John Lutz - Ride the lightning

The crickets were raising a racket again outside, their shrill ongoing scream the loudest sound in the baking trailer. Candy Ann raised her head to look directly at Nudger with eyes that begged and dreaded. She asked simply, "Why would I do that?"

"Because you were Curtis Colt's accomplice in all of his robberies. And when you hit the liquor store, he stayed in the car to drive. You fired the shot that killed the old woman."

Candy Ann shook her head slowly, as if stunned. "Lordy, that's crazy."

"Curtis was the one who fired the wild shot from the speeding car," Nudger said. "I realized that when one of the witnesses, Edna Fine, told me she saw an arm come out of the car to fire a gun back toward the liquor store. She was looking at the car from the left side. The driver's side. It was the driver's-side window she'd seen the arm come out of to fire the shot. Curtis' arm. Which was why tests indicated he'd fired a gun that night."

"Why, that just ain't so, Mr. Nudger. None of it."

"It's so. And you cozied up to Randy Gantner so you could make him stand firm if the other witnesses did change their stories. When it looked as if I might actually make progress, you would have aroused curiosity if you'd simply called me off the case, so you had Gantner hire one of his union strong-arm friends to beat me up and try to scare me off it. When that failed, Gantner made sure the other witnesses would stick to their stories; he even terrorized Edna Fine by killing her pet. While I was following you, waiting for you to get the car I was sure you must still have hidden somewhere, Gantner was following me. Just now, outside, he realized how much trouble he was in, how much you'd lured him into doing for you by playing up to his adolescent machismo, and he tried again to use force to stop me." Nudger looked at the gin bottle. He felt like taking a drink, but he didn't. "Did Gantner just hold you when you slept with him, Candy Ann?"

She didn't answer. She drained her glass and poured another drink into the jelly-jar glass, striking the neck of the bottle hard on the thick rim. It made a surprisingly sharp, flinty sound, as if sparks might fly.

"Colt never talked," Nudger said. "Not to the police, not to his lawyer, not even to a priest. Now that he's dead you can trust him forever, but I have a feeling you could have anyway. He loved you more than you loved him, and you'll have to live knowing he didn't deserve to die."

She looked down into her glass as if for answers and didn't say anything for a long time. Nudger felt a bead of perspiration trickle in a wild zigzag course down the back of his neck, like a tiny live thing crazy from the heat.

Then she said, "I didn't want to shoot that old man, but he didn't leave me no choice. Then the old woman come at me." She looked up at Nudger and smiled ever so slightly. It was a smile Nudger hadn't seen on her before; it sent a tingling coldness through him. There was a pinpoint center of darkness, the abyss of madness, in her eyes. "God help me, Mr. Nudger, I can't quit thinking about shooting that old woman. And about Curtis."

"You murdered her," Nudger said softly. "Then you murdered Curtis Colt by keeping silent and letting him die for you."

"I was scared," she said simply, in a flat voice.

"Everybody's scared most of the time."

"That's right, I suppose. But some of us are more scared than others, and with more reason."

Nudger kept silent, refusing to agree with her. She hadn't confided everything to Gantner, he was sure. Nudger was the only one who knew everything about her, and he wouldn't tell her what she longed to hear, wouldn't soothe her and give her what she needed to justify her actions. There had to be a measure of justice in all of this, had to be some balance to the world.

"You can't prove nothing," Candy Ann said, still with her ancient-eyed, eerie smile that had little to do with amusement.

"You're right," Nudger told her, "I can't. But I don't think legally proving it is necessary, Candy Ann. You said it: our thoughts are actually tiny electrical impulses in the brain. Curtis Colt rode the lightning all at once. With you, it will take years, but the destination is the same. I think you'll come to agree that his ride was easier."

She sat very still. She didn't answer. Wasn't going to.

Nudger stood up and wiped his damp forehead with the back of his hand. He felt sticky, dirty, confined by the low ceiling and near walls of the tiny, stifling trailer. He had to get out of there fast to escape the sensation that he was trapped.

He didn't say good-bye to Candy Ann when he walked out. She didn't say good-bye to him.

The last sound Nudger heard as he stepped down from the trailer was the clink of the bottle on the glass.

t was December, and frost had softly webbed the corners of Nudger's office window, when Hammersmith phoned and told him Candy Ann Adams had committed suicide. All of Nudger's breath left him for an instant; something icy whispered in his ear. It hadn't taken as long as he'd thought; he could imagine Candy Ann old and guilt-ravaged, but it was difficult to imagine her dead.

"She was found in her bathtub with her radio," Hammersmith said. "The radio was on, she was off." Beneath his flipness lay an almost unfathomable sadness. Nudger knew Hammersmith as probably no one else did, knew how sarcasm and irony hid the real man, protected him from pain. But this time it wasn't enough protection.

"Maybe it was an accident," Nudger suggested, knowing better, knowing what had saddened Hammersmith.

"She left a note, Nudge. She admitted killing the old woman, and she admitted using you, and then Gantner, to try to make sure Curtis Colt burned for what she did. It was all the way you figured it last summer."

"What about Gantner?" Nudger asked, fastening a few more buttons on his sweater. The office was cold.

"He was telling the truth," Hammersmith said. "Candy Ann told him Colt had put her up to trying to get the witnesses to change their stories, that he'd shot the old woman and she was afraid of him and knew he'd kill her if he escaped execution and somehow got out of prison. That's how she talked Gantner and his strong-arm buddy into trying to scare you off the case when it looked as if you might get to the truth. I think Gantner only realized Colt was innocent, and Candy Ann was the killer, when he followed you around after the funeral and guessed what you'd figured out."

That was how Nudger had seen it. Hammersmith had questioned Gantner in July, trying to find out if Candy Ann had admitted the liquor-store killings. But Gantner was smart enough not to implicate himself as an accessory to murder and had denied knowing of Candy Ann's guilt. He'd been telling it straight, and there hadn't been enough evidence to bring charges against him.

Nudger could feel Hammersmith's grief and frustration flowing through the phone connection. Hammersmith was a cop, not a killer. But he'd helped to build a case against an innocent man, helped to send him out on the lightning.

"It's over," Nudger said. "Don't let it haunt you."

"It's over for Curtis Colt, too," Hammersmith said.

"He was driving the car," Nudger reminded Hammersmith. "He was involved."

"But he didn't pull the trigger," Hammersmith said. "He didn't kill anyone. The law did. And I'm the law." He fired up a cigar; Nudger could hear him slurping and puffing furiously on it. Hammersmith was getting mad, feeling the corrosiveness of what had happened eating into him, gnawing. "I don't buy that vigilante bullshit, Nudge. The man didn't deserve to die."

"He didn't," Nudger agreed. "But he wasn't perfect. Neither is the law, and neither are we."

Hammersmith was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I better get busy, Nudge. Crime never takes time out. And I'm so popular. Every damn line on my phone is blinking. Every one."