by John Lutz
“Your sense of humor will disappear, my friend,” Frick said, “when we get where we are going.”
Frick knew his stuff as well as Einstein knew his. Even the dark humor of desperation evaporated when time was up against a brick wall. When the Lincoln slowed and turned into a dark alley between a closed office building and a seedy hotel, Nudger's stomach tried to get out of the car and run, growling for him to follow.
But he couldn't move. He was sitting staring through the windshield, paralyzed with the realization of his impending death, memorizing every detail of the alley: the high dim light at the end, faintly illuminating the shadowed, iron-grilled windows; the hulking trash dumpster looming like a military tank halfway down the alley; the stack of dampness-distorted cardboard boxes with their plastic-wrapped refuse bursting from separated seams. This was how it would end. They'd find his body here tomorrow. Livingston would hear about it, tell someone that Nudger should have listened to him. Hammersmith would be notified, tell someone that Nudger should have listened to him. Hammersmith would tell Claudia; she would agree that he should have listened. Nudger agreed; he should have listened.
“Can't you hear so good, my friend?” Frick was saying. He'd gotten out of the car and walked around. He was holding the car door open for Nudger. Frack had gotten out of the back and was standing next to Frick, smiling down at Nudger.
That was when Nudger remembered the swamp. Maybe they were going to kill him here, put him in the car's trunk, and drive to where they could hide his body in the bayou. The idea of being under all that muck horrified Nudger; there would be nothing to breathe there, only ooze to suck into his lungs. Then he realized that how and what he breathed would hardly be a problem. He shivered, as if a faint, chill breeze had danced down the alley.
“He don't listen for shit, “ Frack said. “He pays attention just for a while, and then he has to talk.”
“He's not talking now,” Frick said.
He started to yank Nudger from the car, but Nudger shoved his big hand away and got out himself and stood in the alley. For the first time since he'd seen Frick standing in front of the hotel, his stomach was calm, his mind strangely placid with resignation. Now he could accept what was about to happen. What, in fact, in all but the heart-ceasing details, had happened. But he wouldn't make it easy for them; he owed the old, once-alive Nudger that much.
He backed a quick step, clenched his fist, and threw a straight right hand at Frack's chin, leaning into it to get all his weight behind the blow.
“Jesus,” Frack said almost sadly, slipping the punch and pushing Nudger into Frick. Frick drove the tips of his fingers into Nudger's stomach. The wind whooshed out of Nudger as he was spun half around and his hands were pinned behind his back in Frack's relentless grip.
“This one is moderately game,” Frick said, amused. He pressed a hand to the side of Nudger's neck and applied pressure. Almost immediately Nudger became dizzy, nauseated. He managed to free one arm and struck blindly at Frick, heard Frick say in his odd courtly manner, “Please, there will be less inconvenience for everyone, my friend, if you cooperate.”
For just an instant Nudger felt a pain near the small of his back, so sharp that it took away what ability he'd regained to breathe. Then he was staring up at the lane of black night sky between the tops of the buildings, and the hard paving bricks were pressing into his back.
His left leg was bent under him at a sharp angle; he was sliding hard into third base after his sizzling line drive to left had been booted by Ackie, the Roans' left fielder. Then dynamite exploded behind his right ear; the cut-off man on the Roans had thrown low and hit him in the head with the baseball. He realized what had happened, even as he lost consciousness, even as the Roans' chubby third baseman—Ronny? Roily?—tried to recover the ball, lost his footing, and fell on top of him.
“Could be a concussion,” somebody said. “Hell no, he wasn't safe!” somebody else said. His father was bending over him, large features wavering, speaking as if to someone else. “Little League baseball is rough,” he told Nudger.
“Rough,” Nudger agreed. His voice was deep, hoarse. Strange. A man's voice. He wasn't lying on the ball diamond in Forest Park in St. Louis. He was miles and years away from there, in an alley in New Orleans.
