Nausea

by Kurtz, Ed

  “Beer’s fine.”

  “We got all kinds.”

  “How about Stroh’s.”

  The guy nodded. Half a minute later he slammed a bottle down on a green napkin and said, “Two bucks.”

  Nick paid up and found a seat by the window where he could nurse the beer and watch the rain. Cars reduced to headlights slashed by in either direction, their tires obscured by the night and sending wave after wave of gray rainwater splashing against the window. Someone put a Nat King Cole song on the jukebox and Nick smiled. His beer tasted uncommonly good and he unconsciously wiggled his hips when the chorus of voices rang out, “Flash, Bam, Alakazam!” A woman laughed sweetly and happily close by and was soon joined by others laughing in tandem. Nick finished off the beer and raised a hand to catch the barman’s attention.

  Then the mobile phone in his jacket pocket buzzed ominously.

  * * *

  He was still humming “Orange Colored Sky” while he opened up the phone book and ran the tip of his index finger down the first column of the sixty-seventh page to the twenty-ninth entry from the top—

  Cole, Nathan K.

  Nick sucked in a sharp breath and choked on it.

  Coincidences gave him the creeps.

  * * *

  On a cold spring morning, just before the sun peeked over the distant hills, Nick sat in a smoky room at an interstate motor lodge and waited for the Indian on the television screen to give up the night for regular programming. He had been up all night and all the day before, and though his head swam and his vision was blurry, he had absolutely no intention of sleeping now. Sleep brought awful things to mind, memories mixed with liberal doses of some deep inner guilt that tended to manifest as demons and monsters that usually turned out to be himself in hazy reflection. Nick needed no shrink to decipher the dreams—he got it. He just didn’t want to deal with them. Not now.

  Not ever.

  The motor lodge was one of those ugly Southwest affairs made up to look like an Indian camp, or at least a 1950’s TV version of one. All the roofs were done over with fake plastic animal skins and the main office was housed in a gigantic teepee. Supposed to be cute, and Nick wondered what the Indian on the black-and-white twelve-inch screen in front of him would have thought. For his part, Nick found the whole affair deeply tasteless, but not from any lingering white man’s guilt—it was just plain garish. He wanted to get back on the road, get farther away than he already was, but he’d never really figured out where the hell he was going in the first place. Somehow it just seemed better to put distance between himself and the blood he had spilled. The memory of the killings faded a little bit with every extra hundred miles he put on the powder blue rental Buick he was driving.

  The purple glow on the hills seemed to trigger the television, which at precisely 6:01 AM sent the Indian packing and introduced a chorus of solemn, robed singers for some religious program Nick really didn’t want to watch. The pastor’s name was Dr. Elliot Jacoby, a name that garnered a roar of applause from the peanut gallery when announced at the lectern at the front of the huge church.

  “God be with you on this, his glorious Sunday!” the good reverend doctor pronounced. Nick switched the television off and groaned.

  Sunday already. Christ’s sake.

  He glanced down at his trembling right hand, realized he’d had a cigarette burning between his fingers but now it was reduced to the butt with the ashes all over the bedspread. He tamped it out in the ashtray on the nightstand, swept the ashes to the floor with the edge of his hand, and walked jerkily like Frankenstein’s monster to the moldy shower stall in the bathroom. He worked at the knobs until he had the temperature just right, warm but not too hot, and got in, boxers and all. The water felt luxurious, which after a few minutes he concluded was not for the likes of him. He didn’t deserve luxury, did he? Without giving it another thought he turned the water all the way to cold, gasped at the icy needles that shot out by the hundreds at his bunching skin, and ground his molars.

  Two down, he thought, the faces of the cameraman and the Korean receptionist dancing cruelly in his mind’s eye. One to go.

  * * *

  Flash, Bam, Alakazam! What were the fucking chances?

  Life was absolutely dripping with coincidences like that and Nick knew it. Thing was, normally he’d have a song in his head and then switch on the radio and there it was. Ooh, freaky. Nothing more. Happened all the time. To suddenly find himself enamored with Nat King Cole on the same night he’s asked to kill a dude called Nathan K. Cole—well, that was a tad worse than freaky.

