by Kurtz, Ed
He gave the guy a shove that turned him 180 degrees so Nick could get in behind him, and the guy gave a long, panicked wheeze as Nick wrapped the wire around his neck and pulled it taut. It was then he realized he’d caught a couple of the guy’s fingers in there as well, left over from clutching at his impacted throat and used now to buffer himself from the wire. Nick cinched it with one hand and delivered a couple of rapid blows to the guy’s left kidney, one-two, and swiped at his arm to pull the fingers free. The wire snapped close around the guy’s throat and he threw the hand back up, but too little, too late. It was tightening still, biting into the skin and cutting off his air supply. It was much too dim to see, that far from the open door, but something in Nick delighted at the thought of the guy’s face darkening, changing colors. So too did he delight in the spasms the dying man made with his shoulders and arms and hips and legs.
Apart from that, Nick felt nothing. It was self-defense. And moreover, practice.
When at last the guy stopped struggling and expired, Nick held tight for a couple minutes longer to be sure. After that, he loosened the wire, let the guy slump to the floor, where the body fell against the endcap and knocked over a selection of different-colored water bottles to the floor. Nick stepped to the side, to allow as much of the meager light to reach the body as possible, and regarded it in all its stillness and total lack of function. Just a skin sack full of bones and meat, none of them useful for anything anymore—but were they ever? Animate, inanimate; ephemeral at best and hardly necessary in the grand scope, Nick thought. Superfluous. Like bees in a hive—the whole produced the honey, but any one was perfectly useless on its own, and hardly missed when squashed underfoot. The work still went on. What was a drone to the big operation?
Life, he considered while staring at the man he’d just killed, wasn’t at all unlike sex. The two inextricably linked, of course, but neither much more than the hopeful yet inadequate fumbling of nature’s meat-machines, as programmed and ultimately stupid as a cockroach or an ant, doing only what its instinct commands—no more, no less. People slept and ate and fucked and shit and worked eight hours a day, five days a week, 260 days a year, all the years of their lives until they were dead and rotting and replaced with a new warm body, a new meat-machine to get the entirely pointless work done. Trying like hell to put away their programming, the fight or flight, the survival of the fittest, the need to run and kill and rend flesh from bones. Tribalism. Warfare. Murder. That was the stuff of human instinct, wasn’t it? Kill and fuck and eat and shit and see who’s standing atop the mountain of cadavers come dusk, dripping blood and screaming victorious…
“Nothing but meat and bones,” he said to the corpse on the floor. A few of the water bottles still wobbled noisily on the uneven cement floor. Nick’s fingers and palms ached from where the wire had pressed hard into his own flesh, pulling it so tight. He tried to recall the name for that particular implement of execution but it wouldn’t come to him. Probably he’d read about it somewhere, or seen it on TV. He’d think of it eventually, probably in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep. Though something told him from here on out, he was going to sleep like a baby.
Or, better yet, like the dead.
On his way back to the other end of the aisle, he snagged a plastic bag off the floor and filled it with coils of wire, along with a few packets of lead line weights, heavy and ovoid. He stepped over the big man, dead by then, and made his way back into the blinding white light of day, freshly geared up and less anxious than he could ever recall feeling in all his life.
Because it was all like that, wasn’t it? he decided as the number 4 puttered up to the bus stop. People react the way they think they’re expected to, but it’s all programming. Killing, fucking, loving, living. All Spot ever was—all Misty ever was—was another bag of bones, another cog in the machine. He hadn’t loved her. He’d only done and felt what programming, instinctual and cultural, had told him to do and like a faithful dog he followed every command. Pathetic.
(And look where it got you, Nick—look at what you are now!)
He climbed the steps into the bus and fed his change into the slot. The driver did not acknowledge him. At the back, Nick sat down, peeked at the transit map up near the roof, and pulled the plastic bag tight to his abdomen. In doing so, a small hole in the side tore wide, and one of the coils dropped out to the floor. Two seats over, an older man with cottony white hair retrieved the package and handed it gently back, a smile on his pinched, wrinkly face.