He tried to sit up and realized that Frick and Frack had treated him more brutally than the Roans' cut-off man. Those guys were sluggers, not shortstops. Pain erupted in Nudger like a nuclear reaction, spreading from his torso down each of his limbs. Bile rose like a solid, bitter column of fire in his throat. He tried to swallow it back down; instead he vomited.
He lay still and tried to regulate his breathing. The pain abated somewhat. Slowly he raised his right hand and wiped his mouth, ran his fingertips over his face. It felt all right. Same familiar features. He used both hands to explore himself and the paving stones on which he lay. No cuts or abrasions. No blood. Nudger knew he'd been the victim of a very professional beating; one that induced pain but no outward evidence of physical violence. Nothing to show the law, to demonstrate with photographs in court. Real pros, were Frick and Frack; all of the damage they'd inflicted was within, like scrambling an egg inside its shell.
The egg rolled over, moaned. Several people strolled past the mouth of the alley, but none of them glanced into its darkness.
It was a full twenty minutes before Nudger managed to get to his feet. He leaned against a brick wall and probed his body for injuries. His ribs seemed okay. There were no mushy spots on his skull. His arms and legs worked, but stiffly and painfully. What the hell had they used on him, rubber hoses?
With an intense effort of will, Nudger made his seemingly disconnected legs propel him jerkily from the alley out onto the sidewalk. It seemed to take several seconds for each signal from his brain to reach his muscles. It was as if he were slow-walking through a nightmare. And maybe he was.
Then he was standing with one foot on the sidewalk, one foot off the curb. He wondered how he could alleviate that problem; it seemed he couldn't move the foot in the street. It was glued down firmly, part of the concrete. Half a dozen people walked past him; they didn't have any idea how to help him, or else they assumed he was drunk. One of them, a woman, even laughed.
“Hey, my man, you sick or something?”
A car was in front of him. For an instant Nudger felt terror. Then he saw the light on top of the car, the lettering on the door.
The police?
He squinted. No, a cab. The driver must have seen him standing half in the street and thought he was hailing a taxi.
“You sick or something?” the cabby repeated.
“Something,” Nudger mumbled. He lurched toward the cab and got the rear door open, slumped inside onto the back seat. He hit his head on the roof going in but barely felt it.
“Hospital?” the driver asked, giving him a level, appraising stare in the rearview mirror.
“Hotel Majestueux,” Nudger said, letting the cab's soft upholstery envelope him like a mother.
“Hell, that's right around the corner.”
“Then drive around awhile before you go there. I need a few minutes.”
“You look like you need more than that, mister. I'll get you to a doctor.”
“There'll be one at the hotel if I need him.”
“You'll need him.”
“You forgot to start your meter.”
The cabby sighed and pulled the taxi away from the curb. “Left or right?” he asked at the corner as he waited for the light to turn green.
“Either,” Nudger said. “It doesn't matter.”
“Nope,” the cabby said, “I guess it don't.”
Nudger managed to walk through the lobby without bending over from the pain in his sides. He'd run up a twenty-dollar taxi fare, but he figured it was worth it; he'd needed the time to recuperate enough to make his way to his room. When he got there, he'd take careful inventory of himself. He really might need a doctor, but he doubted it; Frick and Frack we
re too good at their job actually to snap or rupture something. Their stock-in-trade was internal bruises, and they were craftsmen.
There was no one else in the elevator, or in the hall, as he made his way to his room. Good. He didn't want to attract attention. The pain was wearing him down, causing him to hunch his shoulders and bend at the waist.
He tried three times before he fumbled the key into the lock. Then he turned the knob, shoved in on the door, and staggered into the room.
It was dark, almost totally; only a tall rectangle of lighter-gray shadow that was the window. He felt around on the wall, found the light switch, and flipped it.
He drew in his breath, making a harsh sound that startled him.
Sandra Reckoner was sitting on the foot of the bed with her long legs crossed, grinning. She was holding a half-full bottle of Southern Comfort and appeared to be a little drunk, but all the way undressed. Her clothes were folded neatly on the blue chair by the desk.
