by Kurtz, Ed
Nick lighted a fresh cigarette with the smoldering end of the last one and took the smoke deep into his lungs. He held it for a half a minute, then exhaled through his nose. The blue-white vapor twirled out, licking up the sides of his nose and burning his eyes. The sound system softly spewed an easy listening tune, the sort of thing the clientele wasn’t really supposed to notice, and he glanced up at the dining area, which was mostly vacant save for an elderly black man reading a maimed paperback copy of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and a couple of kids with dyed black hair and eyeliner to match, sullenly poking at their pancakes and reveling in their faux-apathy.
And Nick did what he almost always did when he found himself sitting quiet and alone in a public place like that—he wondered what his next steps would be if someone had paid him to kill any of the complete strangers he was watching. The old man would be a cinch, he decided, a simple matter of hand over nose and mouth and tossing the hoary old gent into the trunk or backseat for a ride to someplace dark and unpopulated. He might wail and caterwaul all the way there, but that wasn’t usually a problem, just an irritation. Once there—there being either someplace new or at least unused for a good long while—Nick would almost certainly use the garrote. Or he could likely snap the poor bastard’s neck without much trouble, or simply push him down a flight of stairs. Worst-case scenario, he’d pinch the man’s nose shut and cover his mouth and wait a few minutes for the victim to suffocate. Easy peasy. He’d had a handful of aged marks over the years, and they never gave up much of a struggle. Whether that was because they were tired of living Nick didn’t know; he’d never asked. They were weaker, usually, the exception being the USMC lance corporal who’d kept up his exercise regimen so that even at seventy-eight he was a formidable son of a bitch. Nick had shot that one, right in the neck. Died badly. But that hadn’t bothered Nick in the least. Not then.
He shifted his gaze from the old man to the kids. Disaffected, like every generation of teenagers and young adults since the species slithered out of the primordial muck. The girl wore retro butterfly glasses she probably didn’t need and the boy smoked clove cigarettes that he pinched between his forefinger and thumb like a Nazi villain in an old WWII movie. Promise them drugs, he guessed, and they’d follow him into the mouth of hell. Then again, they might just as likely call the cops on the skeezy older guy offering the pleasures of altered consciousness to impressionable youth. He’d have to stake them out a bit, gather some intel before he knew best how to proceed. Maybe he’d wait in the car until they came out of the restaurant, follow them and hope for the best. Might end up clumsy, even messy like Lou something-or-other, but the bottom line was he always finished a job and it never got connected to whoever forked over the bread for it. To at least that degree, Nick was a professional.
As he mused on the possible outcomes of targeting the black-garbed kids for cold-blooded murder, they rose and took their bill to the cash register. Nick snapped back to reality, tipped his coffee cup to his mouth only to find it empty. His pack of Pall Malls was just as empty, which meant his stay at the Howard Johnson’s just off Exit 24 had reached its natural conclusion. He waited in line behind the kids and paid his bill as they went morosely out to the parking lot, to their car and on with their lives, never once considering themselves fortunate that the murderer across the room from them would probably never be paid to rub them out.
She was already sitting in the passenger seat of the early ‘90s model Ford as her beau was sliding behind the wheel. Nick floated by them on the way back to his Benz, kept his eyes to himself but didn’t outright ignore them. He couldn’t help it: now that he’d given them the consideration, they were more or less in his sights.
And when the Ford stuttered to life and puttered out of the parking lot to the access road, Nick kept a respectable distance as he followed it.
And when his guts started to quiver again, he considered the extreme unlikelihood of bad eggs twice in twenty-four hours.
* * *
“I’m not suicidal,” Misty said. “It’s not like that.”
They were lying side by side on her twin mattress that had neither frame nor box spring. She was smoking an Eve 120, which seemed to Nick about as thick as a toothpick. He didn’t smoke yet. They were both naked, save for the sling on her busted arm.
“You just wish you’d never been born,” he said.
“Yeah. See, I wasn’t ever given a choice in the matter, was I? I mean, let’s say I’m up in heaven, or wherever souls hang out before they slip into a newborn baby.”
“Okay.”
“And so there I am, and God or whoever, he says to me, he says, ‘Misty, how about it? Do you wanta get born and be alive and live a life like ordinary people do?’ And me, I’m the sorta gal wants to know what I’m getting into before I jump into something, so I says, ‘Well, what’s the deal?’ You know? ‘What’s it all about? What can I expect once I’ve signed on the dotted line or whatever?’ So he shows me.”
“Shows you what?”
“Life, Nicky.” She’d taken to the nickname like a drowning victim takes to oxygen. There was no talking her out of it. “Everything, the good and the bad. Mostly bad, from where I’m sitting, but I’m just being honest about that. You get hurt a lot, you work your ass off for nothing, people stab you in the back every chance they get. That sorta shit. And then at the end of it you’re laid up in some hospital room smells like bleach and throw-up and you got tubes coming out of every hole and you ask yourself, ‘What was the whole goddamn point?’ No, thanks. After all that, I’d say no. I’ll not be born, but thanks all the same.”
