Ride the Lightning (Alo Nudger)

by John Lutz

  “Send me your bill, Mr. Nudger,” she said, all business again. “I'll pay it somehow. Maybe not right away, but someday. I promise you that.”

  Nudger thought about the cramped trailer and her near-minimum-wage job at the Right Steer. Then he thought about her hill-country pride. “I'll mail it,” he said. “But there won't be a due date on it. I won't worry about it and I don't want you to.”

  She was silent for a while before speaking. “I do thank you, Mr. Nudger.” There was a weary finality in the way she said it. She'd gone up against the world for love and lost, and was settling into resignation.

  Nudger told her to call him if she needed any more help of any kind, then hung up. An emotion he couldn't identify was lodged in his throat. He swallowed. That helped, but not much.

  He sat for a long time staring at the phone.

  It might be a good idea to call Harold Benedict tomorrow morning, he thought, find out if there was any work available. Life went on. So did expenses. Eileen would be calling. That was a sure bet. So would Union Electric and his landlord and the phone company. Everyone could form a line.

  Nudger decided not to worry about that. Benedict would have something. And Nudger was still due to be paid for the Calvin Smith photographs. Anyway, it might be weeks before a steady diet of Danny's coffee and doughnuts could prove fatal. There was enough of that most precious commodity in this world, time. What the old woman in the liquor store and what Curtis Colt had run out of. Time. What whittled away at flesh and empires. What hurt and healed and always won its dark victory.

  What Nudger had too much of today.

  Monday morning a copy of the latest St. Louis Voyeur was stuffed into Nudger's mailbox in the vestibule of his apartment building. He wasn't a subscriber, so with a certain dread he withdrew the thin weekly newspaper from the tarnished brass box and unfolded it.

  Though he was somewhat prepared, it was still a shock. The Voyeur hadn't given up on Candy Ann, hadn't the decency to allow her some breathing space. There was a front-page photo layout of the entire Curtis Colt affair, including shots of Colt being arrested, a long view of Olson's Liquor Emporium, Colt being led to his execution, and a candid close-up of an apparently sobbing Candy Ann above the caption “Wages of Lover's Sin.”

  The last photograph, “Solace After Heartbreak,” was of Nudger stealthily stepping outside into the brightening morning and closing Candy Ann's trailer door behind him. His face was turned three-quarters toward the camera, his features highlighted by the rising sun. The shot was a little fuzzy because of the long lens the photographer had used, but there was no doubt as to the identity of the man in the photo. There was what appeared to be an expression of guilt on his face, though Nudger knew it was really the result of him squinting in the sudden morning light.

  He felt embarrassed, then angry. Then he told himself nobody read the rag of a paper anyway.

  But he knew better. People in his line of work read the Voyeur. So did some of the people who might hire him. Even people who couldn't read bought the Voyeur. The photograph would be misunderstood and bad for business.

  But then, business was plenty bad already.

  The hell with it. Nudger carried the paper upstairs, wadded it tightly, and dropped it into the wastebasket in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. It made a solid, satisfying sound hitting the rest of the trash.

  Then he stood for a moment, rubbing the back of his neck and turning in a slow circle. The sun was brilliant on the window over the sink, casting a weblike shadow of the glass's corner crack onto the bright counter. A large wasp, reveling in the morning heat, buzzed exploringly against the pane from frame to frame, found no opening, then zigzagged away. Nudger stopped turning and stood still and watched it, until the mere speck that it had become blended with the leaves of a tree and could no longer be discerned. He wondered how long the wasp would live if it didn't fall victim to a bird or exterminator. It struck him as tragic that any creature should miss the opportunity to live out its allotted time. Cruel nature, crueler mankind.

  He knew he couldn't stay away. He'd known it since yesterday.

  Before he had breakfast, before he called Harold Benedict or left to look at his office mail or checked his answering machine, he put on his blue sport coat and a dark tie and drove to Curtis Colt's funeral.

  28

  It was a state-funded affair, with only a graveside ceremony at a paupers' cemetery in south St. Louis. Nudger had noticed the date and time of burial while reading newspaper accounts of Colt's execution, and they had lodged, cold and nagging, in his mind.

