by Kurtz, Ed
“I’m not interested.”
Once again, he pulled the garrote taut. It made a twangy sound, an out-of-tune guitar string.
“The reason the warrior who killed the enemy wasn’t allowed to eat from the body? Because they were one and the same now, Nick. When he killed the guy, he became him, in a way. Took him in, blood and cum and soul. Eating the enemy would be destroying himself. Do you see? It was more intimate than fucking, killing somebody. To these people you couldn’t have a closer bond between two souls than by one killing the other.”
Nick arched an eyebrow and said, “I get paid.”
“That doesn’t preclude what I’m talking about.”
“Then the governor of Texas must have a lot of very close friends living inside him by now.”
“It’s not the same and you know it.”
“All right, then—Dahmer.”
“You might be onto something with that one.”
“You really are sick.”
“Maybe we both are. I’ve never killed anyone. How many have you rubbed out?”
“More than enough for both of us. And three on your dime, lady.”
Lorraine snorted. Folded her arms over her breasts. Nick breathed a little easier with them out of view.
“You think Nathan was the first,” she said. It was a statement, not a question, but the surprise was evident in her voice.
She chuckled, lightly, and said: “You killed my dear old daddy, Nicholas.”
“Your daddy.”
“You really don’t know.”
“Spit it out, lady.”
With a dramatic flourish she offered her hand and said, “Lorraine Szczepański, at your service. Tell me, Nick—when you killed my Daddy Lou, did he suffer much?”
Nick gawped.
* * *
By the dull light of the moon, Nick could make out the ravine if he squinted. The walk seemed longer than he recalled from long ago, though he knew it would have been faster on the dirt bike. He wasn’t sure if he smoked his first cigarette here, but it would have been among the first. Back then he never smoked enough to get hooked, and he stopped before he even got out of his teens. He jonesed for one now, having barely gotten started in earnest since “Mother” pushed it on him back at the Midnight Cowboy.
She’d be the death of him, anyhow. Just very slowly, he concluded, and he lit up a fresh square.
“How deep does that go?” Hart asked, a little breathless from the walk.
“Don’t know,” Nick said. “Fifteen, twenty feet, maybe.”
“Not that bad of a fall. I’m no expert but I’m not sure that’ll get the job done, hoss.”
“I know it.”
Nick did know it. He’d fallen down there himself, at fourteen, showing off and making a complete jackass of himself, half-drunk on pilfered gin and adolescent recklessness. Sprained a wrist where he tried to cushion the impact. Cracked a tooth and gashed his right ear. His father was more pissed off by the state of his pants than anything. Mother long gone by then.
Mother.
“I helped kill a kid,” Robert W. Hart said abruptly.
Nick paused, staring into the semi-abyss at his feet.
At length, he said, “A kid?”
“A nine-year-old girl,” Hart said. “Her name was Anna Lynn Becker.”
“Anna Lynn,” Nick parroted.
“She was small for her age, had small teeth, which struck me for some reason. Sandy blonde hair, curly like a doll’s. Anna had a bad life in nine years. It ended underneath my knee. This one here.” Hart raised his right leg and patted the knee like he was showing off a lethal weapon.
Blinking, Nick exhaled noisily through his nostrils.
“Why?”
“My wife—Sylvia—she said Anna had reactive attachment disorder. I mean, that was her diagnosis. She was a child psychologist before she ended up in stir.”
“Anna’s psychologist.”
“Yeah. The kid was badly abused when she was little. Ended up in foster care, then got adopted by this couple up in Stanton, but she was wild. Got violent. It was nasty, way I heard it. Like a demonic possession almost, like in that movie.”
“I saw it.”
“Well, it was like that.”
“So what—you got mad your old lady was spending too much time trying to help somebody else’s kid?”
“No! Christ, no.” Hart’s eyes bulged and he wiped his face from the sweat starting to bead on his forehead and cheeks. “It wasn’t anything like that at all.”
“What, then?”
Nick fixed his stance, staring Hart down. If he’d been more or less as uninvested as possible until now, all of that was unraveling.
Killing a little girl was no small thing. But feeling anything about this, about Hart, was not on his agenda. Even if it was a sense of just desserts.
“Sylvia heard about this different kind of therapy for kids like Anna, basically simulating the birthing process to try and shake them into a new reality, I guess. So they can accept their new life more readily, start over, you know?”
“No.”
Hart sighed.
“Her adoptive parents agreed to it,” he said, looking anywhere but at Nick. “They brought her in that day, and Sylvia explained to her what it was they were going to do—the meaning of it, anyway. Anna didn’t seem receptive to it, I didn’t think. I mean, I don’t think she got it, but then I didn’t, either. I’m a hands-on kind of guy, seeing is believing, all that. Trying to cure a messed-up kid with a metaphor didn’t seem like a viable method to me, but I wasn’t the one with the alphabet soup after my name. I didn’t question it.”
Hart shuffled his feet, kicking at the rocks and pebbles, some of which sailed over the edge and into the dark at the bottom of the ravine.
Nick listened to them scatter and clunk off one another until Hart resumed.
