by John Lutz
The engine idled quietly, hissing as it breathed without the air cleaner.
“Shuddup down there!” a voice yelled. A man in a sleeveless white undershirt was leaning from a second-story window, registering his complaint about having his sleep disturbed by noise.
Nudger ignored him and stared down the dark street. He saw no sign of the large man with the large knife.
“Get outa here!” the man in the window yelled. “I’ll come down there and teach you to wake up me and my wife in the middle of the night!”
Trembling, Nudger climbed back in the car and drove away fast.
Glancing up and back, he saw the man in the undershirt puff out his chest, then slam the window shut so he could return to bed and wife a hero.
Society needs heroes, Nudger thought, knowing he could do little to fill the void. He despised the kind of fear he felt now, that lived in him like a parasite and occasionally erupted into terror.
He tried not to think about it as he drove.
Chapter Nineteen
His heart still hammering, Nudger pulled the Granada into the parking lot of the White Castle at the corner of Manchester and Big Bend. Most of White Castle’s business was drive-through, but there was space for customers to eat the square little bargain-priced hamburgers inside. Nudger occasionally had lunch there, or stopped at the almost identical White Castle on Gravois to take a carry-out order to Claudia’s apartment. Near one corner of the lot was a public phone.
Nudger parked the Granada near the phone and got out. He waited while a man in a green jumpsuit with his name stenciled over its breast pocket finished talking. Though he was anxious enough to leap straight up and spin in a circle, he casually leaned on the Granada’s front fender to let the guy know he was waiting to make a call, but not being pushy. His left shoulder hurt, his hand stung where he’d burned it on the coffeepot, and he didn’t feel like any more confrontation tonight.
When the phone was free, Nudger fed it a quarter and called Lacy Tumulty, hoping she was home. It was almost one A.M., which was about the time Lacy often started to prowl for fun.
On the sixth ring, she answered in a sleep-thickened voice. Maybe the cane had slowed down her social life, Nudger thought, as he identified himself.
“Brad Pitt, did you say?” Lacy asked.
“Nudger. Don’t play with me, Lacy. I’ve just had a run-in with the goon who cut your tendons. He tried to cut mine.”
“Big guy, pointy head, jug ears?”
“Him or somebody else who looks like him and happens to slice people’s Achilles tendons.”
“How’d you stop him from cutting yours?” She sounded awake and alert now, curious as a just-roused cat.
“I threw hot coffee in his face. He’s even uglier now.”
“Great! Good for you, Nudger!”
“Last I saw of him, he was staggering around outside my apartment holding a towel to his burns.”
“Did you burn him good?”
“Hard to say. I was busy running for the door and didn’t take time to assess the damage. He wanted to take me out of action to stop me from probing Brad Millman’s death.”
“Did he say that?”
“Good as. You’re investigating the Millman accident, just like me, Lacy. The reason I called is, maybe I was only his first stop. Maybe the goon might be on his way to your place now.”
“I’m sitting here on the edge of the bed thinking about that. It’s possible, Nudger.” Her voice quavered. She wasn’t so tough. This wasn’t a burglary fantasy. “The whole damned thing was harder than you can imagine. I don’t want it to happen to me again. Don’t know if I can go through it another time.”
“Get out,” Nudger said. “Go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“A motel for now. You can let me know where you are later. Call my office tomorrow, but don’t leave a message on the machine giving your location.”
“Do you have a gun, Nudger?”
“You know I don’t. I hate them.” He didn’t mention that he was also afraid of guns.
“I want a gun.”
“Don’t you have one?”
“Not anymore. I got short of money and sold it.”
“Sold it to who?”
“Don’t ask me that, Nudger.”
His stomach was churning; he absently felt in his pocket for his roll of antacid tablets. “Time’s ticking away. You’d better hang up and get out of there.”
“I’m packing even as I talk.” He heard some banging around that sounded like drawers being shoved shut. “I hope you burned the skin right off that bastard’s face. I hope—”
“Get away from there before he shows up. He left my apartment almost ten minutes ago.”
“We should both have guns, Nudger.”
The receiver clicked in his ear as she hung up.
Nudger found the antacid tablets, pried two of them off the roll, and chewed and swallowed them. They weren’t thoroughly chewed and scratched his throat going down, almost choking him.
When he thought he could talk okay, he phoned the Maplewood police, then got back in his car.
They took his statement and examined his apartment door. There were only a few scratches near the lock where it had been skillfully slipped. The goon who’d broken in possessed at least one delicate skill despite being crude.
“Better get yourself a deadbolt,” the larger of the two Maplewood uniforms advised him. He was a young man going to fat, with a shave so close that it had left his fleshy face red and raw.
Nudger knew he was right, but deadbolt locks weren’t cheap, and he’d have to hire somebody to install one.
When they were finished examining the scene, the two uniforms told Nudger to come to Maplewood Police Headquarters the next afternoon and look over some mug shots in the hope of identifying his assailant.
“Even though you changed his looks with the hot coffee,” the smaller cop said, “it could still help us locate him.”
“Guy in your line of work should have a deadbolt on both doors,” the large cop said. “Some good brass chain locks, too.”
