Nausea

by Kurtz, Ed

  Another shot cracked out, struck the television screen, forming a spiderweb from top to bottom and shorting the whole thing out. Nick stared at it in wonder, his ears ringing, and he said, “I hate gun work.”

  The garrote shifted uselessly in his pocket. He threw up his hands, groaned loudly, and fell into a march for the door.

  Trevor stage-whispered, “Don’t!”

  Nick unlocked it and threw the door open. Into the cool night, he bellowed, “You shoot like shit!”

  “Hiya, Nick,” Lorraine shouted back at him, perched atop his Mercedes across the street with the rifle in her hands. She brandished it above her head, theatrically. “No scope. Blind firing.”

  “That’s why I do close work.”

  “You want me to come up there, then?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  She cackled, and its echo bounced off the building’s façade.

  “I don’t think so, Nicky,” she shouted. “I’ve seen you work with that thing you carry around. Even when you hardly knew what you were doing.”

  “I know you have.”

  “Remember what you said to me that day?”

  He did.

  * * *

  “Don’t be scared,” Nick said, one hand at the back of Selma Bea’s neck, holding the garrote tight, and the other held up, palm out, toward the child at the edge of the roof. Selma’s throat all red and raw, her face drained white and eyes wide open. The girl hugged her knees, her bottom an inch off the edge, hovering some ten feet or more over the side yard. Her tiny face pinched, her eyes pink and wet.

  “Mommy,” was all she managed to say, her voice a squeak.

  “Mommy is sleeping,” Nick said, his voice even and eyes hard. “Come away from there. You’ll fall.”

  “Mommy.”

  He relaxed his grip on the garrote (he was growing fond of the word) and slid away from the corpse, by inches, and showed the child the other hand.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said again. “I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t be scared.”

  Scooting up against the window frame, he maneuvered himself over Selma Bea’s legs, a little closer to the girl. She hugged herself tighter still, her little feet wiggling in her little pink and white sneakers. Her entire body wobbled. Nick fell into a lunge, pushing off with the balls of his feet and snaking his right arm out to grab the nearest sneaker. The girl screamed and went limp, dropping backward. Nick yanked as hard as he could, dragging her over the rough edge and across the shingles, hiking up her butterfly shirt and raking her bare back. She was bawling and shrieking now, flailing her arms and contorting her body in impossible directions.

  Nick pulled her toward him, hauling her close enough to slap her hard across the face. The child was instantly stunned into silence, shocked and staring dumbly, her brow scrunched up as though she couldn’t understand Nick’s species.

  (Not a human being)

  For a brief moment he wondered how old she was, exactly. He decided he didn’t care. Picked her up like a rag doll and tossed her through the open window, back into the little pink bedroom. She fell in a tiny heap to the carpet with an equally tiny groan. For the time being Nick let Selma Bea cool on the roof and climbed in after the kid. Her eyes popped at the sight of him. She went rigid, then twisted onto her belly and started to crawl, spastically, toward the hallway. Nick seized her by the back of her shirt and hauled her up, threw her on the captain’s bed taking up the center of the room. The girl bounced several times on the mattress before coming to a rest, her chest heaving and throat emitting animal sounds.

  “Don’t move,” he commanded. She froze.

  Nick glanced around the room until his eyes fell on a small chest, beside which rested a pair of roller skates, some knee pads, and a jumping rope. Perfect. He went for the jumping rope, made quick work of securing it around the child so that she couldn’t move her arms or legs. She screamed bloody murder, but he ignored it entirely. Once she paused long enough to take a long, ragged breath, he cut in: “Listen, your dad will be home soon. He’ll take care of you. Tell him your uncle Nick sends his regards and I’ll see him around the depot, mm-kay?”

  He patted her on the top of the head, gave her a wink, and climbed back out onto the overhanging roof long enough to roll Selma Bea off it. She hit the front walk with a thick thud. The kid went nuts. Nick expected she’d wear herself out in short time, probably be fast asleep by the time good old Stan—the new boss, whoever he really was—got back home, freshly widowed. Wasn’t that how kids worked?

