Nausea (7 page)

“Szczepański,” he said in a half whisper. “His name was Lou Szczepański.”

And for some reason he wished Lawrence R. Phillips could have heard him say it. He sighed again, went out of the house and sprinted for his car.

His guts cramped all the way.

* * *

Merry Christmas, Darling. Your love, Marla, Xmas 1978.

The card was the old man’s string, Nick knew. It went into the notebook, slid between the pages after two new entries were added in ballpoint pen:

34.
Lou Szczepański.

35.
Lawrence R. Phillips.

Two in one day, both of them with first names starting with L. Lou and Lawrence. Lawrence Phillips, Lawrence Welk. Coincidence, but so what? It seemed important, maybe ominous.

He returned the notebook to the lockbox and signaled the security guard to help him lock it up. The guard had a gun in his belt and Nick wondered if he’d ever used it.
I’m right here, pal
, he thought.
Put two rounds in my brain and you’ll be on television for a week.

On his way out of the bank he checked his mobile phone. No missed calls, no messages. That was good. The night was wide open.

He drove back to the Montgomery Ward parking lot to check on the kids.

2. SWEET LORRAINE

“She’s got a pair of eyes

That are brighter than the summer sky

When you see them, you’ll realize

Why I love my sweet Lorraine”

—Mitchell Parish, “Sweet Lorraine”

The couple on screen were rutting like hogs, all sweat and body hair and the shaky camera work turned the whole affair absurd and not a little unsettling. Nick pinched another jelly bean from the crinkly bag on his lap and tried not to groan too audibly. The picture was only twenty minutes or so in, but it felt like hours. He wasn’t really a porn man, even when it was more or less classy porn. This wasn’t classy porn. This was just awful, not that his opinion was shared by the sundry members of the raincoat brigade stationed around the theater in groups of one. These guys appeared to find the feature presentation perfectly acceptable, thrilling even if Nick was to judge by their grunting breaths and furtive shuffling of cloth and belt buckles. Twenty minutes. He popped another jelly bean into his mouth, longed for a cigarette. Smoking was technically prohibited in the joint, but who was going to complain? Jacking off in public was pretty damn illegal, too.

He’d trailed the girl there, same as the night before and the night before that. The first night he waited in the Benz until she came back out again, which was six hours later. The second night he took off after two. Tonight, he went inside. The girl in the box office, surrounded on all sides by dirty bulletproof glass, sold him a ticket for
California Fuckers
, which was bowdlerized on the marquee outside as
CALIFORNIA F—KERS
. The powers that be could deal with the den of filth actually being there, but that pesky U and C just wouldn’t cut it. Go figure.

The girl in the box office wasn’t
his
girl, and neither was the one selling bottles of Coke and boxes of candy in the corner when he walked into the lobby. That one sold him the jelly beans and made a bored, half-assed attempt to suggest he shell out for some of the magazines and videotapes displayed on a dusty shelf behind her. Nick scanned the titles and snorted. The girl shrugged, jabbed a thumb toward the swinging doors to her right. He half grinned, pulled the candy bag open and took in the rest of the cramped, dirty little lobby. Restrooms: one male, one female. Manager’s office. A water fountain flecked with rust. No sign of the girl he’d followed there. He went into the theater and found a squeaky seat that seemed marginally less appalling than the others around it. Nobody in there looked at anyone else. The lights were on, but dim—just bright enough for the creeps to find their seats before the fun started. When the room went dark, there were coughs and shuddering gasps and a few previews played, prolonging Nick’s torture.

Half an hour later he found himself rising from his seat and letting the jelly beans drop to the sticky floor. He edged out of the row and made a beeline for the blurry red
EXIT
sign just beside the screen.

Outside, the air was unseasonably cool and as soon as he lighted a smoke he felt a pair of droplets collide with his cheek. He dragged deep on the cigarette and thought about all the bad luck he’d ever had in alleyways, which was more than plenty, more than one dumb son of bitch’s share, at any rate. So he turned up the collar of his jacket and walked slowly into the yellow glow of the streetlamp above his Benz and got behind the wheel. The rain picked up there, spattering the windshield. He clicked on the wipers and checked his mobile phone. Nothing new. That was good, in its way. He had funds to hold on to for now. And other things on his mind.