“Call of the sea, huh?” he rasped.
“Yeah,” Nick said.
“Boy, I’ll tell ya—used to fish all the damn time back in the day, me and the boys I knew then. Shit, we didn’t care if we caught nothin’ or not. Most the time we was so loaded it didn’t matter one way or t’other anyhow, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Nick arched one eyebrow and set to unpacking one of the coils, the one the old man handed back to him, and then retrieved a pair of weights from the bag. Each weight had lead hoops soldered onto either end, and also a hole drilled right through the center. He fed the wire through the hole of one, looped it round and tied it off before moving onto the other end. Fifteen feet was going to be too much. He considered the dilemma for a moment, and said, “Matters to me.”
“Serious fishmerman, then,” said the old man with a chuckle.
“As a heart attack,” Nick said gravely, glaring deep into the man’s watery brown eyes. Dreamily, Nick imagined the wire around his throat, ending a life already close to its finish. The old man didn’t say anything more after that.
The bus chugged on, stopping every five or eight minutes to pick up or drop off, and while Nick waited for his own stop he threaded and rethreaded the wire through the hole until he had a length of wire three feet long, five times over, with grippable weights on either end.
The old man got off the stop after that without a word. Nick stuffed his new creation in one pocket and the remaining supplies in the other. He had one change, to the number 2 due eastbound, and another six stops until he’d have to foot it the rest of the way. After that, Nick would have his little date with Selma Bea Alvarado.
Whoever she was.
And that didn’t matter.
* * *
He guessed it was imported, or at any rate a brand he’d never seen or heard of. The label looked like art, which made Nick frown. All the same, he pulled the cap off with Trevor’s opener and took a long pull from the bottleneck.
“Goddamn, that’s hoppy.”
“It’s an IPA,” Trevor said.
“Whatever. Have a seat. Both of you. Let your uncle Nick tell you a story.”
The kids sat side by side, at the same time, on the tatty black futon they used for a couch, their knees pressed together. Nick almost laughed. They looked like children caught doing something naughty, in store for a severe talking-to. Charise still silently cried. Trevor mostly looked like he was in a state of shock.
“I used to know a girl named Charise,” Nick said, a little languidly. “I don’t know I’d even be here right now, it hadn’t been for her. Cracked the code for me, that girl.”
They didn’t get it. He didn’t expect them to. Another slug from the IPA, and he made a face. Nick wished they’d had normal, American beer on hand.
Friggin’ hipster kids.
“I don’t know where to start, now that I’m here,” he said, regarding the bottle and letting his eyes float over the cramped, cluttered living space. They had piles of DVDs and video games, books and CDs and even a small selection of old LPs. There were movie posters tacked up on the walls, but Nick hadn’t ever heard of any of them and they mostly looked like old porno flicks. He couldn’t even recall the last time he watched a movie from start to finish, though he tended to consider his favorite Yankee Doodle Dandy, which he remembered liking a lot as a kid. That Cagney had swagger in spades.
“Why do you want to kill us?” Charise asked, her voice trembling.
; “I don’t,” Nick said, zeroing in on a well-stuffed plastic grocery bag resting against the molding between an acoustic guitar and what looked like a didgeridoo. “So what’s in the bag, there?”
“Huh?” Charise came back.
“Every night—well, most nights—you disappear into the Rialto and don’t emerge for hours, and when you do, you’re always carrying a plastic bag with something in it. I know it’s not your lunch, because you don’t go in with it. So: what’s in the bag?”
Trevor and Charise exchanged a knowing and jumpy glance. She swallowed hard. He said, “I told you. Fuck, I told you.”
“What did you tell her, Trevor?” Nick said.
“It’s Angelo, isn’t it? He knows. He fucking knows and damnit, Charise—it is a big deal. You don’t steal from people like that. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s his. Oh, Christ. Christ!”
