by Kurtz, Ed
So Nick did what he felt just about anybody would have done in his situation: he went home, cranked up the stereo, and proceeded to get roaring drunk. Half a gallon of Kentucky Deluxe and Bob Seger on the turntable; someone banged on the wall from the next shithole over but he paid them no mind. He just filled up a spotty water glass with K.D. and took it down in gulps while Seger soothed his troubled soul with that good old American heartland rock. And as the needle spun gradually toward the platter’s silent center, Nick grew increasingly drunk and drunker still. Halfway through side B and he was crooning right along, his voice a warbling horror that only broke away to slurp down another snootful of eighty percent pure grain alcohol. The place was vibrating to the tune of “Mainstreet” when Nick fell into a spinning pirouette and lurched forward, all of a sudden, and unloaded the entire contents of his guts; a wretched, heaving spray all over the linoleum floor.
Crazy, really. He hadn’t lost a lunch since the sixth grade.
Iron stomach, long as he could remember.
Nick’s head felt like it was full of sloshing water and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Slowly, taking small, shuffling steps, he made his way to the kitchen sink where he rinsed his mouth and splashed cold water on his face. The speakers still roared That Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll and the neighbor continued to bang on the wall, so Nick stepped over the noxious Jackson Pollock on the floor and jerked the needle off the record. Through the thin west wall the neighbor bellowed, “THANK YOU!”
After dropping an unwashed bath towel on the mess on the floor, Nick staggered into the relieving dark of the bedroom and crawled beneath the blanket. The room spun but he accepted that. His mind floated over the unmistakably disappointed look on Misty’s face when she realized he was broke, and he cringed. The last thing Nick wanted was to end up wasting away at an actual job, sitting behind some desk or serving up pops to the punk kids from Kensington Consolidated. Corny as it was he knew he was born to be free, a sort of gypsy in a way. He lived to survive, and to be honest scoring that teriyaki chicken on Misty’s dime was just the sort of thing he’d always done to make it by.
But now…
Maybe surviving wasn’t enough.
He squeezed his eyes shut and the room flipped a hundred and eighty degrees. This time he made it to the john before the rest of the K.D. came spewing out of him.
* * *
The setup was the same; it was always the same. Nick drove to the bus depot on 15th, just next to the overpass, and sauntered over to the corridor where all the lockers were stacked up on top of one another. Last time it was 17C, which meant 17C would contain an unmarked duplicate key for 27D—plus 10, next letter. He opened up 27D, left the key he already had for 17C, and withdrew the greeting-card-sized envelope from within before gently pushing the flimsy metal door shut. The new key went on his keychain, the envelope went into his jacket pocket. As innocent as you please, Nick stabbed a smoke between his lips and lighted it as he walked slowly out of the corridor, through the main lobby and back out to the parking lot.
He tore open the envelope once he got back behind the wheel. The reason the envelope was sized for a greeting card was, as Nick already knew, due to the greeting card it contained. This time around it featured a kitten poking its fuzzy little head out of a white and red box. The lid was off to the side, a bright red bow on top. Nick opened the card, seeing first the legend printed inside: WHO’S UP FOR A BIRTHDAY HUG?
Nick smirked. He turned the card around and examined the back. Company logo, barcode, price of the card (an astronomical $3.99). Also, printed neatly in ballpoint pen on the bottom left corner, a short series of numbers.
515—2—34.
He read the numbers aloud: “Five-fifteen, two, thirty-four.” With that, it was committed to memory, at least for the short term.
With a flick of his Bic the corner caught flame and Nick held it between forefinger and thumb until most of the card was burning. He then let it drop out of the window, which he rolled up, then he started the engine. 515—2—34. He stepped on the accelerator and headed south, toward Walker’s Drug, to find out who he was supposed to murder this time around.
