by Kurtz, Ed
And besides, Nick was the picture of health. As far as he knew. Until Mother and her boys discovered that Robert W. Hart still had air in his lungs and life in his eyes.
A killing for a killing.
A stranger’s life for mine.
He said, “I can’t.”
Beside him, an old man in a rumpled plaid golf cap said, “What’s that?”
Nick hadn’t seen him sit down. He jumped a little, looked wide-eyed at the man, who shook his head and pursed his lips.
“I said I can’t,” Nick said.
“Christ,” the old man grunted. “This fucking town.”
“Yeah. This fucking town.”
The guy rolled his eyes. For a fleeting moment, Nick wondered if he could be the guy, this Hart. Because anyone could, as far as he knew. This crabby, elderly man, waiting on the bus to take him God knew where—what if Nick followed him, watched him, waited for him to be alone? And then…what? He couldn’t imagine the next step. In the movies the killer has a gun, or at least a knife. All Nick had were his hands and a heart beating hard enough against his ribs to burst. He shut his eyes and pictured the old man dead, sprawled out on the ground, his limbs arranged like he was awkwardly running. A life snuffed out to preserve one worth nothing. A goddamned hustler. A murderer. No friends, no family. Not even a soul.
It didn’t make sense.
Nick moaned.
“Christ’s sake,” the old man muttered.
Nick rose, jammed his hands into his pockets, and shuffled off with the old man’s clear blue eyes trained on him. The guy called after him, “Why don’t you clean up your act and get a job like everybody else?”
I’ve got one, Nick thought. But I just can’t do it.
* * *
The only thing different about the place since the first time he saw it was the darkness enshrouding it. That, and the absence of a nude lunatic in the yard. Nick rolled past it, his headlamps off, and stopped up the street and around the corner. Part of him intended only to run surveillance tonight, to watch and learn. But another part felt certain she was not only home, but waiting for him. Impatiently. Giddily, maybe. He shuddered at the thought of her bloodlust, or whatever it was, even as his cock stirred in his trousers at the memory of her shameless display. A frown consumed his face at the latter. The first time he flew in an airplane he got an erection when the thing touched down—he was fifteen years old and it wouldn’t go away, so he waited until everybody else was off before he stood up to deplane. That was anxiety then. He didn’t know what it was now. He didn’t want to know.
Nick adjusted himself and got out of the Benz.
* * *
Hart downed three fingers of rye and slammed the glass back down on the bar almost hard enough to break it.
The bartender, a wiry guy with a Nietzsche mustache obscuring his mouth, barked, “Hey.”
“Sorry,” Hart said.
The bartender scrunched his substantial eyebrows together and stalked off, keeping his eyes on Hart, who poked a cigarette in his mouth and tried to get a disposable lighter going. His thumb clicked the button over and over, but all it would do is spark.
“Fuck,” he said.
Sulfur filled his nostrils then and a lit match came into view. Hart jumped a little, craned his neck to get a look at the kid beside him, a dark-faced youth pinching the match between two fingers and raising his brow. Leaning forward, Hart touched the end of the cigarette to the flame and darted his eyes to the matchbook on the bar as he sucked inward. SUGAR’S CABARET, it read on the back.
“I know that place,” he said, gesturing at the matchbook as he leaned back into position and took the smoke from his lips. “You know a girl there called Destiny?”
“I don’t know any girls there,” the kid said. “Never been.”
“Oh,” said Hart. “I was wondering if she still danced there.”
“Couldn’t tell you, pal.”
Hart shrugged, scratched at his beard. “You should,” he said. “Go, I mean. Thanks for the light.”
“No problem.”
The mark signaled for the bartender, who roundly ignored him. When the kid beside him cleared his throat, the bartender flashed an exaggerated smile and went over to him.
“Two of what he was having,” the kid said, pointing at Hart with his thumb.
The smile vanished, but the bartender got to work.