“This is…interesting,” Nick said. He killed off the beer and set the bottle down on the counter dividing the kitchenette from the main room. “I don’t know any Angelo, though to be honest I never know who’s behind a job, at the end of the line. I take the call and do my work, and that’s all there is to it. That said, I don’t think you have to worry about Angelo. Though I still want to know what it is you’re stealing from him.”
“Someone paid you to do this?” Charise cried.
“They’d better. That’s how it works.”
“Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “Jesus Christ, Trev. He’s a….he’s a hit man.”
Nick said, “That’s about the size of it.”
“We’ll pay it off, then,” Trevor spat out. “However much it is, we’ll match it. Or more. You need more to call it off? Make it even, or whatever? We can do that. We will do it, I mean. I promise. Whatever it takes, we can do it.”
Shaking his head, Nick went back to the fridge to grab another IPA. He held it up and called out, “Anyone else?” When there came no reply, he just took the one. “Thing about that,” he went on, cracking the bottle open, “is it’s squelching. It’s bad form in this line, you gotta understand. Trust me, they say that all the time, what you just said. Sometimes it’s big money they’re talking, too. But a deal’s a deal, and you don’t renege on a contract. At least I sure as shit don’t. Never have.”
Charise was crying again. Trevor pulled her into a tight hug. Nick drank.
“Contract,” Trevor said low.
“I think this is growing on me, a little,” Nick said, gesturing with his chin at the beer in his hand. “Fucking IPA.” He snorted. “I remember when a coffee was a coffee and a beer was a beer. Shit used to be simpler, you know that? Every damn thing has to be so overcomplicated now, seems like. I reckon we do that to our own selves, but still. When I was your age—how old are you, anyway?”
Charise stuttered, “Tuh—twenty-four.”
Trevor nodded, as if to say he was the same age.
“Kids, man,” Nick said. “But I was in this before that even. So yeah, when I was your age? Everything was simple. I’d hang around, no mobile, no cable TV, no Internet—take my calls, not too often, do my work. Drink a little in between, you know. And I didn’t think about it, I didn’t parse it out the way people do with every last thing nowadays. Somebody farts and they’ve got to break it down from a hundred different angles on fifty different talk shows. Me? I’d squeeze the life out of some poor bastard and sleep fine as cherry wine, thank you very much. They were gone, I was still here, things were what they were. I mean, they just were.”
He could feel his eyes widen, that faraway, hundred-yard stare he got sometimes when he was lost in his own skull. Charise grasped onto Trevor a little tighter. I’m scaring the hell out of these kids, Nick thought.
“The hell does IPA stand for, anyway?”
“It’s…uh…India Pale Ale.”
“It’s from India?”
“No.”
“Shit, but it’s hoppy.”
“Do—do you have a—a gun, or something?” Charise piped up, shifting so she was half hiding behind Trevor’s shoulder.
“Yes,” he said, feeling it against the small of his back. There was the usual blade strapped to his ankle, as well. “But I never use it. Why don’t you let me see what’s in that bag, huh?”
“The bag…?”
“Whatever it is you’ve been stealing from this Angelo. I want to see it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like unanswered questions. Go get it.”
Trevor made a thin line of his mouth and made to get up.
Nick said, “Not you. Her.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because it’s her bag. She brings it home. Let her show me what it is.”
Charise’s face scrunched up at Trevor. He rubbed her knee, said, “It’s okay. Just get it.”
She did what he told her.
* * *
The walk was longer than he expected. The stop was a block from the mouth of the neighborhood, where a large stone wall displayed COLCHESTER HUNT in capital letters made of iron. From there, Nick wandered meandering, freshly paved roads until, a little more than half an hour later, he finally stumbled upon a green street sign declaiming GREEN CAP PLACE. The address he found in the Circle K white pages was at the end, at the top of a hill on a cul-de-sac. The house rested at the bottom of a sharp decline, with a sprawling front lawn of an acre or so and a complex, terraced garden bordering the front walk. At the end of the sloping driveway was what looked like a brand-new basketball hoop—backboard, net, and all—and a gleaming Chrysler sat parked underneath it. As he made his way down the drive, Nick could see that the backyard continued the slope, even sharper here, a solid forty-five-degree drop to a dense line of trees and nothing but woods behind them. It looked like hell to mow, but he figured a spread like this, they could afford to hire that sort of work out. The back of the house was taken up by an enormous deck on stilts, which descended into three different levels. He snuck around to get a better look, and found a hot tub resting at the bottommost part, right outside a sliding glass door.
