by Kurtz, Ed
“How often do you…you know.”
“Not that often,” Nick said.
“Well, how often is not that often?”
“Could be months go by and I got nothing to do. Sometimes it’s more, though. Crazy, but you’re my second today.”
“Two in one day?” Nick nodded. “Busy beaver.”
“Rare as hen’s teeth. Hadn’t thought of it till now.”
“Who was the other guy?”
“Nobody. Just a guy.”
“You do him with that doohickey in your pocket there?”
Nick patted his jacket, felt the shape of the coiled garrote there. “No. It was—different.” Messy as hell, too, he thought.
“What was his name?”
Nick screwed his face up, sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Does to me. I wanta know.”
“Fine. It was Lou.”
“Lou,” Phillips said, considering the syllable. “Lou got a last name?”
“I can’t remember it.”
“You can’t remember it. You can end the man’s life but you can’t be bothered to remember his goddamn name.”
“Slipped my mind.”
“You remember the first woman you laid?”
“Sure, why?”
“Just making sure you don’t got Alzheimer’s or something.”
Nick smirked. The old man made a face, stretched out his mouth into a broad grimace.
“You all right?”
Phillips gave him a look. Nick grinned out of one side of his mouth.
“Right,” he said.
“Listen,” Nick continued after a short, awkward silence between them, “I want to tell you something about that fella, about Lou. Well, about me, really. Is that all right? I mean, do you mind?”
Phillips spread his bony white hands out in a gesture of helplessness. “Captive audience, pal,” he said.
Nick lighted another cigarette and sat back down. “I was twenty first time I killed anybody. Two people, actually—a man and a woman.”
“For money,” Phillips said. It wasn’t a question.
“No, not for money. It was…I don’t know. Revenge? Self-defense, maybe. Wrong place, wrong time. It was about a girl, sort of. Things got outta hand quicklike. Anyway, I killed them, this guy and this lady. Him, he deserved it, no question. The lady, not so much. She was what you might call collateral damage. So I done it, and I got out of there in a hurry, and I was running, see, like goddamn lightning in a part of town I really didn’t know too well, part of town this girl lived in, as a matter of fact. I ended up in a stand of bare trees behind a filling station, out of breath and puking my guts up. I never barfed so much and so bad in all my life, and by the end of it I was on my hands and knees in the dirt and the upchuck, just wheezing and gasping and thinking, ‘This is it—I’m gunna die right here.’”
“I guess you didn’t.”
“Christ knows I wanted to. Hit me like a brick in the dome, Mr. Phillips. I can’t say for sure what I thought I was going to do when I got there, where the guy was, I mean, but it sure as shit wasn’t premeditated murder. But there you have it—you kill somebody, that ain’t exactly something you can take back. You can’t make up for it, make it right. Dead is fucking dead and that’s all there is to it.”
Phillips nodded. His eyelids were beginning to sag and he shifted uncomfortably where he sat.
“The guy, he was a waste. I mean it. Bad through and through and goddamnit, he had to go. I have never once regretted him and I mean that.”
“Not the other, though,” Phillips said softly.
“She was phoning the cops and I got scared. Later I gave her a lot of thought, I thought about her, uh, her complicity in what I saw going on there, about how she wasn’t exactly innocent or anything. But that wasn’t why I did her. That was spur of the moment, just lash out and put her down. I was afraid and I was angry. I was a mad dog, man. Maybe she deserved it, too. I think she probably did, but that doesn’t matter at all because I wasn’t exercising some kind of vigilante justice there. I was murdering a woman because she got in my way. Cold blood, Mr. Phillips, that’s what it took. My blood had to be ice cold, or else I couldn’t have done it.
“That’s how come all the puking.”
“Jesus Christ, son. You sound like you think the throwin’ up absolves you of it.”
“It did,” Nick said.
Phillips grunted.
“It did.”
* * *
She was gone.
