Ride the Lightning Read Free Page B

roughly on the towel, in the manner of a mechanic who’d just crawled out from under a car and was uncertain about his work. “Well, I dunno, Nudge. You want another doughnut?”
    “No, thanks. Work to do.” Nudger swiveled away from the counter and slid down off his stool. He picked up his foam coffee cup and headed for the door.
    “You really think Colt might be innocent?” Danny asked. He sounded dubious.
    “I never said that,” Nudger told him.
    He pushed out through the door into the hot day, made a tight U-turn, and went in the door to the narrow, creaking stairway that led up to his office. The sweet smell of the doughnut shop followed him.
    After switching on the window air conditioner, he sat in his squealing swivel chair behind his desk and checked his telephone answering machine. There was a click, whir, and a beep, and the first message sounded.
    A drunk, almost unintelligible, painstakingly explained that he’d called the wrong number and asked for the right one. He got angry when no one accepted his apology, and hung up in a snit.
    Beep . Eileen’s voice: “Call me today, if you know what’s good for you. If you don’t—”
    Nudger punched the machine’s off button. He didn’t know what was good for him. Never had.
    He sat back in his chair. He’d heard enough messages for now, and the mail he’d brought in from the landing didn’t look interesting: bills, ads, threatening letters from creditors, bills, junk mail, bills, bills. He made up his mind not to open any of the mail until he needed something to do.
    The office was getting comfortably cool. It didn’t take long; the place was small. Nudger watched the electric bill on the desk flutter lazily in the breeze from the air conditioner. Finally it slid off the desk and sailed toward the far wall, out of sight. He didn’t bother to retrieve it.
    He went through the Curtis Colt information again, this time more carefully, and decided Colt was guilty as original sin.
    Nudger didn’t like where that left him.
    He’d have liked it even less if he’d known where it was taking him.
    II I
    udger looked at the list of names he’d compiled and decided to start with Randy Gantner. Gantner and a friend had been in the liquor store at the time of the shooting and had testified for the prosecution in court. He was as good a place as any to begin—the logical place, really, since it occurred to Nudger that there were so many witnesses against Curtis Colt that he might as well talk to them in alphabetical order.
    Randy Gantner was a construction worker for Kalas Con struction, one of the major contractors in St. Louis, a road builder who did a lot of highway work. Nudger had seen the company name lettered across truck trailers parked at major road construction sites all over the city. Road contractors not only did this to advertise; the countless permits they needed to work were plastered all over the sides of the trailers to satisfy various inspectors and busybody local officials.
    It was afternoon before Nudger located Gantner working weekend overtime on a highway access ramp job in Northwest County. Kalas Construction was building a new cloverleaf on the stem of Interstate 70. It was hot work and a hot afternoon to do it in.
    “Why should I worry about it anymore?” Gantner asked Nudger, leaning hipshot on his shovel. He didn’t mind talking to Nudger; it meant taking a break from scooping away mounds of black dirt that had been brought up by a huge drill that was boring holes to bedrock for concrete piering. “Colt’s been found guilty and he’s going to the chair, ain’t he?”
    The high afternoon sun was hammering down on Nudger, warming the back of his neck and making his stom ach uneasy. He thumbed an antacid tablet off the roll he kept in his shirt pocket and popped one of the white disks into his mouth. With his other hand he held up a photograph of Curtis Colt for Gantner to see. It was a snapshot Candy Ann had given him of the wiry,