Oops! (Alo Nudger Book 10)

by John Lutz

Everyone was silent, still, staring at him.

  “Dinky?” a woman said.

  “Don’t you understand?” Nudger shouted in frustration. “The dinky’s gone!”

  “Too much drinky for him,” a man said.

  Everyone laughed. They turned away from Nudger and resumed their conversation and their drinking. The fat bald man was passionately kissing the woman he was with now, pinning her against the far rail.

  “The dinky’s gone!” Nudger yelled again.

  He was ignored.

  He stumbled down off the hatch and almost fell. Caught his balance and leaned against the rail.

  The throbbing diesel engines stopped. The vibration of the deck ceased. Blue Destiny was drifting downstream with the current.

  Nudger grabbed a padded vinyl seat cushion from one of the benches near the hatch cover. Then he climbed up on the rail, balancing himself and clutching the cushion to his chest, and jumped over the side.

  The current was swifter than he’d imagined, and the water was cold despite the warm night. He was carried swiftly away from the boat, aware of people standing at the rail staring at him. “Hey!” a man yelled, sounding very close as his voice bounced off the water.

  Nudger held onto the cushion with all his strength and kicked to guide himself toward shore, but it didn’t seem to be working.

  The water around him was suddenly orange, brighter and brighter. Then the explosion rocked him and he felt the rush of the concussion as the river shoved him several feet and spun his body around.

  He turned and saw the stark silhouette of Hart’s boat for only a moment at the base of a huge orange fireball that was rising and unfolding into the night sky. Within a few seconds, small pieces of debris began plunking into the water.

  His stomach so tight that he could barely move, Nudger hugged the seat cushion to him like a lover and let the river take him. He was still sick, and now he was trembling. He closed his eyes.

  Though he didn’t lose consciousness, he did lose track of time.

  “Grab hold the line! Grab it!” a man’s voice was calling urgently.

  Nudger was wet, shivering. He opened his eyes and saw the vast size and bright lights of a riverboat only twenty feet away from him. There was a large, rectangular lighted opening below the lower deck, and several men were standing in it as if posed on a backlit stage.

  “Grab it this time!” one of the men shouted again, and Nudger saw him contort his body and hurl a line toward him.

  The thick rope plopped into the water ten feet in front of Nudger and began drifting away with the current.

  Nudger kicked with his feet and gained on it, stretched out an arm, and gripped it.

  Reluctantly, he let go of the floatable seat cushion and grabbed the line with both hands.

  “Wrap it around yourself!” one of the other men yelled.

  Nudger managed that, and they drew him toward the boat.

  “What is this?” Nudger asked, as they dragged him on board. He was dripping water and had lost his remaining shoe. “Where am I?”

  “The Casino Queen gambling boat,” the man who’d tossed the line said. “Tonight, you’re the luckiest one on board. Don’t know how you survived that explosion.”

  “There’s somebody else out there,” Nudger said, “a man in a dinky.”

  “The Coast Guard’s on its way,” another man said. “We’ll radio them and they’ll pick him up for sure, whatever he’s in.”

  “His luck finally ran out tonight,” Nudger said, and was sick.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It was like you thought, Nudge,” Hammersmith told Nudger the next day in Claudia’s apartment. “Close Calls was much more than a phone retailer.”

  Nudger had spent the rest of last night with Claudia, after the hospital emergency room had examined him and he’d given his statement to the police. Now he was sprawled on the sofa and she was in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Nudger was no longer seasick; the scent of frying bacon and eggs was making him hungry.

  Though he’d been up much of last night, Hammersmith had dropped by on his way in to the Third for the day shift. Nudger assumed he’d already had breakfast.

  “You want coffee, Jack?” Nudger asked.

  “Sure.”

  Nudger got up and went to the kitchen, kissed the nape of Claudia’s neck, and poured two cups of coffee.

  He carried the cups back to the living room, handed one to Hammersmith, and sat back down on the sofa. Hammersmith remained standing.

  “Wayne Hart ran a unique and profitable business, using Close Calls as a front,” Hammersmith said. “Close Calls’ primary business wasn’t phones, it was to arrange for so-called accidental deaths. Once a client was obtained, Hart’s expert employees, the ones who died in the boat explosion, would ingeniously rig the intended victim’s house or other environs so within a short period of time, an accident would be almost inevitable. On the surface the house wouldn’t change, but an oven’s gas line would be made faulty, or a basement step loosened, or a washer or dryer’s wiring made dangerous, or the wrong size bulb would be placed in a socket, or an outside concrete step would be angled so that when it was icy the victim might slip and fall. Subtle but dangerous alterations that could be put down to wear or original design. Nothing even the victim would notice—until it was too late.”

  “Devious,” Nudger said, feeling an unwilling admiration for Wayne Hart’s evil concept.