That she worked there was obvious by now. Six hours a shift, four shifts a week. She didn’t work the box office and she didn’t work the concession counter, and Nick mentally scratched out the possibility of management, even for a third-rate porno theater, on account of her age and facial piercings and spiky, unwashed black hair. Frankly, the chick wasn’t the management type. So what did that leave? She was still
in there
, somewhere, doing
something
. Nick checked his watch, figured the girl had another four and a half hours on her shift. He exhaled a blue stream of smoke and started the engine. He had nowhere to go, but he pulled out of the parking slot all the same and rolled down the slick black macadam, the Rialto and
CALIFORNIA F—KERS
growing tiny and indistinct in the rearview mirror.

He had to see her. See both of them.

* * *

“What can I get ya?”

The bartender was a walking stereotype, a study in testosterone and self-assurance. Nick was startled to realize he felt slightly intimidated by the younger, larger man and grinned at himself.

“Beer’s fine.”

“We got all kinds.”

“How about Stroh’s.”

The guy nodded. Half a minute later he slammed a bottle down on a green napkin and said, “Two bucks.”

Nick paid up and found a seat by the window where he could nurse the beer and watch the rain. Cars reduced to headlights slashed by in either direction, their tires obscured by the night and sending wave after wave of gray rainwater splashing against the window. Someone put a Nat King Cole song on the jukebox and Nick smiled. His beer tasted uncommonly good and he unconsciously wiggled his hips when the chorus of voices rang out, “
Flash, Bam, Alakazam!
” A woman laughed sweetly and happily close by and was soon joined by others laughing in tandem. Nick finished off the beer and raised a hand to catch the barman’s attention.

Then the mobile phone in his jacket pocket buzzed ominously.

* * *

He was still humming “Orange Colored Sky” while he opened up the phone book and ran the tip of his index finger down the first column of the sixty-seventh page to the twenty-ninth entry from the top—

Cole, Nathan K.

Nick sucked in a sharp breath and choked on it.

Coincidences gave him the creeps.

* * *

On a cold spring morning, just before the sun peeked over the distant hills, Nick sat in a smoky room at an interstate motor lodge and waited for the Indian on the television screen to give up the night for regular programming. He had been up all night and all the day before, and though his head swam and his vision was blurry, he had absolutely no intention of sleeping now. Sleep brought awful things to mind, memories mixed with liberal doses of some deep inner guilt that tended to manifest as demons and monsters that usually turned out to be himself in hazy reflection. Nick needed no shrink to decipher the dreams—he got it. He just didn’t want to deal with them. Not now.

Not ever.

The motor lodge was one of those ugly Southwest affairs made up to look like an Indian camp, or at least a 1950’s TV version of one. All the roofs were done over with fake plastic animal skins and the main office was housed in a gigantic teepee. Supposed to be cute, and Nick wondered what the Indian on the black-and-white twelve-inch screen in front of him would have thought. For his part, Nick found the whole affair deeply tasteless, but not from any lingering white man’s guilt—it was just plain garish. He wanted to get back on the road, get farther away than he already was, but he’d never really figured out where the hell he was going in the first place. Somehow it just seemed better to put distance between himself and the blood he had spilled. The memory of the killings faded a little bit with every extra hundred miles he put on the powder blue rental Buick he was driving.

The purple glow on the hills seemed to trigger the television, which at precisely 6:01
AM
sent the Indian packing and introduced a chorus of solemn, robed singers for some religious program Nick really didn’t want to watch. The pastor’s name was Dr. Elliot Jacoby, a name that garnered a roar of applause from the peanut gallery when announced at the lectern at the front of the huge church.

“God be with you on this,
his
glorious Sunday!” the good reverend doctor pronounced. Nick switched the television off and groaned.

Sunday already.
Christ’s sake
.

