Nausea (3 page)

“Who worked you over?” she asked.

“Some college pricks I suckered at a pool hall,” he answered honestly.

“Some people don’t like to be taken for fools,” she opined.

“So I’ve noticed. How about you?”

She was struggling with her panties, a challenging feat for a girl with only one working arm. At the question she gestured toward her injured arm and said, “You mean this?”

“That and the shiner, yeah.”

She laughed—a short, nasal snort—and finally managed to shimmy her panties up and over her ass. “You know I’m on the game, right?”

Nick just shook his head. She wasn’t talking his language.

“I’m a whore, Nicky,” she clarified.

“Oh,” he said.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Misty said, her eyes on the floor in search of her T-shirt and skirt. “I’m not going to gouge you or anything. Tonight I’m just a chick you lucked into, sailor.”

“Lucky me,” he said with a crooked grin.

“Lucky Nicky,” she agreed.

He found his shirt, shrugged into the sleeves and buttoned it up most of the way. She thrashed about, fighting with hers, and Nick went to help her.

“Thanks, Lucky,” she said.

“New nickname?”

“Fits.”

“And what should I call you, I wonder?”

Misty pointed at her black eye, and she smiled sadly.

“Spot,” she said.

* * *

The Ford didn’t head straight for home, wherever that was. It stopped first at the porno theater on South First, the Rialto. Parked in the one handicapped space out front. The marquee proudly proclaimed the title of the week’s feature presentation:
CUMMING TO AMERICA
. The boy let the car idle while the girl hustled into the lobby, her frayed Converse smacking the crumbling cement.

Nick killed his headlights as soon as the kids pulled into the parking slot, and he pulled off to the bike lane to watch from a hundred yards away. He was dying for a smoke but to stop for a pack would mean losing the Ford’s trail. It was important, somehow. He just couldn’t tell why.

He ended up digging a butt out of the ashtray and firing it up.

As he smoked the bent half-smoke, Nick stared at the aged marquee and dimly recalled seeing regular movie titles spelled out there, back when he was the same age as the kids in the Ford and before he’d ever killed anyone. Had he seen
The Towering Inferno
in there before it exclusively catered to the raincoat brigade? Or was it
The Poseidon Adventure?

It certainly wasn’t
Cumming to America
.

The girl reemerged from the lobby, a plastic shopping bag dangling from one hand. Nick considered for a moment that his first hunch had been correct—drugs could have been the hook. She hurried to get back into the car and the boy was backing out before she shut the door. Nick jerked the gearshift back to D and rolled forward, letting the Ford gain a bit before stepping on the gas.

“
The Towering Inferno
,” he mumbled to himself as he switched the headlights back on and cruised up to 35 MPH, half a block back from the hatchback. “It was definitely
The Towering Inferno.
”

* * *

“So it was what, like a pimp or something?”

“No,” Misty said, shaking her head. “I’m self-employed, don’t answer to nobody. No, just some john. He wanted to play games I don’t play. Didn’t like it when I told him no, that’s all.”

“You’re awfully…I don’t know…”

“Cavalier about it?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He didn’t want to embarrass himself by admitting he didn’t know that word.

“What am I going to do? The bastard still paid what he owed.”

“And how much is that?”

“Nunya.”

“Nunya?”

“Nunya goddamn business, Lucky.”

“All right, all right.”

Nick stabbed a cube of teriyaki chicken with his fork, having given up on the chopsticks after the first failed attempt. The meat was tougher than leather, hardly becoming of a joint that called itself The Golden Palace. The semiconscious junkie sleeping it off just outside the front door might have been his first clue that it wasn’t exactly a four-star eatery. Nick threw in the towel and concentrated on his iced tea instead.

“Way I see it, there’s loads of hazardous jobs out there,” Misty said with a philosopher’s air, a tone with which Nick was rapidly becoming familiar. “You think construction workers got it easy? Or firefighters? Those guys wake up every day not knowing if it’s their last one or not, you ever think about that?”

“Not much,” Nick said.

