by John Lutz
Lacy didn’t argue, but it took her a while to stop giggling. Nudger cut her some slack, attributing her behavior to nervous reaction.
When they found their way to the road, Lacy began walking in the opposite direction from where the Granada was parked.
It took Nudger only a moment to see where she was going. Near a bend in the road was a red neon sign that said STEAMBOAT RESTAURANT.
“We can call a cab there,” Lacy said. “That way we can ride back to your car without walking past the Hart estate. After we get your car, we can drive back for the canoe.”
“Good plan,” Nudger said. He was still shaking and his legs were wobbly. “But I’m going to make another call.”
“Who to?”
“Hammersmith. About that kid in the pool.”
Chapter Thirty
You need more than what you saw, Nudge,“ Hammersmith said, when Nudger called him from the Steamboat Restaurant. It was a tiny place with paneled walls covered with photographs of celebrities. Most of the photos were autographed. Nudger couldn’t believe any of those people had ever eaten here. The signatures must be forged. “Not that I don’t agree with you, but from a legal standpoint, lying around nude while a kid swims isn’t exactly child molestation. Then there’s the fact you were trespassing on the guy’s property.”
Nudger hadn’t mentioned breaking and entering. He remained silent, staring at Steve McQueen, who stared sullenly back at him above “Loved your Steamboatburger—Best wishes.”
“Then there’s the fact that Hart has money and influence and a herd of attorneys,” Hammersmith continued. “You have none of those things. As I see it, Nudge, if you really push this, you might wind up paying a fine and seeing prison time.”
“Life not being fair,” Nudger said, “you’re probably right.”
“If you do get something solid on Hart with the kid, let me know. I mean that.”
Nudger said that he would, then hung up, frustration wringing his stomach into tight knots.
He left the phone and sat at a table with Lacy near a window. They were both exhausted and said little as they sipped diet Cokes and waited for the cab.
“Police gonna move on Hart about the kid?” Lacy asked.
“No. They can’t.”
“Thought that was how it’d be.” She sounded bitter and resigned.
They sat and sipped, depressed and staring out at the darkness. Life not being fair.
After returning to the Granada by cab, they drove back to where they’d left the canoe near the half-submerged trees. There was no way to get the car close, so Nudger and Lacy had to drag and wrestle the canoe to where he’d parked the Granada twenty feet off the road.
Nudger was puffing hard by the time they’d hoisted the canoe upside down onto the roof of the car and lashed it down with ropes, strung through the rolled-down windows and across the inside of the car, so it wouldn’t blow off on the highway.
“Can we return this boat tomorrow?” Nudger asked, as he settled down behind the steering wheel and started the engine.
“Canoe, Nudger,” Lacy said beside him.
“What?”
“It’s a canoe, not a boat.”
Nudger didn’t think it was time for a lesson in nautical terms. He steered the Granada back onto Peterson Road and accelerated. “I’ll drop you off, then I’ll leave the canoe tied to the roof of the car out in front of my apartment. Nobody will steal it.”
“Somebody might.” She sounded irritated. The night’s tension had passed and she was emotionally played out.
Well, Nudger was played out and irritated himself If Lacy hadn’t bought that stupid, block-long convertible that looked like something Elvis had traded in, the boat—canoe—would be lashed to the top of her car. “Then how about when I drop you off,” he said, “we take the canoe down from the car and leave it at your—”
He stopped talking when he noticed brightness and saw headlights looming larger and larger in the rearview mirror. He was aware of Lacy turning around in her seat to look behind them.
“Nudger—”
The headlights were suddenly blinding. Nudger’s head snapped back and bounced off the headrest as whatever was behind them slammed into the rear of the Granada.
The steering wheel writhed in his hands and the car swayed and bucked as the right front wheel left the road. Trying to keep his grip on the sweat-slippery plastic, he fought the steering wheel, yanking it hard to the left.
The Granada bounced back onto the road and was suddenly up on its two left wheels. It crashed down with a teeth-rattling jolt and thunked level again, then finally straightened out. But the headlights grew brighter as whatever was behind them closed in again at high speed.
