by John Lutz
“Or I’ll call you. With the computer, I bet I can get to a lot more information than you can using old technology like the phone.”
Nudger, soon-to-be man of the previous century, thought she was probably right, but he said nothing as he folded his list of names and poked it into his damp shirt pocket.
“You better get with the high-tech world, Nudger,” Lacy persisted, plugging her computer into the telephone jack near the bed. “Technophobes, guys like you who are afraid of computers, are gonna be as obsolete as Beta VCRs before long.”
“I’m not a technophobe,” Nudger protested.
“Like Nixon wasn’t a crook.” She smiled up at him. “I’d let you stay here and work the phone, but my modem will have the line tied up.”
“My office is better anyway,” Nudger said. “It’s hot in here. It’ll run up my phone bill, but it’s worth it.”
“Wherever we are together,” Lacy said with a wink, “it’s gonna be hot.”
Maybe it was because of that last remark, or maybe because it made more sense to be with Claudia than in his office, but as he turned the Granada left out of the Hostelo Grandioso’s parking lot, Nudger decided to do his phone research from Claudia’s apartment.
By noon the next day, Nudger and Lacy had most of the available basic information about the guests on Wayne Hart’s list. Lacy was right—in a limited time and via her computer, she’d garnered much more information about the guests on her list than had Nudger about those on his. They exchanged information by fax. Nudger received and sent his faxes at Double Play, a small copy shop on Grand Avenue not far from Claudia’s apartment. Lacy used the fax machine in the Hostelo Grandioso’s office.
Nudger was impressed by Double Play’s fax machine, and how easy it was to send and receive. After initial confusion, then brief instructions from the teenager behind the counter, he’d easily mastered the machine.
He felt like a bona fide citizen of the technological era as he walked back to the Granada with the still-hot faxes in the briefcase he’d borrowed from Claudia. He’d always thought that the generation ahead of his own, the one that had endured the Great Depression then World War Two, Korea, and the Cold War, was the most impressive American generation of the twentieth century. Behind Nudger lurked Generation X, whose members had grown up with and smoothly adjusted to the microchip world that befuddled Nudger and his ilk. It seemed to him that people between the ages of forty and sixty were stuck in the middle. Well, he would cast his lot with Generation X, even if he was thick through the midsection and breathed hard after taking a flight of stairs. He even liked Natalie Merchant, Hootie and the Blowfish, and thought Madonna could act a little. Eyes to the future!
“What do you think of Hootie and the Blowfish?” he asked Claudia, settling down on her sofa and preparing to read the information faxed to him by Lacy.
“I like Sinatra and Gershwin,” Claudia said.
So did Nudger. That was a fact. All of a sudden he felt old again, like Generation Rx.
Claudia had brought in the potted plants from the balcony off the kitchen that overlooked the building’s small rectangular backyard. She was pruning and watering them inside, where it was cooler.
While she busied herself with the plants, Nudger leaned back in the soft sofa, sipped Budweiser from a can, and began to read Lacy’s faxes. He found himself humming “That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp.”
Two hours later, when he phoned Lacy, he said, “Notice what I noticed about the guest list?”
“I did,” she said. “Of the seventeen invited guests, five are like Warren Tully: within the past year they were the beneficiaries of the wills or insurance policies of men or women who died accidental deaths.”
“So what does it mean?” Nudger asked.
“Couldn’t tell you, Nudger. But I bet it means something.” She waited for him to say something. When he didn’t, she said, “What do we do with this information, take it to the cops?”
“It would interest them,” Nudger said, “but not so much they would or could do anything about it.”
“Even so, Nudger, you should tell Hammersmith.”
“I should,” he agreed. “And I will. What do you think about choosing two of the five beneficiary guests and putting loose tails on them?”
“Why only two? I know three cops who’ll work off-duty tailing the other three on the list.”
“We’ll have to pay them,” Nudger said.