  There were about a dozen people gathered around the grave, including the state-appointed clergyman. Most of them were pallbearers, also paid by the state. Lester was there, looking more bereaved then anyone, wearing an oversized winter-wool sport jacket over a T-shirt. There was an older couple who appeared bored with the ceremony. Welborne Colt hadn't attended. He and his brother had reached the final parting still separated by antagonism and distance.

  Candy Ann was standing about a hundred feet away from the clergyman, off to the side of the gleaming wood casket. Her straw-colored hair glowed with the morning. In the wash of bright sunlight, she looked like a child playing dress-up in black.

  When she saw Nudger, she averted her eyes. He was sure she'd gotten her complimentary copy of the Voyeur, as he had. A great thing to wake up to on the day of your fiancé's funeral.

  The preacher, who himself resembled a cadaver and was of indeterminate religion, adjusted his dark suit on his thin frame and made a vague crosslike motion with his right hand. Nudger noticed several people, including a man with a tripod-mounted camera, stationed on the grave-strewn hill above Curtis' coffin. The media would stop only after Colt was buried, and maybe not even then. Certain crimes, and their aftermaths, caught and held the public's attention. Nudger knew a telephoto lens was probably trained in close-up on Candy Ann now as the photographer, possibly from the Voyeur, hoped for an expression of grief, a tear. If he really got lucky, she'd faint.

  The clergyman rambled on about life and death, gesticulating grandly, playing for the press. Where Nudger was standing, the man's voice came across merely as a monotonous drone. Everyone around the grave was shifting their weight from leg to leg, perspiring heavily, wishing the clergyman would finish sending Colt on his way. Only Candy Ann stood perfectly still, though, like Nudger, she was probably too far away to understand what the preacher was saying.

  A blue jay in a nearby pin oak began chattering angrily, noisily, upstaging the preacher, who turned briefly and glared at it. The jay cocked its head to the side, as if to get a better angle of vision, and stared back insolently with a bright eye, a look it probably usually reserved for worms. The clergyman made up his mind to ignore the winged interloper. The jay hopped down onto a lower branch, among sunlit leaves, and really started raising hell. That seemed to hurry the gaunt man of the cloth along.

  Finally the service was over. The jay stopped its clacking as if in relief. Candy Ann walked to the single floral spray by the grave, plucked a blossom, and laid it gently on the lid of the casket. The clergyman rested a bony hand on her shoulder, but she ignored him. He was part of Curtis' imposed untimely death and could in no way comfort her.

  After standing motionless for a few minutes, she turned and walked away. Nudger saw the photographer with the tripod and long lens straighten up from his camera and say something to the man next to him. Everyone began drifting toward the parked cars.

  Something tugged at Nudger's arm. He turned to see Lester Colt beside him, red-eyed and stricken-looking. His face was puffier than usual, and he reeked of cheap, perfumy cologne or shaving lotion mingled with perspiration.

  “I figure you did your best, Mr. Nudger,” he said. He sniffled. “Want you to know there ain't no hard feelings 'cause you couldn't save Curtis.”

  Nudger nodded, feeling uncomfortable. “We did what we could,” he said. “I'm sorry, Lester.” Over Lester's shoulder he saw Candy A
nn get into a waiting County cab, a flash of pale leg against the black of her dress.

  “Welborne shoulda been here, don't you think?”

  “I think so,” Nudger said. He didn't feel like giving Welborne a break. “It was the least he could have done. His own brother.” Nudger meant it.

  The taxi carrying Candy Ann wound along the cemetery's narrow gravel road, flashing through patches of deep shade. It paused at tall black iron gates hinged open on stone pillars, then turned out into the traffic. Nudger could see Candy Ann's wide black hat through the cab's rear window. She didn't look back.

  “She did okay by Curtis after all,” Lester said, watching with Nudger as the cab disappeared beyond the trees. He smiled, looked over at the grave, and sniffled again.

