Nausea

by Kurtz, Ed

  Something in the back of his mind had told him—commanded him, really—to leave them well alone from here on out. Do your work and keep your fucking head down seemed to be the best approach, and they had nothing at all to do with it, regardless of how he felt or how much he puked.

  Except now they did. Or, at least, he did.

  Trevor Goode.

  Nick didn’t know her name yet. Or if she was a part of the job.

  Didn’t matter.

  Nothing mattered.

  Just do your work and keep your fucking head down.

  And try not to think about sweet, sweet Lorraine.

  3. ISLANDS

  “Islands in the sea are so much like me

  They don’t ever change—no emotion, no emotion.”

  —Oingo Boingo, “Islands”

  Everything was exactly how he expected it to be apart from one additional detail: inside the greeting card (Happy Birthday to the Best Grandpa in the Whole Wide World) rested a small, unused bankbook with Nick’s full name written in a neat hand on the first page. The code was given, but nothing to explain the bankbook nor its direct relationship to what he was expected to do at this point. He could guess as much, all but the amount, so he slipped card and book both into his pants pocket and took the new key, 34C. The next gig, should there be one.

  (Would there always be another? And another after that?)

  Walking briskly out of the depot, he thought again, as he had numerous times en route, that he didn’t have to come. He didn’t have to open the locker. He’d only ever agreed to Hart. Just the one and done. Even Steven.

  But he did come. Switched out keys. He was in it, now.

  (Forever?)

  He caught the number 11 bus to the university and sat in the back, what his old man used to call the Rosa Parks Memorial Seat, the racist fuck. There, he examined every blank page of the bankbook carefully, looking for anything he might have missed and coming up empty. He also glanced over the code so many times he had it memorized by the time the bus came to a halt on the corner of Franklin and the Loop. It was only half a block back to the motor court from there, but Nick didn’t have a phone book in his room. Instead, he shredded the card, deposited the remains in a waste bin at the bus stop, and walked the opposite direction to the Circle K for a tall boy of Bud and use of their white pages.

  79-1-13.

  Selma Bea Alvarado, as it turned out.

  Whoever the hell she was.

  Nick committed the address to memory, too, and drank the tall boy all the way back to the motor court, open-container laws be damned.

  This time, he concluded along the way, he was going to have to do better than a rock.

  * * *

  Trevor Goode’s girlfriend came home at a quarter past one in the morning, her plastic shopping bag predictably in tow. Nick watched her wait at the bottom of the steps until she finished her smoke, then climb them to the door, which opened as though by mental command, Trevor on the other side in a black T-shirt with a peck on the cheek for her. The door then shut, and Nick switched on the radio. It was a talk show, and he kept it low enough that it was nothing more than background noise while he smoked and stared at the Goodes’ door and thought about coincidences.

  This wasn’t one. (But it was, wasn’t it?) This was Lorraine. About that he had no doubt in the slightest.

  He wondered how good she was or, rather, if she was as good as she thought she was. If she knew—really knew. It hadn’t skimmed the frontal lobe until then, the clear and obvious reason Nick had been tailing these kids since he first saw them at HoJo’s.

  He wanted to learn about them. Perfectly innocent people. See how they lived, how they interacted. Find out what was important to them. And then murder them in cold blood—no contract, no payment, and no reason apart from proving to himself that he could. That it didn’t matter one way or another.

  It was the sickness. Everything that started with Lou Szczepański—Sweet Lorraine’s dear old dad—and had been spiraling ever downward since. Why him? Why now?

  What the hell kind of sociopath spontaneously developed a conscience overnight?

  Nick could feel his blood getting up, jumping in his veins. His heart ratcheting up to a worrisome rate. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. Sweat from his hairline trickled down into his eyebrows. He didn’t feel like himself anymore. Maybe that’s what Lorraine was doing, he considered. Trying to get Nick back to being Nick.

  “Sure,” he said to himself. “A real angel of grace.”

  The curtains moved slightly in Goodes’ solitary window. Nick watched them, and he watched the barely visible silhouettes moving behind them. He’d never worked with distance weaponry, though he could understand why some might have preferred it. A rifle with a decent scope would have put an end to this job in a hurry; just zero in on one vaguely human shape, lightly squeeze the trigger, then quickly move on to the next before it gets away from the window. Wam, bam, thank you, ma’am. But just as he abhorred knife work, Nick never cottoned to the idea of separating himself so greatly from the object of a given gig. It seemed somehow disrespectful, and with Lorraine’s added philosophy, he could almost see it as a sort of dance, verging on erotic, doing it in close quarters with his own hands. The closest he’d ever gotten to distance work was his first pro job, all those years ago, and that was off-the-cuff necessity for a panicked idiot with no idea what he was doing. By his second, the garrote was well set as his instrument of choice.

