Nausea Read Online Free Page A

hour had passed since the Ford pulled up to a two-level apartment building on East Fifth, whereupon the two dour kids tramped up the apartment at the top of the steps, plastic shopping bag in tow. Nick waited in the Mercedes in the dark parking lot of a long-ago shuttered Montgomery Ward and watched.
    The door to the apartment in question remained shut. The window was dark. A dirty old guy was pushing a shopping cart in circles around the parking lot behind Nick, but he did his best to ignore it.
    Nick also tried to ignore the pair of streetwalkers pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the building, each attired in dazzling arrays of spandex and rubber, their heads crowned with audacious wigs (bright blue and clown red, respectively). Blue was tall and spindly, her skin the color of chai tea. Red was a head and a half shorter, her bust straining violently against the stretched rubber halter top she’d unwisely chosen for the night’s uniform. Nick narrowed his eyes at her, could have sworn for a second there that she was an old friend. But unless she’d discovered the Fountain of Youth…no, it wasn’t her. Just another whore. That part of town had more supply than demand, or so it typically seemed. He couldn’t help but wonder how long they’d been out there, and not just tonight, but total nights, as if it somehow mattered. It wasn’t like they got gold watches when they met a particular quota of hours, or johns, or orifices filled. What they got was too old, or too sick, or too damn dead.
    He sighed and poked around the ashtray with a probing finger, looking for a butt with some tobacco left in it. He didn’t find one.
    He didn’t even realize he’d nodded off until his mobile phone bleeped and snapped him back to reality.
    “Yeah?” he croaked.
    “Delivery for ya,” came the voice on the other end.
    Nick’s eyes bulged. “Already?”
    The click had already sounded. The line was dead.
    Nick folded the phone closed and twisted his neck until it cracked, one way and then the other. He knew where they were for the time being, at least—with a little luck, they’d still be there by the time he was done. What he aimed to do then was something to figure out later. Now he had work to do.
    * * *
    Slick’s was, for all intents and purposes and for the foreseeable future, off limits. The jig was up, as they say, and Nick was now a known hustler, persona non grata. No scratch to be made there, or probably anyplace else on the scene, for that matter. And he was dead broke with weekly rent coming up and a girl who deserved better than paying for his third-rate Chinese dinner.
    So Nick did what he felt just about anybody would have done in his situation: he went home, cranked up the stereo, and proceeded to get roaring drunk. Half a gallon of Kentucky Deluxe and Bob Seger on the turntable; someone banged on the wall from the next shithole over but he paid them no mind. He just filled up a spotty water glass with K.D. and took it down in gulps while Seger soothed his troubled soul with that good old American heartland rock. And as the needle spun gradually toward the platter’s silent center, Nick grew increasingly drunk and drunker still. Halfway through side B and he was crooning right along, his voice a warbling horror that only broke away to slurp down another snootful of eighty percent pure grain alcohol. The place was vibrating to the tune of “Mainstreet” when Nick fell into a spinning pirouette and lurched forward, all of a sudden, and unloaded the entire contents of his guts; a wretched, heaving spray all over the linoleum floor.
    Crazy, really. He hadn’t lost a lunch since the sixth grade.
    Iron stomach, long as he could remember.
    Nick’s head felt like it was full of sloshing water and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Slowly, taking small, shuffling steps, he made his way to the kitchen sink where he rinsed his mouth and splashed cold water on his face. The speakers still roared That Old Time