Ride the Lightning (10 page)

Worst of all was the way he was smiling. It was the kind of smile you saw sometimes after hearing the dirtiest of dirty jokes. Like a crack in the curtains of a room where something basic and lewd was happening.

Nudger started to back up a step, but a huge hand darted out in an oddly lazy fashion and caught him on the side of the neck, driving him farther into the office. He skidded, caught his balance, and something like a bowling ball with knuckles rammed him in the chest. Air exploded from him and he was aware of saliva dribbling down his chin. He felt two more hard blows to the lower ribs, and he sank slowly to his knees, like a horse he’d once seen shot in the head. He seemed a distant party to what was going on; there was no pain, only numbness. He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t respond and he wound up merely windmilling his arms and looking silly, like something built for the ground but trying to fly.

Vaguely he felt two more punches, this time to the head. The last one only grazed his ear and did bring a slice of hot pain. Each time the big man threw a punch he grunted loudly; it was more a grunt of animal pleasure than of effort. The ear continued to burn and Nudger somehow got his arms up over his head and started to roll into a protective ball.

But the grunter had feet and knew how to use them. He was an Astaire of destruction. Nudger experienced the same merciful numbness, but he was sure he heard a rib crack as the toe of a hard leather boot found him where he was most vulnerable.

Then he was yanked to his feet. The camera he’d used that morning was still strapped around his neck. His assailant grabbed it and laughed loudly, having a high old time. He twisted the strap about Nudger’s neck, then began swinging him around like a bucket on a rope. Nudger heard himself gasp for breath as he stumbled in a circle, scrambling wildly to keep his balance. The revolving office began to fade into a deep and dizzying blackness pinpointed with beautiful, silent explosions of red, like hundreds of roses that kept blooming and blooming.

The strap, or one of the brackets where it was attached to the camera, broke. Nudger flew like something discarded into a corner, slumped on the floor, and began a rasping struggle for oxygen. Through hazed and distorting eyes he saw the big man hurl the camera onto the desk, pick it up and slam it down again, grunting as it broke into pieces that slid onto the floor. The guy sure liked to break things.

He walked over to Nudger, bent low, and gripped the front of Nudger’s shirt, wadding it into a ball that tightened the fabric and made Nudger’s head loll back. “Can you hear me?” he asked in a surprisingly soft voice. The words seemed muffled by distance.

Nudger somehow managed a ludicrous nod.

“A message from Western Union,” the man said, grinning. He was witty as well as muscular. His breath smelled as bad as his deodorant, only different. “Back off the case, asshole. You understand? Leave it alone. Com-fuckin’pletely alone.”

He stood up, seeming to float, and Nudger, with that odd numbness, felt the back of his head hit the floor and bounce.

“You understand?” a voice asked from up near the ceiling.

“Complete fuckly alone,” Nudger stammered, wondering if the hoarse, dutiful voice was his own.

“No.
com
-fuckin’-
pletely
alone.” Trying to be patient.

“Fuck . . . com . . . ’lone.”

“Oh, well. You got the message.”

A boot toe dug into Nudger’s thigh; there was another low, primal grunt.

After a moment Nudger heard the rear window scrape-squeak open. The big guy had figured it all out; he was parked in back and had known from the beginning he was going to use the fire escape to leave.

Nudger listened to the faint ringing clatter of leather heels on the steel fire escape, the muted metallic scream of the drop ladder levering down to the alley. Then he heard nothing but a high-pitched buzzing that he knew was inside his head, and he sank into a cold and dark place that scared him.

“I thought somebody was playing racquetball upstairs,” Danny was saying next to Nudger. Nudger sat with his eyes closed, concentrating on not letting the pain make him vomit. He was in a soft seat that vibrated and rocked; there was a low humming sound. A car engine. He slowly opened his eyes.

He was slumped low in the passenger seat of Danny’s old blue Plymouth. So low that he couldn’t see much out the windshield except the tops of trees and telephone poles zipping past.

Danny glanced over, caught his eye, and smiled his sad hound smile. But there was concern in his watery brown eyes. And something else. Anger.

“The guy had already got out the back way, Nudge,” Danny said. “I didn’t call the police; I figured I oughta ask you about that first. I couldn’t identify him anyway, didn’t even get a look at his car. And I only got a glimpse of him earlier when I seen him go up to your office. He musta been driving away while I was running up the front steps to see what all the bumping and bouncing around upstairs was.”

