Nightlines

XXII

Or maybe Nudger was home. The area around the Twin Oaks Mall fountain was beginning to seem as much like home as his apartment. He settled down on his customary concrete bench to wait for Kelly.

The mall was more crowded in the evenings than during the afternoons. And there were more male shoppers, more family units of husband, wife, and trailing, misbehaving offspring. The tempo of the mall was quicker. Fewer shoppers were here for idle recreation. Now the real business of buying was being conducted by many of the people hurrying past. Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, marching to the rhythms of the latest catch phrases and advertising jingles. Nudger sat back and observed the orderly lockstep madness. It was enough to make him wish he had disposable income.

A gray-haired man, easily in his seventies, sat down gingerly on the opposite end of Nudger's bench and sucked on a nasty-looking black briar pipe, all the time watching the passing parade of women with his weary but interested eyes. A couple of young boys ran up to the fountain and tossed coins in, then threaded their way at high speed back into the crowd. Two teenage girls in tight jeans walked past chattering and giggling. The old guy on the bench, probably a retiree well out of the melee, useless now to the mall except as a consumer of dentifrice and laxative, looked on with approval before fixing his wandering gaze on a buxom woman yanking a pre-schooler along behind her. Nudger had played this scene over and over during the past week. Home, all right.

With the old man, Nudger watched the woman with chest and child until she veered and entered the drugstore. When he looked away from her, there was Kelly.

Nudger glanced at his wristwatch. Kelly-and he was immediately sure it was Kelly-was on time to the minute. He was indeed close to six feet tall, but he was so broad through the chest and shoulders that he appeared shorter. He was wearing a black shirt with pearl buttons, and neatly creased gray slacks, all as Jeanette had described. But what claimed Nudger's wary attention was Kelly's full head of very curly coarse blond hair. Nudger let his gaze drop to Kelly's hands. They looked as if they could crush a week-old Danny's Dunker Delite.

Kelly's features were broad and flat, and because of their blandness barely missed being handsome. He wasn't at all fat, but he was wide through the waist, hips, and thighs. His arms were tanned and muscular, dusted with blond hair, with wrists as thick as many men's ankles. Not more than two hundred pounds, but a born strongman, the kind that made natural college halfbacks or ends that could block.

As Kelly rested a foot on a concrete planter and looked around with wide-set blue eyes, Nudger pretended to study the shoppers streaming toward him, as if someone were keeping him waiting. He felt Kelly's gaze slide over him like a cool wave that stirred the hairs on the back of his neck. Wearing a carefully neutral expression, Nudger glanced at the blond man with seeming disinterest.

Kelly was looking away from him now with those ominously guileless blue eye, eyes so emotionally void that they must conceal much, placidly surveying the throng of shoppers. Then he walked over to the circular concrete bench encompassing the fountain, sat down as if settling in for a wait, and began gnawing on a hangnail on his right ring finger.

He gnawed persistently for quite a while, although without real concentration, his wrist twisted at an awkward angle to allow him to use his incisors. He was lucky not to dislocate his arm.

Finally he gave up gnawing, then waiting, and began walking toward the main exit. Nudger stood up from the hard bench and followed.

Kelly strode slowly past the cafeteria, toward the glass doors that would let him out onto the lower-level parking lot. Despite his bulk he moved in a glide, with a jungle cat's grace. Nudger's Volkswagen was parked on the upper-level lot. There was no time for him to rush to his car and drive to the lower level with any expectation of spotting Kelly again in the acres of parked cars. All Nudger could do was stay behind the blond man and try to get his car's description and license-plate number.

Nudger felt an undeniable shameful relief. Kelly was one of those men who had about him an air of controlled menace, of barely restrained, unpredictable violence seething beneath a crude, calm exterior. A gut-deep tough man, close to the primal.

He surprised Nudger. Instead of going to a parked car when he got outside, Kelly turned and followed the walk bordering Sears' display windows. He stopped and stood in a relaxed wide stance, with his hands clasped behind him, a few feet from a bus stop sign.

Nudger's cowardly relief left him and his stomach came to bothered life again, spurring him on as he hurried back through the mall to the escalators and the upper-level parking lot.

He didn't know if he was disappointed or not when he drove the Volkswagen into the lower-level lot and saw Kelly still lolling at the bus stop. Nudger found a parking space from which he could observe Kelly, positioned the Volkswagen between the yellow lines just so, switched off the engine, and waited.