Nudger tried to return her grin, but something in him seemed to shift and he groaned. He watched the smile disappear from Sandra's long, bony face. Alarm rearranged her features. She stood up. Boy, did she stand up!
“Nudger, what's wrong?”
“My timing,” he said, and stumbled to the bed and collapsed.
TWENTY-ONE
Willy Hollister's timing was better than Nudger's. While Nudger was floating through varying degrees of pain, Hollister was with Ineida.
“What time is it?” she asked him. She lay huddled against him in his bed, her head resting in the crook of his lean arm. They were comfortably spent and cool, covered only by a light sheet; both of them smelled faintly of perspiration transformed to a musky scent by body heat, the result of their desperate coupling of only a few minutes ago.
“Almost midnight,” Hollister told her, squinting to see the luminous hands of his watch through the spray of Ineida's dark hair. He bent his head forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He loved her. He was reasonably satisfied that he loved her.
“I need to get home,” she said.
“Why? You might as well stay here tonight.”
“I'm going in to the club early tomorrow morning to talk to Fat Jack about some new arrangements. Marty's going to pick me up at eight; I don't want to have to get up here at seven and try to get home to wait for him.”
“Why so early?” Hollister asked.
“It's the only time Fat Jack has free tomorrow.”
Hollister knew that Fat Jack was probably humoring Ineida; new arrangements or not, she still would never bring the crowd to its feet. Polite applause, that was what Ineida would have to learn to feed on. It had never been enough for Hollister, but maybe it would be for her. He smiled faintly in the dimness of the bedroom. But what did it matter? His smile widened, unseen. Should he tell her not to bother with the new arrangements? Not to waste her time?
She sat up suddenly, startling him, the curve of her back smooth and pale in the filtered light, her breasts swaying slightly from her abrupt movement. Hollister saw her fumble with something on the table by the bed. A lighter clicked, illuminating with its bluish flame her unlined face with a cigarette protruding from her compressed lips, her eyes narrowed against the smoke. She seldom smoked, but she had read and heard for a long time about the traditional cigarette after sex, and apparently she wanted to experience it. She often smoked after sex. The bedsprings creaked as Ineida settled back down and rested her head again on Hollister's arm.
“Rather have a joint?” he asked her. “I've got some good Colombian.”
“No, I'll just smoke this and then leave.”
Hollister rested his head back on the pillow, listening to her long, easy intakes and expulsions of breath as she worked on the cigarette. She was breathing mostly through her nose. He had never seen her actually take smoke into her lungs except for the few times she had smoked marijuana.
Ineida did love him, he was sure. Probably more than he loved her. It would soon be time for the pain, the way it always happened in love. His father had treated him so well after the pain of Willy's mother's death when Willy was only ten years old. The beatings had abruptly ceased. His father's drinking had begun. Then, after the drinking, the eyes-rolled-back, falling-in-the-aisles religion. And his father hadn't let them take Willy away after that incident at school with Iris Crane, take him where they could inject him with drugs and probe his mind with subtle sharp questions.
Had he seen his father's hand dart out and edge his mother from the hayloft door? He couldn't know beyond doubt. His father, surprised to see him standing by the henhouse staring at his mother's limp body, registered nothing but numb disbelief on his rough farmer's face. One second Willy's mother had been standing with him, talking and looking out over the just-seeded fields, the next second she was fifty feet below on the bare ground, dead.
Hollister couldn't be sure of what he'd seen that day. He knew that even his father probably wasn't sure about what had happened. Hollister had expected maybe a deathbed confession twenty years later in the sterile hospital room, but his father had simply looked at him, not unlike the way he'd stared at him seconds after his mother's plunge to death, and then turned to face the empty bed next to his and died quietly.