  If the cosmos was trying to tell him something, Nick wished it would mind its own goddamn business.

  He stepped out of the phone booth and the kid behind the counter locked eyes with him. Nick sauntered over to the counter, pointed at the fountain and said, “How about a vanilla Coke?”

  The kid nodded, went to work on the pop. Nick quickly added, “And a scoop of strawberry in it, huh?”

  “Strawberry?”

  “That’s right.”

  The flourish was last-second inspiration: Nick was both lactose intolerant and mildly allergic to strawberries. Cheating, he knew. But a start. Maybe just the push he needed to get back on the right track. If he got sick this time, there’d be a perfectly good reason for it. The kid served it up and Nick paid in cash.

  “Down the hatch,” he said as he dug into the noxious concoction.

  * * *

  Lexus in the driveway, baby seat in the back. Kid’s bicycle in the carport—that’s two kids. Just the one car, though; unlikely that they wouldn’t both have one, man and wife. Someone wasn’t home. Nick rolled on by, taking the scene in. Looked very homey, but somebody wasn’t happy. He noted the sticker on the Lexus’s bumper: MY CHILD IS ON THE HONOR ROLL AT UNION MILL ELEMENTARY. Good for him, or her. Nick needed more intel. He drove on, didn’t make a second sweep.

  His best guess was that Mommy was home but Daddy was out. It was past midnight by the bright blue digital numbers on the Benz’s clock, which made Daddy’s absence a bit strange, unless he was out for the night. Business trip, maybe, depending on his business. Maybe he just wasn’t around much. Nick took two rights and a left out of the subdivision and rode the farm road to the freeway clear to the south side of town, back to the Rialto and CALIFORNIA F—KERS and the familiar little Monkey Ward parking slot across the street.

  The rain had let up a bit, slowed to a cool whisper. A guy in a dull yellow slicker shambled by the front of the theater. He was pulling from a bottle in a sopping wet paper bag. He hesitated under the white bulbs of the jutting marquee, thought about stepping in out of the rain, but the notion eluded him and he kept on. A few minutes later the myriad lights that studded the marquee flickered out, darkening the façade. Five stragglers shuffled through the front doors, ushered away by the women from the box office and concession counter, and the lobby went dark soon thereafter. Nick stabbed out a half-smoked cigarette. He didn’t want the glow at the end to be visible across the street.

  The concession girl left first, as always. She popped open a black umbrella and walked hunched against the rain up the block and around the corner to Van Buren Street. Nick leaned closer to the windshield, fogging the glass a little with his breath. If the pattern held…

  It did, and the girl came out next, having disappeared into the porno theater doing God knew what for six hours and emerging now, the ever-present plastic grocery bag dangling from her hand. No umbrella for her, the black hood of her sweatshirt was all she required. She zipped the front up to her throat and nodded to the box office girl, who locked up and nodded back. Box Office climbed onto a bicycle and sped off dodging the raindrops. The girl remaining waited. Nick waited with her.

  Minutes passed—five, then ten. Nick drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Another five, another ten. The girl threw her arms up in frustration, sucked in a heaving breath, and then stamped out into the rain.

  Nick frowned. The other kid, the b
oy, should have been there. He hadn’t been late before, at least not on Nick’s watch. He grabbed the door handle, but he hesitated.

  “You’re on a job, damnit,” he admonished himself. “Leave it alone for now.”

  Somewhere Nathan K. Cole was living and breathing and that was something Nick could not allow to continue. Still, there wasn’t enough intel to move on, not until he got a grasp on the family situation, what this Cole character did and when he did it. At half past one in the morning, he wasn’t likely to gather that data until morning at the earliest. And in the meantime, the girl was vanishing into the dark, wet night.

  Pulling the handle with one hand, he snatched the keys out of the steering column with the other. He couldn’t very well follow her in the Benz, not without being noticed, so it was down to a foot chase in the cold rain. And for what? He didn’t have the clearest idea. But he set out quickly lest he lose her.