Not for long. Within ten minutes the Cross County Express belched and snorted its way through the lot and hissed to a stop, blocking Nudger's view of Kelly. Half a dozen shoppers got out through the rear door. The bus rumbled mightily and emitted heat-shimmering black diesel exhaust, then disembarked from the curb.

Kelly was gone from where he'd been standing.

Nudger backed the Volkswagen out of its parking slot and followed the bus.

They drove east, through a string of west-county bedroom suburbs, all the way into the city. Kelly got off the bus near Oakland and Kingshighway and stood at another stop on the west side of Kingshighway, waiting to transfer to a southbound bus.

As Nudger parked on Oakland and kept Kelly in view, he pondered the fact that the man had used public transportation to get to his intended meeting with Jeanette. Certainly the women Kelly met had cars, or he would assume so. Kelly's own car-if he owned one-would be a hindrance and possible incriminating complication if he left it in a parking lot while he did murder. It fit, this use of the buses to meet intended victims.

Or maybe Kelly simply didn't have a car. Or maybe he had one and it was in the shop. Maybe Kelly wasn't a murderer, just a lonely guy making blind dates by phone.

Maybe Nudger should be careful about leaping to convenient conclusions.

The Kingshighway bus rumbled to a stop, and Kelly and two other passengers boarded. Nudger waited until the bus would be far enough ahead of him, then pulled out into the Oakland Avenue traffic and made a right turn on Kingshighway.

The bus was stopped for a red light a block ahead. Nudger joined the line of cars behind it. He didn't have to worry about mistaking another bus for it; this one sported a large liquor advertisement below its dusty rear window, on which someone had lettered HOT STUFF with red spray paint across the seductive likeness of a slinky blonde in a black silk evening gown.

Nudger couldn't have gotten close to the bus if he'd tried. Traffic was heavy on Kings-highway, moving irregularly as cars slowed or stopped to make left turns into side streets. Nudger didn't regard that as a problem. From the angle he had, he could catch occasional glimpses of Kelly's blond head through one of the bus's side windows.

But when traffic thinned out near Magnolia, Nudger was surprised to see that Kelly was gone.

Like that. As if Houdini had had a hand in it.

Possibly he'd switched seats. Nudger hadn't seen him get off at any of the stops the bus had made. A horn blared as Nudger veered the Volkswagen into the outside lane.

When he caught up with the bus, which now contained only a few passengers, he still couldn't see Kelly inside. He dropped back half a block and continued following the bus, but with a self-deprecating kind of hopelessness. He could actually taste the bitter frustration of having gotten so close to the man who might be Jenine's killer, only to lose him again through bad luck. Or through incompetence.

Nudger followed the bus all the way to its turnaround point, where it would stand empty before looping in a wide U-turn to make its northward run. The end of the line.

No Kelly.

Somewhere between Tholozan Avenue, where Nudger was sure he'd seen him through the bus window, and Magnolia, where Nudger was sure Kelly was no longer on the bus, Kelly had stepped from the rear door onto the sidewalk with some other passengers and disappeared. It had to have happened when Nudger was well back from the bus, when his view of the bus stop had been partially blocked by stalled traffic.

Nudger sat in the parked Volkswagen and slapped too hard at a mosquito perched on his forearm. He missed the mosquito. He hurt his arm. Letting two antacid tablets dissolve in his mouth, he turned the car around and drove back the way he'd come, ignoring his mosquito antagonist as it explored the far corner of the windshield. A truce of sorts.

Within fifteen minutes he caught up with a northbound Kingshighway bus. It had the same sexy advertisement below its back window, the slender blonde in the black silk gown. He noticed that the ad wasn't what he'd thought. It wasn't a liquor advertisement at all. It was an ad for Tabasco sauce, and the words HOT STUFF weren't sprayed on by a vandal but were made to look that way, part of the copy. some ad man's contribution to creativity. A real eye-catcher.

Nudger actually groaned as he realized his mistake. somewhere along the way he might have begun tailing a different bus. He had stupidly followed an advertising poster instead of Kelly. A poster that was probably one of hundreds being carted around the city.

In a burst of frustration, he slapped the bucket seat next to him, stinging his palm. He wondered if drinking an entire bottle of Tabasco sauce in one sitting might prove fatal. He wished he had an ad man to try it on.