  Nick shook his head, as though to shake the memories loose from the front of his mind. He had work to do, distasteful though it was. He hated the idea that Lorraine was pulling his strings, if indeed that was the case. Either that, or his “fucking around,” as the caller put it, had been better observed and documented than he thought. He reckoned he’d know one way or another before long. In either case, Trevor Goode and Company’s destiny was written. It made no difference who ordered it—it had to be done. In nearly twenty years in his line Nick had never once balked at a job or left one unfinished. He wasn’t about to start tonight.

  * * *

  How, he wondered, was this going to work exactly?

  He had the address, the name. The rest was more or less cut and dry. He’d stake it out, figure it out, do the job. And then what? The money would be deposited, he presumed—but how much? And how would they—would she—know for sure? (She’s watching, of course. Always watching.) Wouldn’t that constitute a paper trail? Suddenly Nick worried about loose ends, admissible evidence. By now he knew his new employer was caught up in prostitution, illicit pornography, and murder-for-hire. That was more than enough, but he couldn’t doubt there was more. She was one enterprising lady, that much was certain. And that much didn’t go unnoticed forever. When the authorities brought the hammer down and starting sifting through Mother’s business, how long before the path led directly to Nick’s front door?

  He’d have to move. Get even more low-key than he already was. Watch his every step. Things were going to be tricky and hazardous from now on. He wasn’t a hustler anymore. Back alley beatings were far from the worst he could expect now.

  Though he tried to put together enough scratch to catch a cab, Nick didn’t want to risk spending the preponderance of his stake on a ride without knowing when his ship was coming in, if indeed it ever arrived at port at all. Thus he found himself once again killing time at a bus stop, fingering the coins in his pants pocket that represented the last of his fortune, and eyeballing the defunct sporting goods shop across the street. He had been in it before, when it was open for business, and reflecting on it now decided apart from a hardware store, a sporting goods shop could easily be viewed as the most ideal one-stop shopping when planning a murder.

  The number 9 came and went, and through the choking exhaust it left in its wake Nick crossed the street and speed-walked over the empty parking lot to the back of the gray monolith that once belonged to Siegler Bros. Spor
ting Goods Co. The front doors were blocked by a heavy steel shutter, but around back the loading dock—strewn with empty and broken bottles of beer and cheap wine—was considerably less enforced. He climbed up onto the concrete slab and tried the back door. The jamb had been pried apart by a crowbar or something like it, so the door came open with a tug. Nick propped it open with a broken-off chunk of the concrete and went cautiously inside.

  There too was plenty of evidence that drunks and addicts had been inhabiting the place, from more bottles to the detritus of junk rigs, filthy bedrolls, and the acrid scent of urine hanging stagnant in the musty air. Nick tried to breathe through his mouth as he hung close to the open door, nervous about wandering too far from his sole light source. The aisles were mostly picked clean from what he could make out—even the shelves themselves were gone in most cases—though some bric-a-brac remained, scattered about as if the former tenants left in a hurry. In Nick’s mind he envisioned things the store once stocked, guns and crossbows, knives and hatchets. Implements for quick, effective work. Now all he saw were discarded and trampled hunting caps, shredded shopping bags, fishing lures and hand weights and…

  Fishing lures.

  He stopped and walked backward to aisle 3, the end of which was littered with little packages of lures and hooks and bobs. Distant memories of fishing from a rowboat in the middle of Smith Mountain Lake drifted through Nick’s mind, the scummy smell of the lifejacket and his old man’s half-drunk grumbling at the fish that wouldn’t bite, bad old Virginia days he’d just as soon forget. For now he focused on the items farther down the aisle—a pair of broken rods and a net with a bent handle, weights and more bobs, more lures. Pieces and parts that, put together, wouldn’t even kill a fish. The damned thing would still have to flop around helplessly in the boat, gradually suffocating to death.

  Drowning, then?

  Nick knitted his brow and wondered if there were any baseball bats still lying around.

  He turned to make his way back to the end when a solid shape filled the void, backlit by the sunlight spilling in through the open door. Nick narrowed his eyes as the shape moved toward him, taking on human features.

  “Hey,” he said, turning again to find yet another man coming down from the other side of the aisle.

  This one said, “Whatchoo doin’ in here?”

  “Shopping,” Nick said.

  “More like stealin’,” the man said.

  “Not your shit,” said the first guy.

  “You must be the Siegler brothers, then?” Nick snarked.

  Neither of the men laughed. The second one lunged for Nick, who fell into a squat before popping back up with a quick, tight jab at the guy’s throat. The guy squawked, stumbling backward with his hands to his neck and eyes bulging. Nick then felt the first man’s arms wrap around his torso in an aggressive bear hug. He couldn’t tell if the guy wanted to fight him or fuck him, but decided an elbow to the gut was the appropriate response in either case. His assailant grunted but only barely loosened his grasp before tightening up again, so Nick slammed the back of his head into the guy’s chin, then again, flattening his nose. The cartilage crunched and the man let loose a high squeal as Nick scampered away from him, doing his best to ignore the pounding ache radiating throughout his skull, when he nearly tripped over a rubber-coated free weight. He picked it up, judged it to be no more than four or five pounds, but good enough for what he intended for it. The free weight sailed down the aisle and smashed into the big man’s forehead, knocking him down. The other guy was still gasping and sputtering, bracing himself against the endcap and stamping his foot in anger or pain or possibly both.

