John Lutz - Nightlines

Nudger was awake in the morning-bright office and the receiver was in his hand. He must have reached for it in his sleep. He brought it to his ear. Danny's voice said, "Short notice, Nudge, but I thought you'd wanna know trouble's coming your way."

Nudger was aware of footsteps, someone climbing the narrow stairs from the street door. He thanked Danny for the warning and hung up the phone, picturing the substantial Hugo Rumbo while trying to recall if he'd locked the office door. He had, he hadn't, he had, he hadn't. He hadn't!

A board on the landing creaked. A familiar sound. Whoever was out there was at the top of the stairs. Nudger would have opened a desk drawer and reached for his gun, if he'd owned a gun. His stomach and heart seemed to be fighting for the same cramped space in his throat as he stood up and leaned steeply forward, supporting himself shakily with his arms locked at the elbows and his hands palms-down on the desk. He found himself unable to look away from the prismatic glass doorknob on his office door.

The knob rotated. The door opened.

Eileen stepped in.

"Startle you?" she asked.

Nudger sat down, leaned back, and breathed out hard. "You startled me," he confirmed.

"I meant to. It seems to be the only way I can capture your attention."

Nudger smoothed back his hair with his fingers, straightened his collar, and gave her his attention. She was still an attractive woman, trim and neatly groomed, with a kind of wholesomeness about her that would have carried her far as an actress playing typical homemakers in television commercials. Though a delicate woman with a certain frilliness about her, she had a robust complexion, large and perfectly aligned very white teeth, and shapely, strong-looking hands. It all suggested that good health meant good sex, and wasn't far off the mark.

Why had they lost both love and lust for each other? Nudger thought sometimes that it was the ungodly and unpredictable hours he worked. Or was it the sterility of the suburban plot they had called home? Whatever had caused the widening gap between them was still a mystery, as it probably remained in most divorces. Nudger only knew that when she suggested the divorce he had felt not only shock but also undeniable relief. A lightning comprehension-or admission. He, too, wanted to live a life different from the one they shared. Eileen had seen that in him as soon as she'd brought up the subject of a divorce as a possible alternative, and that was that. In that instant it had been transformed from an alternative to an inevitability.

Such were the complexities of the human heart. Or maybe it was simpler and less poetic than that. Maybe he'd decided subconsciously to leave her when he heard her use the word "cute" three times in one sentence, there on the phone in that suburban frame house that was like the neighboring houses on either side. But he was being unfair. He knew that his reaction to that triple-cute was probably only symptomatic of their real problem.

"You still have it," he told her.

She smiled. "Thank you."

"I mean, you still have my attention." He hadn't meant to hurt her.

Smile gone. "And you still have a way with words, and I still don't have my money. Almost a thousand dollars now in back alimony."

"Eight hundred fifty-three dollars and some odd cents," Nudger corrected.

"Nine hundred."

He shrugged. "Whatever." Or did he enjoy taunting her? "I have the exact amount written down."

"But not written where it counts-on a check made out to me." He had made her angry. She began to stalk about the office, rotating her high heels slightly with each slow step as if grinding despicable small objects into the floor. She had on those silver shoes with the tiny black bows, like the pair Jeanette Boyington wore. Nudger felt that he might be developing a dislike for those shoes.

"You'll get the money," he said. "You know that."

She stopped pacing and wheeled to glare at him. "But I want you to know that. If I don't have a check in my mail by the end of next week, I'm taking you back to court."

"Eileen, you know what they say about not being able to squeeze blood from a turnip."

He could almost feel the heat from her eyes as she said, "I'll settle for whatever oozes out."

Nudger's nervous stomach growled. It seemed to develop a language all its own when Eileen was around. It was a good thing she didn't know what she had just been called.

"I'm giving you more than a week," she reminded him. "That should leave you plenty of time to raise the money."

"What I don't have is plenty of collateral."

She lifted her shoulders eloquently, flicked lint from her sleeve onto his floor. "That's a problem you let develop. You should have gone back on the police force. You should have been paying me all along."

He smiled and shook his head sadly. "I couldn't go back, Eileen. And I can't get a loan."

She advanced a step and cocked her head sharply sideways. "Are you saying you're not going to pay me?" A long- nailed forefinger was aimed like a gun at him, loaded with ammunition provided by a divorce court judge. They were bullets that stayed in the wounds and festered.

Nudger stared at that steady finger and remembered the divorce proceedings. Eileen's lawyer was about the slickest courtroom manipulator he had ever seen. So convincing was the man that even Nudger thought the exorbitant alimony Eileen had been granted was justifiable, until several hours had passed in the real world outside the illusion- ary but credible world the lawyer had created for just long enough inside the courtroom. By then it was too late. His own lawyer had phoned to apologize, cutting the conversation short so he wouldn't be late for his remedial law classes.

"Of course I plan to pay you," Nudger said to Eileen, wondering how the two of them had come to this. And if they would have if the divorce had been over something simple, or at least definable, like an extramarital affair. They were both basically decent people.

"When and how much?" she asked.

"Soon, and all-well, half."

She smiled as if she'd caught him breaking his diet at midnight. He remembered that beautiful, impenetrable skepticism. "I thought you had no collateral, no resources."

"Someone owes me money from a job," he said.

"And when will you be paid so I can be?"

"That depends. Should be any day. The Ringo case has been wrapped up for weeks."

"Ringo? Sounds like a bookie or police character. What makes you think this Ringo pays his bills?"

"He'll pay. He's from a good family. Breeding tells."

She sighed and scowled at him. Such a naughty boy he was. "All right," she said. "I expect five hundred dollars by the end of next week, or it's back to court. No more deals."

"That's reasonable enough," Nudger said, reinforcing her spirit of compromise.

"And if this Ringo tells you he can't pay, I want to know about it."

"He's not the type to tell anyone that," Nudger assured her.

As Eileen started toward the door, she paused and looked around the office as if finally noticing her surroundings. Her upper lip curled as if she'd just discovered a hair in her salad. Nudger knew that she was making plenty of money selling one of those all-purpose home product lines while recruiting more salespeople. It was like a pyramid. She was a distributor now, with her own network of salespeople and a disproportionate cut of everyone's take. To her, way up near the peak of the pyramid, this was poverty.

"How can you stand it here?" she asked.

Nudger felt anger dig its claws into his guts. But he knew the folly of stumbling into an argument with Eileen at this point. She was inviting him to thrash around in quicksand.

"The roof doesn't leak," he said, "and the rent is cheap, so I can save up and make alimony payments."