“Not much, Nudger. These are guys who’ll do anything for me. You might say they’ve been paid in advance. Not to mention that some of them are married.”
Lord, Lord! Nudger thought. “City cops?”
“Two of them, yeah.”
“Does Kerner know about them?”
“Kerner?”
“Dan Kerner. The Third District cop you gave the gifts to for his birthday. You remember, tiger-striped underwear, ski mask. That Kerner.”
“Kerner doesn’t have to know this part. Neither does Hammersmith.”
“You deal with our three operatives,” Nudger told her. “I don’t want to have to lie to Hammersmith.”
“Omissions aren’t lies.” She sounded annoyed. “Don’t be such a superior son of a bitch, Nudger. Your inferiority complex is what I like about you.”
“I’ll stay just the way I am,” he assured her, and hung up.
Immediately he called Hammersmith at the Third and told him about Hart’s guest list, though not how it had been obtained.
“Odd,” Hammersmith said, after thinking over what Nudger had said.
“More than coincidence, Jack.”
“Yeah,” Hammersmith agreed, “but maybe it’s something easily explained. There could be something we don’t know that connects these people. Maybe those beneficiary folks all have the same law firm, and the attorneys are also on the guest list.”
“Seems unlikely.”
“The entire world I see every day seems unlikely. Is unlikely. But I live in it. It’s my reality. You really only have a hunch there’s something more than coincidental about Hart’s guest list. I can’t sit back fat and happy like you and decide what is or isn’t a hunch before I act.”
“I’m not fat!” Nudger said, amazed anew by the obese Hammersmith’s audacity in calling attention to someone else’s weight problem. Not that Nudger had a problem yet.
“It was only a figure of speech, Nudge.” But there was a gloating note in Hammersmith’s voice.
“All right,” Nudger said, annoyed that he’d let Hammersmith get under his skin. “The point is, I think this is more than a hunch on our part.”
“ ’Our’?”
“Mine and Lacy Tumulty’s.”
“Gee, the company you keep, Nudge. You should have stayed in the police department.”
Obviously Hammersmith was having one of his off days and wanted to argue, but this time Nudger was determined to ignore the bait. And he didn’t want to defend Lacy, considering how she was recruiting three of Hammersmith’s officers. “My situation doesn’t have anything to do with this, Jack,” he said reasonably.
“If you’d stayed a cop, Nudge, you wouldn’t have eaten all those doughnuts.”
“I told you I wasn’t fat! And I don’t have an inferior—”
Click, buzz.
Hammersmith had hung up.
Arrogant bastard! Nudger thought.
But he knew better. There was probably a sound reason for Hammersmith’s agitated state and protective sarcasm. And abrupt termination of phone conversations was simply a Hammersmith eccentricity. Like his toxic green cigars. Anyway, Nudger didn’t have time to be petty and bear a grudge.
He hung up the phone, then scooped up the faxes and his own information and carried them into the kitchen.
“You look irritated,” Claudia said.
“I’m not.”
“Um,” she said.
“There’s something interesting here,” he said.
Claudia was standing over a pot with geraniums and ferns
in it that was sitting with some other potted plants on a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen floor. She brushed soil and clippings from her hands into the pot. She was barefoot, wearing shorts and a green-and-white striped cotton blouse with a pocket ripped halfway off. Her regular gardening clothes.
“Wait a minute, Nudger,” she said, stooping and lifting the geranium pot. “Let me set this one back outside.”
He watched her step back onto the balcony. It wasn’t in the shade, and its concrete floor would be hot on her bare feet. She’d come back in soon.
He caught a glimpse of her head, her long dark hair, moving suddenly vertically and thought she was bending down with the pot.
Then he realized her head, her upper body visible through the kitchen window, had moved straight down.
And he heard the loud crash of iron and concrete as the balcony pulled away from the building and struck the walk below.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Nudger dropped the faxes and bolted for the old glass double doors that led out onto the balcony. He shoved them open and almost stepped out into space two stories above the hard and jagged debris heaped against the side of the building. Here and there green plants were visible among the twisted iron and chunks of concrete.
