by Kurtz, Ed
“Sit, sit,” she barked. “Lu come get you soon. Sit.”
“Does Lu have a client right now?”
“You sit.”
He sat.
A lopsided table between his chair and the couch displayed a crazy pile of out-of-date magazines, half of them in Korean. Above one of the erotic posters on the wall hung a security camera, clumsily anchored with mismatched screws and bolts. Nick wondered if it was real or just for show.
After about twenty minutes the beaded curtain was swept to one side and a tired-looking man came lumbering into the waiting area, his eyelids drooping and forehead dripping with sweat. He was short, bald, and sixty years old at least. He wasn’t the guy. Nick launched himself up from the chair and thrust a forefinger at the freshly fucked client, who couldn’t give a damn about anything at that particular moment as he peeled off bills to pay for the happy ending.
“The hell is this?” Nick said. “Where’s the other guy? Young fella, dark brown hair? I saw him come through the back door, the one in the alley.”
“You sit!” the woman at the desk snapped. “You no yell or police. I call police!”
“Where’s the other guy? Where did he go?”
“Wasn’t nobody in there but me and my sweet Tokyo Rose,” the bald man murmured.
“She no Tokyo,” the desk woman growled. “She from Gwangju.”
“She could suck a golf ball through a mile of garden hose, that one,” the man said.
Nick waved him off. “Look, the door in the alley out back—I saw a man come in that way, and I don’t think he was going into the pawnshop. I think he came up here, and I think that because he’s the sort of guy likes to pay for his action. He also happens to be the sort of guy likes to knock a girl around a bit, maybe black her eye or break an arm, you dig? Not a nice guy. Bad guy, you understand?”
“You bad guy!” the woman shouted, pounding her tiny fists against the desk. “You, you bad guy! You go, get lost!”
Nick looked to the bald man, who shook his head and laughed.
“You best heed the lady, pard,” he said as he vanished down the dark stairwell.
“You go! GO!”
Nick licked his lips, sucked a deep breath into his lungs. The bald man’s masseuse peeked out from the beaded curtains, her face registering mild interest. Nick made a beeline for her. She squeaked, leaping out of the way. He rushed to the middle of the room and made a quick survey of the brown vinyl massage table, the metal tray of oils and lubricants, the boombox stereo softly emitting elevator music. No one was in evidence apart from the girl and the desk woman who burst in after Nick.
The woman barked something in Korean to the girl and she nodded, prancing out of the room. Nick ignored them both and bolted for the door at the back of the room. He turned the knob and pulled it open. Inside a brightly lit and surprisingly spacious storage room, Nick gasped at the sight of the guy he was looking for, looking up from the viewfinder of his video camera at the interruption of his latest masterpiece: an obese man in a zipped-up black leather hood holding a mother-naked chick’s head down in a bucket of ice water. Close by a moribund cocker spaniel wagged its tail and growled at the bucket.
“Jesus Christ,” Nick said.
* * *
Nick leaned over and switched off the ancient console television. The picture sucked up to a single white dot in the center of the screen before gradually disappearing altogether.
“Leave it on,” Phillips said.
Nick looked at the old man, saw nothing remotely resembling fear in the watery blue eyes.
“I said leave it on, goddamnit,” Phillips said. “You can turn the volume down, but the picture stays on. This is still my house.”
Nick raised his brow and nodded. He switched the set back on and turned the volume knob all the way down. Lawrence Welk was signing off for the night.
“Made me miss the rest of the program,” the old man groused.
Nick sat down on a metal folding chair, the only other stick of furniture in the room. He scanned his immediate environment and got nothing apart from the impression that Lawrence R. Phillips was a sad, lonesome, poor old man who wasn’t long for this world as things stood. Yet someone wanted him dead—not enough to shell out for a top-notch pro, but enough to see it gets done. Nick focused on a Christmas card on the mantel above a bricked-in fireplace. The rest of the mantel was bare, save for the dust. And with Christmas months off, the card had to have been a leftover from the previous year, if not older.
“If you’d bothered to case the damn place first, you’d have known I don’t got nothing worth stealing,” Phillips said.
“I’m not here to rob you, Mr. Phillips.”
“No?”
“No, sir.”
“Then what the hell do you want? What’s the story with that peashooter in your pants?”
“Might have to use it.”
“On me?”
“It’s possible.”
“But not definite?”
“No. I’d rather not use the gun. Never liked them.”
“Oh, for Jesus’s sake…what’s this all about?”
“Well, you, Mr. Phillips. It’s all about you. I’m here to kill you.”
“Kill me? What the hell for?”
“I don’t know.”
“What, you just get your kicks like that? Going around knocking off old men with one foot already in the fuckin’ grave?”
“No, sir. I get paid for this.”
Phillips’s face relaxed into a sagging droop.
“I see,” he said.
“And I’d rather not get the gun mixed up into it, but sometimes it’s got to be like that. Just depends—up to you, mostly.”
“So I get to choose how I’m gonna die, is that it?”
“Well, no. Not exactly. All I mean is if you wanta put up a fight, that’s your prerogative, but then that’s what the, uh, peashooter is for.”
