Nausea (13 page)

“Hi,” she said.

“
Hi?
”

“Hello? Good morning? I don’t know what you’d prefer.”

“Christ.”

Lorraine reached for the cup and Nick tightened up.

“Relax, killer. Just my coffee.”

He rolled his shoulders, thinking about a coffee cup years back, one he had to throw at a guy’s head to keep from meeting the business end of the pig-sticker in his fist. That one had gone down badly. Loads of blood. Bad scene all around.

But Lorraine only sipped her coffee and watched him.

“You want a cup?” she asked. “Got a fresh pot on.”

“No.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“No.”

“Then you might as well have a seat,” she said, pointing at the armchair behind him. Nick neither looked nor moved. “Or stand. Whatever tickles your pickle.”

“The hell’s wrong with you, lady?”

Lorraine snorted, holding the cup with both hands just under her chin. She looked to Nick like a commercial for Nescafé or something. Calm and collected. Ice water in her veins, he decided.

Like he used to have.

“I knew you’d be back,” she said. “I just knew it.”

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here. You didn’t call it in. You didn’t report the hit.”

“Not yet, I haven’t. I’ll have to, eventually. Probably tonight. I’m going to say I’ve been hiding in the closet the whole time, terrified to come out. They’ll know the body’s been sitting there cold a while.”

“Sitting—he’s still here?”

“Right where you left him. Well, I guess where
we
left him. We’re more or less in this together, you and me, right?”

“For fuck’s sake, lady.”

“You can call me Lorraine. What’s your name, anyway? Is it, like, Vinnie or Paulie or something obvious like that?”

“Hieronymus,” Nick said.

“Shit. Your folks never gave you a chance.”

Nick scanned the room, taking in the perfectly ordinary surroundings. Bookshelf, houseplants, pictures on the wall. He was too far away to make out most of the faces in any of them, though he did recognize Nathan Cole in at least one of them. Smiling happily in the photo with his mistress while decomposing on a bed stained dark with his own dried blood just down the hall. He wondered where she’d slept, if she had at all. An image popped into his skull of her cuddling up naked to the corpse and he shuddered slightly.

Cool customer
, he thought. Though he knew it was far worse than that.

“I’ve got this idea, Hie—Hee—look, I’m just going to call you Harry.”

“I don’t care what you call me.”

“I’ve got this idea, Harry, that you’ve maybe never met a client before.”

“I don’t have clients.”

“Well, okay. Yeah. I know that. The people you report to or whatever—
they
have the clients. They’re like the landscaping company and you’re the mower.”

“Mower,” Nick repeated, his voice a whisper.

“You do the work, you get your pay. Go home, crack open a beer. Watch the sports highlights.”

“Not a sports fan.”

“Maybe fuck the wife. You married, Harry? Is there a Mrs. Harry?”

From outside, Nick could hear birds chirping excitedly. Apart from that the subdivision seemed dead silent. People at work, kids in school. Nobody venturing a guess as to whether there could be a body in their midst. Much less a psychotic.

He let his mind linger over that diagnosis for a few seconds.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

Lorraine jutted out her lower lip, pouting childlike.

“I’ll be honest with you, Harry. That kind of hurts my feelings.”

“I could give a fuck about your feelings,” Nick said.

She heaved a sigh and set the cup back down.

“The customer’s always right, Harry,” she said, pulling at the hem of her tank top before pulling it up and off.

* * *

To Robert Hart’s significant chagrin, Destiny was not there. To Nick’s continual frustration, every girl that came around, be they dancer or waitress, was peppered with questions about Destiny’s whereabouts and activities. The more he drank—each rum and Coke putting him back another nine bucks, which mortified Nick, who barely nursed his own—the louder and more obnoxious Hart was about it. He started to ask the same girls two or three times over, the same questions, and before long they stopped coming around the table no matter how many crumpled ones he had spread out in front of him. Hart did not seem too frustrated about it.

