Nasty (7 page)

Nicola rolled her eyes as the private investigator rattled on about her case and rummaged through cold, gray, dusty cabinets.

She looked around Max Whitlow’s disorganized, claustrophobic office and sent up silent prayers that he’d soon find her information and that this would be the last time his services were needed. Waiting for the big reveal in his hot office added unnecessary drama. Beads of sweat slid down the curves of Nicola’s back. She could not wait to get out of there and put an end to the mystery of her childhood.

After a half-hour of searching through file cabinets and boxes, God answered her prayers.

“Oh yeah, here it is.” Max pulled out a thick manila file and handed it to his client.

Eager to leave, Nicola grabbed the file out of his hands and stashed it into her purple leather satchel.

“Aren’t you gonna read it now? You might have some questions; it’s heavy stuff, Mrs. James.” Max knew she would need help. It had taken him almost three months to put all the pieces together and the story was not pretty.

“If I have any questions, Max, I’ll call.” She wrote out a check paying him a handsome sum, thanked him for a job well done, and left the office.

It was two days before she got up the nerve to read the file. She left it in the third floor library on top of Harrison’s antique mahogany desk.

She could not find the courage to face up to her past. But today was different. Armed with a fifth of Courvoisier, she entered the office knowing that she was leaving it a different person. The bits and pieces of her childhood that haunted her since the evening she busted Harrison were about to be clarified. She took a big sip out of the bottle. The liquid warmed her insides and inspired her to face the truth.

An hour later, exhausted from reading, Nicola’s brain whirled with details of her childhood. All the disjointed scenes from her childhood were now connecting and finally making some kind of crazy sense as she now remembered how life had been with her adopted parents.

The fiasco with Harrison was not the first tragic event in her life. From Nicola’s perspective, on the scale of life’s catastrophes, it only scored a three out of a possible ten. No, the big ten belonged to her childhood. Her fucked-up childhood.

The Martins weren’t exactly Claire and Cliff Huxtable of
The Cosby Show
. The only decent thing they had done was rename their baby girl in honor of the Nicola building, where officials discovered her at birth. It had all gone downhill from there.

From their rustic secluded cabin in Albany Pond, New York, Hezekiah and Ida Martin had run an ultra successful video business. Their top earner quickly became “Scenes with baby Nicola” series. These were not the cutesy, first steps taken, first
words spoken type of home family movies. Her parents were proud, card-carrying sex perverts.

They adopted beautiful Nicola for the singular purpose of casting her in child pornography scenes. From day one, Nicola was the star in their sick videos. The couple filmed Nicola as they and other paying adults performed lewd and indecent sexual acts with her.

Nicola did not have a childhood. Her first memory, at age three, was of her daddy, Hezekiah, ejaculating all over her face. Mommy was directing her from behind the camera to laugh aloud and act happy. This scene was repeated so often, little Nicola grew up thinking it was normal.

When she turned five, the couple made more serious, painful demands of her body. Customers paid more for videos that included both sex and violence. The Martins thought nothing of tying her up and slapping her around. They would thrust objects into her mouth, anus, or vagina. All the time her “parents” would ignore her screams as she pleaded for them to stop. The pain at times was unbearable. The more she screamed, the torture would intensify. All the while, the camera rolled.

Successfully isolating her from the world, they home-schooled Nicola. She quickly learned how to read and, at age seven, she could understand the newspaper. By age eight she’d connected all the dots and knew that this “loving couple,” the only parents she knew, who had tortured her without mercy, were the devil and his wife. She was desperate to escape.

On her eighth birthday, she ran away. Unfortunately, they caught her in the woods near their cottage. For punishment, her father had chopped off her pet ferret’s (that everyone called Little Nicola) head. Her mother forced her to witness the spectacle. As the ferret’s headless body jerked in what seemed
to be endless spasms, blood squirted everywhere, some splashing on Nicola.

Hezekiah promised if she ran away or called the authorities, she and the animal would share more than just the same name. The next day, he brought home another pet ferret and renamed it Little Nicola. She cared for it as if her life depended on it. They were inseparable.