  “How did you get here?” Nudger asked. There were no more parked cars now other than his VW and a van belonging to one of the media people.

  “Took a bus. Couple of buses. My car's broke down.”

  “Where you going now?”

  “Back to work. I got to. The foreman said I could have the rest of the day free, but I'll be better off taking it out on the freight, what I feel. Work's kinda like medicine, don't you think?”

  “Like medicine,” Nudger agreed. He'd often fled into the diversion of hard work himself. But he knew that eventually work wasn't enough; at a certain point people had to turn and face whatever they were running from or holding at bay.

  He told Lester he was going his way and would drop him off at Commerce Freightlines. Two bearded men in work clothes were hanging around the grave, in the shade of a small canvas awning that had been set up, waiting for the last of the mourners to leave so they could lower the casket.

  He started the VW and followed the path of the taxi along the winding gravel road.

  At the tall gates, he remembered something Wanda Scathers had said, and he knew what had been bothering him since the day of Curtis Colt's death.

  He twisted the vent window to direct fresh air into the car, to combat Lester's smarmy cologne, and accelerated out into heavy traffic that ran parallel to the cemetery's black iron fence.

  Beside him, Lester was talking incessantly, but Nudger wasn't listening.

  29

  Benedict would have work to be farmed out soon, he assured him, when Nudger phoned him. The proprietor of Enchanted Night Escort Service had hired Benedict and Schill to defend the service in a suit brought by a former employee who'd been fired for prostituting herself.

  Nudger decided that the morning was following its established gloomy course. Everything in the office was sticky with humidity.

  “The escort service is really on the up and up,” Benedict explained. “It provides women to accompany out-of-town executives to social functions. The fees are high and the employees have strict, written rales of behavior; they're escorts, and escorts only.”

  That ran contrary to Nudger's concept of an escort service, but he said nothing. His middle-class background might be showing.

  “One of the escorts, a Sandra McClain, went beyond the call of duty one night with an undercover cop, was arrested, and claimed she was a housewife working part-time and had been coerced by the escort service into prostitution. The only way she could continue working, she said, to provide food for the children; yeah, she really said that. So she and her out-of-work husband filed suit, probably hoping to save face more than anything else.”

  Nudger wondered if the woman might be telling the truth, caught in a trap that was perhaps so disturbingly commonplace that it had taken on the exaggeration of burlesque and people refused to take it seriously.

  “How do I figure into this?” he asked.

  “Ms. McClain was a prostitute before she worked for the escort service, spread her wares all over town. She might still be lying down for fun and profit even as the court date nears. We need you to establish beyond doubt that she'd been in the sporting life before. Or better yet, that she still is.”

  That didn't sound too difficult. If the McClain woman had been a high-priced prostitute, he knew the people who would know about it. Unless she was a free-lancer. Then he'd have to dig deeper, follow her.

  “Sandra McClain is out of the city now,” Benedict said. “In the Bahamas. Where else would you expect to find a woman with hungry children at home? She'll be back in a week, tan and fiesty. That's when our client will decide whether he wants a detective on her. When he gives the official okay, you're on the case.”

  It sounded kind of indefinite to Nudger, but he thanked Benedict.

  “Tough about the Curtis Colt thing,” Benedict said.

  Nudger agreed, thinking that “tough” was a bit of an understatement.

  “He suffered, according to the paper,” Benedict said. “You'd think they'd have something like that perfected after all these years. But then, I guess executions aren't supposed to be fun.”

  “Why not?” Nudger said. “Don't be a wet blanket.”

  Benedict spoke in a careful manner indicating he was weighing words. Lawyer paranoia. The old phone-tap syndrome. “Colt can't be helped now, Nudger. I guess you're going to let that case drop.”

  “Yeah,” Nudger lied. “Unless somebody hires me to try to raise the dead, it's over.”

  “I, uh, saw your photograph in the Voyeur. Yellow scandal journalism. You want me to call the rag, talk lawyer talk, throw a scare into them?”