Nudger stomped on the accelerator. The Granada’s engine snorted and rattled, but the headlights in the mirror remained the same. They were high off the road and widely spaced. He saw the dark form of what looked like a pickup truck raised to a towering height on jacked-up suspension and oversized tires. It was the kind of vehicle that might roll right over the Granada, crushing it into something unrecognizable as a car.
Nudger’s stomach manufactured acid that rose into his throat. He mashed his foot down harder on the accelerator, but the headlights behind them stayed close.
“I don’t need this!” he screamed. “I don’t need this!”
“Shut up and drive!” Lacy snapped. “They’re getting closer! ”
“It’s one of those monster trucks!” Nudger shouted over the roar of the engine and the wind rocketing through the open windows.
“Stamp on the accelerator! Give the car more gas!”
“I am! We have to stay on the road!”
“More gas!”
“We can’t outrun it, Lacy.”
“We should have brought my car!”
“We couldn’t see where we were going, with a boat over our heads!”
Which gave him an idea: couldn’t see where we were going.
“Canoe!” Lacy said.
“Yoo-Hoo!”
“What?”
“There’s a Yoo-Hoo bottle rolling around on the floor on your side. Pick it up and toss it out the window so it hits the truck’s windshield! Maybe we can blind them!”
“Very good, Nudger!” She bent low, groped around, and came up with the empty Yoo-Hoo bottle.
“Wait till they close in again, so you can’t miss!” Nudger instructed.
But there was no need to wait. The big truck’s engine roared angrily behind them like a beast pursuing prey, and the headlights rushed toward them.
“Aim carefully!” Nudger shouted.
Lacy extended her right arm out the window, craned her neck to keep an eye on the truck, and deftly and decisively flung the Yoo-Hoo bottle up and behind the Granada.
Immediately the truck’s headlights withdrew. For an instant, in the rearview mirror, Nudger could see its windshield.
Damn! It looked okay.
“Missed!” he shouted.
“I hit it, Nudger!” Lacy corrected. She was twisted around and could see the truck directly through the rear window. “You just can’t see it in the mirror. The bottle cracked the hell out of the truck’s windshield!”
“Not enough!” Nudger yelled. “The driver can still see out well enough to drive. And right over the top of us.”
“Then see if you can get this junk you drive to go faster!”
“Dunker Delite!”
“Huh?”
“There’s a very stale, very hard Dunker Delite on the floor in a sack. Take it out and see if you can score another hit on the truck’s windshield.”
“That’s only a doughnut, Nudger!” Lacy said incredulously.
“A Dunker Delite isn’t only a doughnut, Lacy!”
She bent forward, came up with the crumpled and greasy paper bag, and removed the Dunker Delite. “This thing really is hard and heavy,” she said. “It must weigh several pounds.”
The mirror reflected brilliant light from closi
ng headlights.
“Here they come again!” Nudger yelled.
Lacy repeated her maneuver, this time with the Dunker Delite instead of the Yoo-Hoo bottle.
The truck made contact with the Granada, causing it to careen as Nudger fought the steering wheel for control.
But when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw the headlights falling back and could see that the truck’s windshield had become milky white, its shatterproof glass fragmented but still in its frame. The Dunker Delite missile had done its job and finished what the Yoo-Hoo bottle had started.
“Wha-hoo!” Lacy yelled.
Nudger got the car going in the direction of the road and accelerated. The headlights behind them fell back then veered out of sight.
“We got ’em!” Lacy shouted.
But the headlights were behind them again, distant and drawing nearer, only not so fast.
“They can’t see much,” Nudger said, “but they’re still back there, and traveling fast.”
“Let’s feed ’em the damned boat!” Lacy said.
“Canoe.”
She wrested her pocketknife from her jeans and opened it, then got on her knees on the front seat facing backward and began sawing at the taut ropes holding the canoe to the roof despite the wind that whirled beneath it.
“Hold on to the rope on your side,” she said, and started sawing on the ropes strung through the front windows and across the inside of the car inches beneath the headliner. “They’ll come at us again.”