“Naturally.”
Nick wove his fingers together and rested his hands on his lap. Phillips took in a long, shuddering breath and for a second Nick thought he was going to cry. He didn’t. The old guy just had trouble breathing.
“All right,” Phillips said after a few minutes. “So who pays the bill, huh? Who is it’s so much in a hurry to get me buried?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I got a contact. Someone reached out to him and he told me it’s you. I do the job and then I get my money. That’s all.”
“Who’s your contact?”
“No idea.”
“Right.”
“Never seen the guy. Or gal—could be a woman, I suppose. I really don’t know. Does it matter?”
“No, I guess it don’t.”
Nick arched one eyebrow and pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket. He put it between his lips and flicked a flame out of the plastic lighter. Before he lit it, he locked eyes with Phillips and said, “Mind if I smoke in here?”
Phillips’s mouth dropped open, incredulous. His eyes crinkled up like wrapping paper and he fell into a peal of laughter. Nick’s thin line of a mouth pulled back into a grin, too. He lit the cigarette. As Phillips’s laughter died down, Nick gestured with the pack to him.
“No, no thanks,” said the old man. “Never smoked one of them in all my life, not even when I was in the service.”
“You a war vet?”
“You bet your ass I am. Korea. You?”
“No, not me.”
“I’m guessing too young for the Nam and too old for the Gulf.”
Nick shrugged his shoulders. “Not really the soldier type.”
“Can’t see why not. Pretty much the same thing you’re doing now, ‘cept it ain’t against the law.”
Nick chuckled, took a long drag.
“I really don’t got any money,” Phillips went on. “Nothing anybody’d want.”
“Sounds like revenge, then,” Nick suggested.
“Can’t imagine what for. Worst wrong I ever done anyone
was standing up Susie Hopper for a date at the dance hall, and that was, what? Fifty-three? Fifty-four? No, I never done nothing worth somebody like you coming to my door.”
“I usually come in through a window.”
“That a joke?”
Nick shrugged again.
“This is crazy,” Phillips said.
“Life usually is.”
“And death, evidently.”
Nick stood up, the half-smoked cigarette bobbing between his lips.
“H—hold on a second,” Phillips said, scooting back into the corner of the chair. “Just hold on a second.”
“It’s time, Mr. Phillips.”
“I know. I know it is. But—Jesus! How—how d’ya…why?”
“Like I told you, I don’t know.”
“How can you kill a man with no good reason?”
“You ever kill anybody in Korea, Mr. Phillips?”
“That ain’t the same and you know it.”
“No, I don’t guess it is, but my point is, did you have anything personal against any man you ever took a shot at?”
Phillips’s face slackened, seemed to turn gray. His shoulders untensed and his eyes rolled slowly down until he was staring at his knees.
“I don’t want to die just yet,” he said. “Christ, if whoever it is wants me dead just waited, if they just waited a year, maybe two…”
“They’re paying for expedience.”
The old man touched a trembling hand to his concave chest.
“Why do you do this?”
“I told you, Mr. Phillips, I got a contact…”
“No, I mean this. This. You’re, what? A hit man, is that right?”
Nick crooked his mouth to one side, said, “That’s about the size of it.”
“Then there’s got to be something, I don’t know, wrong with you. Something in your brain doesn’t work right. Ain’t a normal thing, killing people.”
“It’s a crazy world, all right.” Nick slipped a hand into the inside pocket of his jacket, found the garrote, the one he’d failed to use on Lou something-or-other just a few hours earlier.
“I guess some folks need killing, from time to time.”
“That’s a fact.”
“But I sure as shit ain’t one of 'em, son. I’m one of the good guys, I swear to Christ.”
Nick heaved a deep sigh.
“I pay my taxes, fought for my country, worked at a goddamn paint factory until I was seventy-two. Never had no kids, but I was married once. Didn’t take.”
“Not the chick you stood up?”
“No, not her.”
Nick withdrew the garrote, a length of wire with wine cork handles affixed to each end. The wire was still sticky with Lou’s blood.
“Jesus, no—not like that,” Phillips said sadly, shaking his head. “C’mon, not nasty like that. I got a better way.”
“I don’t have a suggestion box, Mr. Phillips.”
“Is it a requirement that it’s got to be painful?”
Nick knitted his brow. Phillips pointed a trembling finger past him, across the room to a closed door on the other side.
“My nitro patches,” he said. “For the angina. I got two dozen of 'em.”
“Nitroglycerin?”
“That’s right. Ups the nitric oxide in my blood, but if I was to slap on all twenty or so…”
“That’d kill you.”
“You bet your ass it would.”
“And this is better than the wire how?”
“Because it’s my way, son. It’s my way.”
Phillips’s face looked grim, determined. Nick slipped the garrote back into the pocket and walked to the bathroom door.
* * *
The dog leapt to one side and barked once, sharply. The girl rolled her head up and out of the water, her face red and raw, eyes bloodshot and unfocused. She muttered something incomprehensible. She was completely naked, and Nick could see her stomach and breasts were crosshatched with red scrapes from the spaniel’s claws.
