Ride the Lightning Read Free

gas chamber. Most of the legislature in Jefferson City, the state capital, opted for using the gas chamber if Missouri had to begin executing convicted killers again. Sly politician that he was, Scalla had used the argument over how for the purpose of diverting attention from the argument over if . Curtis Colt was either going to inhale cyanide gas or he was going to ride the lightning. The if question had been settled just before Colt was tagged for the electric chair.
    “How come you need to learn about Colt?” Danny asked, wiping down the smooth counter and tucking his grayish towel back into his belt. “After Saturday, not much of what you know about him will matter anymore. He’ll be gone.”
    “Probably,” Nudger said. He pretended to sip his coffee while Danny watched with his sad brown eyes. “You think he’s guilty of killing that woman, Danny?”
    “Sure. He was found guilty by twelve good men and true.”
    “There were eight women on the jury,” Nudger pointed out.
    “Sex aside,” Danny said, pausing for a moment to remove the towel from his belt and snap it at a bluebottle fly that had settled on the counter, “Colt is guilty. The truth comes out in court.”
    “It does,” Nudger agreed, watching the fly buzz frantically away through a shaft of gold sunlight, spiraling up, up, winging for life. Beautiful. “But sometimes not all of the truth. And not in any form you might recognize.”
    “It don’t matter much now,” Danny said. “What’s done’s done. The law says Colt did it, and he’s only got a week to live. So what are you doing digging around in the case, Nudge?”
    “I was hired by somebody who thinks Colt’s innocent.”
    “Humph,” Danny said, and bent down to rearrange the leftover cream horns in the greasy display case. One of the spread-out newspapers on which he’d placed waxed paper in the case was today’s sports page. “The Cards have won four in a row now,” he said, reading beyond the cream horns. “We get some relief pitching and we’ll take the division championship.”
    Nudger wished there were a relief corps for every occupation; there were a lot of times he could have used a relief detective. He slid his coffee cup off to the side and got back to reading.
    The papers agreed on the details of the crime. Two customers in the back of the liquor store heard shots, looked down the aisle, and saw Curtis Colt standing over the body of the old man who owned and managed the store. Colt was holding a gun. The man’s wife, also shot, was staggering around the store, grabbing on to things and knocking over displays and bottles. Colt shoved her aside and ran.
    Two witnesses outside saw him, still holding the gun, race from the store and get into a parked car whose driver was waiting with the engine idling. One of the witnesses, a Mrs. Langeneckert, screamed for him to stop. Another shot was fired wildly as the car sped away.
    The liquor-store owner, sixty-eight-year-old Amos Olson, had been shot once in the head and twice in the abdomen. One of the bullets had tumbled and damaged his spine and central nervous system. He would never give his version of the crime. He would never talk or perhaps even think coherently again.
    Olson’s wife Dolly, same age as her husband, had been hit only once, but with deadly accuracy in the forehead. Nudger knew that the forehead was one of the least effective places to shoot a human being; unlike the back of the skull, there was a great deal of bone there to protect the brain. Sometimes people shot in the forehead took a long time to die. Which was why Dolly Olson had thrashed about the store for a while in a blind frenzy before mercifully dropping dead.
    The Dunker Delite seemed to shift weighty position in Nudger’s stomach, as if it couldn’t get comfortable and wished it were someplace else. His large intestine told him he had too much imagination. He swallowed noisily and read on.
    An hour later that evening, a cruising two-man