  * * *

  The next shot split the molding on the doorjamb inches from Nick’s left ear. He flinched, threw his hands up intuitively. From across the street, Lorraine laughed.

  “Don’t be afraid, sweetheart!” she bellowed. “Daddy’s coming home!”

  A clacking sound ratcheted out through the air. She was reloading.

  The full, simple scope of the thing came to him all at once in that moment: Nick killed his boss and got a new one, and then he killed him, too. Lou Szczepański—Stan to Selma Bea’s Jan. Little Lorraine—Lori—inherited the family business, and this time she wanted to make damn sure no one would do to her what her father did to her mother…and what she did to her own daddy.

  Was that why he changed after Lou? Somehow he knew he’d come full circle, made the round trip back to the start, back to how he lost his soul only to find the wretched old thing again, battered and dusty and barely functioning?

  Lorraine fired again, this time striking one of the cement steps leading down to the parking lot. The round took off a chunk, leaving a half circle that looked like someone had bitten it off. Nick stepped right over it, made his way down to the bottom. She gave a protracted Haaaaah.

  He kept walking.

  She jacked another round into the chamber, took aim.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Nick,” she squealed, keeping him in her line of fire. “Don’t be afraaaaid.”

  He heard the next shot loud and clear, at precisely the same moment his left shoulder seemed to explode, the pain starting out like a hornet’s sting but rapidly radiating outward as he dropped to his knees on the sidewalk. It was, to his gathering chagrin, the first time Nick had ever been shot—and it hurt like a son of a bitch.

  “Fuck me running,” he croaked. “That’s about as bad as I thought it’d be.”

  Lorraine leapt down from the top of Nick’s Benz, rifle in hand, and galloped to the sidewalk on the opposite side. She lifted her head to look over and above him, to where Trevor stood gawping at the top of the steps, and she wiggled her fingers at him in greeting.

  “I see you’ve squelched, Nicky-poo.”

  “Nah,” he said, trying like hell to keep his shoulder immobile. “I just decided to retire early. New management. Not to my liking.”

  “You didn’t give notice,” said Lorraine, throwing cursory glances up either side of the street before stepping off the sidewalk. “You’ll never get a recommendation now.”

  “And after all these years of faithful service, too.”

  “No party, either,” she said, crossing the asphalt. “No gold watch.”

  “Better and better,” Nick said.

  “I’ll tell you one thing though.” She stopped a yard short of the sidewalk’s edge and, dramatically, drew a bead on him. “You were a better fuck than Nathan ever was. Can’t fault you there, big man.”

  Black-red blood pulsed from the center of the shoulder wound, thick and hot. Nick grimaced, showing his teeth.

  “Fucking gun work,” he said.

  “Distance work, too,” she said. “I guess I can see why you like to get in close. Can’t say I’d go for that chokey thing you do, though. I’m going to shoot you up close, see how I like that. But maybe if Ozzie and Harriet up there have any decent knives in their kitchen, I’ll mix it up a bit. What do you think? You’re the expert, after all.”

  “Fuck knife work, too.”

  “Consistency. Not such a bad thing. I suspect if you’
d worked it out earlier, I’d have gotten that myself?” She mock-strangled herself with one hand, jutting out her tongue and squinting one eye.

  “Why you think I came to you?”

  “Did you get confused or something? Mixed up fucking and killing? That happen much?”

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” Nick said. “I’m sorry I fucked you all up. No kid ought to see something like that.”

  “Oh, go piss up a rope. Get over yourself, Nick. You did a job, and you did it well. That one was for Dad. Dad was for me. It’s the circle of life, at least for ghosts like us.”

  “Ghosts,” he parroted.

  “We sure as sheep shit aren’t humans, are we?”

  “No emotion,” he said.

  She smiled companionably.