“And thanks again,” Hart said with a hint of embarrassment.
“This round’s on you.”
“Gladly.”
When the glasses appeared in front of them, the two men sipped and smoked in silence for several long minutes before Hart abruptly stabbed out his smoke in the ashtray and slammed what remained of his bourbon. He then wiped his mouth on his sleeve, shook his head, and turned his watery brown eyes on his new friend.
“You know,” he said, his voice trembling almost imperceptibly, “I’d never have guessed on someone so young. What are you, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
“Nineteen. What do you mean, you wouldn’t have guessed?”
“You’re him, right?”
“I’m who?”
“Kid, please don’t fuck with me. Not over something like this. I’m not going to turn this into a fight. I’m not even going to try to run. I just want to get loaded before we get down to business—is that too much to ask?”
The youth narrowed his eyes and sucked on the cigarette, pinching it awkwardly much like he had the match. Hart sniffed, took the smoke from him. Held it gingerly between his first and middle fingers like a pair of chopsticks.
“Like this,” he said. “You look like a Hogan’s Heroes villain the way you hold it. When’d you start?”
“Not very long ago.”
“Might as well quit while you’re ahead, kid. Those things’ll fucking kill you.”
“I s’pose we all got to go sometime,” the kid said, making a thin, flat line of his lips as though he wished he hadn’t.
Robert W. Hart laughed. A long, dry laugh from deep in his gut, loud enough to warrant an askance look from the bartender and set the kid’s nerves on edge.
Hart gave him back the cigarette and readjusted the glasses on his nose. His eyes moved back to the matchbook on the bar, and he tapped the purple silhouette with his finger, cracking a crooked grin.
“Destiny,” he said.
“Yeah,” the kid agreed, blinking and knitting his brow. “I guess so.”
“No, man—Destiny. I wanta see does she still dance there. I got some Jack left on me, haven’t drank all of it yet. Come on, I’m buying. A few more rounds, maybe a lap dance or two. Then we can do what you got to do. No fuss, no muss. Scout’s fucking honor.”
“I wasn’t a Boy Scout.”
“Neither was I. Who gives a shit? Let a dumb fuck get a little something he can’t get at home before he gets his ticket punched, huh?”
Nick tamped out his smoke, nodding at the bartender as he looked at the matchbook.
* * *
She was sitting Indian-style on the couch in the living room in gray sweatpants and a tank top, the television on but the volume way down low. A cup of coffee steamed on the little table beside her, a few magazines and a book on the coffee table in front of her. The book was some tawdry horror paperback, tattered like she’d acquired it used or read it before. A bloody knife crossed over an image of a human skull with the eyeballs still in the sockets, huge and bloodshot and staring without emotion. Her hair was done up, messily, and her nipples pressed against the fabric of her top. Nick noticed that when he came into the room from the kitchen, having entered the same way he did before, and forced himself to move his focus to her face. She blinked, glanced up at him like he belonged there.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi?”
“Hello? Good morning? I don’t know what you’d prefer.”
“Christ.”
Lorraine reached for the cup and Nick tightened up.
“Relax, killer. Just my coffee.”<
br />
He rolled his shoulders, thinking about a coffee cup years back, one he had to throw at a guy’s head to keep from meeting the business end of the pig-sticker in his fist. That one had gone down badly. Loads of blood. Bad scene all around.
But Lorraine only sipped her coffee and watched him.
“You want a cup?” she asked. “Got a fresh pot on.”
“No.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“No.”
“Then you might as well have a seat,” she said, pointing at the armchair behind him. Nick neither looked nor moved. “Or stand. Whatever tickles your pickle.”
“The hell’s wrong with you, lady?”
Lorraine snorted, holding the cup with both hands just under her chin. She looked to Nick like a commercial for Nescafé or something. Calm and collected. Ice water in her veins, he decided.
Like he used to have.
“I knew you’d be back,” she said. “I just knew it.”
