Nausea (8 page)

Minutes passed—five, then ten. Nick drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Another five, another ten. The girl threw her arms up in frustration, sucked in a heaving breath, and then stamped out into the rain.

Nick frowned. The other kid, the boy, should have been there. He hadn’t been late before, at least not on Nick’s watch. He grabbed the door handle, but he hesitated.

“You’re on a job, damnit,” he admonished himself. “Leave it alone for now.”

Somewhere Nathan K. Cole was living and breathing and that was something Nick could not allow to continue. Still, there wasn’t enough intel to move on, not until he got a grasp on the family situation, what this Cole character did and when he did it. At half past one in the morning, he wasn’t likely to gather that data until morning at the earliest. And in the meantime, the girl was vanishing into the dark, wet night.

Pulling the handle with one hand, he snatched the keys out of the steering column with the other. He couldn’t very well follow her in the Benz, not without being noticed, so it was down to a foot chase in the cold rain. And for what? He didn’t have the clearest idea. But he set out quickly lest he lose her.

* * *

The morning air outside his room at the motor lodge was cool and dry, though Nick knew it would turn hot in a hurry now that the sun was up. Accordingly, he decided to get a move on, commencing his plans for the day with breakfast at the diner on the other side of the interstate. He was and always had been a bacon and eggs man, and he could conceive of no reason not to go out with a full belly.

The eggs were runny the way he liked them, the bacon charred and crumbly. He had a side of pancakes that he didn’t touch and a carafe of coffee that he drank to the last drop. When he was through, the waitress brought him a ticket and instructed him to pay the cashier at the front. He obliged, leaving an extravagant twenty-dollar tip. One last good deed before he sailed for the Great Beyond, he figured. Maybe, just maybe, it would make a small dent in the whole double-homicide thing come judgment time.

He took a peppermint from the basket by the cash register, unwrapped it and popped it in his mouth. On his way out of the place, he heard the waitress laugh giddily at the tip he’d left her. He smiled.

Upon reaching the Buick he jammed his hand into his jeans pocket for the keys and almost leaped out of his skin when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around to face a young man, about his age, with long sandy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. The guy wore glasses with black plastic frames and he was in bad need of a shave. He smelled of patchouli, which nearly made Nick gag.

“Hey, man,” the guy droned nasally, “I got a problem, maybe you can help.”

Nick opened his mouth, started to tell the guy off, but he remembered the fat tip and why he’d done that and reached for his wallet instead.

“Sure,” Nick said. He opened the wallet and withdrew what remained of his wad, a pair of tens and a twenty. These he handed over like it was nothing. The guy just stared.

“What’s this?”

“It’s all I got.”

“I’m not
robbing
you.”

“Didn’t think you were. You want it or not?”

The guy scrunched up his face and turned to signal someone Nick couldn’t see for the metallic blue van parked right next to him.

“Hey, Paul! Paul, come here a second.”

Nick said, “Look…”

The guy raised an index finger that suggested, “Wait.” Nick did.

“Hey, Paulie!”

“Yeah, Christ,” came a low voice Nick took to be Paul’s.

The new guy looked just like the first one, only fatter and with shorter hair and a spotty goatee. He looked Nick over appraisingly and then turned his gaze on the first guy.

“What the fuck, Danny?”

“He’s weird,” Danny said.

“So fucking deal with it.”

“Well, you’re
here
, now.”

Paul groaned. Nick realized he was still holding the cash out and no one was taking it. He slipped it back into the wallet and returned the wallet to his pocket.

“I’m going to go,” Nick said.

“Hold on a minute,” Paul and Danny said in chorus.

“You couldn’t get him to walk fifteen feet with you?” Paul asked Danny.

Danny shrugged.

Nick put in, “He didn’t ask me to. I tried to give him forty bucks. He wouldn’t take it.”

“What, you think he was robbing you?”

Paul shot a furious look at Danny and Danny stared at his shoes. Nick raised his eyebrows, sighed, and said, “Well, it’s been fun, fellas, but I’ve got a day ahead of me.”

“Sure you do,” Paul said. “Come on.”

Nick waved him away and stuck the key into the lock in the Buick’s door. Next thing he knew Paul and Danny grabbed an arm each and dragged him away from the keys still dangling in the lock.