“There was an old afghan, all brown and orange, along with a heavy wool blanket on the couch in Sylvia’s office. They’d always been there, but I’d never seen them any way but folded up and slung over the back of the couch. She got both of them that morning, laid them out on the floor. I moved the table and some chairs out into the hallway for her. She needed a big working space, she said.
“Anna’s parents laid her out on the blankets. She was whining, like a toddler, kicking about some. Her mother had to hold her down while her father and Sylvia wrapped her up like a big human burrito. My wife shouted at her so she’d hear, all this stuff about her being a baby again, and whether she wanted to be born. It was crazy.”
“But you still didn’t question it.”
“No. Not out loud, anyway. Sylvia had the degrees framed on the wall. I never even finished junior college. I always thought she was the smart one, the one who’d always have the answers. She did too—God knows she told me often enough. I don’t know, maybe I was henpecked…”
Nick said, “Get on with it.”
“They held her down, completely wrapped up like that. Head to toe. Sylvia talking—no, she was yelling at the kid. Screaming at her. And the kid—Anna—she was thrashing. I could hear her sobbing in there. The mother said maybe it wasn’t working. Sylvia said baby wasn’t ready to be born yet if she was going to behave that way. I didn’t say anything at all. Not one fucking word. Can I get one of those smokes from you, partner?”
Dragging deep on his own, Nick knocked a fresh one from the pack and poked it into Hart’s mouth for him. He then gave him a light, and Hart sucked at the filter until the end glowed red and hot.
“I couldn’t make out what Anna was saying,” Hart went on, his words expelled with the smoke, “but she was hollering by then. The women were having a hard time keeping her pinned down in the ‘womb,’ so Sylvia looked up at me and said, ‘Don’t just stand there, you idiot—help us.’ I knelt down on her, on Anna, I mean, with my knee crushing her against the floor. I’m no giant but I’m a full-grown man and she was small even for a nine-year-old. She couldn’t fight half as much af
ter that.”
“How’d she die?” Nick asked flatly. His face betrayed nothing going on inside his head, but he could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs.
“Suffocation, officially. But she had a couple of broken ribs, and one of them punctured a lung. I did that. I did almost all of that.”
Hart’s eyes went wide but he didn’t seem to see anything at all. He just smoked and let the eyes wander blindly around in the dark, mulling over what he’d done. The reason he was here now, standing beside a ravine in the middle of the night with a stranger he met in a bar.
“Goddamnit,” he gasped, his voice wet and raw. “Goddamn me. And goddamn fucking Sylvia, too.”
He spat after speaking his wife’s name. By then he was crying.
“How come you’re not in the joint too?” Nick asked.
“They never brought any charges against me. Just her. The adoptive parents—well, the mother really, they got divorced—pressed them. They couldn’t have cared less about me. Said I’d done as much and the same as them. They just wanted her ass.”
“Huh.”
“What’s that?”
“I dunno…seems like if this is a professional thing, like a hit, it’d have been the mother who’d have made it.”
“She could’ve got me already.”
“Unless she wanted you out so she could put you in a hole in the ground instead of the pen.”
“Who cares, right?”
“It’s hinky, I guess.”
“Make any difference?”
“No,” Nick said. “It doesn’t.”
“Maybe it’s her. Maybe it’s the birth mother. Hell, maybe it’s Sylvia. I testified, for Christ’s sake. Should’ve seen the evil in her eyes when I was up there, telling what happened. I never saw anybody look so much like a pissed-off dog straining at the leash.”
“But who cares.”
“Who cares.”
Hart took one last drag, a long one, and held it in his lungs while he flicked the butt into the ravine. It made an orange downward arc through the air as it sailed to the bottom, where it exploded in a shower of sparks.
“You ready for this?” he said.
In lieu of reply, Nick squatted and felt his way over the pebbles and rocks until he found one of suitable, lethal size and heft. The stone was grainy against the palm of his hand, with sharp edges and a rounded size that was easy to grip. He tested its weight and made sure he could maintain his grasp on it as he rose back up, half looking at the rock and half at Hart.
Hart gaped at it, resting it in Nick’s hand like some offering, a gift.
“Christ,” he said.
“For Anna Lynn then, I suppose,” Nick said.
At that, Hart let loose a low moan, spun on the loose pebbles, and broke into a run.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Nick.
* * *
“Lou Szczepański was your old man.”
“Right up till the day you murdered him.”
“You don’t seem that cut up about it.”
“I paid you for it, didn’t I?”
“No—no, you didn’t. That was—shit, I can’t remember. You got me all mixed up, goddamnit. He was sticking it to somebody’s wife, was what it was. Nothing to do with you.”
“That what he told you? I’m not surprised. He was pulling at straws, the poor old bastard. He wasn’t going to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Who he really was.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“My eyes are green, Nick—hadn’t you noticed?”
She batted her eyelashes, all Betty Boop replete with a wiggle of her hips. Nick grimaced.
“How’d he go, anyway?” Lorraine asked. “Quick? Or was it all messy like?”
“Shut up.”
“Get some blood on those pricey shit-kickers, did you? What are those, anyway—Guiseppe’s?”
“Testonis.”