Nicola needed to find a way out of her hell. The filming sessions had become a loathsome part of her day. She felt nasty and dirty after performing in the scenes. She hated her life as a “child star.” Ironically, a video saved her. At age ten, she watched a movie about a pyromaniac. It gave graphic details about how they had burnt down a house, killing everyone in it.

Over the next few years, Nicola was convinced that the only way she would survive was if the Martins died. The thought obsessed her as she made meticulous plans for their “departure.” A few months shy of her thirteenth birthday, at the Martins’ annual “for perverts only” Fourth of July celebration, alcohol flowed freely throughout the crowd. Wearing a provocative French maid outfit, with her hair stylishly pinned up, it was Nicola’s job to serve drinks.

She spiked the Martins’ drinks with the same valium they forced her to take to make her more cooperative during filming. She knew from reading through the Martins’ medical encyclopedia that alcohol and valium could induce a dangerous coma.

Nicola smiled as she watched her adoptive parents pour the cocktails she’d created for them down their evil throats. By party’s end, when the last guest departed, the Martins both collapsed at the kitchen table. Hezekiah still had a half-f glass of Scotch in his hand. When Nicola’s potion took full effect, they were both in a deep sleep.

Ready to execute her plan, Nicola, nervous and afraid they’d awaken before the deed was done, closed all the windows. She placed candles, hoarded for months, all around the kitchen, placing them strategically around the sleeping couple. The Martins often used them in the video scenes to create a relaxed mood.

When she ignited the candles, she looked at the evil duo, both sleeping and snoring peacefully, unaware of their fate. She smiled and had to agree, candlelight did have the effect of chasing away the fear and anxiety that gripped her inside. In its place was a keen sense of justice.

Nicola turned all the knobs of the old-fashioned stove on full blast. Escaping from the top of the stove and the oven, gas rapidly diffused throughout the house. Satisfied, she lifted her pet ferret out of its pen. Carrying the animal with her, stroking its black fur, she walked out the house and slammed the door behind her, forever shutting out the life she had led there.

She found a spot not far from the house where she could view the event and fell asleep. A loud explosion awakened her. As the only home she knew disappeared in the belly of the redhot inferno, Nicola felt true peace. Her hellish nightmare was over. For the rest of her life, the sight of flames would always calm her.

Investigation of the fire revealed that the deceased were the leaders of a sophisticated child porno ring. They confiscated videos starring Nicola. Evidence helped to successfully prosecute several members. Luckily, a fire inspector’s report listed the official cause of the fire as a gas leak. The insurance company placed a quarter of a million dollars in a trust fund for Nicola.

Immediately after the fire, she was admitted to a regional hospital for observation. Nicola remembered how doctors examined her and tried to coax memories about her time with the
Martins; none would surface. After a short stay in the hospital, authorities placed her in a group home in the Bronx. At eighteen, she was considered an adult and discharged from social services.

Nicola used the insurance money from the fire to purchase a tiny studio in Harlem and to support herself through college. Now that she understood the complete story, knowing that she was indeed the arsonist responsible for the Martins’ death, Nicola felt no remorse.

She realized now, the experiences in her childhood had damaged her emotionally. All through high school and her first years at the university, she had never even had a close friend. Never responded to a single boy or man who approached her. Even the decent ones. She had never dated. That is, until she had met Harrison.

Ain’t that a bitch,
thought Nicola.
All that fucked-up life, and the first man that I turn to wasn’t a man at all!

The pain and hurt were too much to bear. Nicola threw her head back and emptied the bottle. Totally out of it now, she and the empty bottle wandered down the hall. Somehow, she made it down the stairs into her bedroom. Forgetting to turn the light on, she walked smack into the pole she had used to entertain her ex-husband.

Rubbing her head, she yelled out as if the house was full of people, “OH SHIT! WHO THE FUCK PUT THAT THERE? OH, THAT’S RIGHT! I DID! I DID IT TO ENTERTAIN THAT FUCKIN’ FAGGOT! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ALL ABOUT? WILL SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE, TELL ME, PLEASE! WHAT WAS IT ALL ABOUT?”