  “And lucrative. First a large advance was paid by the client, then Close Calls received a percentage of the insurance settlement. And of course, Hart had some built-in security safeguards. After a reasonable time had passed following the victim’s death, the client also met an accidental death at the hands of Close Calls’ careful craftsmen. That way loose ends were always being tied. There was plenty of money in this for everyone involved, only the clients didn’t have much time to enjoy theirs.”

  “It might have gone on for a long time,” Nudger said, “considering Hart had a method of cleaning up after himself.”

  “It was you and Lacy who spooked him,” Hammersmith said. “Not only were you closing in on what Close Calls was really about, but you stumbled onto Hart’s personal vice.”

  “Young girls,” Nudger said.

  “Yeah. Very young. So he decided to liquidate his business and move on, and the safest way to do that was to arrange for a final, grand accident that would eliminate the possibility of any of his latest clients, or his employees, talking into the wrong ear. So he threw his party and rigged the boat explosion. Afterward, he was going to remain officially dead until he could be sure no suspicion was attached to the explosion.”

  “Did you learn all this from Hart himself?” Nudger asked.

  “Nope. You and he weren’t the only survivors last night, Nudge. A woman who worked for Close Calls as an electrician, specializing in small appliances and replacing good wiring with worn, realized what you meant when you were yelling about a missing dinky. She jumped overboard a few seconds after you did. The Coast Guard fished her out of the river before they found Hart safe in the dinghy.”

  Nudger remembered the woman standing with the fat bald guy by the rail on the boat, the look on her face. She was probably the survivor. The bald guy hadn’t made it.

  “The woman told us about a body that’s supposedly buried near Hart’s estate, that of a woman named Gloria Brand, from Omaha. She was another of Hart’s employees he couldn’t afford to leave behind. She would have been on the boat with the others, only he couldn’t have her at the party with you and Lacy because you knew her as—”

  “Irma Millman,” Nudger finished for him. “Brad Millman’s so-called sister.”

  “You and Lacy were where you shouldn’t have been when she met you,” Hammersmith said. “But no need to go into that now. She went to Millman’s condo to find and remove anything that might implicate Close Calls or Hart in Millman’s death. You and Lacy were lucky to get there first.”

  And lucky to leave
the condo alive, Nudger thought, with a twitch of his lower intestine. These were dangerous people he and Lacy had stirred up. “What about Tanya, the kid Lacy found in Hart’s house?” he asked. “She okay?”

  “Lacy’s seeing to it,” Hammersmith said. “Some sort of maternal instinct seems to have stirred in her.”

  “Hard to imagine,” Nudger said.

  “Think she-wolf with cub, Nudge.”

  “Ah!”

  Tired of standing, Hammersmith lowered his bulk into a chair, ignoring the loud protest of springs and frame.

  “What about Lacy?” Nudger asked. “She get hurt in her mix-up with Ratko?”

  “Not a scratch on her. The county police answered her call and found her standing over Ratko with an empty gun. His knife was still clutched in his dead hand. Self-defense.”

  Nudger wondered where Lacy had concealed her handgun beneath the dress she’d been wearing. Wondered about the real circumstances of Ratko’s death. “There are a lot of ways to die,” he said.

  “Wayne Hart knew it, and made a fortune out of it.” Hammersmith knitted his white eyebrows in a frown. “What Lacy’s steaming mad about for some reason is a guy named Lance Cintamon double-crossing her, costing her a lot of money in some kind of insurance deal he backed out of Says she doesn’t trust any man and shouldn’t have lowered her guard and thought with her hormones. You know anything about that?”

  “Only that I’m not surprised,” Nudger said.

  “Jack,” Claudia called from the kitchen, “do you want to stay for breakfast?”

  “I could be talked into it,” Hammersmith said, absently patting his protruding stomach.

  But not talked out of it, Nudger thought.

  “Hart will be held without bail while prosecutors continue adding up how many counts of murder to charge him with,” Hammersmith said.

  “Hard to convict someone with all that money.”

  “Not in this case,” Hammersmith said. “No matter how many attorneys Hart has or who they are, eventually he’ll be convicted and he’ll die by lethal injection.”

  Nudger wasn’t so sure about that. He was sure, at least, that Hart would never again live outside prison walls. Reasonably sure, anyway. Which was all you could expect in this uncertain world.

  “Even if Hart somehow escapes the needle,” Hammersmith told Nudger, “like you said, there are a lot of ways to die. Slowly, inside prison, is one of them.”

  The kitchen table was too small for the three of them, with Hammersmith’s bulk, so they ate at the larger table in the dining room.

  No sooner had they sat down when Hammersmith knocked over his orange juice and soaked Claudia’s tablecloth. Embarrassed, he broke out in apologies and awkwardly tried to soak up the liquid with his napkin.

  “Not to worry,” Claudia assured him, “it was an accident.”

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