely aware as I walked that the lights in Bastard and Karen’s trailer went metaphorically out.
    Bastard and Karen. He irritating and vaguely sinister. She jagged and beaten down. Dead. The two of them dead. Their kids, off somewhere, were now orphans and had no idea. Their young lives, as they had lived them, were finished. And I had been a party to it. I had witnessed the unspeakable horror of their deaths and then sat with their killer and, I realized, found him strangely charming. It wasn’t as though I could have saved Bastard and Karen, but I told myself I could do something now. I could go to the police, and go fast, maybe in time for them to catch the assassin while he was still in the trailer. And even if they didn’t get there in time, no one would believe that I had killed them.
    Then again, they might.
    The assassin, when not assassinating, acted like a reasonable guy. It could be that he believed, really believed, that Bastard and Karen deserved it. But did anyone deserve it? Did I live in a world in which bad people were killed by righteous assassins? Nothing in my life told me it was so, but then again, this night had been in my life.
    The first two trailers I passed were dark, though I heard an angry dog’s sonorous barking in the middle distance. I came out onto a street, though not the one on which Bastard and Karen lived, which somehow made me feel better. It was a little less than a mile to the Kwick Stop, and only a couple of cars passed me, speeding by in automotive oblivion. I told myself over and over again that I just might get away with this, I just might get my life back.

Chapter 5
    T HE C UTTING B OARD lacked music. It was a large restaurant, with a moderately unfortunate name, composed of a series of interlinked wood-paneled rooms filled out with white-clothed tables and heavy wooden chairs. Yet it lacked music, and that disappointed B.B. He liked music, soft music, trickling in so quietly that he could hardly hear it. Ambient as a distant highway, but still evanescently there, adding texture to the meal, a little heft if the conversation lagged, a touch of the cinematic sound track. Classical was fine, the soft sort of classical, not the loud stuff with horns and kettledrums, but the truth was that B.B. liked elevator music. He knew everyone got a kick out of trashing