  * * *

  The morning air outside his room at the motor lodge was cool and dry, though Nick knew it would turn hot in a hurry now that the sun was up. Accordingly, he decided to get a move on, commencing his plans for the day with breakfast at the diner on the other side of the interstate. He was and always had been a bacon and eggs man, and he could conceive of no reason not to go out with a full belly.

  The eggs were runny the way he liked them, the bacon charred and crumbly. He had a side of pancakes that he didn’t touch and a carafe of coffee that he drank to the last drop. When he was through, the waitress brought him a ticket and instructed him to pay the cashier at the front. He obliged, leaving an extravagant twenty-dollar tip. One last good deed before he sailed for the Great Beyond, he figured. Maybe, just maybe, it would make a small dent in the whole double-homicide thing come judgment time.

  He took a peppermint from the basket by the cash register, unwrapped it and popped it in his mouth. On his way out of the place, he heard the waitress laugh giddily at the tip he’d left her. He smiled.

  Upon reaching the Buick he jammed his hand into his jeans pocket for the keys and almost leaped out of his skin when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around to face a young man, about his age, with long sandy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. The guy wore glasses with black plastic frames and he was in bad need of a shave. He smelled of patchouli, which nearly made Nick gag.

  “Hey, man,” the guy droned nasally, “I got a problem, maybe you can help.”

  Nick opened his mouth, started to tell the guy off, but he remembered the fat tip and why he’d done that and reached for his wallet instead.

  “Sure,” Nick said. He opened the wallet and withdrew what remained of his wad, a pair of tens and a twenty. These he handed over like it was nothing. The guy just stared.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s all I got.”

  “I’m not robbing you.”

  “Didn’t think you were. You want it or not?”

  The guy scrunched up his face and turned to signal someone Nick couldn’t see for the metallic blue van parked right next to him.

  “Hey, Paul! Paul, come here a second.”

  Nick said, “Look…”

  The guy raised an index finger that suggested, “Wait.” Nick did.

  “Hey, Paulie!”

  “Yeah, Christ,” came a low voice Nick took to be Paul’s.

  The new guy looked just like the first one, only fatter and with shorter hair and a spotty goatee. He looked Nick over appraisingly and then turned his gaze on the first guy.

  “What the fuck, Danny?”

  “He’s weird,” Danny said.

  “So fucking deal with it.”

  “Well, you’re here, now.”

  Paul groaned. Nick realized he was still holding the cash out and no one was taking it. He slipped it back into the wallet and returned the wallet to his pocket.

  “I’m going to go,” Nick said.

  “Hold on a minute,” Paul and Danny said in chorus.

  “You couldn’t get him to walk fifteen feet with you?” Paul asked Danny.

  Danny shrugged.

  Nick put in, “He didn’t ask me to. I tried to give him forty bucks. He wouldn’t take it.”

  “What, you think he was robbing you?”

  Paul shot a furious look at Danny and Danny stared at his shoes. Nick raised his eyebrows, sighed, and said, “Well, it’s been fun, fellas, but I’ve got a day ahead of me.”

  “Sure you do,” Paul said. “Come on.”

  Nick waved him away and stuck the key into the lock in the Buick’s door. Next thing he knew Paul and Danny grabbed an arm each and dragged him away from the keys still dangling in the lock.

  “What the hell?”

  “Shut up,” Paul said.

  They dragged him around to the opposite side of the van, where the sliding side door was already open and waiting. Inside, a woman in her forties with her hair done up smoked a slim cigarette and sneered at him. Nick’s eyes met hers and for a moment he stopped struggling.

  “Hi, Nick,” she said.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Mother,” she said as if he was an idiot for not knowing already.

  The two men lifted him from the pavement and tossed him into the van. His chin hit the plastic seatbelt buckle protruding from the corduroy bench seat. He moaned and one of the guys smacked his ass before slamming the door shut.