She took a long drag from the skinny cigarette and exhaled it like she was being photographed for a magazine. Nick crumpled his brow, trying to suss it out.
“Why’s it got to have a point?” he asked at some length.
“You don’t think it should?”
“Never thought about it.”
Misty tamped the Eve out in a glass ashtray on the floor beside the mattress and scooted back until she was sitting up against the wall. The low-wattage bulb in the lamp cast a long, awkward shadow diagonally across the ceiling.
“Well, I have. I think about shit like that all the time. Too much time on my hands, I guess. It’s how come I’ll never have a baby.”
“Because it might have a crummy life?”
“Because life itself is pretty damn crummy, if you think about it. The way I see it, life is kinda like hard time.”
“You mean prison?”
“That’s right. My old man spent most of his life in the pen, so I know what I’m talking about here. See, Pop wasn’t really all that angry the way a lot of the guys in there were. It was just the way things turned out, his lot in life and that sort of thing. He read a lot, worked out all the time. Got his high school diploma when he was forty-two, though I’ll be damned if I know why he bothered. Point is, he focused on all the things he could do to make it through so he wouldn’t lose his mind or just get bitter and mean. That wasn’t much, but he buried himself in whatever he could get.”
“And you’re saying it’s that way for everybody.”
“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, hey, that was a pretty good lay we just had, wasn’t it?”
Nick flushed pink, but he nodded.
“I’m glad for that. That’s a good thing. But it’s a high school diploma for a cat who’s stuck in the joint for the rest of his life. It’s like drinking an imported beer while you’re in a plane about to crash into the side of a mountain. Maybe all you’re thinking about is how much you’re digging that beer, but me? I can’t take my eyes off that fucking mountain.”
Nick’s cheeks blanched back to white. “Jesus,” was all he could think to say.
Misty smoked another Eve and when she was done, some ten minutes later, rolled awkwardly on top of Nick, all lashing tongue and scrabbling, exploring hands. Round two lasted considerably longer than their first go. Neither of them came this time.
Afterward he
washed up in the tiny bathroom and stepped back into his blue jeans and set to thinking about supper. While he dressed, Misty studied his taped ribs and bruised torso in the dim lamplight.
“Who worked you over?” she asked.
“Some college pricks I suckered at a pool hall,” he answered honestly.
“Some people don’t like to be taken for fools,” she opined.
“So I’ve noticed. How about you?”
She was struggling with her panties, a challenging feat for a girl with only one working arm. At the question she gestured toward her injured arm and said, “You mean this?”
“That and the shiner, yeah.”
She laughed—a short, nasal snort—and finally managed to shimmy her panties up and over her ass. “You know I’m on the game, right?”
Nick just shook his head. She wasn’t talking his language.
“I’m a whore, Nicky,” she clarified.
“Oh,” he said.
“Don’t look so disappointed,” Misty said, her eyes on the floor in search of her T-shirt and skirt. “I’m not going to gouge you or anything. Tonight I’m just a chick you lucked into, sailor.”
“Lucky me,” he said with a crooked grin.
“Lucky Nicky,” she agreed.
He found his shirt, shrugged into the sleeves and buttoned it up most of the way. She thrashed about, fighting with hers, and Nick went to help her.
“Thanks, Lucky,” she said.
“New nickname?”
“Fits.”
“And what should I call you, I wonder?”
Misty pointed at her black eye, and she smiled sadly.
“Spot,” she said.
* * *
The Ford didn’t head straight for home, wherever that was. It stopped first at the porno theater on South First, the Rialto. Parked in the one handicapped space out front. The marquee proudly proclaimed the title of the week’s feature presentation: CUMMING TO AMERICA. The boy let the car idle while the girl hustled into the lobby, her frayed Converse smacking the crumbling cement.
Nick killed his headlights as soon as the kids pulled into the parking slot, and he pulled off to the bike lane to watch from a hundred yards away. He was dying for a smoke but to stop for a pack would mean losing the Ford’s trail. It was important, somehow. He just couldn’t tell why.
He ended up digging a butt out of the ashtray and firing it up.
As he smoked the bent half-smoke, Nick stared at the aged marquee and dimly recalled seeing regular movie titles spelled out there, back when he was the same age as the kids in the Ford and before he’d ever killed anyone. Had he seen The Towering Inferno in there before it exclusively catered to the raincoat brigade? Or was it The Poseidon Adventure?
It certainly wasn’t Cumming to America.
The girl reemerged from the lobby, a plastic shopping bag dangling from one hand. Nick considered for a moment that his first hunch had been correct—drugs could have been the hook. She hurried to get back into the car and the boy was backing out before she shut the door. Nick jerked the gearshift back to D and rolled forward, letting the Ford gain a bit before stepping on the gas.
“The Towering Inferno,” he mumbled to himself as he switched the headlights back on and cruised up to 35 MPH, half a block back from the hatchback. “It was definitely The Towering Inferno.”
* * *
“So it was what, like a pimp or something?”
“No,” Misty said, shaking her head. “I’m self-employed, don’t answer to nobody. No, just some john. He wanted to play games I don’t play. Didn’t like it when I told him no, that’s all.”