The searching was long, a sort of trial-and-error detective job that started with trawling all the streetwalker hotspots and came to a head when the tough-as-nails chick who drove the truck and called Nick “Jack” realized he wasn’t looking for a date, after all.
He found her on Pearl Street. She was leaning against the brick façade of the Mercury Motel, long since closed and abandoned, chatting with another girl and gesturing wildly with her hands. Nick nearly went right past her, failing to recognize her in uniform, but she called out to him before he made another half a block: “Looking for a date, Jack?”
He said he was and he was amazed that she didn’t recognize him. Probably a cavalcade of male faces had passed through her experience since last they met, he realized. Probably they all merged together to form the same leering face, all-knowing grin and wide, assessing eyes. They walked away together, leaving the other girl alone in the chill of the night, and eventually the topic of location was broached. Nick suggested the Lanai Apartments. The working girl blanched, drew away.
“You son of a bitch, I knew I’d seen you before.”
“I just want to know where she is.”
“Forget it, Jack. She’s gone.”
“Don’t be like that,” Nick pleaded. “I want to see her.”
“Hear what I’m telling you, man. She’s gone. As in not here, as in far away.”
“What? Where?”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I knew, which I don’t anyway, so it don’t matter.”
“Gone?”
“Like a fart in the wind, Jack. Put together a stake and beat it. Owes me a week’s rent, if you wanta know the truth of it. So if you’re up to helping me pay my goddamn bills, let’s get to business. Otherwise, fuck off and let a girl make a goddamn living, for Christ’s sake.”
“But I don’t understand this,” Nick said, his voice like a child’s. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“That’s because you’re stupid. Not an insult, just an observation. You’re the type of guy falls in love with the stripper who knows you’ve got a wad in your pocket. All puppy dog eyes, that kinda shit. Thing you don’t get is you’re alone, I’m alone, fucking Misty is alone. Period. You can get next to each other, but that’s as close as it gets and you’re still…fucking…alone. So it don’t matter, unnerstand? So she’s gone—so what? You weren’t ever going to get inside anyway, so forget it. Just forget it, man. Another one’s gunna come round and it’s gunna be the same damn dance. Learn your lesson now so you don’t cry so much the next time, okay?”
Nick, his face hanging loose like a wet cloth, said, “God.”
“So what’s it going to be, Jack? You want a fuck, it’s fifty—up front. I don’t suck cock but you can stick in my ass for a hundred.”
“Jesus—no, no I don’t want that…”
“You’re a peach, you know that?” She lightly slapped his cheek and frowned. “A real goddamn peach.”
With that she turned on her stiletto and click-clacked back down the cracked sidewalk to her station beside the Mercury Motel.
Nick remained where he stood for what seemed like a long time.
He didn’t know what else to do.
* * *
“I’ve got a little notebook, it’s in a lockbox at the bank. Very unwise, this damn thing, but it’s important to me. All the names, is what it is. Couple decades of working this gig and what’s come of it, at least in human terms. I haven’t gotten to putting Lou in there yet,
so it’s not quite up-to-date, but it’s got 'em all, Mr. Phillips. Every last one starting with that son of a bitch I killed at the Midnight Cowboy and, well, I guess when I get back to it, ending with you. Except it won’t really be the end, not really. Just a—a bookmark, like. Where I left off.”
Nick stood up and wandered over to the dusty mantel, looked briefly at the Christmas card there. It was yellowing around the edges and had a watercolor of a wreath on the front, red bow and all that.
“I did some digging when I started the notebook,” he went on. “This was some years later, you understand. Took me a while but I got the cat’s name, the first one I mean. It was Joe Motal. The woman’s name was Hana Hyun. I got sick for them. Made a note of it.”
He reached for the card, picked it up.
“It’s important, you got to understand. I figure it’s the most important thing in the world, at least to me. I get it, I know I’m a messed-up guy, that what I do—it’s not a normal thing, Mr. Phillips. It’s not normal and it’s really not okay. It’s not. But even if I’m a monster, a real bad guy, which I guess I am, when you get right down to it…”
Nick narrowed his eyes at the card and gently ran the pad of his thumb over the wreath. It wasn’t store bought, as he’d assumed, but hand painted. Somebody had made it special.