  “Thanks for the offer,” Nudger said, “but you probably wouldn't scare them, only get them mad. Then they'd figure out an excuse to sue me. I'm afraid of litigation, putting my fate in the hands of twelve people I might be tearing away from the afternoon TV soaps.”

  “Objection sustained,” Benedict said. “Take care of yourself, Nudger. Stay away from … trouble.”

  Trouble being Candy Ann Adams.

  “I'll avoid it as if it were a downed power line,” Nudger said, and hung up.

  Early the next morning, he began watching Candy Ann's trailer.

  At eight-thirty she emerged, dressed in her yellow waitress uniform, and got into another taxi. She moved slowly, as if mired in her grief. Her hair was combed differently, parted and flung to the side. It made her appear older.

  Nudger followed in his battered Volkswagen as the cab drove her the four and a half miles to her job at the Right Steer. She didn't look around as she paid the driver and walked inside through the Old-West-saloon swinging doors. Nudger waited for the sounds of a tinkling piano, of whooping, of breaking glass, and gunshots. Then he remembered the place was full of Muzak and baked potatoes.

  At six that evening, another cab drove her home, making a brief stop at a Kroger supermarket. She came out of the store carrying a single small paper sack, got back in the cab, and continued on her way.

  It went that way for the next couple of days, trailer to work to trailer, all by taxi. A lonely ritual. Candy Ann had no visitors other than the plain brown paper bag she took home every night.

  During the day, while she was safely at work, Nudger spent his time unobtrusively talking to her neighbors. He avoided Wanda Scathers, thinking she might tip Candy Ann that he was hanging around the trailer court.

  Posing as an insurance investigator, it didn't take him long to learn what there was to know in a metal-and-wheeled neighborhood where people made it a point not to meddle in their neighbors' business, but were bored and glad to gossip nonetheless—if the right questions were asked in the right way. He got a fuller picture of Candy Ann and Curtis Colt, though not necessarily an accurate one.

  Sometimes, sitting melting in the Volkswagen in the middle of one of the Sultry City's legendary summer heat waves, Nudger wondered if what he was doing was really worthwhile. Curtis Colt was, after all, dead, and had never been his client. Still, there were responsibilities that went beyond the job. Or maybe they were actually the essence of the job.

  Thursday, after Candy Ann had left for work, Nudger used his honed Visa card to slip the flimsy lock on her trailer door, and let himself in.

 
He was alone now where Curtis Colt had spent so much time with Candy Ann, and time by himself. Nudger's heart began hammering and his stomach turned over a few times. He always felt like this when he was trespassing. An unhealthy respect for the law.

  Though Candy Ann had switched off the air conditioner before leaving only minutes ago, the inside of the trailer was getting warm fast. It wasn't well insulated, and the sun was beating out a rising rhythm on the aluminum roof. Nudger didn't want to turn the air conditioner back on and possibly draw the attention of Wanda Scathers, who might know that Candy Ann had left for work by this time of the morning.

  Patiently, methodically, he began searching the trailer.

  It took him over an hour to find what he was looking for. It had been well hidden, in a cardboard box above a loose ceiling panel in the bathroom. After examining the box's contents—almost seven hundred dollars in loot from Curtis Colt's brief life of crime, and another object Nudger wasn't surprised to see—he resealed the box and replaced it above the panel.

  Curtis Colt, you desperado, you, Nudger thought. Then he thought about Tom, and he decided, heat or no heat, that he'd continue following Candy Ann. He owed her, and Curtis, that much.

  He knew her work schedule, which made things much easier for him. For now, she would be safe at work at the Right Steer and didn't require his attention.

  He made sure he left the trailer as he'd found it, then went back outside where, for at least a few minutes, he felt cooler.

  When Nudger got back to his office, Danny told him Claudia had been by early that morning, looking for him. She'd had a Dunker Delite and a carton of milk, waited around for a while, then she'd given Danny a note to forward to Nudger.

  The note was in blue pen, stroked in her neat teacher's handwriting. It said simply that she wanted to see Nudger late this afternoon or tonight, and asked him to come by her apartment anytime after four. She needed to talk about something important, she said. It was signed “Love, Claudia.”