But no body!
No Claudia!
“Nudger!”
The voice came from below him, to his left.
He craned his neck to look down and saw Claudia clinging to a bent, steel reinforcing rod protruding from the building several feet beneath where he stood.
“Don’t let go, Claudia!” He lay flat on his stomach on the floor and extended his left arm toward her.
He couldn’t reach her.
“I can’t hold on much longer, Nudger!” She sounded exhausted and terrified.
He was rocked by a mental image of her on the unforgiving wreckage below. “Hold on! Please!”
He scrambled to his feet, his mind careening from idea to idea, none of them good enough to save Claudia before her grasp loosened on the rusty steel rod and she fell. In the true and terrible core of his mind was the unthinkable question: Did she want to live enough to hang on?
He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and found nothing other than bottles of cleanser and dishwashing detergent, a miniature plunger whose handle wasn’t long enough to make up the distance he was short of being able to clasp Claudia’s hand and wrist and pull her to safety.
“I called them!” someone yelled from the backyard below. “I called the fire department!”
Nudger knew the fire department wouldn’t get here in time. They dealt in minutes, not seconds.
Then he noticed the spray nozzle protruding from the back of the sink near the faucet handles. He grabbed it and pulled hard. Its rubber hose unreeled about four feet. More than long enough! With a mighty yank, he broke the hose from its moorings. Water sprayed from the sink toward the ceiling.
Carrying the hose and nozzle, Nudger returned to the gaping space beyond the open double doors. He lay down again on the floor, feeling the coolness of water beneath him now. Leaning as far out as possible, he swung the nozzle end of the rubber hose toward Claudia. She released her grip on the rod for a moment with one hand and caught it.
“Wrap the hose around your wrist!” Nudger told her.
When she’d done so, he crammed his shoulder against the door frame and slung his body sideways, bracing with his right foot on the opposite side of the door. He didn’t want to fall out himself He looped his end of the thick rubber hose around his right hand, then clutched it with both hands.
“Okay!” He shouted, summoning his strength. “Let go of the rod with your other hand and I’ll pull you in.”
“You sure, Nudger?”
Half a dozen people, one of them a man he recognized who lived downstairs, were standing in the yard staring up at them. “Better do what he says,” the man said. “We’ll try and catch you if you fall.”
“That won’t work,” a teenage boy said. “She’ll bust like an egg.”
Jesus! Nudger thought.
“Nudger?”
“Let’s try it, Claudia. Claudia?”
Abruptly she released her grip on the rod and her entire weight swung beneath him on the length of rubber hose, almost pulling his arms from their sockets. His body slid on the wet floor and he thought he might slip into space and fall with Claudia. Desperately he shoved with his foot and shoulder, stiffening his body and wedging himself tighter in the doorway.
He stopped sliding. Claudia hung suspended on the taut, stretched hose. Motion ceased.
He began to pull on the hose.
Beneath him, Claudia braced her bare feet against the building’s brick wall and began to climb as he drew up the hose hand over hand, each time wrapping it around his right wrist that was by now numb.
“Can’t make it, Nudger!” Claudia gasped, when she was only a few feet beneath him.
“Can, too!” Nudger shouted at her. He tugged harder at the hose. “Can, too!” He could see her bare feet bleeding from contact with the rough concrete where the balcony had torn away from the building, the blood red and vivid.
Her left hand slipped an inch or two down the hose, and frantically he pulled harder, drawing her toward him.
“Hang on, dammit!”
She said nothing. He could hear her desperate, rasping breathing.
One of her hands found his wrist and tried to wrap around it, but her fingers slipped off and she almost dropped.
“Claudia!” He made his right arm rigid, released the hose with his left hand, and grasped her right wrist as she clutched his.
This time she held.
He shifted his body, felt her left hand close around the hose near where he was gripping it.