* * *
Page 515 of the local white pages was about halfway through the Ps, and Nick was astounded that every name on the page was some variant of Phillips. The thirty-fourth listing in the second column was for a Lawrence R. Phillips of 1045 Willow Street. The handy, full-color street map in the back of the phonebook placed Willow Street in the northeast part of town, the sticks as far as Nick was concerned. He whispered the address to himself. It stuck.
When he emerged from the phone booth—a rarity and a relic, even in that stale old neighborhood—the jerk behind the counter touched the crumpled paper hat on his head and said, “You want a float or something, pop?”
Pop. Nick sneered.
“Eat a bag of turds, shitbird,” he growled on his way out the door.
The jerk didn’t say anything.
Nick headed northeast.
* * *
Misty was evicted without notice, just a pounding knock at the door and a harsh word to get the hell out. The fuzz were leaning on management according to one of her similarly evicted compatriots, and they were gracious enough to give the heads-up before it all erupted into a big ugly raid. By the time Nick came around that evening, all of Misty’s worldly possessions were piled messily on the pavement, a jumble of well-used cardboard boxes and plastic milk crates. The mattress and loveseat, it turned out, came with the place.
The truck was backing into two and half parking spots when Nick arrived, piloted by a young woman who looked like she worked in the same line as Misty, though judging by her prematurely hard-lined face, probably for a lot longer. Nick could tell that it used to have GROSSMAN’S VEGETABLES painted on the side, but the letters had long since faded away. Misty walked over to him in her bare feet, narrowly escaping a splash of broken glass that used to be a liquor bottle. She didn’t much seem to care.
“You got here fast,” she said.
“Got nothing better to do,” Nick said. He angled a thumb at the woman clumsily parking the ancient panel truck. “Friend of yours?”
“More or less,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “Colleague, more like.”
Nick squinted at the woman, now climbing down from the cab, the engine still running. He said, “I figured.”
“And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
His head snapped back, his brows raised like a guy who’d gotten caught, which he was.
“Nothing, I didn’t—”
“Forget it,” she cut in. “Just help me get this shit in the back.”
He did. In fact, he carried it all up the ramp, box by box, and deposited them among the other woman’s more substantial catalogue of impractical crap. When he was done, the woman play-punched him on the shoulder.
“Thanks, Jack,” she barked, and she climbed back into the cab. Nick flashed a phony, lopsided grin.
“I think she likes me,” he said.
“We found a place up in the Junction.”
“That trailer park?”
“What, I should live in a palace? It’s two hundred a month. And there’s a truck stop…” She trailed off, but it was too late. Nick’s face fell, his eyes darkened beneath his bunching brow.
“I need to save up, Lucky,” she said.
“For what? You going to college or something?”
“I’m getting the hell out of here, is what. California, I guess.”
“Yeah, well—California needs hookers too, I suppose.”
Misty’s eyes popped wide and she bared her teeth. Nick waited for the slap, scrunching up his face and turning a defensive shoulder toward her, but it never came. He relaxed a little, realizing her rage had given way to something a lot like terror.
“Misty?” he said. “Spot?”
She seized his forearm and dug her nails into him. Nick yelped, smacked instinctively at the clawlike grip she had
on him. Her grasp relented but she held on. He stared at her, then followed the invisible dotted line from her pupils to the man standing by the newspaper dispenser across the street.
The man was working his jaw, chewing on gum or something. With his hands he was worrying the end of his shirt, untucked and hanging loose about his waist. His stance was off-kilter, his hips jutting slightly to one side. His eyes were trained hard on Misty.
“Who’s he?” Nick asked, slowly returning to face her.
“Gotta go,” she chirped, and she made a beeline for the cab.
“Misty?”
“Gotta go.”
She climbed up beside her new roommate and slammed the door shut. The driver leaned over Misty, cranked the window down, and shouted, “Pull the back down, will ya?”
Nick nodded, did as he was asked. The second the rolling door latched shut the woman stomped on the gas. The engine growled, oily black exhaust spewed from the pipe jouncing out of the back. In a minute, the panel truck was bouncing down the road, away from the Lanai Apartments with no lanais and away from Nick and away from the man across the street who was still chewing and still messing with his shirt and still staring Misty down, even as she disappeared from view.