“What the
hell?
”

“Shut up,” Paul said.

They dragged him around to the opposite side of the van, where the sliding side door was already open and waiting. Inside, a woman in her forties with her hair done up smoked a slim cigarette and sneered at him. Nick’s eyes met hers and for a moment he stopped struggling.

“Hi, Nick,” she said.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Mother,” she said as if he was an idiot for not knowing already.

The two men lifted him from the pavement and tossed him into the van. His chin hit the plastic seatbelt buckle protruding from the corduroy bench seat. He moaned and one of the guys smacked his ass before slamming the door shut.

“Relax, Nick,” the woman,
Mother
, said.

“You relax,” Nick seethed. “What is this? What are you doing?”

“Kidnapping you, isn’t it obvious?”

Paul climbed behind the wheel in the front seat and Danny got in beside him. The latter looked back and flashed a dumb grin.

“Be nice to Mother, now,” he warned.

“Eat shit,” Nick growled.

Danny frowned. “That’s not nice.”

Danny’s fist flew at Nick’s neck too quickly to duck. Nick felt his head expand, disconnect from his body, and float through the roof of the van into a vast, cold blackness above.

* * *

Somewhere, Nathan K. Cole was doing whatever the hell it was he did, but Nick was stepping quickly and heavily over, around, and much too frequently straight through overflowing puddles on the scarred and pitted sidewalk that carried him on the trail of a girl he had no business following. He still didn’t know her name, what she did, who she was. That was the largest part of it, the
why
of it—it had all begun as a sort of game, really, an excuse to follow through the steps of his chosen profession without actually getting his hands bloody for once. All Nick wanted to do was play it out, pick someone and play it out until—what? He had them in a corner and they’d all laugh about it over beers? He didn’t know. Not for sure. They were a chimera, a pair of sad, quiet ghosts who evaded him at every turn for reasons he couldn’t figure, and he had to. It was mostly him at first, the boy, but the kid hardly ever left their pad except to pick up smokes at the Circle K or hang around on the steps watching the world go by. The girl was slightly more interesting, if only because she spent four nights a week hiding out in a porno theater for six hours a go and for the life of him Nick couldn’t understand why. So he walked in the rain, in the middle of the cold damn night, his trousers soaked to the shins and the water dribbling down his back. A hell of a thing to do, particularly when there was a dead body walking around out there who needed to be informed he was deceased.

Five or six blocks up—Nick lost count after four, or maybe three—the girl huddled under the awning of a shuttered deli and watched the empty intersection for a few minutes. Nick dropped behind a pay phone and made like he was on a call, keeping her in the corner of his eye. Rain poured down in silver sheets on all sides of the awning, mostly obscuring the girl except for her general shape. It was a small shape, amorphous due to her heavy, baggy clothing. A black blob. The blob remained perfectly still for a while longer, then slipped around the corner. Nick swore, hung up the phone, and hurried after her.

He turned the corner and looked down a well-lit street, a row of conical yellow bursts every twenty-five feet on either side of the street for several blocks. A few cars were parked on the street, junkers mostly, and a taxi crossed from the next side street up. Its top light was dark. Nick scanned the street for the girl, saw no one. His eyes found a blinking
OPEN
sign in the front window of a dirty bookstore and he wondered if they were really open or if they’d just forgotten to turn the sign off. It then occurred to him that might have been where she headed—six hours with porno movies and then dessert with filthy paperbacks. Why not? He crossed the street and hurried for the blinking sign. When he reached the place, he found the door locked and the store dark inside.

He’d lost her.

It seemed impossible, but there he stood sopping wet and chilled to the bone in the pouring rain at a quarter to two in the morning. A kid had easily evaded him and somewhere in the world, Nathan fucking K. goddamn Cole was still walking around, or sleeping one off, or whatever a dead guy did when he didn’t know he was dead. Or wasn’t dead yet because Nick couldn’t get his priorities straight. He wanted to scream. Instead, he jogged back, he didn’t know how many blocks, to his car across the street from the Rialto. He arrived at it huffing and filled the seat with water before his rump ever touched the vinyl. He turned the key, started the motor, and stomped on the accelerator, nearly spinning out on the shiny black road ahead of him.

Vaguely he wished he would.
Flash, Bam, Alakazam!
he thought, and laughed.

