The Ethical Assassin: A Novel by David Liss

stare, in something like shock, I suppose. The terror swelled in my head like a dull roar against my ears, and my heart pounded, but the thud of it felt distant and detached, the tinny echo of someone banging on something far away. My neck ached from craning, but I didn’t want to look away. Too much shifting might make him nervous.
    “What are you doing here?” the assassin asked. “You don’t look like a friend of theirs.”
    I knew I’d better answer a direct question, but something in the pulley-and-wheel mechanism of my vocal cords wouldn’t move. I swallowed hard, painfully, forcing something down, and tried again. “Selling encyclopedias.”
    The green eyes went wide. “To those assholes? Jesus. You should have done it a few years ago. Maybe a little knowledge would have saved them. But you know what? I doubt it.”
    Don’t ask him, I warned myself. Just shut up, play it cool, see what he wants. He hasn’t killed you yet, so maybe he won’t. He says he won’t. Don’t ask him anything. “Why did you kill them?” I asked anyway.
    “You don’t need to know that. You just need to know that they deserved it.” He grabbed the chair next to mine and sat down, moving in deliberate and authoritative movements, as if he were about to deliver an older brother’s kindly lecture on saying no to drugs. I could now see that the assassin was younger than I had first realized, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. He looked cheerful, as though he had a good sense of humor, almost certainly dry humor—the kind of guy you might want at your party or to live on the same floor of your dorm. Even as I thought it I knew it sounded idiotic, but there it was.
    “I’d like you to pack up your stuff,” the assassin said. “Don’t leave any evidence of being here.”
    I couldn’t make myself move. It seemed like the stench from the trailer park had begun to seep inside, to beat down the smell of tobacco and gunpowder and sweat, but then I realized it was the smell of the bodies—shit and piss and blood. And there were those dead faces with their empty eyes. My gaze kept drifting over to their ruined heads, frozen in terminal surprise.
    “This is important,” the killer said, not unkindly. “I need you to clean up your stuff.”
    I rose in hypnotic compliance, expecting to discover his promise not to hurt me to be a lie. The instant I turned my back, I’d hear the squeak of the silencer and the burning rupture of metal in my back. I knew he was going to kill me. Yet at the same time, I didn’t quite believe it. Maybe it was intuition or wishful thinking, but when he said he didn’t want to kill me, part of me believed he meant it—and not desperate, pathetic belief, either. It didn’t seem to me like the desperate hope of the blindfolded condemned, feeling the roughness of the noose as it slipped over his neck while certain the reprieve would come. For whatever reason, the idea that I could get out of this alive struck me as entirely plausible.
    I looked at my stuff. All of the book materials were on the table, and miraculously, none had been splattered with blood. My hands, big surprise, trembled like an outboard motor, but I began to pick up the brochures and samples and pricing sheets, holding each gingerly as though I were a cop collecting evidence, and I dropped them into my stepfather’s moldy bag. I took the check Karen had written and shoved it in my pocket. Meanwhile, the assassin began to organize Karen and Bastard’s stuff. He placed the checkbook next to a pile of bills by the phone, returned the pens to a cup on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. Careful not to step in any blood, he brought my cup over to the sink and washed it methodically with a sponge, somehow keeping his gloves reasonably dry.
    He was so cool about it, so damn cool, moving around the room with unflappable focus, the sort of person who acted as though everything had gone according to plan, even when it