Nick screamed. He hadn’t planned to and didn’t realize it was coming from his own mouth at first. But it came long and high, a siren of anguish and horror and disgust, and before he was finished screaming he vaulted from the floor at the guy with the camera like a goddamned panther.
The camera clattered against the floor, then skidded across the room before slamming into a wall. The cameraman shouted and flung a wild punch that met air. Nick had him in a bear hug and was pumping his legs, propelling the guy back, back into a series of metal shelves stacked with cleaning supplies. They collided with the shelves, knocking bottles of bleach and window cleaner to the floor, which burst open and spewed their contents. The air filled with the astringent odor, inciting a deep, rumbling growl from the dog and a shuddering sob from the girl, who rolled back and forth in the frothing chemicals, too out of her mind to sit up or even turn away. The dude in the mask bolted out of the room like his ass was on fire.
“Gunna kill you, sucker!” the cameraman roared. He brought up a knee that met Nick’s balls, driving them up and apart. Lightning struck Nick’s brain and he howled, let go of the guy to reach for his crotch with both hands. “Kill you!”
The next blow hit Nick in the side of the skull, though he couldn’t tell if it was a fist that hit him, or an elbow, knee, or foot. He squealed in pain, doubled over and spun around in time to catch a right jab in the gut. He spit blood and staggered away, sliding across the spill on the floor and stumbling over the naked, wiggling legs of the bombed-out girl. From the doorway the woman from the front desk screeched in Korean, slapping madly at the dog barking at her and dancing around her legs. Nick lurched into a corner and turned around. The guy charged him. Reaching out blindly, Nick seized the first thing his grasping hand found, which happened to be the handle of a mop. He brought it in front of him, gripped it tightly, and thrust it up and out. The end of the handle jabbed into the soft center of the guy’s throat. The skin sank in and the guy made a gargling sound. He stopped, stepped back a couple of feet, and touched his neck. His larynx was smashed and he was making Os with his mouth like a suffocating fish. His eyed bulged and his face darkened as he clawed at his throat, desperate for a breath he’d never take.
The guy died slow. He dropped to his knees first, then lowered himself down to all fours, sluggishly moving his head from side to side as his oxygen-starved brain blotted out, bit by bit. Nick could hear his lips smacking until the very end, when the guy lay down on his side like a wounded animal and stopped moving altogether. The girl’s bladder had let go at some point along the way, and the dead man’s face was pressed into the puddle of her urine. Nick’s head spun. The Korean woman kicked the cocker spaniel and screamed furiously as she rushed back to the front waiting area. The dog yelped and ran in the opposite direction.
Nick shook his head, rubbed his temples and his throbbing crotch. Then he lunged forth, out of the back room and through the massage area to the front.
The woman clutched the phone receiver with both hands, rattling off into it with a mix of English and Korean that made no sense at all apart from a few clearly enunciated words: murder, dead, help, police.
She was crazy, or so Nick thought; there would be plenty of questions for her, as well, questions pertaining to the nature of the Midnight Cowboy’s business and the goings-on in that strange back room and, of course, the tape itself. And the girl. And the corpse. And Nick, the murderer. The killer of a man whose name he didn’t even know. The room canted like something from Through the Looking Glass. His stomach flipped. He snatched the receiver out of the woman’s hand and slammed it down on the cradle, hanging up on the emergency dispatch operator.
“No, no!” the woman screamed. “No, you crazy! You killer! Help! Help!”
A hand clamped down over her mouth and Nick grasped that it was his own. It was as if his body were acting on instinct alone, a primeval autopilot programmed for survival, and if he was going to survive the night, this woman—this loathsome pimp
—was most assuredly not.
It was easier this time. Less struggle, more focus. Still messy—he ended up grabbing a handful of her hair and slamming her head against the corner of the desk a dozen or so times—but the end result was just the same. She was quite, irrefutably dead.
Nick straightened himself, took stock of his aching body and swimming mind. The masseuse and the hooded man were long gone. The dog was cowering in the corner, behind the chair Nick sat in when he arrived. In the back the guy he’d come after was as dead as ever and the girl moaned softly, splashing about in the bleach and Windex and piss and blood.
The police would come, there was no doubt about that. They’d find the girl, and she’d be taken care of, whatever that meant. All there was left for Nick to do was beat feet.
He did.
* * *
“What is that, sixteen?” Lawrence Phillips asked.
“I wasn’t counting.”
“Five left, looks like.”
“Will you need them all?”
“Better safe than sorry.” He looked up at Nick and winked. It made Nick feel vaguely uncomfortable, something having to do with the loss of control over the situation. Over the killing.
Phillips unwrapped the rest of the patches and, one by one, affixed them to his bare torso wherever he could find room. When he was done, Nick asked, “Now what?”
“Wait.” The old man sighed. “Shouldn’t be long now.”
“You want I should turn the volume back up on your TV?”
“Nah. Nothing worth watching at this hour. I’m usually in bed by now.”
“I could take you to your bed, if you want.”
“I’m fine right here.”
“All right.”
Phillips idly poked at one of the patches with the tip of his finger. Nick swallowed a mouthful of spit and rolled his shoulders.