Frustrated, Nicola felt her way to the nightstand and turned
on the light. She looked up over in the sitting area and spotted the huge framed photograph hanging over the fireplace. It was the one picture of Harrison she didn’t have the heart to pull down. It was a photo of them snuggled together on the yacht,
Nicola’s Beauty
, enjoying their honeymoon in the Indian Ocean near the Seychelles Islands. She looked at it from where she stood and threw the bottle at it, smashing both the picture and the memories into a million pieces.

“Next…” Nicola pointed toward the pole, as if she was giving instructions out to her rehab crew, “we’re getting rid of YOU!” Nicola found her way to the bed and passed out.

The next morning, everything about Nicola hurt; throat, muscles, brain, and bones. She vomited her insides out till all she could do was dry-heave. A high fever kept her body in sweats and chills. Frighteningly ill, her housekeeper called the ambulance. When they arrived, Nicola refused to go to the hospital. Instead, she popped Tylenol and drank the soups and teas that the kind Jamaican woman had prepared for her. On the seventh day of her illness, she awoke without pain or a fever.

That evening, she took a long hot bath and dressed in her most provocative outfit. She found the most dangerous pair of stiletto heels in her shoe closet and strapped them on. With one last confident look in the mirror, Nicola’s reflection confirmed that she was indeed a beautiful woman.

Nicola walked out of her brownstone that night a completely different woman. She was no longer the shallow, timid woman that Harrison “saved.” No longer the tragic child that two sociopath deviants had had their way with. She would never again be that vulnerable infant who was victim to an insane mother’s reign of terror.

This was a new Nicola. She would now be in charge and run-
ning the show.
The Nicola Show
. Starring, you got it, Nicola. And she dared any man, woman, or beast to stand in her way. And this time payback would indeed be a bitch. To a society that had stood by and let so much happen to an innocent baby, Nicola was going to tell all…FUCK YOU!

Clicking her heels to a confidant rhythm, she strutted proudly down Convent Avenue. As she walked, she could feel a little warm “itch” from her G-shot. It made her smile, because tonight she was retiring her pink little electronic buddy. Tonight she was in search of the real thing…a real hard, fuck-you-all-night, never-get-tired dick.

When she got to 145th Street, Nicola hailed down a cab.

“Where to, Miss?”

“Downtown. Club Zeon.” Nicola sat back in the seat as she headed to the hottest club in the city.

T
he African drums pulsated at a frenetic joyful pace. Ophelia had problems keeping up with the younger students.

“MOVE THOSE HIPS, OPHELIA! Move them to the right…now left…NOW! That’s it, baby! Ooooh…you got it. Now give me some nice belly rolls! Here…like this…” The young, buff, scantily clad instructor slid up behind her and rhythmically rubbed his pelvis against her buttocks, encouraging her body to do the same. He then placed both his muscular hands on Ophelia’s abdomen, forcing her to perform the proper movement. “Ahhhh…you got it, girl!” Pleased with his pupil’s progress, he moved to the front of the room and continued to lead the class.

Now able to keep up with the class, Ophelia hopped, stomped her feet, and jumped up and down, matching ancient African rhythms beat by beat. Her heart, loving what she was doing, pumped in tune with the music. Sheets of hot sweat poured down her back as the endorphins cascading through her body made her feel good, inside and out. This was a love dance. She was in love with her body and wanted it healthy. It was her way of saying thanks to the Creator.

Later, in the dance school’s locker room, Ophelia looked in the mirror and could see that her body was as tight as that
African drum! Her reflection revealed a woman fifteen years her junior. No one would have guessed that ten years ago, at three hundred and twenty-five pounds, she could have easily fit into a size twenty-four. Even at five feet and ten inches, that was packing quite a load.

She thought about her poor late husband. Pops never met a bucket of fried chicken or smothered pork chops that he could walk away from. He loved sitting on his four hundred pound ass and when he conducted business for his successful architectural firm, he rarely left his desk.

That’s where she found him dead two years ago after a massive heart attack. It took her a long time to get over him leaving her like that. If he had only listened when she begged him to shed the weight and adopt a healthier lifestyle. She was a nurse, after all. She knew what she was talking about.