  Nick twisted at the middle and reached for the piece in his waistband, his shoulder jetting blood from the exertion, but found nothing there. He never had use for the goddamned thing, nothing more than insurance he never cashed in, but the first time in forever he actually needed it the fucking .38 was gone. Dropped out when he was blowing groceries in Trevor’s john, he reckoned. Still had the blade strapped to his ankle, but it was useless now, even if he could manage to get to it. He was done the moment he hit Lou Szczepański, he realized in that moment. Out of the game. Basically dead and waiting for confirmation. Losing his backup in a mark’s residence. Ridiculous. Almost funny. He’d have laughed if he hadn’t been too busy scowling from the pain.

  “Looks like you’re naked there, Nick,” Lorraine said.

  “It’s like that dream,” he said, his words getting slurry, “where you go to school with no pants on.”

  “Thanks for the memories,” she said, raising the barrel and sighting down the length of it, straight at Nick’s chest. “It’s been real fun.”

  “A ball,” he said, and she squeezed the trigger.

  * * *

  More than satisfied with the deposit he discovered in the account at the end of the week, Nick went back to the depot first chance he got, eager to continue work and build enough savings to get the hell out of the motor court. He was deeply disappointed to find the next locker completely vacant.

  The city bus brought him there, but he treated himself to a cab back into town, where he found an Italian restaurant, the kind with white tablecloths instead of the checkered ones, and items on the menu never replicated by Chef Boyardee. He drank Chianti and ate lasagne Bolognese and for dessert he ordered torta barozzi, which he picked at over black coffee. After, he wandered down the strip to a convenience store, where he bought name-brand cigarettes that he chain-smoked like a man who could afford it. The food was terrific, and the smokes were a welcome relief from the horse manure flavor of the Spheres he’d been burning. But Nick felt essentially nothing at all.

  A powder blue Impala sputtered past on the street with an orange and black FOR SALE sign taped up in the back window. Nick caught a sidelong glance of the sign and decided he should buy a car as soon as he could afford it. He hoped the next time he checked the locker there would be work waiting for him within.

  On the fourth day following, having gone to look every day in between, Nick found an anniversary card inside, along with a new key. A small grin teased at the corners of his mouth. He thought about Selma Bea Alvarado for the first time since the day he strangled her on the roof, but only because it occurred to him there had been no certainty in his new gig continuing now that she was gone. The new boss, however, had use for him. He memorized the code, got rid of the card, and went in search of a telephone book.

  Misty R. Thorne.

  Spot.

  Nick said, “Huh.”

  He thought, Test for loyalty.

  Love doesn’t really exist, Mother told him. You understand that, right?

  It looked to Nick like his new employer wanted to be sure he understood that, too.

  All he could figure was how, in a few days’ time, he’d be that much closer to acquiring a set of wheels.

  So he patted his pocket, felt the garrote against his thigh, and went to work.

  Easy peasy.

  * * *

  The bullet struck him in the chest, left of center, and knocked him flat on his back. He didn’t make a sound, not even when Lorraine’s cheek burst open, spitting a dark mist, at the noise of a loud report close by.

  The rifle clattered to the pavement and she threw both hands up to her face, gibbering and staggering from side to side. Nick couldn’t move. He just stared, and while he did so Lorraine tried to scream, the blood pouring down her jawline onto her blouse. White shards dribbled from the red froth bubbling out of her mouth. There was a shrill ringing in his ears from the shot, a high-pitched howl that developed into something quite like sirens. After a few seconds he decided that was exactly what it was.

  In the mid-distance, rolling up from University Avenue, the first cherry-tops came into view, pulsing red and blue and shrieking toward the intersection that would bring them right to Nick’s feet. He felt a tickle in his otherwise ice-cold chest, but thought it better not to cough if he could help it. Lorraine bent at the waist in front of him, her eyes bloodshot and streaming, the hole in her face ragged and nasty and drooling blood. She shot out a hand toward the rifle on the street, and a second shot rang out, blooming black at her temple and dropping her still to the macadam. Nick rolled his eyes back in his head and saw Lux Interior looming wrinkled above him on Trevor’s T-shirt. He knew he’d best not try to speak either, so he managed a small wink to let the kid know he’d done good, and blacked out before he could determine whether the message was received.