Hollister still wasn't sure, not about anything, really, except his music. The fools who knew he was great could never imagine the cost of greatness. The price in pain that had to be paid. The trick was never to reach equilibrium, and to let the genuine agony of loss sing between the notes. How could anyone possibly understand the cost of that if they weren't touched by greatness and the need? The need and the way, and the roar of pain tamed to a seductive whisper. Hollister almost laughed out loud at the way so few could see and feel the deeper, wiser blackness against the night. The precious gain in loss.
Beside him a tiny red meteor arced to the ashtray and Ineida stubbed out her cigarette. She sat up again, then twisted her body and leaned low to kiss him on the lips, his face tented softly by her dangling hair.
She asked the eternal question. “Do you love me?” she said, sitting halfway up, still bent over him. “Do you? Even now that you've found out—”
“That doesn't matter to me,” Hollister interrupted. “In fact, I admit I'm pleased about it.” He ran a fingertip lightly along the soft inside of her thigh and she sucked in breath sharply and her body twitched with pleasure. “I love you more than you might imagine,” he whispered.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as I've ever been of anything.”
She kissed him again, then got up and went into the bathroom. The light from the bathroom window spilled outside and illuminated the courtyard. A corner of the garden was visible through the bedroom window.
Hollister lay quietly staring at the symmetrical dark row of rosebushes. The roses would bloom soon, he knew.
TWENTY-TWO
“God, you're pissing blood.”
Sandra Reckoner, shy thing that she was, had stayed after helping Nudger into the bathroom. She stood now near the door, nude and unafraid of what the harsh morning light might reveal about her long body. She had no reason to be afraid; the few stretch marks and the slightly pendulous angle of her breasts somehow seemed only to add to her attractiveness by making her real and sensuous in a way no mere centerfold candidate could approach.
“It's from being punched in the kidneys,” Nudger told her, leaning with one hand flat against the wall.
“Don't you think you should see a doctor?”
“No.” He pushed away from the wall and turned toward the washbasin.
“Why not?”
“Doctors are like mechanics and a number of other people who charge too much for their services. If you go to them, they'll find all sorts of things wrong.”
“That's a stupid attitude.”
“It probably is at my age; there could really be all sorts of things wrong with me.”
“Doesn't it frighten you, seeing blood in your urine”
&nb
sp; “Sure. But it scared me worse the first time, after I'd been kicked in the kidneys a few years ago. But I know now it will eventually take care of itself; the people who did this to me knew just how far to go.” He washed his hands, splashed cold water over his face.
“You sound as if you admire their professionalism,” Sandra said.
“I don't admire it,” Nudger told her, “but I'm counting on it instead of my medical insurance.” Insurance which, it occurred to him, might have lapsed. Had he paid that last premium? That was something he'd better remember to check on.
“Do you know who beat you up? And why?
“Yes and yes,” Nudger said. “It was two very large primeval types who were underlining a message they'd delivered to me earlier.”
“There's such a thing as the police, you know,” Sandra said. “Have you called them?”
“No.”
“You should. You were assaulted. I understand there's a city ordinance against beating up out-of-towners. And maybe you could use police protection.”
“I'm not so sure, in this instance.”
Sandra looked at him curiously. “You weren't in any shape to talk about it last night,” she said. “Would it help you to talk about it now?”
“No,” Nudger told her, “I don't even want to think about it.”
She knew when not to pursue a subject. She stepped around him, bent over and turned on the taps in the bathtub, then pulled the chrome lever that got the shower going. “Wait for the water to get warm,” she said. “I'll be right back.” She sidestepped around his listing form again and left the bathroom.
Nudger stood remembering his night with her. She had comforted him, held his head close between her bare breasts, as he drifted in and out of sleep, in and out of pain. Several times she had suggested calling the hotel doctor; each time Nudger had refused. In the coolness of the air-conditioned room, it was the heat of her long body that he wanted, the warmth of her limitless compassion. Sex, of course, had been out of the question; Nudger was having enough difficulty simply breathing. But she had stayed with him and given him what at that moment he so badly needed.