The Ethical Assassin_ A Novel Part 25

"I don't believe it," she said.

I'd said the same thing that afternoon. Looking at the hogs, listening to Melford explain how they were housed, why they were housed that way, and what it did to them and the people who ate them, I hadn't believed it. Looking right at it, I hadn't believed it.

"Believe it," Melford said. "Lemuel, over here. We're in luck. We've found some videotapes."

So while Desiree finished snapping pictures, he and I shoved videotapes into his bag. We then shut out the light and left the lab. Melford looked at his watch. "We shouldn't push our luck, and we don't want Lemuel here to turn into a pumpkin if he doesn't get to his pickup, but why don't we do one more lab. I kind of want to see Lab Two for myself. I've heard things."

We followed him around a corner, where he opened another door. Here we were met by the sounds of subdued whimpering. The smells weren't much different from those of the monkey lab, but when he turned on the light we were met by a room stacked with dog cages, two or three on top of one another. Thin wooden boards separated them, but they did a poor job, and the feces from the animals above dripped onto the animals below.

A few let out tentative barks, but mostly they watched us. They rested, heads on paws, eyes wide and brown, watching. Off in the distance I heard one let out a whimper.

Melford handed Desiree the camera, and she began to snap photos again. He looked around until he found the clipboard he wanted. "Oh, no," he breathed. "They're scheduled for an LD50 test for pesticide to start in two days. This is what sucks about this kind of operation. There's nothing wrong with these dogs. Those monkeys were the living dead, but these guys are savable. Unfortunately, we can't do anything. If we try to get them out of here, we'll get caught, they'll get brought back. The best we can do is doc.u.ment this and get the evidence into the right hands and wait for a better day."

"Where do they get these dogs?" Desiree asked.

"A lot of shelters have deals with places like this. They send over unclaimed strays. But the truth is, labs have backdoor deals with animal abductors. People will steal pets and sell them to a place like this for fifty bucks a pop. You can make decent cash if you don't have scruples."

Desiree put down the camera. "Melford, we can't leave them here. They would at least have a chance if we could let them out in the woods."

"We can't do it," he said. "How are we going to herd twenty or thirty dogs out of here without alerting the guards?"

"I'm not leaving them," she said.

"You are," he told her. "If we all go to jail, we won't do any good. You want to walk this path, you have to harden yourself. You can't blow up every Burger King you drive past. You can't liberate all tortured animals from all the factory farms. You want to, but you can't, and it drives you crazy sometimes because everything you do is just a drop in the bucket. This isn't a fight for the moment or a year or even a decade. This is a battle that will be resolved over generations. And right now we have to make choices. We do what we can and we stay free and keep going and chip away at the edifice. Our getting arrested and those dogs being sent back to their cages isn't going to accomplish anything."

"Doesn't choosing who lives and who dies make us as morally suspect as the people who put these animals here?"

"No," Melford said. "They put the animals here, not us. And we're doing the best we can-which right now is to bear witness."

"We're taking one," I said. "We can take one, can't we?"

"How do you choose which one?" he asked.

I pointed. It was a black poodle. It wasn't Rita, Vivian's black poodle, but it was a black poodle, and I knew that Vivian would take care of it. I knew that she would regard it as some sort of divine compensatory gesture. Maybe the idea was silly, but I believed it. I believed that dog could have a home and someone to love it. This was no longer abstract, no longer theoretical.

"We're taking this dog," I said. "If you don't like it, you can leave without me."

Melford swore but didn't say anything else. Desiree, however, nodded at me. "If Lem knows someone who'll take the dog, we can't leave it here to feast on Black Flag."

"She's a poodle," Melford said. "She'll bark."

"I don't believe this." I could feel myself getting agitated. "Melford Kean, with ice water in his veins, is afraid to do the right thing?"

"It's a matter of being practical. I don't want to fight a battle that will lose the war."

"It's one dog," Desiree said, her voice hard. "We'll keep her quiet. And I'm with Lem. We're taking the dog whether you help or not."

Maybe it was that he didn't think he could dissuade her, but I had the sense that it was because he liked the fact that she felt so adamant. "Boogers," he said. "Let's do it."

He went over to the cage and began to open it very carefully. I suspected he knew enough to suspect that a dog that had been mistreated the way this one had might well turn on him, but she came out docilely and licked his hand. I figured that was a good sign.

"Okay," he said. "Let's try to pull this off."

But when we turned around, we saw the guard standing at the door.

Melford didn't see it, but I did. Desiree reached into her back pocket and removed a switchblade. She didn't open it, but she balanced it in her palm. She might believe that Melford was committed to nonviolence, but she clearly had not yet signed off on that part of the Animal Liberation Front manifesto. Maybe the two of them belonged together.

