Nausea

by Kurtz, Ed

  Nick returned the blackjack to his pocket and took out the garrote. He knelt over Cole’s insensate body, wrapped the wire around his throat, and tightened it with the handles in his gloved hands. The wire bit into Cole’s skin. His face purpled. It was more difficult to determine the moment of death when the victim was unconscious, but after a few minutes when Nick checked Cole’s pulse, he determined he’d gotten it right the first time. Cole was dead.

  There was blood on the wire. Nick wiped it off on a pillow and returned the garrote to his pocket. On the whole, a simple job.

  The closet door opened a crack and Lorraine peeked out.

  “Is it over?”

  “It’s over.”

  She came into the room, still naked, still unashamed. She paused at the side of the bed and gaped at Cole’s body. He almost looked asleep, apart from the blood in his hair and around the circumference of his neck.

  “He’s really dead.”

  Nick looked her over, crown to toe, almost curious but largely indifferent. Was she a witness or the client? Both? She’d expected him. He was the guy. His intestines clenched.

  He said, “Yep,” and headed back the way he came.

  Lorraine went into the hall in pursuit.

  “Wait,” she called to him. Nick ignored her, vanished into the kitchen and around the corner to the back hallway. “Wait a minute.”

  He was out the back door and several paces away when Lorraine burst out of the house, her breasts bouncing as she rushed after him.

  “Don’t you wanta know why?” she asked shrilly.

  “No.”

  Nick picked up the pace. He reached his car, got in, started it up. When he drove back by Lorraine’s house, she was standing in the side yard, naked to the world, just staring him down.

  Three and a half blocks away, at the entrance to the subdivision, Nick jerked the wheel and stepped on the brake, bringing the Benz to a bouncy stop on the side of the road in time to lean out the driver’s-side window and heave down the outside of the door. His stomach cramped and he kept on lurching, even when he was empty. An old Chrysler rolled up, slowing as it passed him, a middle-aged woman giving him a deep stare as she went by. Nick ducked his head, obscuring his covered face from her view. His head felt like it was full of helium. In his mind, he could almost see Lorraine chasing him down on foot, still naked as a baby, growing larger in the rearview mirror.

  Don’t you wanta know why?

  He swallowed hard, his tongue recoiling at the taste of bile, and the phantom of Lorraine transformed into Hana Hyun.

  Know why? she cried.

  Why?

  Nick croaked, “Why.”

  He got the hell out of there after that, his eyes stinging and guts twisted up like a car wreck.

  * * *

  He was handed a small scrap of lined notebook paper, folded in half, on his way out the door. He clutched it tightly in his right fist as he went quickly down the stairs and back out to the street. The van he’d been riding in the last couple of days was parked at the curb, a huge white monolith that made his neck throb harder. He wished he hadn’t left his keys dangling from the door of the rental Buick back in the diner parking lot; if he’d still had them, he would have gladly keyed the shit out of this bizarre family unit’s ride. As things stood, the rental was certainly long stolen and probably totaled by now. Nick frowned, kicked the van’s back left tire, and went race-walking down the sidewalk in search of a drink, or a cup of coffee, or possibly both—all depending on what, exactly, was written on the scrap in his fist.

  He found a neighborhood bar on the corner of Pitts and Clifford Avenue, a mostly typical walk-into sort of joint with beer signs glowing in the windows and out-of-season Christmas lights dangling from the eaves. He went in, took a booth in the back, told the girl he wanted a Stroh’s when she came up with her hands on her prodigious hips. The barmaid wandered off without a word and for the first time Nick realized everybody else in the place was black. For a second he felt like an intruder, like he’d just walked into some stranger’s living room during Thanksgiving, but nobody was staring except him. So Nick shrugged it off and finally unclenched his fist. The crumpled wad of notebook paper, slightly damp from the sweat of his palm, dropped to the table. He gingerly picked it up and flattened it out. It read:

  BUS DEPOT

  14A

  KEY IN JACKET POCKET

  And in large, bold letters just underneath: BURN THIS.