The glass door was cracked open.
Cautiously, Nick climbed up onto the deck and crept the length of it to the first set of steps, then down to the next. He reached the last level, wormed his way around the hot tub, and edged up beside the glass door. There, he held his breath and listened.
A television droned on inside. A jingle for a local Tae Kwon Do school (“We fight for right!”). It then returned to the Scooby-Doo Mysteries. A tiny voice squealed with delight. Nick flattened himself against the siding.
Another voice, adult and far away, called out.
“Lunch, Lori,” she said, her tone impatient.
The child harrumphed. Tiny feet scampered across the floor and upstairs, getting faint until silent. Nick waited a moment, then risked peering in through the cracked door. It was a basement, only half-finished, with old-school faux-wood paneling on the walls and a pool table with a green felt top taking up the center of the space. A faux-Tiffany bar lamp hung overhead. At the far end sat a tattered old couch with lamps on either end of it, and an ancient Magnavox up against the far wall, rabbit ears and all. The kid had left it on. Scooby and the gang were up to their ears in it.
Nick squeezed inside, leaving the door as it was. The same tiny feet scuttled overhead, the child’s minder snapping at her with indistinct words. Mrs. Alvarado, he presumed.
He waited. Moving quietly around the basement, his shoes tiptoeing over the thin rug, listening carefully and biding his time. If things proceeded the way he generally remembered them from his own childhood, a kid that young would likely get put down for a nap following her lunch. That, anyway, was what Nick was counting on.
He hung tight, pacing but silent, until Scooby gave way to an old One Day at a Time repeat, at which point Nick moved to the bottom of the stairs and pointed his left ear up them. He could hear little apart from the clinking of dishware, the shuffling of paper. A deep sigh.
No child. Warily, he as
cended the stairs, wincing at every creak, toward the closed door at the top. There he paused, breathing shallow and listening intently. She was right on the other side of the door, going about her day. Oblivious to the man coming up from the basement, the stranger in her house. The killer sent to end her.
Nick readied the wire, grasping the leaden weight on one end in his hand. The woman cleared her throat. He exhaled hard through his mouth and, seizing the knob, opened the door and threw it wide open while throwing himself into a large, spotless kitchen.
The woman at the kitchen table fell against the back of her wooden chair and gave a curt gasp, her eyes bulging over the top of the reading glasses perched on her nose.
“Fucking—” she began, the ing hanging on long until she finished with, “Nick?”
Nick stood frozen, a yard away from her with the wire stretched between two hands, and stared hard at Mother.
She stared doubly hard back.
* * *
The bag crinkled on her lap when she sat down and resituated herself, taking her time to sweep the overlong bangs from her eyes and scoot as far back into the cushions as she could manage. Nick watched, patiently, and so did Trevor. For a moment all three of them were dead silent and stock-still, before at last Charise pulled the bag open and gazed inside, almost as though beholding some sought-after archaeological legend.
She reached into the bag, and withdrew three candy boxes, the extra-large kind usually sold at movie theaters, even a dirty one like the Rialto. Jujubes and Whoppers and Raisinets, none of them rattling about the way they would if full. Charise then swept the bag away to the empty couch cushion beside her, set the boxes carefully on her lap where the bag had been, and took up just one—the Jujubes—which she pried open before plunging her forefinger and thumb into it. From within she pinched and pulled out a dark, gleaming strip. Nick squinted at it. It looked to him like camera film.
