Ride the Lightning (14 page)
Read Ride the Lightning Online
Authors: John Lutz
Nudger gave her a to-hell-with-it shrug he didn’t feel. “I’ll make an effort.”
“I do love you,” Claudia said. “Or I think I do. Which is why I’m being honest with you. I don’t talk about Ralph or the girls much . . . about what happened. But I still think about it too much.”
Nudger understood that. Thinking about Ralph just a little was thinking about him too much.
“You helped me when I needed it,” Claudia said. “I’m grateful, and I’d be lying if I said that had nothing to do with why I’m fond of you.”
“If you’re fond of me, why go out with Biff Archway?”
She moved closer, her dark eyes pleading with him to see her point of view. Her lips twitched nervously before she spoke. “After my marriage to Ralph, even though I love you, I feel that to fully regain my identity, my wholeness, I need to see other men. I’ve felt that way for quite a while, but I didn’t say anything about it.” She flexed her long-nailed fingers, eventually working them into tight, pale fists.
He stared at her. “What is this? Kick Nudger therapy? Did Doctor Oliver put you up to this?”
“It was my decision.”
“Well, I don’t agree with it.”
A few seconds passed. Something bright seemed to go out of her. She seemed to have made some decision about Nudger, to have withdrawn to a place behind some barrier in her mind where he couldn’t hurt her. Then she shrugged as if to say the hell with what
he
thought. She seemed to mean it.
“We had what the books and talk shows call a relationship,” Nudger pointed out.
“We still do. Only it’s changed somewhat.”
“Like the atomic bomb changed Hiroshima somewhat.”
She stepped over to stand next to him, rested a hand on his shoulder. He could feel a vibration running through her fingers. She was wearing his favorite perfume. Biff’s, too? “Don’t feel that way, please!” she said softly. She wanted to come out from where Nudger had forced her.
He moved away from her hand and walked toward the door.
She let her arm fall limp. “Nudger!”
“You wouldn’t want me here when Biff arrives,” he said.
“I asked for understanding,” she told him, as if she were disappointed in him.
“Can’t give it to you,” he said. “I’m feeling too sorry for myself.”
“Damn you!” she said, turning unexpectedly angry. “Don’t
you
lay a load of guilt on me! Not you, too!”
“Maybe Ralph—”
“What?” she interrupted, furious and afraid. She stood waiting for him to finish what he’d begun to say, close to tears, close to something else. Scary.
“Forget it,” Nudger said, and went out the door.
His heart was pumping and his stomach was churning. He didn’t feel at all tired going down the stairs.
He sensed that Claudia had followed him out into the hall and was standing above at the railing, watching him leave. That she might shout something after him.
But when he turned at the bottom of the stairs to look up at her, she wasn’t there.
XVI
I
udger didn’t feel like going home to his empty apartment and trying to tune out the silence. He didn’t want to find out how sorry for himself he could feel.
His side was aching, throbbing with his heartbeat. First he’d been kicked around physically, then he’d taken his licks mentally. Some life. Maybe the TV evangelists were right and he was involved in some sort of celestial test. Maybe boils and locusts were next.
Women were certainly one of his life’s tribulations.
No, not women generally. Claudia. She was primarily his woman trouble of the moment. It wasn’t wise to general
ize about people. About anything. Thinking that way could lead in wrong directions, and to more problems.
Eileen, for instance. Eileen was a problem and a wrong direction in Nudger’s life. But she was hardly similar to Claudia.
Eileen was a problem from which he longed to escape, Claudia one he longed to solve. But he sensed that any solution was beyond him for now, and possibly forever. Maybe
it had to be that way. Fate. Fate was always jerking around people who loved each other. Fate had a sense of humor that wasn’t very nice.