“People need buildings to live and work in, need guys to put out fires, and they need to get fucked, too. So it’s there, it’s available, and most of the time it’s just some lonesome cat can’t make it with a girl or them guys can’t stand to look at their wives anymore. Simple, no problem. But sometimes it’s a son of a bitch like the son of a bitch worked me over the other night. It happens. It’s
life
.”

“The life you would’ve said no to,” Nick put in.

“I should get excited about a broken arm from a guy wants to piss on my face? Would you say yes to that?”

“It’s not that or no life at all, Spot.”

“Sure it is. Everybody’s pissing in your face, all the time. You just don’t taste it anymore 'cause you’re used to it. That’s about all it is, this whole stupid game: people just pissing all over each other, the rotten bastards.”

She punctuated her vitriol by impaling a floret of broccoli, dripping with soy sauce, which she poked into her mouth.

Nick said, “Jesus—you ever consider therapy?”

“I steer clear of blow and junk,” she said with her mouth full, “which in my world makes me a pretty goddamn stable individual.”

Nick’s head swam. He brought his glass of iced tea up to his face, stabbed himself in the eye with the straw.

“Careful there, Lucky.”

“I just wish you’d show some, I don’t know…
indignation.
”

“Hey, I’m plenty indignated,” she said with a wink. She raised her busted wing, wagged the elbow at him. “Which has gotten me real far, as you can see.”

The waiter—a Mexican kid no older than fifteen—came around with a pitcher of murky tea and asked if they wanted anything else. Misty shook her head and the kid left the ticket on the table. Nick eyeballed it, the grand total in particular, and swallowed noisily.

“That’s right,” Misty said, her shoulders slumping a little. “You got rolled.”

He swallowed again. She dug a thick fold of crumpled green bills from her back pocket and peeled off a twenty.

“A free fuck
and
a free meal. Lucky Lucky.”

Nick felt like a world-class prick.

* * *

Half an hour had passed since the Ford pulled up to a two-level apartment building on East Fifth, whereupon the two dour kids tramped up the apartment at the top of the steps, plastic shopping bag in tow. Nick waited in the Mercedes in the dark parking lot of a long-ago shuttered Montgomery Ward and watched.

The door to the apartment in question remained shut. The window was dark. A dirty old guy was pushing a shopping cart in circles around the parking lot behind Nick, but he did his best to ignore it.

Nick also tried to ignore the pair of streetwalkers pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the building, each attired in dazzling arrays of spandex and rubber, their heads crowned with audacious wigs (bright blue and clown red, respectively). Blue was tall and spindly, her skin the color of chai tea. Red was a head and a half shorter, her bust straining violently against the stretched rubber halter top she’d unwisely chosen for the night’s uniform. Nick narrowed his eyes at her, could have sworn for a second there that she was an old friend. But unless she’d discovered the Fountain of Youth…no, it wasn’t her. Just another whore. That part of town had more supply than demand, or so it typically seemed. He couldn’t help but wonder how long they’d been out there, and not just tonight, but total nights, as if it somehow mattered. It wasn’t like they got gold watches when they met a particular quota of hours, or johns, or orifices filled. What they got was too old, or too sick, or too damn dead.

He sighed and poked around the ashtray with a probing finger, looking for a butt with some tobacco left in it. He didn’t find one.

He didn’t even realize he’d nodded off until his mobile phone bleeped and snapped him back to reality.

“Yeah?” he croaked.

“Delivery for ya,” came the voice on the other end.

Nick’s eyes bulged. “Already?”

The click had already sounded. The line was dead.

Nick folded the phone closed and twisted his neck until it cracked, one way and then the other. He knew where they were for the time being, at least—with a little luck, they’d still be there by the time he was done. What he aimed to do then was something to figure out later. Now he had work to do.

* * *

Slick’s was, for all intents and purposes and for the foreseeable future, off limits. The jig was up, as they say, and Nick was now a known hustler, persona non grata. No scratch to be made there, or probably anyplace else on the scene, for that matter. And he was dead broke with weekly rent coming up and a girl who deserved better than paying for his third-rate Chinese dinner.

