The Ethical Assassin: A Novel by David Liss Page A

hadn’t. My being in the trailer hadn’t thrown him off for more than an instant. He’d changed the plan, was all. I flipped out when I overslept by five minutes, but this guy was centered.
    He stepped back over the bodies, over the blood, and sat next to me. I ought to have cringed at his proximity, but I don’t think I did. Under the heat of his gaze, my mind emptied of everything except a loose, preverbal fear and an irrational hope.
    The assassin pointed the gun toward the ceiling, unscrewed the silencer, and then ejected the clip and removed a bullet from the firing chamber. Keeping his eye on me, he placed these accessories in his backpack and then set the gun on the table. I stared at it. We didn’t have guns in my family. We didn’t have firearms or knives or even baseball bats under the bed. We didn’t handle weapons. If there were mice in the house, we called an exterminator and let him touch the traps and the poison. I came from a background of squeamishness, and I’d been raised to believe as a matter of faith that if I handled anything with the capacity to do harm, it would turn on me like a mutinous robot and destroy its master.
    Now, there it was, right in front of me: the gun. Just like in the movies. I understood the pistol wasn’t loaded, but for a moment I thought I should grab it, do something heroic. Maybe I could smack the assassin with the gun. Pistol-whip him or something tough guy-ish like that. While I pondered my options, however, the assassin took another gun out of his backpack, so pistol-whipping became less of an option.
    Once again, he sort of aimed his firearm at me, less at me than in my direction, not to terrify me, but to make sure I kept my head, remembered who stood where in the hierarchy. “Give me your wallet.”
    I didn’t want to give up my wallet. It had my money, my driver’s license, the credit card my stepfather had reluctantly handed over, which I was allowed to use only in absolute emergencies, and even then I could expect to get yelled at. On the other hand, if the assassin wanted my wallet, I told myself, maybe he really wouldn’t kill me. It would be easy to take a wallet off my dead body. So I reached into my back pocket, maneuvered it out—not so easy since it and my pants were moist with sweat—and handed it over. The assassin deftly thumbed through it, unimpeded by his black gloves, and then removed my driver’s license, in which I looked unspeakably dorky and was wearing a velour shirt, which surely must have seemed like a good idea at the time, though now the decision mystified me.
    The assassin studied it briefly. “I’ll keep this, if you don’t mind, Lemuel.”
    He wanted to take my license. That meant something significant; it portended of terrible things to come, though I couldn’t quite shape the ideas in my mind.
    “Now, pick up the other gun. Come on. I promise if you cooperate, you’re not going to get hurt.”
    I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. And what would happen if I did? Would he shoot me, claim self-defense, claim I’d shot Bastard and Karen? Picking up the gun was insanity, but so was not picking it up, so I slowly wrapped my fingers around the handle and lifted. It was both heavier and lighter than I imagined, and it trembled in my hand.
    “Aim it at the refrigerator,” the assassin said.
    Beyond the point of making trouble or arguing, I did as I was told.
    “Squeeze the trigger.”
    Though I knew he’d taken out the clip, which I understood meant the gun was unloaded, I still winced as I followed the order. I pressed down hard, expecting the rich boom of a TV shot report, but I got nothing except a hollow click. I kept my arm out. The gun continued to shake.
    “Good job, Lemuel. Now put the gun down on the table.”
    I did.
    “So, here’s the deal,” the assassin said. “Your fingerprints are now on the murder weapon. Bad for you, good for me, but let me be clear about this. You leave