  Jacket pocket? Nick wondered, but a cursory check revealed something there that wasn’t supposed to be, something that turned out to be a small key with a red rubber covering over the head. On the rubber, printed in metallic gray—14A.

  “Natch,” he said under his breath as the barmaid set a can of Stroh’s in front of him.

  “What’s that, hon?” she asked.

  “Sorry, mumbling to myself.”

  “Two bucks,” she said.

  She smiled and, despite the dark gap of a missing bicuspid, it was a nice smile. Nick dug out his wallet and handed her three of his last remaining eight dollars.

  She said, “Thanks, doll,” and sashayed back to the bar. He watched her closely all the way and cursed the timing.

  He then slammed his beer in three mighty gulps and winked at the barmaid on his way out. With only five bucks left to his name it was going to be a long walk to the bus depot and he saw no sense in delaying the inevitable.

  He tossed the paper scrap in the gutter along the way.

  * * *

  On top of his bedsheets Nick lay fully clothed, idly watching the blades of the ceiling fan make slow circulations that never quite managed to shake the dust off the tops. He thought it was a funny world where a guy could lie on his bed with his clothes on and think about a girl who stood in her yard without a stitch. He also found it a little funny that he’d driven all the way home with the damned balaclava still on. He already had the key in the building’s front door before he realized he looked for all the world like a burglar. Luckily no one saw him. Luck didn’t last forever. Nick needed to get his shit together.

  Instead, he continued to give the ceiling fan his finest thousand-yard stare and run the eyes of his short-term memory slowly and lecherously over his mind’s image of a buck-naked girl named Lorraine. She was petite and thin, but not too thin, with what he judged to be B-cup breasts and brown, pointy nipples approximately the size of silver dollars. Her hair was dirty blonde, bobbed in a fun, girlish cut, and Nick was relatively certain that she had green eyes. She was a beautiful girl, this Lorraine, who shelled out a not-insignificant sum to have a guy murdered while she was still fucking him. Quite beautiful.

  And though he never concerned himself with the why of it, never really wondered what might be a given person’s reason for wanting another person dead, Nick wondered now. Lorraine had seemed so terribly excited about the whole nasty affair. She clearly hadn’t expected the killer, whom she had never met and wasn’t supposed to meet, to come barging in while she and poor Nathan K. Cole were in flagrante delicto, but by Christ she was perfectly thrilled that he did.

  Beautiful, and—what? Crazy?

  The girl behaved as though she were watching a scene in an action picture unfold—look out, Bruce Willis! He’s got a gun!—with no evidence whatsoever that the proceedings in which she was the fundamental link had any effect on her at all. She was not horrified to behold the recently deceased corpse of her erstwhile lover, nor was she at all modest about her total nudity in front of the guy who had done the killing.

  A nut, Nick decided. That’s all.

  But a gorgeous one.

  And damned if she wasn’t interesting.

  The mobile phone on the nightstand buzzed, having been set to vibrate. Nick snapped out of his reverie and let the ceiling fan have some privacy while he turned to check the time—5:34 PM—and the caller ID—UNKNOWN. To the phone, maybe, but he knew who it was. And for the first time in the better part of two decades, he deliberately let it ring until it s
topped.

  “That’s not like you, Nicky,” he said aloud in the gathering darkness of his bedroom. “And a bad idea, too.”

  He did not respond to himself. A minute after the buzzing stopped, the phone gave one long, last buzz to signal a new voice mail. He ignored that, too. While he busied himself with ignoring the phone, he also continued to puzzle over the riddle of Lorraine, the stunning, naked, possibly—probably—unbalanced woman who apparently wasn’t surprised by anything.

  Sweet, sweet Lorraine.

  Just found joy—I’m as happy as a baby boy, baby boy—with another brand-new choo-choo toy—when I met my sweet, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine…

  Nat King Cole again, Nick realized with a sneer.

