John Lutz - Ride the lightning

He knew he couldn't stay away. He'd known it since yesterday.

Before he had breakfast, before he called Harold Benedict or left to look at his office mail or checked his answering machine, he put on his blue sport coat and a dark tie and drove to Curtis Colt's funeral.

It was a state-funded affair, with only a graveside ceremony at a paupers' cemetery in south St. Louis. Nudger had noticed the date and time of burial while reading newspaper accounts of Colt's execution, and they had lodged, cold and nagging, in his mind.

There were about a dozen people gathered around the grave, including the state-appointed clergyman. Most of them were pallbearers, also paid by the state. Lester was there, looking more bereaved then anyone, wearing an oversized winter-wool sport jacket over a T-shirt. There was an older couple who appeared bored with the ceremony. Welborne Colt hadn't attended. He and his brother had reached the final parting still separated by antagonism and distance.

Candy Ann was standing about a hundred feet away from the clergyman, off to the side of the gleaming wood casket. Her straw-colored hair glowed with the morning. In the wash of bright sunlight, she looked like a child playing a dress-up in black.

When she saw Nudger, she averted her eyes. He was sure she'd gotten her complimentary copy of the Voyeur, as he had. A great thing to wake up to on the day of your fiance's funeral.

The preacher, who himself resembled a cadaver and was of indeterminate religion, adjusted his dark suit on his thin frame and made a vague crosslike motion with his right hand. Nudger noticed several people, including a man with a tripod-mounted camera, stationed on the grave-strewn hill above Curtis' coffin. The media would stop only after Colt was buried, and maybe not even then. Certain crimes, and their aftermaths, caught and held the public's attention. Nudger knew a telephoto lens was probably trained in close- up on Candy Ann now as the photographer, possibly from the Voyeur, hoped for an expression of grief, a tear. If he really got lucky, she'd faint.

The clergyman rambled on about life and death, gesticulating grandly, playing for the press. Where Nudger was standing, the man's voice came across merely as a monotonous drone. Everyone around the grave was shifting their weight from leg to leg, perspiring heavily, wishing the clergyman would finish sending Colt on his way. Only Candy Ann stood perfectly still, though, like Nudger, she was probably too far away to understand what the preacher was saying.

A blue jay in a nearby pin oak began chattering angrily, noisily, upstaging the preacher, who turned briefly and glared at it. The jay cocked its head to the side, as if to get a better angle of vision, and stared back insolently with a bright eye, a look it probably usually reserved for worms. The clergyman made up his mind to ignore the winged interloper. The jay hopped down onto a lower branch, among sunlit leaves, and really started raising hell. That seemed to hurry the gaunt man of the cloth along.

Finally the service was over. The jay stopped its clacking as if in relief. Candy Ann walked to the single floral spray by the grave, plucked a blossom, and laid it gently on the lid of the casket. The clergyman rested a bony hand on her shoulder, but she ignored him. He was part of Curtis' imposed untimely death and could in no way comfort her.

After standing motionless for a few minutes, she turned and walked away. Nudger saw the photographer with the tripod and long lens straighten up from his camera and say something to the man next to him. Everyone began drifting toward the parked cars.

Something tugged at Nudger's arm. He turned to see Lester Colt beside him, red-eyed and stricken-looking. His face was puffier than usual, and he reeked of cheap, per- fumy cologne or shaving lotion mingled with perspiration.

"I figure you did your best, Mr. Nudger," he said. He sniffled. "Want you to know there ain't no hard feelings 'cause you couldn't save Curtis."

Nudger nodded, feeling uncomfortable. "We did what we could," he said. "I'm sorry, Lester." Over Lester's shoulder he saw Candy Ann get into a waiting County cab, a flash of pale leg against the black of her dress.

"Welborne shoulda been here, don't you think?"

"I think so," Nudger said. He didn't feel like giving Welborne a break. "It was the least he could have done. His own brother." Nudger meant it.

The taxi carrying Candy Ann wound along the cemetery's narrow gravel road, flashing through patches of deep shade. It paused at tall black iron gates hinged open on stone pillars, then turned out into the traffic. Nudger could see Candy Ann's wide black hat through the cab's rear window. She didn't look back.

"She did okay by Curtis after all," Lester said, watching with Nudger as the cab disappeared beyond the trees. He smiled, looked over at the grave, and sniffled again.

"How did you get here?" Nudger asked. There were no more parked cars now other than his VW and a van belonging to one of the media people.

"Took a bus. Couple of buses. My car's broke down."

"Where you going now?"

"Back to work. I got to. The foreman said I could have the rest of the day free, but I'll be better off taking it out on the freight, what I feel. Work's kinda like medicine, don't you think?"

"Like medicine," Nudger agreed. He'd often fled into the diversion of hard work himself. But he knew that eventually work wasn't enough; at a certain point people had to turn and face whatever they were running from or holding at bay.

He told Lester he was going his way and would drop him off at Commerce Freightlines. Two bearded men in work clothes were hanging around the grave, in the shade of a small canvas awning that had been set up, waiting for the last of the mourners to leave so they could lower the casket.

He started the VW and followed the path of the taxi along the winding gravel road.

At the tall gates, he remembered something Wanda Scathers had said, and he knew what had been bothering him since the day of Curtis Colt's death.

He twisted the vent window to direct fresh air into the car, to combat Lester's smarmy cologne, and accelerated out into heavy traffic that ran parallel to the cemetery's black iron fence.

Beside him, Lester was talking incessantly, but Nudger wasn't listening.

Benedict would have work to be farmed out soon, he assured him, when Nudger phoned him. The proprietor of Enchanted Night Escort Service had hired Benedict and Schill to defend the service in a suit brought by a former employee who'd been fired for prostituting herself.

Nudger decided that the morning was following its established gloomy course. Everything in the office was sticky with humidity.

"The escort service is really on the up and up," Benedict explained. "It provides women to accompany out-of-town executives to social functions. The fees are high and the employees have strict, written rules of behavior; they're escorts, and escorts only."

That ran contrary to Nudger's concept of an escort service, but he said nothing. His middle-class background might be showing.

"One of the escorts, a Sandra McClain, went beyond the call of duty one night with an undercover cop, was arrested, and claimed she was a housewife working part-time and had been coerced by the escort service into prostitution. The only way she could continue working, she said, to provide food for the children; yeah, she really said that. So she and her out-of-work husband filed suit, probably hoping to save face more than anything else."

Nudger wondered if the woman might be telling the truth, caught in a trap that was perhaps so disturbingly commonplace that it had taken on the exaggeration of burlesque and people refused to take it seriously.