Nausea (17 page)

With three cans of Pearl left, he went into his fusty little room at the far right end of the motor court and flipped on the TV before collapsing onto the narrow bed. A game show host belittled a trio of befuddled contestants while Nick started in on a fresh beer, and he figured on hitting the hay when the last one was drained, though he was out a quarter of the way through it.

The bells and buzzers from the show still worked their way into his brain, but merely as background noise while Nick worked
his
way over a damp, crowded street, something like Times Square at night, replete with blinding neon and flickering bulbs and the odor of hundreds of tightly packed bodies squirming against one another in a mad fight to get to one end of the street or the other. Somewhere in that throng was Misty—
Spot
—which he somehow knew despite being unable to see her or find her. She was just there, somewhere between one avenue and the next, lost in a single city block. Twice, then thrice, he thought maybe he caught a glimpse of her, the side of her face or the bounce of her hair, but in a fraction of a second she was gone again, swallowed up by the crowd. Nick grew frustrated, pushed and shoved more aggressively, gritted his teeth against the incessant noise of the buzzers and bells. Someone grabbed his arm, tightened their fingers so that they pressed into the muscle, and Nick jerked back, ready to attack. It was Mother, and her face was like a death mask: pale and motionless, like it was made of clay or porcelain. She jabbed her free hand toward him, opened it up to reveal an old-school switch, the sort the Mex kids used to carry when Nick was in school, or so he’d always heard. He took the offering and Mother vanished into the throng, and in an instant the blade shot free, all glimmering and clean and razor sharp on both sides. He thought of old jungle adventure movies, the kind he’d watch on the UHF station in the basement when he was a boy, black-and-white films with Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller, where Englishmen with huge mustaches wore pith helmets and sliced their way through the dense vegetation with massive machetes provided by their native guides. Nick liked the notion, that he was embarking on a great adventure. He started slicing.

The people came apart like paper dolls. He slashed with broad strokes, halving them, lopping off limbs and heads, opening throats that dribbled like red waterfalls. They were felled one by one, dropping in piles to the wet macadam, opening up the crowd and Nick’s field of vision until at long last, dripping with the blood he’d spilled, he espied her standing in the dead middle of the street in a pink prom dress, her feet bare, looking for all the world like the belle of the ball. She was pure and lovely, sweeter twenty times over than he remembered her, and her expression betrayed fear and loneliness, a need for protection, maybe even love. By then the people comprising the throng leaped out of his way as he went with purpose toward her, thinking vaguely that this—that
she
—was his destiny. Those who did not move quick enough were cut down, some of them familiar to Nick: Joe and Hana from the Midnight Cowboy died hand in hand, while Robert Hart took the full length of the blade in his stomach and rapidly deflated like a balloon, all skin and no bones. Someone’s voice came in a loud whisper, sandpaper against pine, asking
Why?

Nick realized it was her, it was Misty, though her lips didn’t move at all.

Why, Lucky?

“Why the hell not?” he said, and he swept the blade across her neck, severing her head completely, which dropped to the street with a dull thud. Nick took what remained of her into his arms before the body collapsed, and he fell into a fluid waltz, gripping the headless corpse close to his own body, to the rhythm of the game show din that now filled his skull.

No guilt at all. No regret. All were ants, or smaller still. Even himself, who would doubtless someday get cut down, too. It didn’t matter. He’d killed for love, but the love wasn’t there. He’d killed to save his own skin, and that turned out a much better bet. All of them died the same. Everyone did, in the end. Nick dragged Misty, or most of her, over the asphalt and kissed the air where her lips would otherwise have been. Life, he decided, was neither beautiful nor ugly. It just was, and it was transient at best. A game short-lived, and no one ever really won.

Why the hell not?

He woke, in stages, to the late news—the end of it, when they blathered on about saccharine local human interest bullshit—and smacked his lips at the taste of warm beer on his tongue. The tap water at that place tasted like pennies and peat, but he thought maybe another cold Pearl might be the thing for it. First he rolled over, flopping one leg out from beneath the blanket, and smashed his face against something cold and rigid on the thin down pillow.

The key to the locker.

He pushed away and looked at it.

“You got to be fucking kidding me,” Nick said to the key.

All the key said in reply was
24B
.

He made a face at it, and started checking the room for obvious signs of a break-in. There was nothing, which he expected, and it didn’t matter. What was obvious was that he was being tailed, maybe watched, maybe closely. And they wanted him to open that locker.

It did not seem a far stretch to him to guess at what he’d find in it.

But all the same, he rummaged for change until he scrounged enough for bus fare and, once again, after splashing some cold water on his face, Nick made his way back out into the world.

* * *

He had all but given up on them. Roundly upbraided himself for letting his focus stray so egregiously, for the wild and baseless shift in his mind and in his approach to his day to day. For the clumsiness and the nausea. The doubt. The overthinking. What was the point in it all? It wouldn’t bring any of them back. And it wouldn’t stop anyone else from getting what was coming to them, either. Even if Nick bowed out straightaway, vanished into the night never to be heard from again, there was always going to be someone else to fill his Testonis. It didn’t take a skilled assassin or ninja to take down someone like Szczepański or Cole or any of the hapless bastards Nick got paid to take off the board. Just a certain philosophy and bills that needed paying.
Keep to that philosophy, boyo. Your résumé
is a bit sparse if you try to keep it aboveboard, you dumb bastard.

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.