by Kurtz, Ed
“Thanks,” he said. He struck one and fired up the Salem. “You any good with puzzles?”
“Some.”
“Have a look at this.”
Nick tapped the code with his index finger. The menthol smoke felt good in his throat and lungs.
“Two sixty-seven, four, fifty-eight,” Charise read aloud.
“What do you make of it?”
“How about a clue?”
“I wish I had one.”
She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side. “What’s this for?”
“It’s a game, like.”
“A game, huh? And what do you get if you win?”
“I find somebody.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m gunna pour you that drink and think on it.”
“Do that,” Nick said.
She offered him a sharp, exaggerated nod and trounced off. Nick sucked at the menthol cigarette and enjoyed the burn as he agonized over 267-4-58. His agony was short lived—two minutes later, Charise called out, “Find someone, you said?”
“Yeah.”
“I got it.”
He jerked his head up, startled, to find the girl tramping back in his direction with a glass of liquor sloshing in one hand and the white pages in the other.
She’d figured it out.
* * *
Todd Ruben. 10102 Pratchett Street. Nick committed the name and address to memory and sighed loudly at the phone book.
He reached the house about an hour later, though it would have been considerably sooner had he not gotten lost. The neighborhood was all prefab and ugly as hell and the streets had no order, no grid to them. Rather, they were all useless roundabouts and twisty byways that had Nick’s head spinning before some miracle tossed a green rectangular sign in his path that read PRATCHETT STREET. From there it was smooth sailing.
He parked in the street right in front, killed the engine, and stepped out onto the front lawn. It was getting late and he was tired and he just wanted to get it done as quickly and painlessly as possibly. Accordingly, Nick walked directly to the front door and pressed the button for the doorbell.
A voice cried, “Hold on!”
Nick held on.
A moment later the lock ratcheted and the door opened. A short, brown-skinned man Nick took to be Mexican looked up at him inquisitively and said, “Hi.”
“Hi there,” Nick said, feigning a smile that almost hurt. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but I’m quite lost. I’m supposed to be at my sister’s baby shower, but it’s at her friend’s house, and—listen, I know how this sounds, but would you mind if I used your phone?”
The Mexican knitted his brow, thinking it over. Another guy, a redhead in his undershirt, came up behind him.
“Who is it, Todd?”
“Guy wants to use the phone,” Todd said.
The redhead laughed. “Well, are you going to let him, or just stand there having a staring contest?”
Todd laughed, too. Even Nick joined the merriment. All three men had a grand laugh, and only one of them felt how terribly bizarre it all really was due to what was going to happen next.
Todd stepped back, opened the door the rest of the way, and said, “Sorry, sure. Come on in.”
Nick crossed the threshold as he’d crossed many before, and when Todd shut the door again, Nick noticed that the men were now holding hands. He smirked, tried not to make anything of it. But it did occur to him that he had never offed either a Mexican or a homosexual before.
First time for everything, he thought.
“Phone’s over there,” Todd said.
“In the kitchen,” his lover added.
Nick said, “Thanks.”
He crossed the den to the kitchen, which was a good size and in the middle of some massive food preparation scheme. Todd followed, noted Nick’s taking in of all the chopped vegetables on the counter and meat laid out on the island in the middle.
“Brent’s a chef,” he said, gesturing to the redhead.
Nick said, “Ah.”
“There’s the phone.”
“Right.”
Nick reached for it, took it from the hook, and silently wondered how a Mexican cat ended up with a decidedly Caucasian name like Todd Ruben. He dismissed it when Todd turned around to hunch over a mound of chopped onions.
It was time.
Nick slammed the receiver against Todd’s temple twice in quick succession, stunning him. While Todd wobbled on his feet, wondering what the hell had just happened to him, Nick rapidly wrapped the telephone cord around his neck and pulled it tight. Very tight. In seconds Todd started to spasm and his brown faced turned dark purple. His throat made wet retching sounds and his tongue protruded. Brent called out from the den:
“Don’t forget to mix the onions with the peppers, babe.”
Nick held fast to the makeshift garrote until Todd quit fighting. He held on for another minute and a half after that, just to make sure. When it was done, he supported the dead man with one arm and let him down slow to the cold linoleum floor.
In that moment, he considered his car out front and his naked face burned onto the redhead’s memory. He wondered if Brent had seen the car and whether he could name the make and model of his Mercedes to the investigating officers. He wrinkled his nose and damned himself for his carelessness. All he’d really wanted to do was trail the kids, see if he couldn’t figure something out about them, then head back home for bed. Well, maybe a snack and a movie, then bed. Either way, his heart hadn’t been in it and now he’d fucked up. Bad.
“Todd? Did you hear me?”
Nope, Nick thought. He sure as shit didn’t.
He let go of the body and stood up straight.
“Todd?”
Nick peered around the corner into the den, where he saw Brent rising from the sofa, his face scrunched up with confusion, if not outright concern. Nick smiled.
“I think there’s something wrong with your phone, man.”
“My phone? Is Todd still in there?”
“Can’t get a dial tone.”