Nick turned to face the man and looked at him. The man spit his gum into the street, stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked right back. They remained that way, staring each other down without expression like a couple of Saturday matinee cowboys, until a city bus divided them, coming to a grinding halt with a jarring groan and a long, plaintive hiss. The man across the street did not board the bus, but he did wander away.
The bus took off in the opposite direction. After a short while, the street was relatively quiet again and the man was only just lost from Nick’s view. He fell into a rapid walk to catch up, to follow.
Nick reckoned he had an idea who the guy was, and he aimed to find out whether he was right.
* * *
Willow Street was a decent couple of blocks of single-story, postwar houses that had to have been nice for the returning soldiers, eager to get cooking on their families and put the nightmares of France and the Pacific behind them. Now, as Nick crawled slowly up to 1045, they were mostly crumbling relics with bad roofs and rotten siding, the lawns largely overgrown or dead or darkened by the rusting hulks some of them had displayed on concrete blocks. Whatever occupants still had connections to that first generation of new homeowners were either descendants who couldn’t get out or the vets themselves, old and infirm and waiting to die in the falling-down ghosts of a sixty-year-old dream come horribly true.
Nick cut the lights and then the engine, got out of the car like he belonged there. Pocketed his keys and walked across the shaggy front yard to the dirty window at the front of the house. The drapes were closed, but not entirely—there remained an inch-wide crack between them, enough for Nick to incautiously peek into the house. He’d never have done that before, nor would he have parked right in front of the house. This wasn’t the 1950’s Wonderland it used to be, but folks still noticed things. Chances were the folks around there weren’t too fond of answering questions from the local constabulary, but still…
Slumped into a threadbare paisley armchair that used to be orange was a man, a considerably old man who looked like some of the mummies you sometimes saw in National Geographic. His skin was thin and paper white, stretched so tight over the melting muscles and deteriorating bones that it looked to Nick like it was fit to split at the seams, slough right off like an old one-piece leisure suit. The man’s eyes were closed. He was naked to the waist. Nick watched him, bold as balls, and decided it was too late. The mark had already croaked.
He moved, then: twitched his fingers, licked his thin, bluish white lips. The eyes stayed closed, but the guy clearly wasn’t dead. Not just yet. But damned close, whichever way Nick looked at it. He thought for a moment he could wait the old man out; by morning, he might just pass away on his own accord. But that wasn’t what he was here for, watching some pathetic old-timer wasting away. He didn’t even know for certain that this was, in fact, Lawrence R. Phillips.
So Nick did the exact opposite of what he should have done, what he would have done at any other time in the last twenty or so years of his peculiar career: he ambled up to the front door and knocked.
Now he could hear the television, though he resolved that he could probably have heard it at the window, only he hadn’t noticed it. Lawrence Welk. Of course.
Beyond that—“Wunnerful, wunnerful!” Welk bellowed—there was nothing.
Nick knocked again, louder and longer this time.
“Mr. Phillips? Mr. Phillips, are you there?”
Stupid. But didn’t much care.
“Ah ONE an’ ah TWO!” Welk roared. A big-band orchestra thrummed to life, drowning out the shuffling steps of the old man, who surprised Nick by opening the door. His face was pinched but mostly devoid of emotion. Sleepy, Nick thought. Or just defeated.
“Who’re you?” came a voice from the vicinity of those bluish white lips. Nick hadn’t seen them move. He narrowed his eyes.
“Mr. Phillips? Lawrence R. Phillips?”
“What of it?”
Nick smiled—not the broad, shit-eating grin of a killer, but something small and noncommittal. The smile was the smile of a man wondering if he’d get sick. As his eyes shot past the stooped, shirtless old man and into a foyer cramped with tchotchkes and newspapers and dust, he almost hoped he would.