“We’ve gotta do this right!” Nudger said, clutching the cut rope and feeling the windblown canoe yank at it and test his grip. He slowed the car a few miles per hour.
The driver behind them took advantage of the slackened speed and a straight stretch of road. The truck speeded up. Nudger tapped the accelerator as if trying to escape another attack. They needed to be traveling fast, but not too fast.
“Let go the rope when I say!” Lacy shouted. She was holding the rope end on her side of the car with both hands, craning her neck to watch the truck close in.
Nudger built up more speed.
The truck kept coming.
“Now, Nudger!”
They released their grips on the ropes simultaneously. Nudger heard a metallic scraping sound on the car’s roof as the wind beneath the canoe lifted it and momentarily held it airborne. He caught a glimpse of it in the rearview mirror, spinning sideways.
There was a loud crash behind them and the truck’s headlights went dark.
On her knees again, facing backward, Lacy was bouncing up and down on the seat. “Wha-hoo!” she screamed again. “That stopped the bastards!”
Nudger’s entire body was shaking.
“Game point!” Lacy yelled jubilantly, slapping the back of the seat.
Game? Nudger’s heart was slam-dancing with his ribs as he kept his speed up on the dark river road, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the disabled monster truck. His stomach was pulsating and he was nauseated. He fumbled for his roll of antacid tablets, but his hands were trembling so he couldn’t remove them from his shirt pocket.
“You gotta admit it, Nudger,” Lacy crowed, jabbing him in the ribs with her elbow, “that was a major rush! It was goddam great!”
Nudger admitted nothing.
“Now we don’t have to return the canoe!” she said. She began laughing insanely.
What have I gotten into? Nudger wondered, concentrating on keeping the car on the dark, curved road.
Where is it taking me?
Chapter Thirty-One
Nudger was in a canoe over Germany. Below him Berlin blazed. Tracer bullets flashed by him and Messerschmitt fighter planes roared past in tight formation and winged into a steep turn to make another pass. He put his canoe into a dive, but the canoe wasn’t as fast as the Messerschmitts. The German planes were behind him, diving faster and closing the distance, about to open fire and blast the canoe out of the sky. A terrified Nudger knew he would either be killed in the air or plunge into the dark ocean below and die on impact. He wondered which would hurt most. One of the Messerschmitts honked its horn and roared past him, its pilot, Wayne Hart, looking over at him and grinning. “Wear some clothes, you bastard!” Nudger screamed into his radio mike, and futilely hurled a Yoo-Hoo bottle at the German plane. Hart was saying something back. Nudger suddenly realized a Messerschmitt was on his tail, and he didn’t have a parachute. The canoe’s phone was ringing.
Nudger awoke and groped for the receiver, his eyes still closed.
“ ’Lo,” he muttered thickly into the phone. He found he couldn’t open his eyes; they seemed to be sealed shut with gluelike mucus. “ ’Lo,” he said again, pressing the cool plastic receiver hard against his ear. There was a roar, and he thought the German planes were returning. That got his eyes open.
His bedroom was bright with morning sunlight swirling with dust motes. He heard the roar again, and he knew it had been made by a bus on Sutton Avenue beneath his window.
There were no German planes. He sighed with relief at not having to cope with airborne Nazis.
“Nudge? You okay?”
Hammersmith. Not Goring.
“Okay,” Nudger said, rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his free hand. “You woke me up, is all.” He looked over at the clock on the nightstand and saw it was a few minutes past nine.
“I wanted to catch you before you did anything rash,” Hammersmith said. “I did some more checking on Wayne Hart. He’s a leading donor to Mizenty House.”
“What’s Mizenty House?” Nudger asked, trying to get his tongue moving so his words weren’t slurred by sleep.
“Charity that helps pregnant teenagers. Some of the wealthiest people in the area support it. That could explain the young girl you saw in Hart’s swimming pool.”
“She didn’t look pregnant,” Nudger said.
“You don’t look like a tough private eye.”
Okay, Nudger thought, looks could deceive.