“There’s a string, you could say. Everybody’s got 'em, Mr. Phillips, the strings, and they’re all tangled up to hell for most folks, I think. They’re what connect you over here and over there, all the little tethers that keep a person grounded and part of it all, part of being a human being, you see? Except, way I see it, every so often there’s people who don’t have any strings at all. Nothing holding them back, grounding them. Maybe they got cut somewhere along the way or maybe they weren’t never there, but the point is without the strings you aren’t dealing with a warm body anymore. Not human, do you get me, Mr. Phillips? I’m talking about serious psychos and like that—the guys you read about, murdered a dozen people and laugh about in front of the judge, that sort of thing. Real monsters. No strings.
“Now me, I had only one string left that I can see. And yup, you guessed it by now if you’ve got half a brain in your skull, which I know you have. It’s the sickness, right? I do a job, fine, it’s good. Somebody disappears and I get paid and sometimes that’s the way things are, but thank Christ there’s still a…what, a spark…? that tells me, it says, ‘Nick, ole buddy, that’s some fucked-up shit you just did right there, sick and twisted and evil to the core, Nicky baby.’ And that same horrible feeling from the first time, Mr. Phillips, when the weight of what I’d done at that grubby massage parlor came crashing down on me, it all comes back each and every goddamn time. But I don’t get sick anymore, you understand. I don’t get sick because I don’t hate myself for what I’ve done and for what I know I am. That might’ve been my string, my tether. How come I know I may be a bad person, but I’m still a person. Except I’m not. Cheapened my soul, maybe, that first time—but ever since? Nothing. Not a nightmare. Not a wince. Not even a fucking burp.
“But I barfed like a drunk kid at his first frat party and for shit’s sake, just this morning I did! It’s horrible and I don’t want it. Twenty years since I last felt at all goddamned human, Mr. Phillips, and all of a sudden? Just like that? For what? What’s the fucking purpose?”
Nick stamped his foot on the floor and jerked his shoulder a little. He could feel his nose wrinkling and his upper lip curling into a sneer.
“I don’t want to feel this shit, Mr. Phillips. Can you understand that at all?”
He flipped the card open and glanced back to Phillips at the same time. The old man sat slumped in his chair, his eyes closed and his face shiny with a thin sheen of sweat. His bare, sunken chest, riddled with nitro patches, was still.
Nick sighed.
His eyes trained down on the card in his hand, at the message written in blue ink on the inside. It said, Merry Christmas, Darling. Your love, Marla, Xmas 1978.
Nick’s mouth twitched, then he groaned. Goddamn fingerprints. He folded the card closed and slipped it into his pocket, made for the front door.
There, he paused before he reached for the doorknob.
“Szczepański,” he said in a half whisper. “His name was Lou Szczepański.”
And for some reason he wished Lawrence R. Phillips could have heard him say it. He sighed again, went out of the house and sprinted for his car.
His guts cramped all the way.
* * *
Merry Christmas, Darling. Your love, Marla, Xmas 1978.
The card was the old man’s string, Nick knew. It went into the notebook, slid between the pages after two new entries were added in ballpoint pen:
34. Lou Szczepański.
35. Lawrence R. Phillips.
Two in one day, both of them with first names starting with L. Lou and Lawrence. Lawrence Phillips, Lawrence Welk. Coincidence, but so what? It seemed important, maybe ominous.
He returned the notebook to the lockbox and signaled the security guard to help him lock it up. The guard had a gun in his belt and Nick wondered if he’d ever used it. I’m right here, pal, he thought. Put two rounds in my brain and you’ll be on television for a week.
On his way out of the bank he checked his mobile phone. No missed calls, no messages. That was good. The night was wide open.
He drove back to the Montgomery Ward parking lot to check on the kids.