“It was me,” Nudger said. He raised his head to look around. A pain like a sharp slab of ice cut deep into his right side and made him suck in his breath.

Danny’s pale right hand patted him gently on the knee. “You okay, Nudge?”

“My guess is that I’m not.” His head began pounding with slow-pulsing force, as if someone were hammering long nails into his temples. “Where are we?”
Pound! Pound! Pound!

“On the Inner Belt. I’m taking you to the County Hospital emergency room. You need some X rays. And they’ll give you some pain pills.” Dr. Danny. “Guy did a job on your camera, Nudge. I cleaned up the pieces.”

Nudger didn’t answer. He settled deeper into the Plymouth’s worn upholstery and closed his eyes again, trying to stay as detached as possible from his throbbing head, from the playfully malicious pain that moved around his body and seemed to take a bite here, a bite there.

The message the human mountain had delivered to him was clear only up to a point. Had the man set out to smash Nudger’s camera in order to expose the film? Or had he simply found himself holding the camera after the strap broke and in his orgy of destruction hurled it down on the desk? He might not know that Nudger had already dropped off the Smith shots at a film lab, that Nudger always reloaded his camera immediately after removing film, that the film in the camera was a fresh, unused roll.

Nudger had to consider the man’s emphatic warning. “Hero” was a title he didn’t particularly want. It was so often preceded by “dead.” But even if he wanted to back away from the case rather than face another beating, he couldn’t do it.

His problem was that he didn’t know which case the big man had warned him about.

If it was the Smith case, the man’s visit had been too late. The photos of Calvin Smith scooping up his kid and carrying him around were probably developed and printed by now, and would soon be in the clever hands of Harry Benedict.

Once Smith realized that, it would be pointless to have Nudger beaten again unless for the pure pleasure of revenge. And a pro like the bone crusher who’d plied his trade on Nudger didn’t work cheap.

Nudger hoped the case in question was the Smith matter; not only would he see no more of his violent caller, but Benedict and Schill would pay the portion of Nudger’s medical expenses not covered by insurance.

But if it was the Curtis Colt case he’d been warned to get out of, Nudger was probably still in danger. Because he wouldn’t back away from that one.

He swallowed, fighting down the nausea that was hitting him now in waves. Persistence was all he seemed to have left in this confusing world; it was his constant, his religion. It was what his half-assed occupation was about, and somehow it had become what
he
was about. The sick and wrong ones could crush and grind him until he had nothing left but the ability to breathe. He would be scared and his stomach would turn on itself like coiled cable and he’d walk in where even fools feared to tread. Because he knew this about himself: if he couldn’t make himself crawl back to the dotted line, he was nothing. Everything else had been taken away from him. His work was the albatross around his neck that sustained him.

He was on the Curtis Colt case at least until Saturday, when there would be no more Curtis Colt.

The car slowed, then rocked to a stop. Nudger opened his eyes and saw a sun-brightened brick wall with half a dozen fingers of grasping ivy growing up it, a bank of wide, green-tinted glass doors with gently sloping ramps leading to them. A brilliant monarch butterfly touched down for a second on the ivy, thought better of it, and fluttered away.

“We’re here, Nudge,” Danny said. “I’ll come around and help you out.”

But Nudger had already opened the passenger-side door and was sitting straddling a yellow line in the parking lot.

XI
I

Filipino doctor and a husky blond nurse argued about Nudger’s X rays. Nudger and another emer
gency patient, a calm man with a fishhook in his arm, watched as the nurse kept trying to poke at the X rays with her finger while the doctor waved them around. Finally they decided that one of Nudger’s lower ribs might be cracked. They also thought he might have suffered a concussion.

The guy who’d beat him up had been very professional. He could have hurt Nudger much more seriously. Nudger’s face was unmarked except for a long red scratch, probably from a thumbnail, leading to his mangled and swollen right ear. There were fast-developing, huge bruises on his sides and on his right leg, where he’d been kicked. He was colorful.

County Hospital decided to keep him overnight for observation. They asked him if there was anyone he wanted notified of his whereabouts, but he said no. Claudia didn’t have to know about this. A cheerful nurse woke him three times during the night, probably to assure him that he really was being observed.

When they released him in the morning, Danny was there to help him ease his stiffened body into the old Ply
mouth. Then they drove to Nudger’s apartment on Sutton.

