The Ethical Assassin: A Novel by David Liss

and appearances suggested I’d been more or less forgotten.
    “No, I scored.” I opened my bag and handed Bobby the paperwork. “I almost got a double, but it didn’t pan out.”
    Bobby smiled. “Hell, my man. You scored two days in a row. You’re on fire.” Pronounced, for sales motivation effect, “fie-yah.” “Just stay pos, keep thinking pos thoughts. It’s the pos attitude that will get you the double or triple tomorrow.”
    Bobby was a big guy, big like a football player or more like an ex–football player. He had meaty arms and thick legs, no neck, but he also had a sizable gut that jutted out over his cloth belt. Bobby’s face was wide and boyish and almost preternaturally charismatic. I wanted to be too smart to be drawn in by Bobby’s charm, but I was drawn in all the same.
    The fact was, I found it impossible not to like Bobby. He enjoyed everyone’s company, and he displayed a generosity beyond anything I had ever seen. Part of it was his command of the power of money. Bobby wanted always to demonstrate to his crew that he had cash, that cash was good, and that cash made you happy. He would buy us beer and lunch and, on occasion, a night out. During long drives, when we stopped for fast food, Bobby tipped the counter workers at McDonald’s and Burger King. He tipped tollbooth attendants and hotel clerks. He was, to use his word, pos.
    “You don’t have a check here,” Bobby said, waving my paperwork at me. He ran a hand through his short, almost military style hair. “You didn’t get green on me and forget again?”
    I had scored a double my first day on the job. My first day. No one expected people to score their first day, so Bobby hadn’t yet talked me through the credit app, and consequently I hadn’t asked my buyers to fill one out. Bobby had then taken me over to both houses—and this was now after midnight and all lights were out—getting the people out of bed so they could sit around in their robes and fill out credit apps. I would rather have given up the sales, but Bobby worked himself up into a feverishly rotating tornado of sales energy, and he’d insisted. Then again, he knew he could get away with it. He had that chummy grin and inviting laugh and that way of saying hello that made strangers think they must have met him before and simply forgotten. I would have had the door slammed in my face, but Bobby had the wife at the second house making us all instant hot chocolate, the kind with the little marshmallows that melted into gooey clouds.
    And he had motivation. I made $200 off each sale, Bobby made $150 each time I or anyone else in his crew scored. That’s why people wanted to be a crew boss. You made money for getting other people to do work.
    The paperwork Bobby now held in his big hands belonged to Karen and Bastard. I had handed over the wrong sheets. The momentary relief I’d felt at escaping the redneck was now gone. I was back to the roller-coaster feeling of plummeting straight down.
    “Sorry,” I said. I was bearing down, clenching my abdominal muscles, to keep the fear from seeping into my voice. It was like trying to stanch a gaping wound. I knew that the more time went by, the more time I could spend living a normal life, the less I would remember Karen lying on the floor, her eyes wide open, a jagged crater in her forehead, blood pooling around her like a halo. I’d forget the acrid and coppery smell in the air. I wanted it gone.
    “That was the one I blew.” I fished around in my bag and got the paperwork from early that afternoon. The quiet little couple in the run-down green trailer. Their two kids and four dogs. The stench of unpaid bills. That had been a walk in the park.
    Bobby looked it over, nodded definitively. “This looks pretty good,” he said before filing the papers in his own bag. “Shouldn’t be a problem passing.” I had missed out on commissions and bonuses because credit apps hadn’t passed. I’d even missed out on a big one,