"Can I help you?" Melford asked. He had found a leash and was in the process of attaching it to Rita's collar. He hardly even bothered to look at the guard.

"Who are you?" he asked. He was in his forties, overweight to the point that he had trouble walking. He stared at us with dark and heavily bagged eyes.

"I'm Dr. Rogers," he said. "And these are my two students, Trudy and Andre."

The guard stared at us. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm running a 504-J," Melford said.

From the puzzled look on the guard's face, it seemed pretty clear to me that Melford had just made up the 504-J.

"How come I didn't get any word that anyone was going to be here?"

"Do you really think I would know the answer to that?" Melford asked.

"You have your ID card?"

"I'll show it to you on my way out," Melford said. "In the meantime, you can see I'm doing something. Are you new here? Because you're supposed to know that you must never disturb the staff when they're handling animals."

The guard stopped to think for a minute. "I've been here all day. How come I didn't see you come in?"

This question must have stumped Melford, because he paused.

"Right," the guard said. "I'm calling Dr. Trainer, and if he doesn't know what you're doing here, I'm calling the cops. Now put the dog back in the cage and come with me."

"No, wait," Melford said. "Let me show you something first." He handed the poodle's leash to me and walked over to his black bag. I stood frozen with fear. Desiree had her knife out, and now Melford was going to take a gun and kill this guard, just for doing his job. This wasn't some nefarious force of evil, like he claimed Karen and b.a.s.t.a.r.d were. This was some poor working a.s.shole.

I tensed, ready to dart forward, but when Melford took his hand out of the bag, he didn't have a gun. He had a stack of money. They were twenties, and I couldn't tell how many, but there was easily $500 there.

"I don't know what they pay you to keep guard over this house of horrors," Melford said, "but you have to know what goes on here is wrong. So I'll make you a deal. You take this cash and let us walk out with this dog. It's one dog. No one will miss her. No one will know we were here. Anyone asks, you say you have no idea. Simple as that."

The guard looked at the money and then around the room. Sure, there was no sign anyone had been here. We hadn't vandalized the place. Many of the cages were empty anyhow, so no one would notice one more empty one. He didn't know about the missing videotapes, so it seemed like a good deal.

The guard s.n.a.t.c.hed the money. "I'll make my rounds again in half an hour," he said. "If you're still here, I'm calling the cops and I'll deny you gave me anything."

"Fair enough," Melford said. He turned around to grin at Desiree, who already had the knife back in her pocket.

Most of the ride back went silently. We made a stop at a 7-Eleven and bought some doggie treats and water for the poodle, and she happily ate and drank in the backseat with me. She hardly made a noise. It was just one dog, I thought. One dog rescued from being forced to eat insecticide. We'd made some small difference.

I told Melford where Vivian lived, and we stopped outside her trailer; he tied the dog to the door, rang the doorbell, and we drove off. We were halfway down the street when her door opened and we heard her m.u.f.fled shriek of joy. What we didn't hear was the subsequent disappointment. It wasn't her dog. Her dog was gone, maybe dead. But it was a dog, and I had to think it would be some comfort.

We were tired from what we had done and what we had seen, but I was lost in another thought. Why had Melford said he had no idea what Oldham Health Services was if he'd been keeping his eye on the place for who knew how long? And what was its connection to b.a.s.t.a.r.d?

It was just shy of eleven when Melford dropped me off outside the Kwick Stop. It was only after I was out of the car and it had driven away that I recalled that Melford had said I was done with him, that our business was over. Did that mean I would never see him again? Was he hurt that I hadn't said good-bye? And did I really care if I hurt the a.s.sa.s.sin's feelings?

Not that it mattered. Maybe it was because of everything that had happened in the last day, but I didn't believe I was done with Melford, and I found it even harder to believe I was done with the Gambler, Jim Doe, and the rest. When I was back home, away from Jacksonville and bookmen, I'd believe it.

I walked over to the pay phone just outside the Kwick Stop's door. It was late to be making the call, but, surprisingly, Chris Denton picked up on the first ring.

"Yeah," he told me. "I've got your guy."

"And?"

"And not much. He's a Miami businessman, deals in livestock, and also deals with some door-to-door encyclopedia outfit. He also runs a charity. That's about it. No record, no arrests, no stories in the media other than the usual business c.r.a.p."

"That's all you've got?" I asked.

"What do you want me to do-tell you he's a ma.s.s murderer? He's just an a.s.shole, like everyone else. Like you."

"I was hoping to get more for my money."

"Too bad," he said. And he hung up.