In fifteen minutes he was back in the subdivision, turning onto the Cole’s street, where someone was snug as a bug in a rug in the dry warmth of the upper-middle-class house with the Lexus in the drive and the bicycle in the carport.

And a new addition, too—a Mercedes Cabriolet.

Daddy was home.

* * *

The blackness washed away like an ebbing tide, leaving nothing, not even white, which lasted for what seemed like a billion years. Then that too washed away and Nick was left with the throbbing pain in his neck and a throat that felt like it had been scrubbed clean with broken glass and sandpaper. He moaned, and the moaning hurt like hell, so after that he kept silent.

The road jostled beneath him and the engine murmured ahead of him. The dense, warm air inside smelled strongly of patchouli and cigarette smoke. Nobody spoke.

Nick opened his eyes. Paul still drove. Danny still sat beside him. Both men smoked. The woman shifted in her seat behind him, the one who called herself Mother. Nick planted a hand on the corduroy seat and heaved himself up to a sitting position. Tears spilled out of his eyes from the agony in his neck and head. Mother smiled coyly at him when he reached eye level with her. She was smoking, too.

She said, “Good morning, sunshine.”

“Thirsty,” Nick croaked.

“We’ll stop for gas before long. One of the boys will get you some water then.”

He nodded.

“Anything else you’d like? A sandwich, maybe? Some cigarettes?”

Nick shook his head. “Don’t smoke,” he said.

“How about a lotto ticket? Do they have lotto in this state, Paul?”

“Don’t know,” Paul answered gruffly.

“Are you a gambler, Nick?” Mother asked, her coy smile widening. “Like to try your chances?”

Nick narrowed his eyes.

“Because you strike me as the type who likes to live on the edge. A hustler, the sort to shack up with whores. Oh, and a cold-blooded killer, at that! That’s a chance, isn’t it? Murdering perfect strangers in their place of employment? People who—now, correct me if I’m wrong, here—but these are—
were
, of course,
were
, because they’re quite fucking dead—these were people who’d never laid eyes on you in their too-short lives, isn’t that so?”

“What—what is this?”

“Homecoming, Nick. This is your homecoming. Because we’re going back home. And you, my son, are going to face the music.”

Nick narrowed his eyes some more and before he knew it, they were closed again.

He said, “Fuck me.”

Mother laughed. “Too late for that, Nick,” she said. “You’re already fucked.”

* * *

Diagonal from the Cole house, on the other side of the street, was an almost identical house with the same neatly trimmed hedges in the yard. Its uniqueness lied not in the absence of a bicycle in the carport nor any outward expression of the homeowners’ children’s academic prowess, but rather in the plastic newspaper box affixed to the side of their regular mailbox at the edge of the front yard. It was stuffed full of soggy gray paper, three day’s worth of news at least. Whomever they had asked to pick up their paper had fallen asleep on the job, and Nick silently blessed that irresponsible soul as he crept from his Benz a block and a half away to the station wagon parked in the relative dryness of the neighbor’s carport. He brought along the slim-jim from his trunk and had the car open in seconds. He got into it quickly and shut the door with one hand while covering the dome light with the other until it faded out. From there he climbed into the backseat and watched the Cole house. He watched it for a little over three hours. Finally, at a few minutes past six in the morning, the rain having dissipated and the sun rising to dry out the world, the side door leading to the carport opened and out stepped a man who was either Nathan K. Cole or some guy Mrs. Cole was schtupping while the hubby was out of town. While he chatted with the missus and exchanges good-bye kisses, Nick snuck out of the station wagon on the passenger side and rushed back to the Benz. He caught up with the other Mercedes just outside the subdivision on the farm road. A sticker on its bumper proclaimed:
MY CHILD IS ON THE HONOR ROLL AT UNION MILL ELEMENTARY.

Nick said, “Hiya, Nathan.”

* * *

The quarry stopped three times between home and his final destination: once for gas, another time for breakfast tacos at a food trailer, and lastly at the First Mutual Savings and Loan on Chestnut and Riverside. Gassed, fed and moneyed, Nathan Cole finally went on to what he surely told his wife was work but was most assuredly not. Nick smirked when Cole’s Mercedes pulled into the driveway of a single-story starter home in one of those new cookie-cutter developments on the far south side of town. The pieces were coming together.