  * * *

  Misty died quickly.

  Her john, a wiry man with a thin mustache, put up a fight, but it didn’t last.

  Nick put a payment down on a secondhand Subaru the following Tuesday, drove it off the lot that afternoon.

  On the way back to the motor court to start packing up what few possessions he had there, he got in behind a gleaming steel-gray Mercedes Benz on the interstate and decided then and there that, someday, he was going to have to upgrade.

  And that meant quite a few more jobs between now and then.

  As many as it took.

  * * *

  Nick came to with a head full of sand and a persistent ache that radiated throughout his torso. Machines were whirring and bleeping nearby and, in fact, all around him, and the antiseptic room in which he lay was partitioned by curtains on metal frames. He discovered his right wrist was handcuffed to the hospital bed on which he was laid out, and a hollow, flexible tube was sticking out of the left side of his bruised and stitched-up chest, greedily sucking away the fluid otherwise building up in there.

  Dreamily, he wondered if the morgue was in the same building, somewhere underneath him perhaps, where Lorraine Szczepański was cooling in a metal locker. She’d be alone down there, her father in the ground by then, or at least incinerated and scattered to the four winds.

  He couldn’t tell which hospital they’d brought him to, so he wondered too how close he was to the police department where Trevor and Charise were undoubtedly recounting their extraordinary night for the fifth or sixth time in a row to a bank of incredulous officers and detectives.

  Good old Trevor.

  Nick hoped Charise would be all right, after everything. And upon realizing he sincerely felt that way, he forgot to breathe for a moment. It didn’t matter. The machine was doing most of the work for him.

  No one was rushing about, or even bothering to observe or check on him. The breathing apparatus and chest tube appeared, as far as he could tell, to have him well in hand. A punctured lung, he supposed. Recoverable. Curable—like his sociopathy?

  Didn’t seem likely.

  He conjured the image of little Lorraine—Lori—so tiny and afraid, fragile already and broken indefinitely, and his stomach twisted into a tight knot. In his mind’s eye, she transformed first into her adult self—all mother-naked and quivering psychosis—and then poor, pretty Spo
t. He hadn’t made much of it, of Misty: like the child he left half drowning in her own tears and snot he barely gave a second thought to what he had done. He’d become this—himself—because of her, hadn’t he? (No love, no emotion.) It was only fitting, but not worth lost time or sleep or introspection. Get in, do the job, get out, get paid. Rinse and repeat. Not human. Hell, she hadn’t even wanted to be born. She said so. Didn’t she?

  Didn’t she?

  Fucking Spot.

  Lucky Nicky, he could hear her say, her blackened eye crinkling into a smile.

  Somewhere close someone said his name. His full name. The voice low and syrupy. Full of contempt. Police, he figured. The owner of the key to his fashionable new bracelet? Mindlessly, he tugged at it. The steel rattled against the bed frame.

  “Everything comes together,” he whispered to himself, knitting his brow and licking his bone-dry lips, “in the end.”

  Seemed good enough, as eulogies went. He tried to reach the tube with his right arm, but he’d forgotten about the shoulder wound, much less the extensive bandaging, and had to swallow a scream. His face poured sweat, his head pounded from the center of his brain outward. For some reason he envisioned his garrote in a plastic bag, in some evidence locker, a cryptic number handwritten in permanent marker on the white labeling strip understood only by those in charge of organizing the local criminal paraphernalia. (Little codes, Nick knew them so well.)

  He still had the original at home, shut away in a drawer. Sentimental. They’d find that, too.

  Pushing a long breath slowly past his lips, Nick maneuvered his left arm, rolling the shoulder and sliding the elbow back, until his fingers could touch the chest tube. It was held in place with a suture in the flesh, past which the tube fitted into him between two ribs, all the way into the gunshot lung it was keeping from collapse. He remembered none of it, having blacked out in the street and presumably been put under with general anesthesia. But with the canister sucking away at him, keeping his airbag inflated, it was clear enough what would happen should it end up prematurely removed.