John Lutz - Nightlines

Jeanette was smiling down at him, apparently impressed at last. Nudger's ego inflated a couple of more pounds per square inch.

"Everything's elementary if approached in a simple- enough fashion," she said, shrinking him once more to doltish proportions.

"That's me," Nudger told her, "I'm simple and I work cheap."

"Don't be hard on yourself," Jeanette said. "Remember the model T Ford. Reliable if not swift. The favorite of millions."

They left Jenine's depressing apartment and Nudger drove Jeanette back to her car, parked outside his office.

His spirits perked up as he pulled to the curb in front of the building and switched off the engine; he was lucky enough to get the parking space with the broken meter. Fortune's wheel on the upswing?

"It smells terrific around here," Jeanette said, as he walked with her to her very practical blue sedan.

"That's the doughnut shop located directly below my office," Nudger told her. "Don't be fooled by the aroma."

"That's always been my philosophy," she said, unlocking and opening her car door. Before getting behind the steering wheel she asked, "What now?"

"As I am an investigator," Nudger said, "I will commence to investigate. I'm going to find out more about those numbers; I'm well connected at the phone company."

She lowered her neat frame and scooted onto the seat, fishing in her oversized white vinyl purse for her keys. "You'll call me?"

"When I have something worth saying."

Her face was as placid and unexpressive as ever as she drove away. She could have been one of the gang on Mount Rushmore.

Nudger realized suddenly that a cool drizzle was falling on him and that it was past lunchtime. Probably he should have invited the unresponsive Jeanette to dine with him. That would have been the gentlemanly and professional thing to do, even though he didn't want to take time for lunch.

Dodging traffic, he crossed the street, but before trudging up the narrow flight of stairs to his office, he ducked into Danny's Donuts. He would assuage hunger and at the same time do penance for his lack of manners by eating an iced Danny's Dunker Delite, and so kill two birds with one stone.

Chewing antacid tablets as if they were addictive, Nudger left his office and bounced across St. Louis in his dented vintage Volkswagen beetle to his appointment with Sam Fisher, a phone company programmer who made most of his income with his lucrative side business.

"So whose phone do you want bugged, Nudge?" Fisher asked, as Nudger settled into a chair in Fisher's semi-private, glassed-in office. The place was like an aquarium.

Nudger's stomach did a quick somersault and he glanced around nervously at the scores of employees milling about beyond the clear glass walls of the cubicle. He felt as if he and Fisher were on display. "Aren't you, er, afraid someone might overhear?"

Fisher smiled beneath his wide graying mustache. He had the eyes of an anarchist. "I do the overhearing around here." He waved an arm, gold wristwatch glinting. "Nobody'll hear us in here; I took precautions."

"Good," Nudger said, "because I came here for information."

Not telling Fisher why he wanted that information, Nudger explained what he needed to know. Fisher confirmed that there were such service numbers, and that it was common knowledge within the company that they were used for illegal late night conversations but that nothing was being done about it. The reasons he gave for the phone company's inaction were the same that Jeanette had stated.

"There are five such numbers, Nudge," Fisher said. "The caller dials, hears a tone, then waits until someone dials the corresponding number that makes the connection. The line will stay open until that happens."

"There's no ring?" Nudger asked.

"Not on these lines," Fisher said. "During the day they're kept open for installers and repairmen. At night the weirdos get on the lines and wait for a similar weirdo to make a connection. Weird talk ensues. Nobody knows exactly how these numbers become known to the public, but people have a way of finding out, especially the kinds of people who might use the lines at night."

"Can more than two people use one line at the same time?"

"No. They're not like party or conference lines. Anyone wanting to use a busy line has to wait until one of the callers has hung up."

"Would there be any permanent record of such calls from a particular number?"

Fisher shook his head. "None."

An impeccably groomed executive type in a three-piece pinstripe suit knocked on the glass cubicle and pointedly held up his wristwatch, apparently reminding Sam Fisher of an appointment, probably for lunch. Fisher waved and the man went away.

"What I need to know, Sam…" Nudger said.

But Fisher was already jotting down the five phone numbers on his memo pad. He was probably hungry. He ripped off the sheet of paper and handed it to Nudger.

Nudger thanked him.

"I'll send you a bill," Fisher said, "just like the telephone company."

After Nudger left phone company headquarters, he drove to a restaurant on Washington Avenue and ordered a bacon omelet and a glass of milk. His waitress was a coltish teenage girl with a hundred fiery pimples. She almost dropped or spilled everything and smiled a lot with self- conscious charm.

He sat picking at his food and staring out the grease- spotted window at the traffic on Washington, thinking about how things didn't feel right the way they were shaping up. Nudger didn't like danger, and in the manner of any sensible citizen did what he could to avoid it. Of course in his occupation that wasn't always possible, not unless one tried extra hard. He tried extra hard, always, and had developed a warning sense like that of a ten-point deer during hunting season. That warning tingle at the base of his spine was fairly screaming at him that this time he had stepped into something particularly nasty. He felt like Alice after falling down the rabbit hole, only everybody was trying to keep it from him that he was in Wonderland.

Leaving half the glass of milk and most of the under- cooked omelet, he paid his check and left a reasonable tip for the acne-marred teenager. He hoped she realized that someday she would be a beauty. Just as he stepped from the restaurant door onto the sidewalk, it began to rain again. This city and its come-and-go weather.

Nudger returned to his office, locked the door, and got out the army surplus cot and his sleeping bag from the closet. After checking the answering machine for phone messages and hearing about past-due bills and a limited discount on lakeside resort property, he set his wristwatch's alarm for midnight. Then he stretched out on his back on the cot, not bothering to get into the sleeping bag.

He laced his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, listening to the oddly comforting faint rattle and pop of steam pipes, the intermittent soft swishing sound of traffic on the rain-swept street two stories below. At least for the time being things were under his control and manageable.

He was forty-three years old. He was tired. The two facts were not unrelated. He had no trouble falling asleep.

The innocent sleep blissfully. So do the unsuspecting.

Each shrill, penetrating bleep of his wristwatch alarm was like the point of a needle probing the tissue of Nudger's brain. Something similarly sharp had been scraped across the base of Jenine Boyington's phone, he told himself foggily in his world of uneasy dreams.

As Nudger came awake, he groped for the ridiculously tiny watch stem and switched off the alarm, then pressed another stem and saw by the glow produced that it was two minutes past midnight. His office was dimly illuminated from the street lamp on the corner. Everything was quiet; even the steam pipes were taking a rest from their cacophony of popping and hissing.