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Authors: Ed Kurtz

Nausea

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NAUSEA

 

Ed Kurtz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Edition

Nausea
© 2016 by Ed Kurtz

All Rights Reserved.

A DarkFuse Release

www.darkfuse.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

 

 

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OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

 

Angel of the Abyss

 

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1. LUCKY AND SPOT

 

 

“When the day is done

Hope so much your race will be all run

Then you find you jumped the gun

Have to go back where you begun

When the day is done.”

—Nick Drake, “Day is Done”

 

 

 

 

Turned out to be a messy one.

Nick hadn’t expected it. Figured on it being clean and simple, but the dumb son of a bitch put up a fight. Next thing, what was supposed to be a garrote job ended up fists and a bad curb stomp.

Ugly.

Nick was shaking all over when it was done, took stock of the scene and frowned at his ruined suit. The guy on the ground was worse off, naturally. His jawbone lay flat in a straight flush with the top half of his face. Nick looked away in a hurry, scanned the immediate area for the best place to toss his cookies. Being as he was standing behind a warehouse last used when Nixon was in office, he decided anyplace would do.

He climbed down from the crumbling loading dock and bent at the waist, thrusting his face at the aromatic weeds springing up all around his feet. Paused in this compromising tableau, he waited for his stomach to roil, for the warm remains of his breakfast to launch out of him. It came faster than he expected, lurching up and out like a geyser, blocking his airway and temporarily blinding him with tears.

The freeway roared dully in the middle distance. Nick caught sight of a campfire’s remains a few yards off, figured it was a hobo camp. Hoboes didn’t like to talk to cops, which was good. He shook his head, forced himself to gag some more. Nothing else came.

He couldn’t recall the last time he puked.

Straightening up, Nick shuffled back to the loading dock, leaned against the cracked cement, lighted a Pall Mall. The sickness was unexpected, that was all. Nothing to worry about. Probably not even related to the job—bad eggs, he reckoned. He’d finish his smoke, dust himself off, get the hell out of there. Just like always.

A few minutes later he ground the butt under the heel of his boot and narrowed his eyes at the purplish ribbon of the gathering dusk. The air was getting a bit nippy now that summer had ended; even this far from town he could smell woodsmoke. It was an old, familiar smell, a comforting one. He gazed at the shooting stars made by the headlights of the semis on the freeway and wished he could vomit again.

Behind and just above him, on the dock’s decrepit landing, the guy remained sprawled out the way Nick left him. His name was Lou something-or-other, a Polish-sounding name or maybe Czech, and the only other thing about him Nick knew was he’d been slipping it to his administrative assistant who happened to have a husband who didn’t take too kindly to the news. Or at least that was what Nick gathered from the guy’s desperate rambling near the end. It wasn’t the first cuckold Nick ever worked, and if experience was worth anything, he guessed the unhappy couple would end up split in the short-run anyway—he’d even told the cat as much, and went on to explain he wouldn’t do the wife when the time came, he didn’t play both sides like that.

“You’re going to have to get another man,” he’d have said, if he ever had any contact with the clients, “and they don’t come cheaper than me, so you’ll want to cash in that 401(k).”

Naturally the guy would get all jumpy about it, try to laugh it off. His hands shaking when he passed over the manila envelope with the bread for the job. Another stupid shit figured he could cure infidelity by taking out a hit on the lothario schtupping his old lady. It would make no difference to Nick. He’d take the paper. But it didn’t work that way. All Nick got was enough to find his mark, and scoped good old Lou something-or-other’s pad that night. Had him out cold in the trunk of the Benz before lunch the next day and off to the warehouse they went. Now he had five grand coming into his account to show for a ruined suit, a black eye and a pair of Testonis absolutely awash with the asshole’s blood. If he’d known the hit was on goddamn Smokin’ Joe Frazier, he’d have planned for it. But that’s what you get when you don’t ask too many questions.

Still, he imagined there weren’t too many assholes so lucky as Lou to get stomped to death by a pair of fifteen-hundred-dollar shoes.

Messy as hell.

Nick rolled his shoulders, sucked in a deep lungful of cool, smoky night air. He jabbed two fingers into his mouth, index and middle, and touched the soft palate there, tickled it. Oldest trick in the book, it worked on almost anybody.

It didn’t work for Nick. He gagged a little, did the whole dry-retching routine, but that was the extent of it. He wiped the fingers on the leg of his trousers and blinked his watery eyes. There was no two ways about it—he wasn’t getting sick again, no matter how bad his stomach roiled.

Bad eggs, he told himself again.

He walked a few paces away from the dock, pivoted on a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar heel, looked up at poor old Lou.

“Sorry, Lou,” he said.

He swallowed the spit in his mouth and climbed back up to drag the body down before retrieving the shovel from his trunk.