I stood there by the phone, letting disappointment wash over me. I don't know what I had expected. Maybe some missing piece, something to help put it all in perspective. Maybe I wanted something that would have helped me feel safer.

And I didn't buy it. If B. B. Gunn was the head of some kind of drug and hog operation, whatever that would look like, he must have had some dealings with the law. An arrest that never went anywhere, unfounded allegations that made their way into the newspaper, something like that. Why had Denton come up empty?

As it turned out, it was my fault. I never noticed that Chris Denton's number was in the same exchange as the one Karen had put on her application. It was a Meadowbrook Grove exchange. And Chris Denton, I would later learn, knew Jim Doe.

When I hung up the phone, I had the feeling someone was watching me. I looked up. There was Chitra, her eyes narrow and, I thought, judgmental.

"Hi," I said. "This is your pickup too?"

"Yeah," she told me. "You weren't selling today, were you."

"Not selling?"

"I've been here a while. I saw you get out of that car your friend was driving. Did you go swimming?"

"What?"

"That woman in the front was wearing a bikini."

That was about as far as our conversation got before Bobby pulled up in his Cordoba and she melted back into the store.

Ronny Neil and Scott were already in the car, Ronny Neil in front, whispering conspiratorially to Scott in the back. Did that mean something? Bobby had been picking me up first for weeks.

Why should I care who got to sit in which seats? I was planning on leaving and never coming back. I had bigger and more important things to worry about than whether or not Bobby considered me the best bookman in his crew. I was more interested in making certain I didn't go to jail for murder or get killed by drug dealers.

The Cordoba came to a stop in front of the store, and Bobby pushed himself out. The engine was still running, and from inside Billy Idol crooned about eyes without a face, whatever the h.e.l.l that meant. Bobby grinned and came around to the back, flipping open the trunk with a flair of his wrist, as if he were a magician performing a trick. His blue oxford s.h.i.+rt was partially untucked, and he'd spilled something sodalike on his pants.

"So, besides running errands for the Gambler, did you have any time to make money?"

I shook my head. "I blanked."

Bobby sucked on his lower lip. "That was a pretty primo spot I gave you. Might have helped if you'd been there."

"I was out there most of the day. It just didn't work out."

"Yeah, right."

"It's not like I blanked on purpose," I said, even though that's exactly what I did.

"So, what happened?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. Bad luck."

"No such thing as bad luck, Lemmy. You make your own luck." Bobby looked at me with a kind of seriousness I had never seen before, and I knew he didn't want to hear my bulls.h.i.+t excuses. He gave his head a little sad shake and then shut the trunk. "You guys want to go behind my back, f.u.c.k me up, that's your business. Get in the car."

I had to climb in the back with large, smelly Scott. When they picked up Kevin, there was no way Scott would scoot over to the middle, which meant I would be squished between them, breathing in the stink of Scott's unwashed body all the way back to the motel.

But, I told myself, it would all be over soon. Tomorrow would be the last day in town. Monday morning Bobby would head for home. We would stop on the road to sell, and I'd be back by two or three A.M. A.M. early Tuesday, and I would never have to sell books again. Just two more book-selling sessions and then freedom. early Tuesday, and I would never have to sell books again. Just two more book-selling sessions and then freedom.

A tinny Genesis tune was coming through the radio now, and I tried to concentrate on it. I'd read once that if you had a really bad headache, you could make it go away by thinking about some other part of your body instead. That's what I was trying out. I figured if I listened to Genesis, if I concentrated on Phil Collins's voice, I might not smell Scott quite so much.

"I bet you blanked today," Ronny Neil said from up front. "I didn't. I got me a double."

This was where Bobby would tell him to be quiet, that they didn't talk about how it went in the car. But Bobby didn't say anything. He just stared ahead as he drove.

"You ain't gonna answer me?" Ronny Neil said.

Scott shoved an elbow into my ribs. "I heard someone say something to you," he told me. He scratched at a zit on his nose.

I still didn't say anything. I decided instead to nurse my indignation.

"Well, did you blank or didn't you?" Ronny Neil asked. "I thought you understood English so great."

"You know we're not supposed to talk about it."

"I don't hear Bobby complaining."

I paused to let Bobby chime in, but he didn't say anything "We're not supposed to talk about it," I said again.

"s.h.i.+t, boy, you worry too much about what you're supposed to do and what you're not supposed to do. Me, I'm gonna celebrate in style. A double. With that bonus I got me six hundred dollars today, and I get me some p.u.s.s.y."

"Yeah," said Scott.

"Yeah what?" Ronny Neil asked his friend. "Yeah, your buddy is going to get some p.u.s.s.y? You know you ain't. Who would get with a fat, lisping f.u.c.k like you?"

Scott laughed.