Brent came on quickly, rounding the couch and moving fast into the kitchen before Nick could say another word. The corpse of Todd Ruben was laid flat on the floor between them, his legs straight and his arms at his sides like he was nothing more than a department-store mannequin. Brent screamed.
“Todd!”
“Yeah, I don’t think he’s feeling too well,” Nick offered.
Brent dropped to a crouch beside the body, his fingers tugging at the tangled cord still wrapped tightly around the purple and black flesh of the neck.
“What happened? What did you do? What did you do?”
The tears and harsh breaths came on in a hurricane and Nick closed himself off to it in a hurry. He slipped the blackjack from his inside pocket and brought it down hard on the crown of the redhead’s skull. Brent cried out and fell into a heap as Nick stepped over him and picked up a large knife from the cutting board.
Nick hated knife work, always had. But he was in the zone and running out of time. He bent at the waist, grabbed a handful of red hair and lifted Brent from the floor. The redhead yelled and shrieked. Nick drove the tip of the kitchen knife deep into his chest between the third and fourth ribs on the left side. He pushed the handle hard, scraping the metal against cartilage and bone until it wouldn’t go in any farther. Brent gurgled and let out a weak sob as Nick released him to crumple beside his dead lover, soon to join him.
Nick examined his right hand, which was now spotted with blood up to the wrist. He said, “Oh, hell.”
For the first time in almost twenty years, he’d finished a job with an unacceptable casualty, an innocent bystander who wasn’t supposed to die. He trembled, bit his lower lip.
“Oh, hell,” he repeated. “Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
A small, viscous red-black puddle had formed beneath Brent’s prone form and Nick knew he was gone. He leaned down to retrieve the knife, seized the handle and pu
lled but it wouldn’t dislodge. Instead, he found a damp kitchen towel and wiped down the handle, and then the telephone and receiver and everything else he thought he might have touched.
Then, a flash of horrible, hateful brilliance.
Nick could, he decided, cover his tracks, make the whole nightmarish thing look a lot different from what it actually was. He could easily make it look like a routine, run-of-the-mill hate crime. All he needed was a little paint, or a Marks-A-Lot marker, anything with which he could scrawl one simple word in the biggest letters possible on the living room wall for the police and anyone else to see and know what had happened and why: FAGS.
He bristled at the nasty notion. It was an ugly thing and he knew it. Nick was no bleeding heart liberal by a damn sight, but he’d never really had any problems with gay people, either. If indeed he had any problems when it came to them, it was with the prickholes who made it their business to yell and whine about them on a daily basis from their pulpits and their rabidly bigoted talk shows. If he was going to be honest with himself, he’d certainly used the term before, he’d laughed at queer jokes once or twice and gotten a little out of sorts once upon a time when an ostentatious queen had squeezed his ass in a nightclub (resulting in a broken nose for the queen and a hasty retreat for Nick). But this was different. It was a lousy idea, an appalling way to cover his own ass.
And he had every intention to do it.
He went back into the den and examined the walls, looking for the best one to sport his defacement. The wall above the mantel under the stairs seemed best, so he crossed over to it…whereupon he immediately forgot all about his stupid little plan. For there on the mantel, among numerous baubles and curios and knickknacks, were six framed photos of friends or family or both, and among the photos was one in which three people stood grinning like idiots in front of a waterfall. They were Todd and Brent and a young woman Nick liked to think of as Sweet Lorraine.
“You,” he managed to say before his knees buckled and he went down on the carpet, his guts knotting.
* * *
She was right, of course. What else could it have been? Smart girl.
267-4-58—page 267, fourth row, fifty-eighth name. Guess I am pretty good with puzzles, she’d said.
The name was Robert W. Hart. Nick didn’t know him. For some reason or another, assuming Charise was right, which Nick did, Mother wanted him dead. And she wanted Nick to do the killing.
And innocuously, the poor girl, Charise was making that possible. Without her, and he would never forget this, he would surely have never figured it out. Without her, good old Robert W. Hart, whoever the hell he was, just might have been able to go on living.
But not now.
“Who is he?” she wanted to know. Naturally she wanted to know; she was part of it now.
“I—I don’t know.”
“Well, who’s he supposed to be?” she asked. She was sitting across from him now. The bar was mostly empty; even the laughing friends had moved on to greener pastures. “What’s the next step of your game?”
“I—uh…” Nick stammered and toyed with an unlit Salem. He had smoked four of them already and reckoned he liked them. “I find him,” he said.
“Sounds like a scavenger hunt,” she said. “Except instead of silly shit like a moose’s head or something, you gotta find this dude.”
“Yeah,” Nick haltingly agreed. “I guess that’s about right.”
Charise smiled, melting his heart a little bit at a time.
“Y’know, I bet this dude gives you the next step. Another code, maybe, something like that.”
“Might be,” he lied.
“And there’s other folks, right? With their own codes and shit?”
“Probably,” he lied again.
“Then it’s a race. It’s on, man! You got to get moving.”
“Well…”
“Hell, I wish I could go with you.”
Nick’s eyes widened. He said, “You do?”
“Sure, this sounds like a lot of fun, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Fun.”