“Pull, Nudger!” There was fire and determination in her voice now. She had a chance to live! She wanted to live!
He gritted his teeth and braced himself harder. Heard himself whimper as he used all his remaining strength and will to draw her to him, up, up to safety.
Up!
Up and in!
Her body was lying across his now, most of her weight pressing down on him. She released his wrist, moved her hand quickly and grabbed the edge of the door frame. She pulled, kicking with both legs, while he rolled to the side to help her.
And her weight shifted over him.
And they were both inside, lying on the edge of nothing.
“Wow! Maximum!” shouted the kid below. “Just like on TV!”
Then everyone down in the backyard was yelling. Suddenly they started to applaud.
Nudger didn’t have the strength to take a bow even if he’d wanted to. He lay next to Claudia, between her and death now, and listened to the shrill, approaching sirens of the fire department emergency crew.
They were too late, but who could blame them? Probably they didn’t even know what kind of call they were answering. Where’s the fire? they were probably wondering, searching the sky for smoke. Where’s the fire?
In my chest, Nudger thought, struggling to catch his breath.
An air horn sounded and an engine roared as the hook and ladder unit racketed around the corner onto Wilmington.
Nudger sat next to Claudia’s bed in Incarnate Word Hospital and listened to the nurse’s squeaky soft-soled shoes as she bustled about and arranged covers and medical paraphernalia. Claudia lay propped up on two pillows. There was a white disposable ice pack on her forehead. Beneath the thin sheet, her feet were bandaged where she’d kicked and scraped her toes against rough brick and concrete. Her right hip was badly bruised where she’d banged it against the wall, and one of her hands was cut and bandaged, injured from gripping the rusty concrete reinforcement rod that had saved her life.
“She’ll be fine,” the young, sincere nurse said to Nudger, then eep-eeped out of the room.
Nudger had been assured of the same thing half an hour ago by the doctor who’d treated Claudia. No serious injury, but something had struck her in the head, o
r she’d given it a bad bump, though there was no concussion. And the X rays of her bruised hip were inconclusive and had to be taken again. So they wanted to keep her overnight.
“Head hurt?” he asked softly. His voice didn’t seem to carry well in the cool room.
“No.” Her dark eyes shifted to look at him from beneath the soft white edge of the ice pack. She was on pain medication and not thinking exactly straight. “Nothing hurts. You saved me, Nudger.”
“We did it together,” he said.
“You’re modest.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Don’t be nauseating, Nudger.”
“Whatever you say.”
“I say I’m woozy. How long they plan on keeping me in here.”
“Overnight at least.”
“Tha’s ’kay with me.”
“What did they give you for pain?”
“Don’ know. Like it, though ...” She closed her eyes.
“Claudia?”
“Be here when I wake up, Nudger ...”
“I was going to tell you I would be.”
Her chest rose and fell evenly beneath the sheet and she began snoring lightly.
Other than that, it was quiet in the room except for the faint background rush of traffic out on Grand Avenue. Sounds of people living out their lives. The way Claudia and Nudger would be able to live out theirs.
Nudger stood up, stretched, then wandered out into the corridor.
He stopped and stood just outside the door to Claudia’s room. The huge, fleshy form of Hammersmith was advancing on him. Hammersmith moved with the odd grace of fat men who had once been thin and possessed underlying strength; he seemed almost to be gliding through the air, only touching down to steer with his comparatively small and shiny black shoes.
“How’s she doing, Nudge?” he asked, when he was close to Nudger.
“Okay. She isn’t seriously hurt, and she’s asleep. They’ve got her on some kind of pain medication that acts like opium.”
“Can I look in on her?”
“Sure, but she won’t know it.”
Hammersmith poked his head into Claudia’s room, jutting his rounded rear end out, then backed away and closed the door. Nudger remembered when Hammersmith had been slim and sleek and could charm female suspects into confessions or informing on lovers or cohorts. Too many years ago. He and Nudger had both changed, inside and out.