I know, I know, Nudger thought, but he only nodded, wondering if the large cop had an interest in a nearby hardware store.
When they were gone, he looked around the apartment, then at the door whose lock had done little to thwart his attacker. Even though it was 2:00 A.M., the goon might return, and he’d enter more effortlessly than the first time. Nudger had been struck twice by lightning before. It was impossible for him to go into hiding, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep in the apartment tonight.
He weighed the notion of sharing Claudia’s bed. It would be safe there. And he could make sure he wasn’t followed to her apartment. At this hour, any car tailing his would be easy to spot, and he could make use of the many one-way South St. Louis side streets to drive a circuitous, wrong-way route that would guarantee no one was behind him.
But the goon knew things about him, and one of them might be his involvement with Claudia. He might already know where she lived and go there searching for Nudger.
And find Claudia alone!
Nudger’s stomach kicked.
He left the apartment immediately, setting the ineffectual lock out of habit. Taking the stairs to the street door two at a time, he thought life was like a cruel board game with no safe moves and no respite.
But there was no acceptable choice other than to keep playing.
He retrieved the Granada’s air cleaner from where it sat on the curb, fastened it back on the carburetor with a few quick turns of its wing nut, then drove fast to Claudia’s apartment.
Chapter Twenty
The intercoms in Claudia’s building hadn’t worked for years. Nudger stood in the vestibule and leaned on the doorbell button for about ten seconds, trying to wake her so she could answer his knock by the time he climbed the wooden steps to the second floor. As he trudged up the stairs, his left shoulder was throbbing, and the burn on his hand felt as if it
were being stung by bees.
He approached her apartment door and drew back his fist to knock.
“Who’s there?” came her wary voice from the other side of the door. So the doorbell had roused her as he’d hoped.
Nudger wondered for a second why she couldn’t identify him through the peephole, then remembered that the convex glass had long ago been broken.
“Me,” Nudger said.
“Nudger?”
“Yes, me.”
She opened the door about four inches on its chain. He was glad to see her being so cautious.
“It is you,” she said, as if he’d asked her a question. “It’s also two-thirty in the morning. Why is it you at two-thirty A.M.?”
“I was worried about you.”
She stared at him with one dubious brown eye that was partly concealed behind an errant lock of dark hair. She would disagree with him, but he always found her at her most beautiful immediately after waking.
“What are you gawking at?” she asked.
“You. I love to look at you when—”
“You mentioned being worried,” she said, cutting him short, letting him know this wasn’t acceptable behavior, turning up on her doorstep at this hour.
“Let me in,” Nudger said, “and I’ll explain to you why there’s good reason to be worried.”
She did. He did.
“You need to leave here,” he said, when he was finished telling her about his near-death experience with the giant assailant.
“Why?”
“Because the oversized goon, or whoever hired him, probably knows about us, where you live, that I might be found here.”
“And here you are,” Claudia said.
“But not for long. Neither should you be here for long. If he comes here looking for me and finds us—or worse still, you alone—it could be ...”
“What?”
“You know what. Dangerous. Tragic.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, as if drawing into herself to consider everything Nudger had said. She seemed so vulnerable when she did that. Nudger couldn’t help noticing how her small but firm breasts strained the material of her robe that was tied tightly at her narrow waist with a sash. Her neck was lean and graceful, and the line of her jaw—
“No,” she said, interrupting his errant thoughts.
“Huh?”
“I can’t leave. I live here. And if I took up temporary residence somewhere else, couldn’t whoever is after you find out about it and simply come there?”
“Possibly,” Nudger admitted, “but it would be more difficult for him.”
“You don’t know for sure he’s even coming here.”
“That’s true,” Nudger admitted.
“I stay.”
He’d been afraid of this. “You’re being stubborn.”
“Why is it stubborn when I dig in my heels, and courageous when you dig in yours?”
“I rarely do dig in mine,” he pointed out.
She didn’t differ with him, which for some reason rather annoyed him. “If you’re not going to leave, what then?”
“We can discuss that in the morning.”
“Now would be better,” he said, sort of digging in his heels.
She sighed. “Let me put something on that burn on your hand first to keep it from hurting.”
He wasn’t stubborn about that.
She went to the bathroom medicine cabinet and returned a few minutes later with a tube of some kind of lotion that contained an ingredient from an aloe plant. The stinging in Nudger’s hand abated almost as soon as she applied it.
They talked in the kitchen while Claudia prepared instant coffee. With her back to Nudger, she ran tap water into two identical chipped cups with a yellow flower design on them. The pipes in the old building banged and clanked, probably waking the tenant downstairs.
Claudia leaned back against the sink and crossed her arms while waiting for the first cup of water to heat in the increasingly inefficient microwave oven that would have taken forever to heat two cups simultaneously. Nudger had bought the microwave at Three Nice Guys Appliance Warehouse’s Going-out-of-Business Sale and given it to her for her birthday. That had been over a year ago. The Three Nice Guys, ostensibly brothers who advertised heavily on local cable TV, were still in the process of going out of business, a more lengthy and complex matter than Nudger had assumed.