  “Relax, Nick,” the woman, Mother, said.

  “You relax,” Nick seethed. “What is this? What are you doing?”

  “Kidnapping you, isn’t it obvious?”

  Paul climbed behind the wheel in the front seat and Danny got in beside him. The latter looked back and flashed a dumb grin.

  “Be nice to Mother, now,” he warned.

  “Eat shit,” Nick growled.

  Danny frowned. “That’s not nice.”

  Danny’s fist flew at Nick’s neck too quickly to duck. Nick felt his head expand, disconnect from his body, and float through the roof of the van into a vast, cold blackness above.

  * * *

  Somewhere, Nathan K. Cole was doing whatever the hell it was he did, but Nick was stepping quickly and heavily over, around, and much too frequently straight through overflowing puddles on the scarred and pitted sidewalk that carried him on the trail of a girl he had no business following. He still didn’t know her name, what she did, who she was. That was the largest part of it, the why of it—it had all begun as a sort of game, really, an excuse to follow through the steps of his chosen profession without actually getting his hands bloody for once. All Nick wanted to do was play it out, pick someone and play it out until—what? He had them in a corner and they’d all laugh about it over beers? He didn’t know. Not for sure. They were a chimera, a pair of sad, quiet ghosts who evaded him at every turn for reasons he couldn’t figure, and he had to. It was mostly him at first, the boy, but the kid hardly ever left their pad except to pick up smokes at the Circle K or hang around on the steps watching the world go by. The girl was slightly more interesting, if only because she spent four nights a week hiding out in a porno theater for six hours a go and for the life of him Nick couldn’t understand why. So he walked in the rain, in the middle of the cold damn night, his trousers soaked to the shins and the water dribbling down his back. A hell of a thing to do, particularly when there was a dead body walking around out there who needed to be informed he was deceased.

  Five or six blocks up—Nick lost count after four, or maybe three—the girl huddled under the awning of a shuttered deli and watched the empty intersection for a few minutes. Nick dropped behind a pay phone and made like he was on a call, keeping her in the corner of his eye. Rain poured down in silver sheets on all sides of the awning, mostly obscuring the girl except for her general shape. It was a small shape, amorphous due to her heavy, baggy clothing. A black blob. The blob remained perfectly still for a while longer, then slipped around the corner. Nick swore, hung up the phone, and hurried after her.

  He turned the corner and
looked down a well-lit street, a row of conical yellow bursts every twenty-five feet on either side of the street for several blocks. A few cars were parked on the street, junkers mostly, and a taxi crossed from the next side street up. Its top light was dark. Nick scanned the street for the girl, saw no one. His eyes found a blinking OPEN sign in the front window of a dirty bookstore and he wondered if they were really open or if they’d just forgotten to turn the sign off. It then occurred to him that might have been where she headed—six hours with porno movies and then dessert with filthy paperbacks. Why not? He crossed the street and hurried for the blinking sign. When he reached the place, he found the door locked and the store dark inside.

  He’d lost her.

  It seemed impossible, but there he stood sopping wet and chilled to the bone in the pouring rain at a quarter to two in the morning. A kid had easily evaded him and somewhere in the world, Nathan fucking K. goddamn Cole was still walking around, or sleeping one off, or whatever a dead guy did when he didn’t know he was dead. Or wasn’t dead yet because Nick couldn’t get his priorities straight. He wanted to scream. Instead, he jogged back, he didn’t know how many blocks, to his car across the street from the Rialto. He arrived at it huffing and filled the seat with water before his rump ever touched the vinyl. He turned the key, started the motor, and stomped on the accelerator, nearly spinning out on the shiny black road ahead of him.

  Vaguely he wished he would. Flash, Bam, Alakazam! he thought, and laughed.

  In fifteen minutes he was back in the subdivision, turning onto the Cole’s street, where someone was snug as a bug in a rug in the dry warmth of the upper-middle-class house with the Lexus in the drive and the bicycle in the carport.

  And a new addition, too—a Mercedes Cabriolet.