A waitress in lingerie made to look a bit like a tuxedo skulked up sometime after the table was effectively quarantined, and she ignored Hart outright while leaning close to ask Nick if he needed anything. He pushed a hard sigh out of his lungs and thought what he needed was for Hart to keel over and die all on his own, or at least for himself to grow a pair of balls and stop putting off the inevitable. He couldn’t understand what he was thinking coming to this place, apart from believing the mark would go quietly if this small demand was met. Compliantly, even. Frankly, Robert Hart came across like a man ready to die. Already Nick knew he was a man who knew why he had to. Which was the larger of the two puzzles.

“I’m good,” he told the waitress. Hart watched her walk away with keen interest.

“My wife used to have an ass like that,” he said.

“Time marches on,” Nick said. Then, narrowing one eye, he added, “She the one that—y’know—wants you gone?”

“Ah!” Hart crowed, slightly startling Nick. “We’re finally getting around to that. You struck me as a guy who could talk shop, even in a joint like this.”

Nick didn’t say anything. The MC welcomed a slinky chick called Persephone to the stage, who wrapped her fingers around the pole and spun on one heel.

“The gods fulfilled his curse,” Hart said, firing up a cigarette, “even Zeus of the netherworld and dread Persephone.”

“What was that?”

“Women can be cruel, kid.”

“Because you don’t like her ass anymore?”

Hart grinned. “No, it’s not my old lady. She’s in the pen.”

“People take out hits from prison all the time.”

“It’s not her.”

“I don’t really care,” Nick said.

Persephone managed to unhook the bloodred brassiere from behind while still twirling the pole, her face a death mask without emotion. The speakers blared Nazareth and a pair of Mexican guys in flannel shirts and white straw cowboy hats sauntered up to the edge of the stage, fists stuffed with ones. Hart watched them, then gestured with his chin at the cash on the table.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Make it fucking rain for the girl. I won’t be needing it.”

Nick ignored the offer. He eyed Hart instead, who subconsciously bobbed his head to the backbeat. “Love Hurts.” Nick wrinkled his nose at the mounting curiosity in his mind.

Doesn’t matter
, he reminded himself.
You don’t want to know.

Just do the goddamned job, make good with that psychotic woman, and get the hell out of town for good.

On stage, ones and fives scattered down around Persephone’s stilettos as she arched her back to display the long pink scars underneath each breast. Nick wondered how little she paid the butcher who did the job. His mind wandered back to Misty, who hadn’t any enhancements at all.

Nor the heart to stick around when a guy ended a life or two on her behalf.

He clenched a fist, turned his eyes back to Hart. The mark.

“Finish your drink,” he barked.

“One more and we’ll hit the road, pal.”

“I’m not your pal. Finish your fucking drink.”

“One more and I’ll tell you—”

“I don’t wanta hear it, Hart. Keep your mouth shut except to kill that drink and let’s go.”

Pushing back against the table, Nick rose from his chair and stared down hard at Robert Hart, who swallowed the rest of his booze in one go. A small, sad smile graced the doomed man’s lips, which he wiped on his sleeve. Persephone finished her routine and Nazareth faded into some rap track and Hart said, “Just know I deserve this. What you got to do, I have it coming.”

Nick said, “Wonderful.” And grabbed Hart by the elbow.

Hart rose trembling to his feet, the alcohol sloshing in his skull. His eyes were watery and a bouncer with a lumpy, shaved head near the men’s room gave him the evil eye. Nick directed the drunk past the big man, to whom Hart slurred, “Anything you want me to tell Saint Peter for ya?”

“Have a nice night,” the bouncer growled.

With Nick’s hand still on his elbow, Hart laughed all the way out to the parking lot.

* * *

“Don’t do that,” Nick said.

“My house,” said Lorraine. “My tits.”

She tossed the top aside, letting it fall into a crumpled pile on the carpet. Nick ground his molars. But he didn’t look away.

“How many?” she asked, childlike, pushing her breasts out just enough to almost not seem like it was on purpose.

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

He exhaled, having not realized he’d been holding his breath, and started out of the room. Lorraine leapt up, rounded the sofa and blocked his path. Nick stopped, rolling his eyes and settling them on the microwave oven in the kitchen. Anywhere but at her.

“How many?” she asked again.

“How many what?”

“How many have you killed? Or hit. Or whatever you call it.”

“Get out of my way, Lorraine.”