He glanced down at his trembling right hand, realized he’d had a cigarette burning between his fingers but now it was reduced to the butt with the ashes all over the bedspread. He tamped it out in the ashtray on the nightstand, swept the ashes to the floor with the edge of his hand, and walked jerkily like Frankenstein’s monster to the moldy shower stall in the bathroom. He worked at the knobs until he had the temperature just right, warm but not too hot, and got in, boxers and all. The water felt luxurious, which after a few minutes he concluded was not for the likes of him. He didn’t
deserve
luxury, did he? Without giving it another thought he turned the water all the way to cold, gasped at the icy needles that shot out by the hundreds at his bunching skin, and ground his molars.

Two down
, he thought, the faces of the cameraman and the Korean receptionist dancing cruelly in his mind’s eye.
One to go.

* * *

Flash, Bam, Alakazam!
What were the fucking chances?

Life was absolutely dripping with coincidences like that and Nick knew it. Thing was, normally he’d have a song in his head and then switch on the radio and there it was. Ooh,
freaky.
Nothing more. Happened all the time. To suddenly find himself enamored with Nat King Cole on the same night he’s asked to kill a dude called Nathan K. Cole—well, that was a tad worse than freaky.

If the cosmos was trying to tell him something, Nick wished it would mind its own goddamn business.

He stepped out of the phone booth and the kid behind the counter locked eyes with him. Nick sauntered over to the counter, pointed at the fountain and said, “How about a vanilla Coke?”

The kid nodded, went to work on the pop. Nick quickly added, “And a scoop of strawberry in it, huh?”

“Strawberry?”

“That’s right.”

The flourish was last-second inspiration: Nick was both lactose intolerant and mildly allergic to strawberries. Cheating, he knew. But a start. Maybe just the push he needed to get back on the right track. If he got sick this time, there’d be a perfectly good reason for it. The kid served it up and Nick paid in cash.

“Down the hatch,” he said as he dug into the noxious concoction.

* * *

Lexus in the driveway, baby seat in the back. Kid’s bicycle in the carport—that’s two kids. Just the one car, though; unlikely that they wouldn’t both have one, man and wife. Someone wasn’t home. Nick rolled on by, taking the scene in. Looked very homey, but somebody wasn’t happy. He noted the sticker on the Lexus’s bumper:
MY CHILD IS ON THE HONOR ROLL AT UNION MILL ELEMENTARY
.
Good for him, or her. Nick needed more intel. He drove on, didn’t make a second sweep.

His best guess was that Mommy was home but Daddy was out. It was past midnight by the bright blue digital numbers on the Benz’s clock, which made Daddy’s absence a bit strange, unless he was out for the night. Business trip, maybe, depending on his business. Maybe he just wasn’t around much. Nick took two rights and a left out of the subdivision and rode the farm road to the freeway clear to the south side of town, back to the Rialto and
CALIFORNIA F—KERS
and the familiar little Monkey Ward parking slot across the street.

The rain had let up a bit, slowed to a cool whisper. A guy in a dull yellow slicker shambled by the front of the theater. He was pulling from a bottle in a sopping wet paper bag. He hesitated under the white bulbs of the jutting marquee, thought about stepping in out of the rain, but the notion eluded him and he kept on. A few minutes later the myriad lights that studded the marquee flickered out, darkening the façade. Five stragglers shuffled through the front doors, ushered away by the women from the box office and concession counter, and the lobby went dark soon thereafter. Nick stabbed out a half-smoked cigarette. He didn’t want the glow at the end to be visible across the street.

The concession girl left first, as always. She popped open a black umbrella and walked hunched against the rain up the block and around the corner to Van Buren Street. Nick leaned closer to the windshield, fogging the glass a little with his breath. If the pattern held…

It did, and the girl came out next, having disappeared into the porno theater doing God knew what for six hours and emerging now, the ever-present plastic grocery bag dangling from her hand. No umbrella for her, the black hood of her sweatshirt was all she required. She zipped the front up to her throat and nodded to the box office girl, who locked up and nodded back. Box Office climbed onto a bicycle and sped off dodging the raindrops. The girl remaining waited. Nick waited with her.