Nightlines Read Free Page B

stretched out on his back on the cot, not bothering to get into the sleeping bag.
    He laced his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, listening to the oddly comforting faint rattle and pop of steam pipes, the intermittent soft swishing sound of traffic on the rain-swept street two stories below. At least for the time being things were under his control and manageable.
    He was forty-three years old. He was tired. The two facts were not unrelated. He had no trouble falling asleep.
    The innocent sleep blissfully. So do the unsuspecting.
    II I
    ach shrill, penetrating bleep of his wristwatch alarm was like the point of a needle probing the tissue of Nudger’s brain. Something similarly sharp had been scraped across the base of Jenine Boyington’s phone, he told himself foggily in his world of uneasy dreams.
    As Nudger came awake, he groped for the ridiculously tiny watch stem and switched off the alarm, then pressed another stem and saw by the glow produced that it was two minutes past midnight. His office was dimly illuminated from the street lamp on the corner. Everything was quiet; even the steam pipes were taking a rest from their cacoph ony of popping and hissing.
    Nudger sat on the edge of the cot, his head resting in his hands. His throat was dry; his tongue was thick and seemed to be covered with that stuff used to fasten coats without buttons or zippers. It was the witching hour and cold and dark, so what was he doing still in his office? What was he doing struggling out of bed? What was he doing in this business? But he knew; he was eating regularly and sometimes paying the bills. The stuff of life.
    He stood up, went into the small half-bath and splashed cold water onto his face and rinsed out his mouth. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror above the washbasin, winced, looked away, and went back into the office and sat behind his desk. His swivel chair squealed loud enough to wake the doughnuts downstairs.
    After switching on his yellow-shaded desk lamp, Nudger reached for the phone and dragged it to him. He tried the number from the base of Jenine’s phone and got a busy sig nal. Then he tried all the numbers Fisher had given him and was surprised to keep getting busy signals. He decided to try only the number from Jenine’s apartment and sat punching it out every half minute until he got a dial tone.
    Within seconds there was a loud click in the receiver. A male voice said, “Are you there, sweet thing?”
    “I’m here,” Nudger said. “How sweet I am is debatable.”
    “What’s not debatable,” the man said, “is that you’re not my kind of sweet. That is, unless you’ve got an awfully deep voice to match perfect thirty-six C-cup lung power.”
    “I wear a forty-four-long suitcoat,” Nudger said, “sometimes triple-knit, usually a bit frayed at the cuffs and elbows. Still interested?”
    The man laughed. “Sure, but not in you, pal. I got a feeling we’re looking for the same thing.” He hung up.
    Very possible, Nudger thought, staying on the line.
    Another click.
    “I’m a Nordic-type music lover in my early thirties, and I prefer the muscular Mediterranean macho type,” a man said, sounding like one of those classified ads in the personal column of the National Enquirer . “I can be sheep or wolf, if anyone is listening. Also I’m into rubber. Hello, hello, are you there, lover? Are you assimilating my red-hot vibes?”
    “I’m assimilating them,” Nudger said, “but I’m not quite on the same wave length. I’m into chocolate frosting.”
    “Sounds divine.”
    “That’s what Betty Crocker says.”
    “You jest?”
    “I jest.”
    “Ciao, then.” Click .
    There was something more than a little sad in all of this, Nudger thought, as he shifted position in his chair. It reminded him of forced gaiety on New Year’s Eve, when everybody realized that time was slipping away from them, but wore funny hats and tooted horns and then riotously sang “Auld Lang Syne,”