“Want me to help you get situated, Nudge?” Danny asked, after assisting him up the stairs and opening the door. It had been a long climb; they were both breathing hard and perspiring.

“I can make it okay, Danny. Thanks for all your trouble.”

Concerned and embarrassed, Danny mumbled something about what friends were for and started to back away.

“How about coming in for some coffee?” Nudger asked, leaning on the door to take weight off his aching leg. “You can have some breakfast if you want, but I’m not up to it.”

“Thanks,” Danny said, “but I gotta go. Dunker Delite sale. I put a coupon in the local newspaper. Buy one, get one free.”

Nudger nodded and watched him go back downstairs to the vestibule, then push out into the morning heat to walk to his car parked illegally in front of the building. He wondered if Danny knew that most customers wouldn’t dream of eating a second Dunker Delite. Probably he didn’t, and Nudger would be the last to tell him.

It was hot in the apartment, too. And the air was still and stale. Nudger limped to the thermostat and adjusted it so the air-conditioning clicked on, then he made his way into the kitchen and got Mr. Coffee going. Things were bustling, all right. The pain in his side started to catch up with him as he lurched into the bathroom.

He got undressed slowly, with a great deal of agony, then stood in front of the mirror and gingerly untaped his ribs. Moving like a man made of glass, he bent over the tub and turned on the shower. When the water was plenty hot, he supported himself with a hand on the porcelain towel rack, maneuvered his way into the tub, and stood in the blast of hot water and rising steam.

After adjusting the angle of his body so the needle stings of water didn’t beat on his injured rib, he began to relax.

He stayed in the shower for almost half an hour, until the water began to turn cool. Then he stepped out of the tub, switched on the exhaust fan to clear the bathroom of steam, and carefully rewrapped his torso. He wanted to lie down for the remainder of the day, and knew that he probably should, but he couldn’t rest until after Saturday. Then he and Curtis Colt could rest uninterrupted for a long time.

Nudger stayed in his white terry-cloth bathrobe and sat barefoot in the kitchen while he ate toast with strawberry jam on it and drank three cups of strong black coffee. He listened to some FM jazz for a while on the radio, then tuned to KMOX and caught the hourly news. The Cardinals had won yet another ball game. Other than that, things were grim all over the map. It cheered Nudger perversely to realize that there were millions of people in the world worse off than he was.

He felt better and was moving more easily, if still slowly, as he went into the living room to use the phone.

Siberling’s secretary was mad. Nudger had missed his appointment, actually stood up the prestigious firm of Elbert and Stein. It must have been like a slap in the face. No, Mr. Siberling wouldn’t be in anymore today. Nudger tried honesty and explained to her that he wanted to talk to Siberling about Curtis Colt, and time was fleeting. She was unimpressed but said she would leave a message for Mr. Siberling. Nudger got the impression that, like Curtis Colt, he’d have to murder someone to get to see Siberling. He had a victim in mind.

After hanging up the phone, he sat for a few minutes, then lifted the receiver again.

If one lawyer wouldn’t do, he’d try another.

Welborne Colt was easier to see than Charles Siberling. There was no one else in his office in the Belmont Building on South Central in Clayton. His partners, the “Edmundsen and Keane” lettered above “Colt” on the frosted glass door, were at lunch, Colt explained. As were the secretary and paralegal who usually sat at the semicircular desk in the reception area. The building was full of lawyers’ offices; at first Colt thought Nudger had wandered in by mistake, someone else’s client. When Nudger mentioned Curtis’ name, Colt’s gaunt, strong features darkened and his body tensed, but he smiled.

“Who hired you to hash over my brother’s case?” he asked.

“A woman who cares about him,” Nudger said. You had to play your cards tight with these legal types.

“I see. What happened to your ear, Mr. Nudger?”

“An accident. I was listening to Tina Turner and the earphone on my Walkman exploded.”

Colt grunted and nodded. He knew when not to press. He walked across the plush carpet of the reception area to the window, then studied something down in the street. He was a tall man, but built wiry like his brother Curtis. There was a muscular bounce to his walk. He had hair like Curtis’, too, dark and wavy, only his was styled shorter, razor-groomed, and receding and swept back in a way that lent him a dashing matinee-idol look that was almost caricature.

“I wondered why you weren’t in on your brother’s defense,” Nudger said, not very tactfully but to the point.