“You mentioned that you called the police,” Claudia said.
Nudger nodded. “The Maplewood police.” Claudia’s apartment was in St. Louis proper, a different jurisdiction.
“Are they going to protect you in some way?”
“More or less,” Nudger said.
He knew it was less; no police department could possibly supply round-the-clock personal bodyguards for every crime victim. But there was no reason to tell that to Claudia.
“Call the city police,” she suggested. “Your friend Hammersmith. Get some protection here.”
He was going to do that, if she was determined to stay in the apartment. Hammersmith would do what he could to help, which would certainly be better than nothing. But Nudger thought he still might be able to talk her out of staying.
“You aren’t going to talk me into changing my mind,” she said, with her uncanny knack of seemingly reading his mind.
He knew she was right. He got up from where he was sitting at the enameled oak table and went into the living room, where he used the phone to call Jack Hammersmith’s house.
As he was standing listening to Hammersmith’s phone ring and ring, he heard the defective microwave chime in the kitchen, signifying that time had finally run out and the first cup of water was heated. Nudger didn’t like thinking about time running out.
Finally Hammersmith picked up his phone and mumbled a thick hello.
Nudger identified himself, then said, “Did I wake you up, Jack?”
Hammersmith hung up.
Nudger called back.
Hammersmith, having made his point, picked up on the second ring.
“I’ve had some trouble,” Nudger told him.
“So now you’re looking for more, phoning me at three in the morning?”
Instead of answering, Nudger told him about the attack in his apartment.
“You think this guy was trying to kill you?” Hammersmith asked.
“No. He was going to cripple me by severing my Achilles tendons.”
“Then technically your life isn’t in danger.”
“Dammit, jack! ”
“Only joking, Nudge. I got a right, considering the time of night—or morning—it is. You gonna stay with Claudia tonight?”
“That’s my plan.”
“I’ll make a call. Man and woman power being in short supply, I’m not sure what I can manage, but I’ll try to get a uniform stationed outside Claudia’s building until dawn, then have frequent patrols run past the place. ’Bout all I can do, if that much.”
“I appreciate it, Jack.”
“Is Claudia going to teach tomorrow?”
“No. She’s on spring break for a while.”
“I wish cops would get spring breaks. But that would mean criminals would have to take them, too. And—”
“Jack.”
“Okay, Nudge. The guy who worked on you, is this the same geek who carved up that crazy Lacy Tumulty?”
“It has to be,” Nudger said. “He fit the description, and he threatened the same kind of operation. In fact, that’s what he called it, an operation.”
“Did you phone Tumulty?”
“Yeah. She took the warning a lot more seriously than Claudia. She’s hiding out at a motel. I don’t know where yet, but she’s supposed to call and tell me. Claudia’s stubborn as hell,” he added.
“The frail often are,” Hammersmith said. “They have to be. You’re stubborn, Nudge.”
“I’m not frail,” Nudger said.
“No, you’re even about twenty pounds overweight. I was thinking about your d
elicate stomach.”
Nudger was rankled by the idea of the grossly fat Hammersmith calling him overweight. “Listen, Jack, I’m not—”
“What?”
“Twenty pounds overweight. Ten, maybe.”
“Okay. But you are stubborn,” Hammersmith said.
Nudger wasn’t going to dig in his heels. “Sometimes. That I admit.”
“The stubborn are often frail,” Hammersmith said, and hung up.
Aggravated as he was by the lieutenant’s usual abrupt termination of a phone call, Nudger was sure Hammersmith was at that moment calling the local district station house so he could use his rank and influence to provide at least a modicum of protection for Claudia.
The microwave oven chimed again. It made a sound like cheap glasswear being plinked.
“Your water’s hot, Nudger!” Claudia called from the kitchen.
My usual environment, Nudger thought, and went to drink coffee with the woman he loved.
Chapter Twenty-One
As soon as he woke up next to Claudia in the morning, Nudger was afraid. His mind focused in on the apprehension he’d felt even as he’d slept. They should have gotten out of her apartment last night when the getting was good.
Then he calmed down, soothed by the regular sound of Claudia’s sleep-breathing, barely audible over the low hum of the window air conditioner. He glanced over at her in the sunwashed bedroom and saw that she was lying on her back, covered only by a thin blue sheet that followed the graceful contours of her slender body. A bright pattern of sunlight reflected by the dresser mirror lay across her hips. Her dark hair was fanned wide on her pillow and her eyes were closed lightly. A strand of hair, touched by sunlight, was caught in the corner of her mouth. He watched her breasts rise and fall as she breathed.
Maybe she was right, he decided, and he’d overreacted. Of course, it was easy to overreact after being attacked by a giant cretin with a knife the size of a sword.
“Are you staring at me, Nudger?”
“Yes.” He continued to stare.
Claudia daintily spat out the hair in the corner of her mouth and rolled over to face away from him. He lay on his side and scooched across the mattress to lie against her warm body spoon fashion. As he moved, the burn on his hand slid over the sheet but didn’t hurt much; the ingredient from the aloe plant was still doing its job. His shoulder still ached, but it was better.