2. SWEET LORRAINE
“She’s got a pair of eyes
That are brighter than the summer sky
When you see them, you’ll realize
Why I love my sweet Lorraine”
—Mitchell Parish, “Sweet Lorraine”
The couple on screen were rutting like hogs, all sweat and body hair and the shaky camera work turned the whole affair absurd and not a little unsettling. Nick pinched another jelly bean from the crinkly bag on his lap and tried not to groan too audibly. The picture was only twenty minutes or so in, but it felt like hours. He wasn’t really a porn man, even when it was more or less classy porn. This wasn’t classy porn. This was just awful, not that his opinion was shared by the sundry members of the raincoat brigade stationed around the theater in groups of one. These guys appeared to find the feature presentation perfectly acceptable, thrilling even if Nick was to judge by their grunting breaths and furtive shuffling of cloth and belt buckles. Twenty minutes. He popped another jelly bean into his mouth, longed for a cigarette. Smoking was technically prohibited in the joint, but who was going to complain? Jacking off in public was pretty damn illegal, too.
He’d trailed the girl there, same as the night before and the night before that. The first night he waited in the Benz until she came back out again, which was six hours later. The second night he took off after two. Tonight, he went inside. The girl in the box office, surrounded on all sides by dirty bulletproof glass, sold him a ticket for California Fuckers, which was bowdlerized on the marquee outside as CALIFORNIA F—KERS. The powers that be could deal with the den of filth actually being there, but that pesky U and C just wouldn’t cut it. Go figure.
The girl in the box office wasn’t his girl, and neither was the one selling bottles of Coke and boxes of candy in the corner when he walked into the lobby. That one sold him the jelly beans and made a bored, half-assed attempt to suggest he shell out for some of the magazines and videotapes displayed on a dusty shelf behind her. Nick scanned the titles and snorted. The girl shrugged, jabbed a thumb toward the swinging doors to her right. He half grinned, pulled the candy bag open and took in the rest of the cramped, dirty little lobby. Restrooms: one male, one female. Manager’s office. A water fountain flecked with rust. No sign of the girl he’d followed there. He went into the theater and found a squeaky seat that seemed marginally less appalling than the others around it. Nobody in there looked at anyone else. The lights were on, but dim—just bright enough for the creeps to find their seats before the fun started. When the room went dark, there were cough
s and shuddering gasps and a few previews played, prolonging Nick’s torture.
Half an hour later he found himself rising from his seat and letting the jelly beans drop to the sticky floor. He edged out of the row and made a beeline for the blurry red EXIT sign just beside the screen.
Outside, the air was unseasonably cool and as soon as he lighted a smoke he felt a pair of droplets collide with his cheek. He dragged deep on the cigarette and thought about all the bad luck he’d ever had in alleyways, which was more than plenty, more than one dumb son of bitch’s share, at any rate. So he turned up the collar of his jacket and walked slowly into the yellow glow of the streetlamp above his Benz and got behind the wheel. The rain picked up there, spattering the windshield. He clicked on the wipers and checked his mobile phone. Nothing new. That was good, in its way. He had funds to hold on to for now. And other things on his mind.
That she worked there was obvious by now. Six hours a shift, four shifts a week. She didn’t work the box office and she didn’t work the concession counter, and Nick mentally scratched out the possibility of management, even for a third-rate porno theater, on account of her age and facial piercings and spiky, unwashed black hair. Frankly, the chick wasn’t the management type. So what did that leave? She was still in there, somewhere, doing something. Nick checked his watch, figured the girl had another four and a half hours on her shift. He exhaled a blue stream of smoke and started the engine. He had nowhere to go, but he pulled out of the parking slot all the same and rolled down the slick black macadam, the Rialto and CALIFORNIA F—KERS growing tiny and indistinct in the rearview mirror.
He had to see her. See both of them.
* * *
“What can I get ya?”
The bartender was a walking stereotype, a study in testosterone and self-assurance. Nick was startled to realize he felt slightly intimidated by the younger, larger man and grinned at himself.