Nudger chewed antacid tablets and drove around the city for a while, down South Grand with it’s odd assortment of little shops and struggling businesses, along side streets lined with solid brick flats and houses lived in by solid Ger
man families, then west on Chippewa, past the array of cars and people at Ted Drewes’ frozen custard stand, along Resurrection Cemetery with its neat rows of flower-decorated graves. Traffic was heavy despite the late hour, and some of the cars had their hoods unlatched the first few inches to prevent boiling radiators in the relentless heat. Summer in the Gateway City. Sizzle, sizzle.
Nudger listened to the Cardinals game on the car radio. The Cards were winning ten to nothing in the fourth inning. He was glad somebody was having a good night; he knew he wasn’t. If only the Cardinals’ luck would rub off on him and he could win five in a row of something. Anything.
Finally he decided to go to his office and examine his mail, see if he’d won the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.
Relieved to have a sense of direction, however brief and insignificant, he stepped down on the Volkswagen’s accelerator and wished other drivers would get out of his way.
When he pulled to the curb in front of his office, a set of headlights swerved in behind him, then brightened as the car parked with its nose to the back bumper of the Volkswagen. Nudger looked in his rearview mirror. Too bright to see anything; like a damned Steven Spielberg movie. He winced from the glare. Whoever was back there didn’t turn the car’s headlights off, and left the engine running.
Nudger thought about driving away, but maybe there was no need for that. It could be that the car behind him was a police cruiser, and he was about to get a ticket for a burned-out taillight or a faulty muffler. The old Volkswagen provided a wide range of targets for a nit-picking cop.
Then a chill hit him. Maybe whoever was behind him wasn’t a cop. Maybe it was—
“Hi, Nudge.”
Danny.
Whew!
He had walked up beside Nudger on the street side. Now he moved over where Nudger could see him better, stooping slightly on creaky legs so Nudger wouldn’t have to crane his neck to stare up at him.
“I seen you turn onto Manchester,” Danny said. “I been trying to get in touch with you since late this afternoon. Called at Claudia’s, but she said you’d left over an hour ago.”
Nudger got out of the car, leaned against the warm metal in the bright wash of the headlights, and listened to the idling engine in Danny’s Plymouth tick-tick-tick. Heat was rolling out from beneath the Volkswagen, finding its way up Nudger’s pant legs and making him uncomfortable. He shifted position but it didn’t help.
“That guy that beat you up was back around here today,” Danny said. “Him and somebody else.”
Nudger felt another thrust of fear. “Did you see him go up to the office?”
“Nope. Both him and the other guy just sat in a rusty old red pickup truck across the street. The big guy was behind the wheel. They sat there for over an hour, talking and looking up at your office window now and then. Twice they drove away, then came back within half an hour or so and parked over there again.”
“You said there were two of them. What did the other one look like?”
Danny stepped closer to the car as a bus passed. The bus was moving slowly, heading for downtown, hissing and belching diesel fumes. A black woman in a window seat stared down at Nudger and Danny from behind the glass as if she were touring another world and they aroused her curiosity.
“The other guy was big, too,” Danny said. “Hard to tell next to the driver, but I’d guess around six feet, and built plenty stocky. He had red hair and a real deep suntan. Oh, yeah, I can’t be sure, but it looked like he was wearing an earring. He turned his head for a moment and the setting sun caught it, made it glint gold.”
Randy Gantner. Nudger knew what it meant if Gantner was connected with the strong-arm who’d beaten him. The beating had nothing to do with Cal Smith’s phony insurance claim that Benedict wanted investigated. It was impossible now to doubt: Nudger had been methodically bruised in an attempt to persuade him to drop the Curtis Colt case.
Now someone seemed to have decided he needed another round of unfriendly persuasion.
“Something else, Nudge,” Danny said. “I drove by your apartment about an hour ago to see if you were there. I didn’t see your car parked where you usually leave it, so I knew you weren’t home, but I did see the rusty pickup with the two guys in it. They were parked half a block up from your building where they could keep an eye on the entrance.”