Colt turned and gave him a measured look that he had probably practiced before the mirror as a law student. Great eyebrow work. “We do corporation work here, Mr. Nudger, not criminal law.” There was the barest trace of Ozark twang in his voice.

“Some might say that’s a contradiction in terms.”

“Sometimes it is,” Colt said.

“Have you been in touch with Charles Siberling?”

“Curtis’ attorney? No, I haven’t.” He appeared uncomfortable, then leaned his weight far back on his heels and tucked the fingertips of both hands into the vest pockets of his three-piece, pinstripe lawyer’s uniform. It was a portly old man’s posture that didn’t look right on a lean young man. “Curtis . . .” he said thoughtfully. “Crazy bastard wouldn’t settle down. Couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Welborne Colt straightened up and removed his fingertips from his pockets, as if his stance were a pose he could affect only so long. He shrugged. It was one of the most elegant shrugs Nudger had ever seen; Welborne was young and limber inside his skin again. “Who knows? We didn’t come from a wealthy family, Mr. Nudger. My father sacrificed to send me to college at the state university, and he never let me forget it. Him and my momma, neither.”

The abrupt country dialect startled Nudger. It went like a black roach on a white rug.

“You were the oldest brother,” Nudger said. He didn’t mention Lester. “So Curtis never had the same opportunity. That’s the way it is in some families.”

Welborne smiled and shook his head. “The little shit had opportunity. Made straight
A
s in high school when he wasn’t jerking around with junk cars and becoming part of the drug scene. There’s a college near Branson, Missouri, Mr. Nudger, The School of the Ozarks. It’s self-sufficient; the students farm it and take care of the livestock while they study agriculture. It’s a damned good school. Curtis had himself a scholarship to go there, but he didn’t even bother taking them up on it. Didn’t even bother showing up to graduate from high school.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to ranch or raise corn.”

“Wanted to raise hell is what Curtis wanted. What he did. Especially after coming to the city.”

“Have you seen him since the trial?”

“No. I don’t want to see him, and I don’t think he’d want to see me. There’s bad blood between us.”

“He’s your brother,” Nudger said. “They’re going to execute him. That’s a forever thing.”

“He did it to himself, Mr. Nudger. The way once a cue ball is stroked by the stick in a certain direction, everything is inevitable. It’s going to bounce off a cushion, strike this ball at an angle and send it into that ball, and send that ball into another ball that will drop into a pocket. Curtis set his own direction and destiny early; what happened to him was in his future the way the pocket is in the future of a billiard ball.”

Nudger stood mystified, glad Welborne Colt wasn’t defending him in court. “Life isn’t a pool table, Welborne.”

Colt smiled handsomely, sadly. “Isn’t it?”

“Do you believe Curtis is guilty of murder?”

“If a jury found him guilty, he killed that old woman.”

“Juries have been wrong a few times.”

“They’re not wrong in Curtis’ case. And if they’d found him not guilty, it would only have postponed the inevitable.”

Billiard balls again. “Do you know Candy Ann Adams?”

“No. And I wouldn’t know her if she’s a friend of Curtis. We didn’t have much to do with each other after I got out of southwest Missouri.”

“Are you ashamed of your hillbilly origins, Mr. Colt?”

Welborne glared at Nudger. “You’re a direct bastard, aren’t you?” He rotated his wrist and glanced at the gold Rolex watch peeking out from beneath his white French cuff. “Let’s see you be even more direct. Why exactly did you come here?” No more Ozark twang now; he had it under control and sounded almost British upper class.

“I wanted to find out more about Curtis by discovering how he looked through your eyes.”

“Why?”

“I need to know the man whose life I’m trying to save.”

“You’re years too late to save Curtis, Mr. Nudger.”

“Probably,” Nudger admitted. He liked admitting that less than ever now that he’d met Welborne.

The office receptionist, a tall mannequin-perfect brunette in a tailored brown business suit, swayed into the office, smiled with dazzling whiteness, and sat down behind her desk. Her back was straight and she had the clear, alert gaze of the very efficient. She looked as if she’d been manufactured by I.B.M. and trimmed with lace.

Nudger nodded to her and moved toward the door. “Thanks for your time,” he said to Welborne.

Colt looked at him with curiously pained eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you much.” His glance shifted to the receptionist, then back to Nudger. “The party in question and I just haven’t had much contact.”

“You’ve helped,” Nudger assured him. “Blood tells. Peas in a pod and all that.”