She shivered as though the room temperature dropped twenty degrees, then let loose a high giggle.

“You said my name, Harry.”

“If I say it backward, will you disappear?”

“Not likely,” she said, throwing her arms around his neck and landing a dry kiss on his cheek. Nick grunted, spun out of her grasp as he planted his left hand between her breasts and pushed, hard. Lorraine gave a yelp and staggered backward, caught her hip on a kitchen chair, went ass over teakettle to the linoleum floor. “Harry!”

“Stop calling me that. And stop whatever it is you think you’re doing. It’s fucked up and I don’t care why you’re doing it, just stop. Next time I find out you’ve put me on a job, you’ll be next on the list. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

The girl pushed herself up to a sitting position and smiled up at him.

“You mean you’ll kill me, Harry?”

“I don’t make threats.”

“And how would you do it? Like you did Nathan? The wire around my throat, crushing my larynx, strangling me to death? Is that it, Harry?”

Nick took a step back.

He stared into her eyes, wide and almost shimmering. Her chest heaved with short, heavy breaths. He noticed her nipples were erect, the dark skin around them shriveled and straining outward. The chick was aroused, he decided.

She was crazy.

As a shithouse rat.

And Nick was getting harder than a brick bat.

Lorraine hooked her thumb in her waistband.

Nick said, “Don’t.”

“Kill me, Harry,” she mewled, tugging the sweats down over one hip. “Fuck me and see if you can do it. If you can kill a woman freshly screwed.”

“Arrange another killing and I won’t have to fuck you, girly. I’ll crush your throat with my bare hands.”

“That would only make me come so much harder, Harry,” she said.

Nick groaned, shook his head. He went toward the back hall, stepping over her. Lorraine reached up and gently placed her hand on his crotch, slowly closing her fingers around the shape of him.

Nick stopped.

“Some weapon you’ve got there, killer,” she said.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to picture Nathan Cole’s cold blue face. Todd and Brent, dead together on their kitchen floor. But all he could see was the same thing he saw with his eyes wide open—a pretty woman, half-naked beneath him and well on her way to making the other half match. A probable psychotic, or something damned close, who found out she got off to all the killing and death that someone like Nick left in his wake. She wanted to pull those strings, be the power behind his power, the power over life and death. Maybe, he considered, she was playing God. Bumping off anyone and everyone she could think of because her need finally broke her mind. Whatever. Whyever. He asked himself the same question he’d been asking for as long as he’d been doing what he did: was there a such thing as a bad job? Or did a killer do what he was paid to do, whatever the client’s reason?

Never ask why. That was always the answer.

Never again.

“What in the blue fuck is wrong with you, lady?”

He remained stock-still. Grew in her grasp. Opened his eyes.

Lorraine said, “Why don’t you come down here and find out?”

* * *

“I ought to be in the pen, too,” Hart said.

“Shut up and drive.”

“I deserve worse than that, even.”

“I said stop it, Hart.”

“I guess she does, too. Sylvia, I mean. My wife. It was her thing, that nightmare. But for Christ’s sake, I’m a grown man, aren’t I? I could have stopped it. I
should
have stopped it. I guess I figured she was the one with the training, the framed degrees on the fucking wall. She knew what she was doing, right?”

“Turn left on McNeely.”

The guy was starting to tear up, gently turning the wheel to go where Nick told him. For his part, Nick endeavored only to stay on task, and to get it done as quickly and painlessly as possible.

He said, “There aren’t any more street signs after this. New development.”

“All right.”

“Just keep going straight all the way to the end. Then I’ll tell you what next.”

“All right.”

A few of the prefab houses right on the turnoff to McNeely were inhabited and lit up, but farther down they all had
FOR SALE
signs out front before they turned into bare wooden skeletons with dirt hills for yards and construction equipment scattered pell-mell. At the cul-de-sac that dead-ended McNeely a half circle of bulldozers obscured the wilderness beyond, soon to be flattened and developed, too.

Hart slowed to a stop, the big, dusty back tire of a bulldozer illuminated by his headlights. A pair of yellow-green eyes glowed in the light, a hundred feet or so out, before darting off and vanishing.

“See that coyote?” Hart asked.