  For a fleeting moment, Nick considered leaving him be and getting the hell out of there. Instead, his anger bubbled up inside him, a collected sort of rage directed at two thugs who had nothing better to do than attack someone who was only scavenging, the same as them, and had they wanted any of this crap wouldn’t they have already hoarded it somewhere for themselves? Shoulders tensed, he moved back to where the free weight fell beside the dead, or at least severely concussed, man on the floor, but caught a glimpse of something infinitely more interesting.

  U. S. Fisherman brand surfstrand, piles of it: spring-tempered, stainless-steel trolling wire in coils of fifteen feet a piece.

  “Huh,” said Nick, bending down to retrieve a coil.

  * * *

  At the fifth knock Nick could hear the guard chain clatter off and the dead bolt turn, whereupon the door opened up to reveal Trevor Goode, closer by a mile than they’d ever been in proximity to each other. His spiky dye-black hair jutted up over a slightly chubby, generally amiable face that Nick suspected didn’t require daily shaving. The younger man raised his eyebrows up and over the thick black frames of his glasses and Nick glanced past him, for just a second, to where his significant other sat curled up in the concavity of a papasan chair with a video game controller in her hands and colorful chaos on the TV screen in front of her. She didn’t take her attention away from it. Nick returned his to Trevor, his eyes drifting down to the Cramps T-shirt barely concealing his substantial belly.

  “You must be Trevor,” Nick said, his tone jovial. He felt oddly nervous, as though meeting a character from a favorite book or a minor TV celebrity.

  “Uh,” said Trevor, “who are you?”

  He asked as if he should have known, but it slipped his mind, maintaining the round O on his lips for several long seconds.

  Hiernoymus, his favorite old inside joke, nearly passed Nick’s lips then, but at that last possible moment he changed his mind.

  Smiling sincerely, he told Trevor his name. His full, legal name.

  He couldn’t recall the last time he spoke it out loud like that to someone, anyone. Nothing of his carried the name, not any of his driver’s licenses or Social Security cards or credit cards, none of his half dozen bank accounts. He never met anyone socially, nor did he ever share space with his employer or associates, none of whom he knew from a hole in the ground anyway.

  Trevor’s eyebrows remained high and puzzled.

  “I—uh—I mean, Mr.…”

  “Nick is fine.”

  “Nick.”

  “You got a second, Trevor?”

  “Y’know, not really…we’re just getting settled in for the night…”

  “I know it’s kind of late, but I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “What is this about?”

  Finally, the girl popped her head up from her game and peered past Trevor to the stranger at the door.

  “Who is it, Trev?”

  Trevor craned his neck to look back at her and shrugged.

  “Nick?” he said.

  “Nick who?”

  He told her. She shrugged, too. Trevor turned back and assumed a helpless expression.

  “We’re not religious,” he said.

  “Atheist, myself,” said Nick. “Baptized Catholic, though.”

  “Honestly,” Trevor said sheepishly, “this is getting a little weird, Nick.”

  “Couldn’t agree more.”

  “Trev?” the girl called again.

  “I’m handling it, Charise.”

  “Charise?” Nick chirped.

  She said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Nick, waving it off with his hand. “Look, this is all a bit of a mess. All right, it’s more than a bit, and it involves both of us. And Charise as well, I guess. Thing is—the truth of it is—you don’t happen to have a cold beer, do you? I’ll pay you for it, but Christ, I’m thirsty.”

  “There’s an ice house up on the corner, if that’s what you’re after, man. This ain’t the 7-Eleven, you know?”

  “I thought it might make a difficult conversation go down a little easier.”

  “Difficult…about what?”

  The game was paused now and Charise rose to her feet, staring. Nick gave her a sharp nod and edged a little farther against the jamb.

  Time to quit fucking around and get back to work, Nick.<
br />
  “Right,” he said, and he planted a hand on Trevor’s chest, right in the dead center of Lux Interior’s silkscreened face, and shoved him back into the living room. Charise yelped. Trevor windmilled his arms, struggling to remain upright as Nick barreled into the apartment and slammed the front door behind him. “Off on the wrong foot there, maybe. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?”

  “What the fuck do you want?” Charise squealed, the controller still gripped in her right hand.

  “It’s not about what I want. But somebody out there has shelled out some perfectly good money to put an end to your short life, Trevor, and an old pro like me?” He shifted his gaze to Charise. “Doesn’t tend to leave witnesses around, you understand?”

  Trevor choked on his breath. Tears welled up in Charise’s eyes and spilled over.

  Nick said, “Now, about that beer?”

  * * *

  Turned out to be a messy one.

  Nick hadn’t accounted for that. He supposed, in the aftermath, that he’d just wanted to switch things up a bit, not make it a habit of throwing heavy things at guys’ heads to waste them. Besides, his shoulder ached. He wasn’t exactly an athlete.

  The trolling wire seemed easy enough. Quiet. Effectual.