“Too bad I’m stuck here till closing time.”
“Too bad.”
“But let me know, huh? How it goes, I mean.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do that.”
“And what you win, of course.”
“Of course.”
Her smile broadened and she touched his hand, which made his skin run hot. His drink was empty and his head was floating on a string. Charise produced a notebook from her pocket, studied it for a second, and then said, “It’s eight bucks if you want to close out, and I guess you ought to. You’ve got to find this dude, right?”
“Right,” Nick said.
He reached for his wallet and his face immediately fell. Eight dollars was a fortune beyond his reach.
“Shit,” he said, opening the wallet and extracting his last five bucks.
“Did I say eight?” she said. “I meant five.”
With an embarrassed look he forked over the fiver. She accepted it, touched his hand again, and stood up.
“See you soon?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Go get ‘im, hon.”
“Right,” he said. “I will.”
With that, he exited the warmth and relative comfort of the corner bar and its pretty bartender to murder a man he had never met.
Nick never saw Charise again.
* * *
He appropriated the photo. Stared at it in the front seat of the car for the better part of an hour, parked at the farthest end of the lot where he couldn’t even see the kids’ apartment. Todd was smiling with his eyes closed; Brent seemed distracted by something off in the distance.
Sweet Lorraine was looking directly at the photographer, her hair wet and slicked back over her head, tiny droplets of water beading all over her sunny little face.
She wore a T-shirt with an unfamiliar cartoon character on the front. It was white and wet, and her nipples showed through. Neither of the men on either side of her appeared to notice or care. Nick wondered what were the photographer’s thoughts on the subject? Had it been a sort of couples retreat? Todd and Brent, Lorraine and the invisible photographer, sporting a throbbing erection behind the camera, impatient as all hell for the day’s group activities to wind down so he could crawl into the tent with Sweet, Sweet Lorraine?
Happy as a baby boy…
Until she ordered a hit on him, that is.
Nick’s breath hitched in his chest at the thought that he might have done it—that whoever had snapped that picture was dead somewhere, the life strangled out of him by none other than Nick himself. He had already killed three people she knew, why not four, or six, or twelve? Why was this woman having people in her life rubbed out?
Who the fuck was she?
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and heavily sighed.
There was only one way to find out.
* * *
He had a name and an address, an empty wallet in his pocket and no weapon.
Even Steven.
A killing for a killing.
Nick leaned back on a bus bench plastered with some real estate agent’s grinning mug and held his breath. He wished he’d never invested so much heart in anyone, enough to get that angry. He wished the worst thing he’d ever done was rip guys off in pool halls and bars. He wished he’d never met Misty—Spot to his Lucky.
He sure as shit didn’t feel lucky now.
This isn’t me, he thought. I hustle. I don’t do this.
I don’t do this.
Except he did. He had, anyway. Lost his cool, his mind. Maybe his soul. The latter billowing out of him, through his nostrils and mouth and eyes, colorless and odorless like natural gas. He couldn’t even feel it at the time, but he could feel the absence now. The empty pit deep in the center of him, the void he knew he could never fill again. Not if he saved a thousand lives—or ended them.
Robert W. Hart. W
hat had he ever done to Nick? Or anyone else for that matter?
He considered whether the guy deserved it. If, perhaps, he was a kiddie fiddler or something, someone so vile he ought to be put down, only the justice system would never have the balls to do what needed to be done.
But Nick also considered the possibility that someone just wanted the cat out of the way, an amorous competitor interested in his wife, or a greedy business partner, or just some psycho pissed that Hart cut him off in traffic.
Would he ever know? Would Hart confess? Would he want him to?
Could he look him in the eye when he did it?
No, Nick decided. He couldn’t look him in the eye any more than he could do it. Those people in the cathouse, he was in a state of rage, he thought he was protecting someone, rescuing her. Taking revenge. Something.
This was different. Something else. No connection to it whatsoever. Nick wasn’t angry at Robert Hart. And he wasn’t likely to get that way. He was a nothing, a chimera. A phantom. A goddamned name printed in the white pages, smudged now where Nick had pressed his thumb against the page.
A total stranger.
The bus appeared at the intersection, groaning and revving as it rolled through the green light before squealing to a stop in front of Nick. The doors breathed open, but he shook his head and waved the driver on. As the doors sighed shut again and the bus started to roll, Nick thought about strangers, and about killing them. He vaguely recalled some true-crime show on cable TV talking about that guy in Texas, back in the ‘60s, who picked off all those people from the watchtower. He hadn’t known a single one of them, and there would have been countless more if he hadn’t been cut down like the mad dog he was. Thing was, they did an autopsy on the guy when it was all said and done, found a tumor the size of a golf ball on his brain. Watching that, Nick had wondered whether the man was responsible for the tragedy at all, or if one could place the blame on the tumor. Maybe he wasn’t himself anymore. Maybe that thing killed what was human in him, only left the cold husk. Nick didn’t reckon the families of all the people the guy killed would much care to hear about that. Loads of people were walking around with tumors in their skulls, and for the most part they weren’t climbing towers with sniper rifles.