“I guess if you’ve got to have your jaw cracked off against concrete with a kick to the dome, it might as well be a thousand-dollar pair of shoes that does the kicking, don’t you think?”
She raised her eyebrows and canted her head to one side, watching him closely. Nick swallowed, concentrating on evenly breathing through his nose.
“You were there,” he said after a long minute.
“I was there,” she agreed.
“Watching.”
“Always watching, Nicky.”
“Was he really your father?”
“My one and only. Six, seven, gone to heaven. Just like old Riley, the family dog he had put down when I was in the sixth grade. Never could forgive Daddy for that, even if the poor old thing was suffering.”
“What’s a little suffering between friends?”
“There’s a lot of things I didn’t forgive him for. But I’m not the forgiving type.”
“So you followed me.”
“Well, I followed him, really. You just happened to be there.”
“What about Todd and Brent? I know you were here when Cole got his.”
“Couldn’t make that one. I figured you’d come sooner and skedaddled when you didn’t show.”
“That one was a mess, too.”
“So far I’d say Nathan was your masterpiece.”
“I used to be cleaner. Better.”
“I never saw anybody hork so much,” Lorraine said, mimicking a finger down her throat.
“Something,” Nick began, but he swallowed the rest of his words and shook his head.
“It does that every time now, doesn’t it? Makes you sick, I mean.”
He didn’t answer her. Couldn’t. He just stuffed the garrote back into his pocket and sat down, gingerly, on the sofa.
“Lou really was your old man?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“That’d cost you.”
“It always does.”
She smiled at that, pleased with herself, and padded over to sit down beside him. She made a show of spreading and then crossing her legs, eyeing Nick through half-lidded eyes, and stretched a pale, sinewy arm over the back of the sofa behind his back.
“Something…” she whispered, restarting his train of thought.
“Changed,” Nick finished, sharply.
“What changed?”
“Me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know, Nick?”
He sniffed, scratched his nose. Gazed vacantly at the carpet and almost seemed to deflate, or melt into the fabric of the sofa. In the fibers of the carpet, faint patterns made by treading feet gathered into rough faces, staring faces in sharp relief, the faces of men and women he had killed. Strangers to him, quarries hunted to eke out a living, to cover utilities and retain some small measure of luxury until, at long last, death took him too. Lou Szczepański and Lawrence Phillips and Nathan Cole and Todd Ruben and Brent and all the others who came before them, all the way back to Joe Motal and Hana Hyun. Blood on his hands, dried to flakey, rust-colored bits on his soul.
No emotion, no emotion.
Nick’s hands trembled. His guts lurched.
Lorraine said, “Bathroom’s down the hall.” She pointed in the general direction of Nathan Cole’s decomposing remains.
Nick beat feet, grasping his midsection. He spiraled into the john, pushing the door closed with force, and collapsed on his knees in time to commence. Tears streamed hot from his eyes as his stomach contents streamed into the porcelain bowl. He wretched and moaned with intensity and tremendous volume. That he was leaving heaps of DNA evidence at the scene of a murder did not elude him, but he pressed it away from his mind. There was no sense in worrying about that when there was no staunching the flow. Like the times before, Nick had little to no control over when and where his newfound sickness would stri
ke, though this was the first time it did not immediately follow a job. This time all he had to do was remember them, their faces, particularly chained together by Lorraine Szczepański’ psychotic whims.
Sociopaths and psychotics.
No emotion.
He heaved his last. His throat burned and his abdomen contracted painfully. From the other side of the door, Lorraine cooed, “Poor Nicky.”
Nick spat in the toilet and pulled the handle to flush it. Spying a toothbrush in a cup on the sink, he decided it was less disgusting using somebody else’s toothbrush than going on much longer with the taste of his own bile in his mouth. And while he brushed, Nick looked at his reflection and wondered if his face had changed along with all the other changes going on inside of him. He wondered did he look like a man with no conscience before? Did his dark, lined face betray one now?
“Don’t forget to floss,” Lorraine called through the door, her voice receding as she walked away.
He didn’t. Instead, he rinsed out his mouth, wiped it on a hand towel, and with a sharp jab inside his stomach, Nick went back into the hall. Lorraine was nowhere in sight, but a high whistle sounded to his right, from beyond the only other open door. He knew the door and the room it led to well. Frozen where he stood, as though his feet were nailed to the floor, Nick waited.
“Don’t take all day, Harry,” she said. “I put Nate in the closet. Just get in here, would you?”
You know you’ve got to, Nick told himself. You’ve got to get rid of her before this goes any further.
“I’m cold, baby.”
He reached yet again for his pocket, but let it alone. He’d do this one barehanded. And for Christ’s sake he wasn’t going to puke his guts out this time. Nick wasn’t going to feel one goddamned thing about it.
They’d find his DNA in the barf and his fingerprints on her throat, and before long they’d come round, ask him if he was who he was, and Nick would tell them yes and he wouldn’t put up a fight, he would go willingly with them to the car waiting outside, bubblegums flashing, and climb into the back with his wrists cuffed tight and the distinct sensation that his rib cage had been opened up to let out all that pressure, all that darkness and vomit and guilt.