So Nick did what he felt just about anybody would have done in his situation: he went home, cranked up the stereo, and proceeded to get roaring drunk. Half a gallon of Kentucky Deluxe and Bob Seger on the turntable; someone banged on the wall from the next shithole over but he paid them no mind. He just filled up a spotty water glass with K.D. and took it down in gulps while Seger soothed his troubled soul with that good old American heartland rock. And as the needle spun gradually toward the platter’s silent center, Nick grew increasingly drunk and drunker still. Halfway through side B and he was crooning right along, his voice a warbling horror that only broke away to slurp down another snootful of eighty percent pure grain alcohol. The place was vibrating to the tune of “Mainstreet” when Nick fell into a spinning pirouette and lurched forward, all of a sudden, and unloaded the entire contents of his guts; a wretched, heaving spray all over the linoleum floor.

Crazy, really. He hadn’t lost a lunch since the sixth grade.

Iron stomach, long as he could remember.

Nick’s head felt like it was full of sloshing water and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Slowly, taking small, shuffling steps, he made his way to the kitchen sink where he rinsed his mouth and splashed cold water on his face. The speakers still roared That Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll and the neighbor continued to bang on the wall, so Nick stepped over the noxious Jackson Pollock on the floor and jerked the needle off the record. Through the thin west wall the neighbor bellowed, “THANK YOU!”

After dropping an unwashed bath towel on the mess on the floor, Nick staggered into the relieving dark of the bedroom and crawled beneath the blanket. The room spun but he accepted that. His mind floated over the unmistakably disappointed look on Misty’s face when she realized he was broke, and he cringed. The last thing Nick wanted was to end up wasting away at an actual job, sitting behind some desk or serving up pops to the punk kids from Kensington Consolidated. Corny as it was he knew he was born to be free, a sort of gypsy in a way. He lived to survive, and to be honest scoring that teriyaki chicken on Misty’s dime was just the sort of thing he’d always done to make it by.

But now…

Maybe surviving wasn’t enough.

He squeezed his eyes shut and the room flipped a hundred and eighty degrees. This time he made it to the john before the rest of the K.D. came spewing out of him.

* * *

The setup was the same; it was always the same. Nick drove to the bus depot on 15
^th
, just next to the overpass, and sauntered over to the corridor where all the lockers were stacked up on top of one another. Last time it was 17C, which meant 17C would contain an unmarked duplicate key for 27D—plus 10, next letter. He opened up 27D, left the key he already had for 17C, and withdrew the greeting-card-sized envelope from within before gently pushing the flimsy metal door shut. The new key went on his keychain, the envelope went into his jacket pocket. As innocent as you please, Nick stabbed a smoke between his lips and lighted it as he walked slowly out of the corridor, through the main lobby and back out to the parking lot.

He tore open the envelope once he got back behind the wheel. The reason the envelope was sized for a greeting card was, as Nick already knew, due to the greeting card it contained. This time around it featured a kitten poking its fuzzy little head out of a white and red box. The lid was off to the side, a bright red bow on top. Nick opened the card, seeing first the legend printed inside:
WHO’S UP FOR A BIRTHDAY HUG?

Nick smirked. He turned the card around and examined the back. Company logo, barcode, price of the card (an astronomical $3.99). Also, printed neatly in ballpoint pen on the bottom left corner, a short series of numbers.

515—2—34.

He read the numbers aloud: “Five-fifteen, two, thirty-four.” With that, it was committed to memory, at least for the short term.

With a flick of his Bic the corner caught flame and Nick held it between forefinger and thumb until most of the card was burning. He then let it drop out of the window, which he rolled up, then he started the engine. 515—2—34. He stepped on the accelerator and headed south, toward Walker’s Drug, to find out who he was supposed to murder this time around.

* * *

Page 515 of the local white pages was about halfway through the Ps, and Nick was astounded that every name on the page was some variant of Phillips. The thirty-fourth listing in the second column was for a Lawrence R. Phillips of 1045 Willow Street. The handy, full-color street map in the back of the phonebook placed Willow Street in the northeast part of town, the sticks as far as Nick was concerned. He whispered the address to himself. It stuck.

When he emerged from the phone booth—a rarity and a relic, even in that stale old neighborhood—the jerk behind the counter touched the crumpled paper hat on his head and said, “You want a float or something, pop?”