  “Goddamnit,” he said, his gorge rising.

  * * *

  The locker—14A—held two small items. One was another key, identical in every respect to one he’d found in his pocket apart from the number printed on the rubber part, which read 24B. Nick slipped it into his pocket and took out the next item for examination, which was a small red envelope. Nothing was written on it, not his name or anybody else’s. He pocketed this, too, then shut the locker and left the depot.

  In the parking lot he ripped the envelope open as he walked across to the cracked sidewalk at the end. Inside he found a card, the cover of which had the word Condolences printed in a fancy gold script and a Bible verse in somber black beneath. Nick skipped the holy writ and dove into the card instead. More religious crap from the greeting card company, but underneath this someone had written a code of some sort. It read: 267-4-58.

  “The hell?”

  Nick carelessly let the little red envelope flutter to the pavement and continued to stare at the meaningless sequence of numbers as he reached the sidewalk and stopped.

  He’d figured the locker situation easily enough—it was pretty obvious—but this time they gave him nothing to work with, nowhere to go. Just a bunch of stupid numbers that didn’t mean one goddamn thing to him.

  Nick growled deep in his throat and crumpled the card in his fist the same way he had the scrap of notebook paper before. He longed for a tall whiskey and ever since he hotboxed that cigarette at the Midnight Cowboy he felt he wanted to start smoking, too. These crazy bastards were playing a game with him, going far beyond the simple business of forcing him to commit murder to save his own ass.

  He grumped and kicked at the sidewalk all the way back to the black bar on Clifford Avenue.

  * * *

  “This is unacceptable, Nick. Your phone will ring again in two hours.”

  This was followed by the dry, robotic voice of some disembodied female asking whether Nick would like to save the message, or hear it again, or…

  He hung up.

  Once again he was parked in the lot across from the shabby apartments where the kids lived, the ones he’d been following for no rational reason these last few weeks. The girl wasn’t working tonight; she would have left for the Rialto by now if she was. Instead, they were both inside, at home on a Friday night at half past six. Pretty soon the mobile would set off again and Nick would have work, assuming his contact didn’t drop him for failing to answer. Or worse.

  People came and went, peeling out in late-model Chevys and slamming doors and carrying on conversations by screaming at one another from one end of the place to the other. All the while the sole apartment in which Nick held any interest remained quiet and still, the same dull yellow light glowing uninterrupted in its only window, the thin white curtains drawn.

  Maybe the phone wasn’t going to buzz, Nick considered. Maybe he was done. For good. Then what?

  He shook his head and lit the cigarette that had been dangling from his lips for a good fifteen minutes. The car radio was on, the volume low. Some guy with an obnoxious voice was screeching about the incredible deal on Mitsubishis some dealer or another was sponsoring that weekend. Nick tapped the Pall Mall against the lip of the ashtray and his mind wandered back to Sweet Lorraine and the little blue butterfly that would forever endeavor to flutter away from her perfect alabaster pelvis but would eternally fail. And the more he thought about that pelvis and all the flesh and bone and hair that surrounded it, the more Nick’s testicles began to ache.

  Restless was the word for it, and he knew it. He’d been stagnant for too long, that was the thing. It was the cure he couldn’t figure—did professional murderers take vacations to the Keys? Nick honestly didn’t know—he’d never taken a vacation and had no colleagues who may or may not have. Or maybe he only needed to get laid. He grunted and sucked deeply at the cigarette and looked back up to the kids’ apartment door as it slowly swung open. His eyes widened and his heartbeat picked up, and at the same time his mobile phone buzzed.

  “Fuck.”

  He ground his teeth and pressed the answer button. A voice both familiar and unknowable said, “So nice to see you haven’t gone and died, sweetheart.”

  Nick said, “I’m here.”

  “You’ve got work.”

  The line clicked and the static white noise from the other end went dead. Nick returned the mobile phone to the passenger seat and watched the boy hold the front door open for the girl and then lock it once she was out. They piled into the Ford parked right in front and the backlights flared red and in no time at all they were out and gone. Nick clenched his fists, ached to know where they were going, what they were going to do when they got there, and who they were going to be with wherever they might be doing it. But he had work.

