Nausea (11 page)

The girl came back round with his Dewar’s, which she set gently atop a green napkin for him.

“Tab this time, hon?” she asked.

“Might as well.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, we don’t see too many folks as pale as you in here,” she said.

Nick shrugged. “Is that going to be a problem?”

She screwed her mouth up to one side. “I don’t know, sugar. Is it?”

He said, “I was just passing by.”

“Twice in one day?”

“Sure, why not?”

Now
she
shrugged. Nick thought she did it better. “No reason. I’ll open you up a tab. Holler if you need another round. Name’s Charise.”

“I’ll remember that,” he said.

“I bet you will,” said Charise.

A pair of older black men—Nick judged them to be in their fifties—chuckled and tossed friendly insults at each other at a table by the door. They were playing cards but Nick guessed it was just an excuse to hang out and be loose. Just a couple of old friends enjoying each other’s company at the corner bar. He wondered about that.

He sipped at the glass Charise brought him and returned his gaze to 267-4-58. After another sip, this one more of a gulp, he started working out alphabetic equivalents in his head: B for 2, F for 6, G for 7, and so on. He ended up with BFG-D-EH. Which was even worse than 267-4-58.

Why the stupid games? Why all the mystery? If this whacked-out broad—this
Mother
—really wanted him to do what she said she wanted him to do, why make it so ridiculously fucking hard for him to do it?

And what if he never figured it out? That left two options he could see: either go back to the Midnight Cowboy to demand an explanation, or simply not do the job. Both seemed especially risky, potentially fatal. Nick felt as if he was being tested, and thus far he was looking at a grade of F.

The sour odor of cigarette smoke floated over to his corner and Nick breathed it in. He glanced up and saw a woman at the bar dressed in a sparkling red top and black leather miniskirt drawing on a long, thin cigarette that reminded him of Mother’s. Charise met his gaze and called out, “Need another one?”

Nick shook his head, said, “You got smokes?”

She dropped whatever she was doing, reached for something under the bar, and came over to the corner booth with a green package that she set down on the table.

“Salem 100s,” she said. “All we got.”

“Put it on my tab.”

“All right. And I’ll go ahead and pour you another Dewar’s, too.” Her eyes moved down to the card. “Aw, who died?”

Nick snorted as he reached for the pack. “My brain.”

“My sympathies,” she said.

He unwrapped the top of the cellophane after spending a little time figuring out where the tab was—he’d never opened a pack of cigarettes before. Charise dug a book of matches out of her apron pocket and handed them to him.

“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 pulled 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.”