Ride the Lightning Read Free Page A

patrol car had stopped at a service station so one of the police officers could use the rest room. As they pulled up by the pumps, a black or dark green car, probably a Ford, screeched from a shadowed corner of the lot. The cruiser’s engine was turned off, and as the driver tried to start the car his partner spotted someone standing by the cigarette machine inside the station. The someone looked terrified and matched the description of the liquor-store woman’s killer that had recently been broadcast on the police radio. The car that had sped from the lot matched the general description of the liquor-store-holdup getaway car.
    The cop forgot all about using the rest room.
    Half an hour later, Colt was handcuffed and booked at the Third District station house. The black or dark green Ford and its driver weren’t seen again.
    It was exactly the kind of case a prosecuting attorney prayed for. The jury was out less than an hour before finding Colt guilty. Colt had shot the old man first; he’d had time to think about killing the woman. He could simply have run from the liquor store, but he hadn’t. He’d stayed. Premeditation of a sort. The judge recommended the death penalty. The jury went along with that one, too. Everybody was ripe for somebody else’s death.
    Nudger studied the photographs of Colt, trying to get a feel for who and what the man was. On the front page of the Post Dispatch was a shot of Colt being led into the Third District station. In the next day’s paper there was a close up of him, handsome in a moody, defiant way, with lean, dark features that looked as if they’d been whittled from hard wood. He was young, with a downswept bandito mustache and wavy dark hair that fell gracefully over his ears and collar. Another shot of him, being led from police headquarters at Tucker and Clark, showed him considerably calmer than on the night of his arrest. He was wearing jail-house dungarees and his wrists were cuffed in front of him. He was somewhat on the short side, compared with the two detectives flanking him in the photo, and had a skinny middleweight’s lithe and muscular build.
    “What are you supposed to be able to do for this guy?” Danny was asking.
    “Save his life,” Nudger said, folding his newspaper copies and placing the coffee cup directly before him.
    Danny was staring at the cup, whose level hadn’t dropped much in the last fifteen minutes. He was almost as sensitive about his coffee as about his doughnuts, which were not quite as lethal.
    Nudger had no choice; hurting Danny’s feelings was like kicking a tired old basset hound. He poured more cream into the coffee, loaded in two heaping spoonfuls of sugar to cut the bitterness, and took a sip. Not bad. Well, not fatal. He looked over at Danny and smiled.
    Danny smiled back and went to the big steel coffee urn and adjusted some valves; something toward the back of the urn hissed and emitted steam. He looked like a submariner getting ready to send his craft on a crash dive into protective depths, where it would lie on the bottom, weighted down with Dunker Delites. “Scalla ain’t the sort to give reprieves,” he said over his shoulder.
    “I know. He’s the type to throw the switch himself.”
    “I don’t know what just reminded me,” Danny said, “but Eileen was by here this morning looking for you. She seemed eager for you and her to be in the same place at the same time.”
    Nudger’s stomach kicked. Hard. Eileen was his former wife. Since the divorce, she and his stomach got along worse every year. “She say what she wanted?”
    “Not directly,” Danny said, “but she hinted it was green and you owed it to her.”
    “Not this time,” Nudger said. “I’m caught up on my alimony.”
    As he spoke, Nudger suddenly wondered if that was true. Had his last check to her been for half the amount owed? Had there been enough money in the account to cover the check? It was all misty memory.
    Danny shrugged and wiped his hands