“What you saw might have been perfectly innocent,” Hammersmith said.
“Not a chance.”
“Be sure, Nudge. I figured I better call before you went charging in someplace and regretted it. Guys like Hart can hold a grudge.”
“He was sitting around in front of the kid nude,” Nudger said. “Wasn’t even wearing any clothes in his plane.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. I’m saying that what I saw didn’t look innocent.”
“And I’m saying maybe it wasn’t, but you can’t do anything about it. Every year, Hart has a big fund-raising party on his estate, takes some of the big-shot donors out on the river in his boat. The fund-raiser’s coming up soon. That might be why that young girl was in his pool. She might have a role in the proceedings.”
“C’mon, Jack!”
“I’m just being devil’s advocate, Nudge. Hart would probably say she was going to be this year’s Mizenty House poster girl or some such.”
“He was naked. This is St. Louis.”
“Maybe you made a mistake and he had on skimpy swim trunks. Or maybe even one of those flesh-colored trunks, you know, string bikinis or whatever, that you might not have been able to see from your angle.”
“Okay,” Nudger said, defeated.
“Devil’s advocate,” Hammersmith reminded him. “I’m only trying to help you.”
“I know. Thanks for the warning.”
“Another thing. It looks like we got an ID on the guy who did a job on you and Lacy. He’s a Serbian refugee named Ratko Djukic.” Hammersmith diligently spelled the last name for Nudger. “Been in this country about six months, which is why we didn’t have much on him. Still nothing official on him, but the word from the Feds is that he’s a war criminal, only it can’t be proved.”
“How and why did he find his way to this country?”
“The how is that he was probably sponsored by someone with money and pull. I can’t tell you the why, because I don’t know it.”
/> “Do the Feds know Dju—Ratko’s—sponser?”
“Nope. I checked on that one myself I didn’t mean an official sponsor, Nudge, only someone who wanted Ratko in this country.”
“I can guess who,” Nudger said.
“But you can’t prove it.”
“Not now, I can’t. But maybe later.”
“Don’t poke anything anyplace where it might get cut off, Nudge,” Hammersmith warned.
“Remember Eileen?” Nudger asked. But Hammersmith had hung up.
Nudger lay back in bed, listening to traffic down on Sutton and thinking about Wayne Hart and the young girl. About Ratko the pointy-headed giant and his bowie knife. Had he been the driver of the killer truck last night? Monster truck, monster driver?
Awake and afraid and angry now, Nudger climbed out of bed. He felt helpless and probably was helpless; modern man in the modern world, aligned against goons in the employ of the untouchable, entangled in misapplied laws and facing phalanxes of attorneys with briefcases.
He showered, got dressed, and found that he was out of coffee. Decided to have orange juice instead with his buttered toast. Burned his toast so badly it was inedible. Dribbled orange juice on the front of his white shirt. Felt not at all better.
“You look like something the dog drug in, Nudge,” Danny said, when Nudger entered Danny’s Donuts.
“Cat,” Nudger corrected, sliding onto a stool at the stainless-steel counter.
“You say black?” Danny asked, drawing a cup of sludge-like coffee from the complex, hissing steel urn.
“Yes,” Nudger said, surrendering. He’d had no coffee this morning. Even Danny’s would be better than ... no, it wouldn’t, but he’d drink some of it, now that it was before him on the counter like hemlock he couldn’t refuse.
A few stools down from Nudger sat a very tall blonde woman who worked in one of the office buildings across the street. There was a folded Post-Dispatch in front of her, but she was staring morosely beyond it and dipping a Dunker Delite in a cup of acidic coffee. Nudger wondered what she’d think if she knew a similar doughnut had been used last night to help shatter a windshield. At the opposite end of the counter sat a bearded homeless man wearing a grimy red T-shirt, denim overalls, and a Cardinals baseball cap. He was simply staring at his Dunker Delite as if it puzzled him but it was food and he owed it to himself to eat it. Nudger had seen the man searching through trash receptacles along Manchester in the early morning and thought his name was Herb but wasn’t sure.