“You’re awfully…I don’t know…”
“Cavalier about it?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He didn’t want to embarrass himself by admitting he didn’t know that word.
“What am I going to do? The bastard still paid what he owed.”
“And how much is that?”
“Nunya.”
“Nunya?”
“Nunya goddamn business, Lucky.”
“All right, all right.”
Nick stabbed a cube of teriyaki chicken with his fork, having given up on the chopsticks after the first failed attempt. The meat was tougher than leather, hardly becoming of a joint that called itself The Golden Palace. The semiconscious junkie sleeping it off just outside the front door might have been his first clue that it wasn’t exactly a four-star eatery. Nick threw in the towel and concentrated on his iced tea instead.
“Way I see it, there’s loads of hazardous jobs out there,” Misty said with a philosopher’s air, a tone with which Nick was rapidly becoming familiar. “You think construction workers got it easy? Or firefighters? Those guys wake up every day not knowing if it’s their last one or not, you ever think about that?”
“Not much,” Nick said.
“People need buildings to live and work in, need guys to put out fires, and they need to get fucked, too. So it’s there, it’s available, and most of the time it’s just some lonesome cat can’t make it with a girl or them guys can’t stand to look at their wives anymore. Simple, no problem. But sometimes it’s a son of a bitch like the son of a bitch worked me over the other night. It happens. It’s life.”
“The life you would’ve said no to,” Nick put in.
“I should get excited about a broken arm from a guy wants to piss on my face? Would you say yes to that?”
“It’s not that or no life at all, Spot.”
“Sure it is. Everybody’s pissing in your face, all the time. You just don’t taste it anymore 'cause you’re used to it. That’s about all it is, this whole stupid game: people just pissing all over each other, the rotten bastards.”
She punctuated her vitriol by impaling a floret of broccoli, dripping with soy sauce, which she poked into her mouth.
Nick said, “Jesus—you ever consider therapy?”
“I steer clear of blow and junk,” she said with her mouth full, “which in my world makes me a pretty goddamn stable individual.”
Nick’s head swam. He brought his glass of iced tea up to his face, stabbed himself in the eye with the straw.
“Careful there, Lucky.”
“I just wish you’d show some, I don’t know…indignation.”
“Hey, I’m plenty indignated,” she said with a wink. She raised her busted wing, wagged the elbow at him. “Which has gotten me real far, as you can see.”
The waiter—a Mexican kid no older than fifteen—came around with a pitcher of murky tea and asked if they wanted anything else. Misty shook her head and the kid left the ticket on the table. Nick eyeballed it, the grand total in particular, and swallowed noisily.
“That’s right,” Misty said, her shoulders slumping a little. “You got rolled.”
He swallowed again. She dug a thick fold of crumpled green bills from her back pocket and peeled off a twenty.
“A free fuck and a free meal. Lucky Lucky.”
Nick felt like a world-class prick.
* * *
Half an hour had passed since the Ford pulled up to a two-level apartment building on East Fifth, whereupon the two dour kids tramped up the apartment at the top of the steps, plastic shopping bag in tow. Nick waited in the Mercedes in the dark parking lot of a long-ago shuttered Montgomery Ward and watched.
The door to the apartment in question remained shut. The window was dark. A dirty old guy was pushing a shopping cart in circles around the parking lot behind Nick, but he did his best to ignore it.
Nick also tried to ignore the pair of streetwalkers pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the building, each attired in dazzling arrays of spandex and rubber, their heads crowned with audacious wigs (bright blue and clown red, respectively). Blue was tall and spindly, her skin the color of chai tea. Red was a head and a half shorter, her bust straining violently against the stretched rubber halter top she’d unwisely chosen for the night’s uniform. Nick narrowed his eyes at her, could have sworn for a second there that she was
an old friend. But unless she’d discovered the Fountain of Youth…no, it wasn’t her. Just another whore. That part of town had more supply than demand, or so it typically seemed. He couldn’t help but wonder how long they’d been out there, and not just tonight, but total nights, as if it somehow mattered. It wasn’t like they got gold watches when they met a particular quota of hours, or johns, or orifices filled. What they got was too old, or too sick, or too damn dead.
He sighed and poked around the ashtray with a probing finger, looking for a butt with some tobacco left in it. He didn’t find one.
He didn’t even realize he’d nodded off until his mobile phone bleeped and snapped him back to reality.
“Yeah?” he croaked.
“Delivery for ya,” came the voice on the other end.
Nick’s eyes bulged. “Already?”
The click had already sounded. The line was dead.
Nick folded the phone closed and twisted his neck until it cracked, one way and then the other. He knew where they were for the time being, at least—with a little luck, they’d still be there by the time he was done. What he aimed to do then was something to figure out later. Now he had work to do.
* * *
Slick’s was, for all intents and purposes and for the foreseeable future, off limits. The jig was up, as they say, and Nick was now a known hustler, persona non grata. No scratch to be made there, or probably anyplace else on the scene, for that matter. And he was dead broke with weekly rent coming up and a girl who deserved better than paying for his third-rate Chinese dinner.