Phillips raised a mildly quivering arm and grasped the doorjamb to steady himself. His eyes were milky blue. There was a USMC tattoo on the raised forearm, so faded it was barely legible. On his chest, just above a grayish nipple surrounded by sprouts of white hair, another small tattoo: 1943, it read in harsh block numbers. Something happened that year, somewhere far away. Something he probably didn’t relish talking about, not the way vets are encouraged to talk out their experiences and feelings nowadays. Nick guessed this decrepit old man had internalized it all, swallowed down like bitter castor oil, lest he let it out and (God forfend) let anyone see inside of him.
“The hell you want, son? I got a program on.”
“Lawrence Welk,” Nick said dumbly, broadening the grin beyond the boundaries of good taste. “My pop was a big fan, too.” A lie.
“Look,” Philips said, lowering his head as if it was getting too heavy for his spindly neck, “I don’t need encyclopedias, Fuller brushes, or the everlasting salvation of Christ Jesus, so unless you got something else to sell…”
“I’m not selling anything, Mr. Phillips.”
“Then what in hell do you want, man? I’m getting cold with the damn door open and I’d rather sit down.”
Nick exhaled noisily and rolled his shoulders. Then he opened the right side of his jacket to display the handle of the gun sticking out from his waistband.
“Let’s do that, then,” he said. “Let’s sit down.”
* * *
The guy turned down an alley and Nick froze, his still-sore bruises throbbing at the memory of the alleyway beating he’d taken. Still, he could see the guy from where he loitered across the street, saw him spit on the ground and scratch his ass before banging a fist against a gray steel door with no handle or knob on the outside. With little delay the door screeched open and the guy slipped inside.
Nick furrowed his brow, wandered up the block until he could see the front of the building into which the guy went. It was two stories and the ground floor was taken up by a pawnshop. A plastic sign bolted into the brick façade above hinted at the proceedings upstairs: MIDNIGHT COWBOY ORIENTAL MASSAGE.
He crossed the street, walked past the window displays of color televisions and video players and sports equipment. A frosted door appeared just past the glass. Nick opened it, looked up a dark stairwell with another door at the top. He went up.
The second door was locked. A small, handwritten sign close to the doorknob encouraged him to RING FOR SERVICE. He searched in the dark but found no bu
tton or any other mechanism to ring. He expelled a deep sigh and was about to knock when the door suddenly opened to reveal a stone-faced woman in her fifties, her salt-and-pepper hair a fluffy cloud around her small, round face. Nick thought she looked Korean but he didn’t want to assume.
He smiled. She didn’t.
“I’d like a massage,” he said.
“You come back,” she said sharply.
“I’m sorry?”
“Too early—only one o’clock. You come back. Six o’clock. You get massage.”
She pushed the door to shut it but Nick pressed back with his shoulder, stopping it and inducing a droopy frown from the woman.
“I can’t wait, actually. It’s my lunch break, so it’d have to be now. I can pay extra.”
She relaxed, let go of the door. She narrowed her eyes.
“Extra?”
“Sure. Double, if you like.”
“Double is hundred dollar.”
Nick’s eyes blinked rapidly at the sticker shock, but he nodded all the same. “Fine,” he said.
The woman shrugged and stepped back, allowing the door to swing all the way open.
“Okay,” she said. “Hundred dollar, then. You come in. Come in, come in.”
She wiggled her fingers at him impatiently and hurried to shut the door behind him the second he was clear of it. The room was dimly lit by three small lamps with low-wattage bulbs in them, the lampshades all different and all gaudy. Equally gaudy were the wallpaper and the furniture, a mishmash of dull pastels and screaming loud patterns of bloodred and jaundice yellow. Reproductions of ambiguously Eastern paintings hung on the walls in cracked plastic frames, images of nude, alabaster-skinned women getting roundly screwed six ways from Sunday. A small, cluttered desk guarded the entryway to the back room, and a beaded curtain blocked any view of the proceedings there. The woman sat down behind the desk and pointed at a shabby chair with an exposed metal spring jabbing out of its side.