  It was shaping up to be a busy season.

  * * *

  For the second time that day Nick found himself seated at the booth in the back, where he’d flattened out a crumpled code on the table in front of him. The same barmaid with the nice smile (sans one bicuspid) and the broad, swinging hips came to the edge of his table and with an arched eyebrow said, “You’re back.”

  “Guess I wasn’t finished,” Nick said.

  “Another Stroh’s?”

  “Dewar’s,” he corrected. “No ice.”

  “Straight?”

  “Double.”

  She raised both eyebrows now and jutted out her lower lip. It was a nice lip, Nick thought.

  While the barmaid wiggled back to the bar to set up Nick’s drink, he squashed his own brow and glared hard at the numbers inside the consolation card.

  267-4-58.

  His first inclination was that it had to be a combination to a dial lock, but he scrapped that on account of the high numbers. No lock went up to 267, or even 58, that he’d ever seen. It was too short to be a Social Security number or state ID, couldn’t be a phone number without an additional digit, and the dashes ruled out the code being some kind of an address as far as Nick was concerned. He squinted at it, worried the corners of the card with his thumbs. It had to be a code, but without a magic decoder ring he was helpless to make sense of it. Maybe, he thought with a mild groan, he’d get a box of Cracker Jack and crack this son of a bitch.

  The girl came back round with his Dewar’s, which she set gently atop a green napkin for him.

  “Tab this time, hon?” she asked.

  “Might as well.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying, we don’t see too many folks as pale as you in here,” she said.

  Nick shrugged. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  She screwed her mouth up to one side. “I don’t know, sugar. Is it?”

  He said, “I was just passing by.”

  “Twice in one day?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Now she shrugged. Nick thought she did it better. “No reason. I’ll open you up a tab. Holler if you need another round. Name’s Charise.”

  “I’ll remember that,” he said.

  “I bet you will,” said Charise.

  A pair of older black men—Nick judged them to be in their fifties—chuckled and tossed friendly insults at each other at a table by the door. They were playing cards but Nick guessed it was just an excuse to hang out and
be loose. Just a couple of old friends enjoying each other’s company at the corner bar. He wondered about that.

  He sipped at the glass Charise brought him and returned his gaze to 267-4-58. After another sip, this one more of a gulp, he started working out alphabetic equivalents in his head: B for 2, F for 6, G for 7, and so on. He ended up with BFG-D-EH. Which was even worse than 267-4-58.

  Why the stupid games? Why all the mystery? If this whacked-out broad—this Mother—really wanted him to do what she said she wanted him to do, why make it so ridiculously fucking hard for him to do it?

  And what if he never figured it out? That left two options he could see: either go back to the Midnight Cowboy to demand an explanation, or simply not do the job. Both seemed especially risky, potentially fatal. Nick felt as if he was being tested, and thus far he was looking at a grade of F.

  The sour odor of cigarette smoke floated over to his corner and Nick breathed it in. He glanced up and saw a woman at the bar dressed in a sparkling red top and black leather miniskirt drawing on a long, thin cigarette that reminded him of Mother’s. Charise met his gaze and called out, “Need another one?”

  Nick shook his head, said, “You got smokes?”

  She dropped whatever she was doing, reached for something under the bar, and came over to the corner booth with a green package that she set down on the table.

  “Salem 100s,” she said. “All we got.”

  “Put it on my tab.”

  “All right. And I’ll go ahead and pour you another Dewar’s, too.” Her eyes moved down to the card. “Aw, who died?”

  Nick snorted as he reached for the pack. “My brain.”

  “My sympathies,” she said.

  He unwrapped the top of the cellophane after spending a little time figuring out where the tab was—he’d never opened a pack of cigarettes before. Charise dug a book of matches out of her apron pocket and handed them to him.