Nudger’s stomach moved; he swallowed a bitter taste that had formed under his tongue. So Gantner and the big man knew where he lived and were serious about finding him tonight. Showdown time. Nudger would make an equally serious effort to avoid that confrontation.
“Thanks, Danny,” he said. “I’ll sleep in the office tonight; they won’t figure I’d come here this late.”
“Is there a reason you don’t want to phone the law, Nudge?”
Nudger absently massaged his stomach. “I don’t know what the law could do. I can’t prove anything I’d tell them about the beating. And it’s legal to ride around and park here and there in a pickup truck.”
Danny dug into his right pants pocket and pulled out a crinkled piece of white paper, a scrap torn from a doughnut sack. He handed the sweat-damp, abused paper to Nudger. “This is the truck’s license-plate number.”
“Thanks,” Nudger said, doubting the worth of the number. The truck probably had stolen plates, or was itself stolen. Otherwise Gantner and the big man would have obscured the plate’s numbers. “I’ll give it to Hammersmith in the morning.”
“You want me to hang around here with you?” Danny offered.
“I don’t see any reason for that,” Nudger said. “They probably won’t come back here this late, and if they do, the light will be off in the office. Will you leave your car parked there and drive mine home tonight? We can switch again in the morning.”
“Sure. Good idea, Nudge. That way they’ll figure you never showed up here.”
Nudger wished he shared Danny’s certainty about that. About a lot of things.
“I got a thirty-eight revolver in the doughnut shop, Nudge. Want to borrow it?”
“No. If I used it, somebody might shoot back at me.”
Danny reached through the Plymouth’s rolled-down window, switched off the engine and headlights, and they exchanged car keys.
Nudger watched the clattering Volkswagen bounce down Manchester and turn the corner, bucking like a one-man horse with a strange rider. Then he went upstairs to his office.
There was enough artificial light from outside for him to see well enough. He left the blinds raised as they had been since morning and tried to stay away from the window. He did switch the air conditioner on low; it protruded high over the narrow gangway, and he figured its hum wouldn’t be loud enough to alert anyone down on the street.
After setting the new dead-bolt lock on the door, he crammed a chair under the knob at an angle. Then he picked up the cracked beer stein he kept pencils in and set it delicately on the chair. If anyone tried to get in, the stein would fall and wake Nudger, and maybe he’d have enough time to phone for help or get out the window and scamper down the fire escape.
He dragged the folding cot out of the closet, set it up, and stretched out on it in his underwear, his pants and shoes nearby where he could quickly wrestle into them. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten dressed in panic; he’d acquired a certain expertise at it.
An hour passed before he managed to fall asleep. Then he skimmed the surface of wakefulness, hearing faint sounds, thinking about too much too rapidly, caught between dreams and reality. Curtis Colt and Candy Ann and Gantner and his overgrown friend were caught there with him. Gantner was wearing a pirate outfit with a huge gold earring and was about to swat Nudger with a shovel. The big man stood in the background with his muscle-caked arms crossed, Mr. Clean fashion, grinning his wicked grin. A blond nurse was arguing with a doctor over whether some X rays showed a broken rib or a broken heart. Either way, it was serious. Claudia was there somewhere, too. Only Nudger couldn’t quite make out what she was doing, or with whom.
In the morning, nothing was any clearer. Nudger awoke blinded by slanted sunlight, his mouth and his mind full of fuzz.
Danny wouldn’t arrive to open the doughnut shop until eight o’clock. It was seven-thirty now, and a prudent time for Nudger to leave the office. Gantner and his massive friend might assume he kept early hours.
He called the Third District. Hammersmith was still on the day shift, but he wasn’t due in this morning until about nine. The privileges of rank.
Driving Danny’s Plymouth, Nudger finally found Hammersmith enjoying those privileges and a huge breakfast at the Webster Grill near his home. Hammersmith seemed surprised to see Nudger walk in the door and motioned for him to sit in the opposite seat of his booth.