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here. You didn’t call it in. You didn’t report the hit.”
“Not yet, I haven’t. I’ll have to, eventually. Probably tonight. I’m going to say I’ve been hiding in the closet the whole time, terrified to come out. They’ll know the body’s been sitting there cold a while.”
“Sitting—he’s still here?”
“Right where you left him. Well, I guess where we left him. We’re more or less in this together, you and me, right?”
“For fuck’s sake, lady.”
“You can call me Lorraine. What’s your name, anyway? Is it, like, Vinnie or Paulie or something obvious like that?”
“Hieronymus,” Nick said.
“Shit. Your folks never gave you a chance.”
Nick scanned the room, taking in the perfectly ordinary surroundings. Bookshelf, houseplants, pictures on the wall. He was too far away to make out most of the faces in any of them, though he did recognize Nathan Cole in at least one of them. Smiling happily in the photo with his mistress while decomposing on a bed stained dark with his own dried blood just down the hall. He wondered where she’d slept, if she had at all. An image popped into his skull of her cuddling up naked to the corpse and he shuddered slightly.
Cool customer, he thought. Though he knew it was far worse than that.
“I’ve got this idea, Hie—Hee—look, I’m just going to call you Harry.”
“I don’t care what you call me.”
“I’ve got this idea, Harry, that you’ve maybe never met a client before.”
“I don’t have clients.”
“Well, okay. Yeah. I know that. The people you report to or whatever—they have the clients. They’re like the landscaping company and you’re the mower.”
“Mower,” Nick repeated, his voice a whisper.
“You do the work, you get your pay. Go home, crack open a beer. Watch the sports highlights.”
“Not a sports fan.”
“Maybe fuck the wife. You married, Harry? Is there a Mrs. Harry?”
From outside, Nick could hear birds chirping excitedly. Apart from that the subdivision seemed dead silent. People at work, kids in school. Nobody venturing a guess as to whether there could be a body in their midst. Much less a psychotic.
He let his mind linger over that diagnosis for a few seconds.
“You’re crazy,” he said.
Lorraine jutted out her lower lip, pouting childlike.
“I’ll be honest with you, Harry. That kind of hurts my feelings.”
“I could give a fuck about your feelings,” Nick said.
She heaved a sigh and set the cup back down.
“The customer’s always right, Harry,” she said, pulling at the hem of her tank top before pulling it up and off.
* * *
To Robert Hart’s significant chagrin, Destiny was not there. To Nick’s continual frustration, every girl that came around, be they dancer or waitress, was peppered with questions about Destiny’s whereabouts and activities. The more he drank—each rum and Coke putting him back another nine bucks, which mortified Nick, who barely nursed his own—the louder and more obnoxious Hart was about it. He started to ask the same girls two or three times over, the same questions, and before long they stopped coming around the table no matter how many crumpled ones he had spread out in front of him. Hart did not seem too frustrated about it.
A waitress in lingerie made to look a bit like a tuxedo skulked up sometime after the table was effectively quarantined, and she ignored Hart outright while leaning close to ask Nick if he needed anything. He pushed a hard sigh out of his lungs and thought what he needed was for Hart to keel over and die all on his own, or at least for himself to grow a pair of balls and stop putting off the inevitable. He couldn’t understand what he was thinking coming to this place, apart from believing the mark would go quietly if this small demand was met. Compliantly, even. Frankly, Robert Hart came across like a man ready to die. Already Nick knew he was a man who knew why he had to. Which was the larger of the two puzzles.
“I’m good,” he told the waitress. Hart watched her walk away with keen interest.
“My wife used to have an ass like that,” he said.
“Time marches on,” Nick said. Then, narrowing one eye, he added, “She the one that—y’know—wants you gone?”
“Ah!” Hart crowed, slightly startling Nick. “We’re finally getting around to that. You struck me as a guy who could talk shop, even in a joint like this.”