* * *

There were two names that shone brightly in Nick’s memory as big firsts: Diana Gonzalez and Joe Motal. Diana was a rosy-cheeked Mexican girl in Nick’s tenth-grade English class who surprised him after the homecoming dance by luring him into the backseat of her
tio
’s Plymouth and bestowing upon him the most astonishing ninety seconds of his life up to that point. His first lay. He was fifteen.

Five years and a moderate but impressive array of lays later, Nick encountered First Number Two. Like most good stories of a man’s youthful adventures and indiscretions, it began with a girl.

* * *

Her name was Misty Thorne, she was five ten in her stocking feet, mouse-brown hair that shined like oil and eyes forever loaded with private introspection. Nick was twenty; Misty twenty-six. The older woman, he sometimes fondly recalled, the siren that led him crashing upon the rocks. He was slightly more experienced than he’d been that night groping blindly in the back of
Tio
Gonzalez’s car, but there remained much to learn and Misty was a more than adequate teacher. Up until Misty it’d been missionary all the way, and until her that suited Nick just fine. But Misty had a bag of tricks with no apparent bottom, an encyclopedic knowledge of games and positions and sensory experiences Nick hadn’t dreamed of. She was a kind of animal and animal trainer both, her greatest skill the effortless ability to denude him of the stifling strictures of civility, for which she had no patience at all in the bedroom. The first time she slipped a middle finger into his rectum he nearly collapsed from a coronary. Within a week he discovered to his astonishment that he was disappointed when she kept her exploratory digits to herself.

He was hustling frat boys at Slick’s when he met her, playing naïve and losing miserably to the inferior players until they were sure they had him for all he was worth. It was good money in the late summer when the new batch flooded in and Nick made the most of it, knowing damn well his luck would run out as soon as his con became evident. He was six hundred to the good on a bumping Friday night when a flat-topped mountain in a Detroit Lions jacket got mad about a two rails reverse shot that wasn’t much more than showing off and landed an openhanded slap across the side of Nick’s head. Nick went down, but he jabbed the fat end of his cue like a joust and smashed the monster’s left eye. Next thing a half-empty bottle of Heineken exploded over the crown of his skull and he was dragged out the back door by his arms while the mountain pressed a hand to his bloody eye and wailed like a mourning Greek.

They all looked more or less the same in the dim light of Slick’s backroom, more so in the near pitch alley that separated the bar from the shuttered florist’s next door. Stocky and lantern-jawed and quite civilly taking turns as they kicked the living shit of him down there on the cement. (
“After you”; “No, please, I insist,”
he later reimagined the scene with a bitter laugh.) They cracked a rib, outright broke another. Stamped a thumb and wrenched it out of place. He lost a bicuspid that would have left a conspicuous gap in his smile if he ever smiled, took three years before he got around to having a crown put in. An errant sneaker found his ear and the alley got bright for an instant. As the sparkling light dissolved he felt a hand worm into one pocket and then another, divesting him of all his ill-gotten gains.

He never did see the mountain again, but he liked to think the son of a bitch lost that eye.

After a while and a lot of disinterested passersby, someone finally paused long enough to inquire after Nick’s well-being, one of those nosy Yankee-type ladies whose busybodiness finally proved useful for something. A quarter of an hour later a pair of grumbling paramedics tossed him into the back of an ambulance and deposited him at Breckenridge Hospital, where he was patched up, doped up, and kicked out with pockets as empty as his prospects. Right then and there Nick met his brown-haired, black-eyed savior.

She was waiting down at the end of the sidewalk, watching the traffic with anxious eyes. Her left arm was in a sling and there were stitches in her cheek. When a yellow top light appeared among the herky-jerky throng of steel and glass, she threw her good arm in the air and stepped off the curb. Nick watched with limited interest until her heel slipped on the curve of the curb and she went tumbling into the street.

Nick fell into a dash. His ribs ached and his head swam but he kept moving until he’d grabbed a fistful of her downy coat and heaved her back up to the sidewalk. She screamed bloody murder.

“Don’t touch me! Get off, you son of a bitch!”

So much for chivalry.

* * *

The only trouble with a fresh grave was how goddamn fresh it looked—you could spot one half a mile away if you knew what to look for. It was for this reason that Nick buried Lou directly beneath the dilapidated loading dock. As soon as he patted down the soil with the flat of the shovel, he climbed the crumbling steps and set to breaking off chunks of concrete and pushing them down over the grave. Looked as natural as though time had done all the damage, just another example of middle-American industrial decay.

Five large
, he reminded himself.
Minus a new suit and shoe repair.

His stomach jumped again.

He didn’t feed himself the line about the eggs this time.

Nick tossed the shovel back in the trunk, slammed it shut, climbed in behind the wheel. Cranked the engine to life, but left the headlamps off. He had one hand on the wheel and the other drifted to his belly.

BOOK: Nausea
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