Authors: Ed Kurtz
Nausea (22 page)
Love doesn’t
really
exist
, Mother told him.
You understand that, right?
It looked to Nick like his new employer wanted to be sure he understood that, too.
All he could figure was how, in a few days’ time, he’d be that much closer to acquiring a set of wheels.
So he patted his pocket, felt the garrote against his thigh, and went to work.
Easy peasy.
* * *
The bullet struck him in the chest, left of center, and knocked him flat on his back. He didn’t make a sound, not even when Lorraine’s cheek burst open, spitting a dark mist, at the noise of a loud report close by.
The rifle clattered to the pavement and she threw both hands up to her face, gibbering and staggering from side to side. Nick couldn’t move. He just stared, and while he did so Lorraine tried to scream, the blood pouring down her jawline onto her blouse. White shards dribbled from the red froth bubbling out of her mouth. There was a shrill ringing in his ears from the shot, a high-pitched howl that developed into something quite like sirens. After a few seconds he decided that was exactly what it was.
In the mid-distance, rolling up from University Avenue, the first cherry-tops came into view, pulsing red and blue and shrieking toward the intersection that would bring them right to Nick’s feet. He felt a tickle in his otherwise ice-cold chest, but thought it better not to cough if he could help it. Lorraine bent at the waist in front of him, her eyes bloodshot and streaming, the hole in her face ragged and nasty and drooling blood. She shot out a hand toward the rifle on the street, and a second shot rang out, blooming black at her temple and dropping her still to the macadam. Nick rolled his eyes back in his head and saw Lux Interior looming wrinkled above him on Trevor’s T-shirt. He knew he’d best not try to speak either, so he managed a small wink to let the kid know he’d done good, and blacked out before he could determine whether the message was received.
* * *
Misty died quickly.
Her john, a wiry man with a thin mustache, put up a fight, but it didn’t last.
Nick put a payment down on a secondhand Subaru the following Tuesday, drove it off the lot that afternoon.
On the way back to the motor court to start packing up what few possessions he had there, he got in behind a gleaming steel-gray Mercedes Benz on the interstate and decided then and there that, someday, he was going to have to upgrade.
And that meant quite a few more jobs between now and then.
As many as it took.
* * *
Nick came to with a head full of sand and a persistent ache that radiated throughout his torso. Machines were whirring and bleeping nearby and, in fact, all around him, and the antiseptic room in which he lay was partitioned by curtains on metal frames. He discovered his right wrist was handcuffed to the hospital bed on which he was laid out, and a hollow, flexible tube was sticking out of the left side of his bruised and stitched-up chest, greedily sucking away the fluid otherwise building up in there.
Dreamily, he wondered if the morgue was in the same building, somewhere underneath him perhaps, where Lorraine Szczepański was cooling in a metal locker. She’d be alone down there, her father in the ground by then, or at least incinerated and scattered to the four winds.
He couldn’t tell which hospital they’d brought him to, so he wondered too how close he was to the police department where Trevor and Charise were undoubtedly recounting their extraordinary night for the fifth or sixth time in a row to a bank of incredulous officers and detectives.
Good old Trevor.
Nick hoped Charise would be all right, after everything. And upon realizing he sincerely felt that way, he forgot to breathe for a moment. It didn’t matter. The machine was doing most of the work for him.
No one was rushing about, or even bothering to observe or check on him. The breathing apparatus and chest tube appeared, as far as he could tell, to have him well in hand. A punctured lung, he supposed. Recoverable. Curable—like his sociopathy?
Didn’t seem likely.
He conjured the image of little Lorraine—
Lori—
so tiny and afraid, fragile already and broken indefinitely, and his stomach twisted into a tight knot. In his mind’s eye, she transformed first into her adult self—all mother-naked and quivering psychosis—and then poor, pretty Spot. He hadn’t made much of it, of Misty: like the child he left half drowning in her own tears and snot he barely gave a second thought to what he had done. He’d become this—
himself—
because of her, hadn’t he? (No love, no emotion.) It was only fitting, but not worth lost time or sleep or introspection. Get in, do the job, get out, get paid. Rinse and repeat. Not human. Hell, she hadn’t even wanted to be born. She said so. Didn’t she?
Didn’t she?
Fucking
Spot.
Lucky Nicky
, he could hear her say, her blackened eye crinkling into a smile.
Somewhere close someone said his name. His full name. The voice low and syrupy. Full of contempt. Police, he figured. The owner of the key to his fashionable new bracelet? Mindlessly, he tugged at it. The steel rattled against the bed frame.
“Everything comes together,” he whispered to himself, knitting his brow and licking his bone-dry lips, “in the end.”
Seemed good enough, as eulogies went. He tried to reach the tube with his right arm, but he’d forgotten about the shoulder wound, much less the extensive bandaging, and had to swallow a scream. His face poured sweat, his head pounded from the center of his brain outward. For some reason he envisioned his garrote in a plastic bag, in some evidence locker, a cryptic number handwritten in permanent marker on the white labeling strip understood only by those in charge of organizing the local criminal paraphernalia. (Little codes, Nick knew them so well.)
He still had the original at home, shut away in a drawer. Sentimental. They’d find that, too.
Pushing a long breath slowly past his lips, Nick maneuvered his left arm, rolling the shoulder and sliding the elbow back, until his fingers could touch the chest tube. It was held in place with a suture in the flesh, past which the tube fitted into him between two ribs, all the way into the gunshot lung it was keeping from collapse. He remembered none of it, having blacked out in the street and presumably been put under with general anesthesia. But with the canister sucking away at him, keeping his airbag inflated, it was clear enough what would happen should it end up prematurely removed.
His name was spoken again, an inquiring lilt at the end.
Nick pulled the tube. Hard.
His lung filled, gradually but steadily, with fluid.
He felt fine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ed Kurtz is the author of
Angel of the Abyss
,
The Forty-Two
, and
A Wind of Knives
. His short fiction has appeared in
Thuglit
,
Needle: A Magazine of Noir
,
Shotgun Honey
, and numerous anthologies including
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014
. Kurtz lives in Texas, where he is at work on his next project, and can be found online at
www.edkurtz.net
.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at
www.darkfuse.com
.
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