Nick didn’t say anything. The MC welcomed a slinky chick called Persephone to the stage, who wrapped her fingers around the pole and spun on one heel.
“The gods fulfilled his curse,” Hart said, firing up a cigarette, “even Zeus of the netherworld and dread Persephone.”
“What was that?”
“Women can be cruel, kid.”
“Because you don’t like her ass anymore?”
Hart grinned. “No, it’s not my old lady. She’s in the pen.”
“People take out hits from prison all the time.”
“It’s not her.”
“I don’t really care,” Nick said.
Persephone managed to unhook the bloodred brassiere from behind while still twirling the pole, her face a death mask without emotion. The speakers blared Nazareth and a pair of Mexican guys in flannel shirts and white straw cowboy hats sauntered up to the edge of the stage, fists stuffed with ones. Hart watched them, then gestured with his chin at the cash on the table.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Make it fucking rain for the girl. I won’t be needing it.”
Nick ignored the offer. He eyed Hart instead, who subconsciously bobbed his head to the backbeat. “Love Hurts.” Nick wrinkled his nose at the mounting curiosity in his mind.
Doesn’t matter, he reminded himself. You don’t want to know.
Just do the goddamned job, make good with that psychotic woman, and get the hell out of town for good.
On stage, ones and fives scattered down around Persephone’s stilettos as she arched her back to display the long pink scars underneath each breast. Nick wondered how little she paid the butcher who did the job. His mind wandered back to Misty, who hadn’t any enhancements at all.
Nor the heart to stick around when a guy ended a life or two on her behalf.
He clenched a fist, turned his eyes back to Hart. The mark.
“Finish your drink,” he barked.
“One more and we’ll hit the road, pal.”
“I’m not your pal. Finish your fucking drink.”
“One more and I’ll tell you—”
“I don’t wanta hear it, Hart. Keep your mouth shut except to kill that drink and let’s go.”
Pushing back against the table, Nick rose from his chair and stared down hard at Robert Hart, who swallowed the rest of his booze in one go. A small, sad smile graced the doomed man’s lips, which he wiped on his sleeve. Persephone finished her routine and Nazareth faded into some rap track and Hart said, “Just know I deserve t
his. What you got to do, I have it coming.”
Nick said, “Wonderful.” And grabbed Hart by the elbow.
Hart rose trembling to his feet, the alcohol sloshing in his skull. His eyes were watery and a bouncer with a lumpy, shaved head near the men’s room gave him the evil eye. Nick directed the drunk past the big man, to whom Hart slurred, “Anything you want me to tell Saint Peter for ya?”
“Have a nice night,” the bouncer growled.
With Nick’s hand still on his elbow, Hart laughed all the way out to the parking lot.
* * *
“Don’t do that,” Nick said.
“My house,” said Lorraine. “My tits.”
She tossed the top aside, letting it fall into a crumpled pile on the carpet. Nick ground his molars. But he didn’t look away.
“How many?” she asked, childlike, pushing her breasts out just enough to almost not seem like it was on purpose.
“I shouldn’t have come here.”
He exhaled, having not realized he’d been holding his breath, and started out of the room. Lorraine leapt up, rounded the sofa and blocked his path. Nick stopped, rolling his eyes and settling them on the microwave oven in the kitchen. Anywhere but at her.
“How many?” she asked again.
“How many what?”
“How many have you killed? Or hit. Or whatever you call it.”
“Get out of my way, Lorraine.”
She shivered as though the room temperature dropped twenty degrees, then let loose a high giggle.
“You said my name, Harry.”
“If I say it backward, will you disappear?”
“Not likely,” she said, throwing her arms around his neck and landing a dry kiss on his cheek. Nick grunted, spun out of her grasp as he planted his left hand between her breasts and pushed, hard. Lorraine gave a yelp and staggered backward, caught her hip on a kitchen chair, went ass over teakettle to the linoleum floor. “Harry!”
