Nightlines

XXIX

She skidded to a stop six feet into the room and stood with her arms raised shoulder-high and extended sideways, as if to keep her balance while poised on a high, narrow ledge. Jeanette's dark wig was askew, drooping low over one eye, and the eye that was visible was icy and inhuman.

Kell followed her inside with his lithe, confident swagger. He was smiling his barbaric little smile and holding a small nickel-plated automatic. Obviously he was a two- weapon man; the gun to frighten and order his victims into their bathtubs, the knife to operate on them at his sadistic leisure. Nudger wondered through his shock if Kell suspected that this tub had been especially reserved for him.

Kell looked at Nudger in surprise, his body still and tense, a wild and dangerous animal confronting danger, calculating on instinct. Then his pale eyes quickly adjusted and his subtle, scary smile was back. "I thought you lived alone," he said to Jeanette. "Didn't you tell me that in the car, bitch?" It was more than Nudger had heard him say on the phone. His voice was soft but with a nasty flat twang that Nudger placed as southwest Missouri Ozark. A mountain man.

"He's a friend," Jeanette explained. "His name's Nudger." She removed the dark wig and flung it angrily away, as if it were an animal that had snapped at her. Her own blond hair was tucked up with bobby pins where it wasn't standing out in wild tufts. Her eyebrows were somehow different, darker and arched higher on her forehead. She looked almost as terrifying as Kell, whose smile took on an even crueler cast.

"I bet you got lotsa friends," he said. He emphasized the "friends," so there was no doubt he didn't mean backgammon partners.

Jeanette ignored him and glared at Nudger as if everything wrong with the world were his fault. "It should have worked," she said. "I didn't think he'd pull a gun in the hall. I thought he'd wait and use a knife." Her voice took on a whiny tone, as if she'd been cheated. "He always used a knife!"

"I ain't gonna disappoint you," Kell said. "You're my type to cut up with."

"I knew I would be," she answered, without a sign of fright.

Nudger knew what she meant. Kell had gone after her sister, so while the dark wig and altered makeup would prevent him from recognizing his previous victim's twin and being alerted to danger, he'd still find Jeanette to his liking. Wouldn't any man, if he didn't know her?

Kell swung his gaze, and the gun, toward Nudger, who was still standing in shock holding the phone. Nudger tasted old metal in his mouth. It wasn't his fillings, it was the coppery taste of fear.

Kell cat-footed closer, keeping the gun leveled at Nudger's quivering midsection. Nudger's nervous energy reached critical mass, had to explode! "Put the phone down, pardner."

Nudger did. On Kell's head.

Kell yelped and the gun dropped to the carpet. A huge hand clamped around Nudger's throat, held him until its powerful mate could join it. In a paroxysm of fright, he clubbed Kell's blond head with the plastic receiver. Smashed down again and again! It seemed to have no effect. He could smell Kell's sour, hot breath, hear his own rasping struggle for air. He tried to shove the larger and stronger man away, and they both fell. The hard gun dug into Nudger's hip, sending a needle shower of pain down his right leg. Kell's hands retained their iron, unyielding strength, squeezing, digging…

Nudger felt his eyes bulging as his vision clouded with a thousand tiny red explosions. The room was tilting, swaying to slow dance music he couldn't hear. So this is how it is, he thought, at the still, hollow core of his panic. So this is death.

Then, without realizing how it had happened, he had the telephone cord wrapped around Kell's neck and was pulling it tight. Tighter! With a strength that seemed to generate from a point outside his body. It was not his turn to die! He wouldn't let it be! This was years too soon!

Kell's robotlike grip loosened slightly. Loosened again. Nudger called again on the strength of raw desperation, twisting the cord so tight he thought it might break. He heard muted, flesh-muffled cracking sounds, like tiny foam- wrapped firecrackers going off in a string.

Kell gagged violently and released Nudger, rolling away, the receiver dangling from his thick neck.

Nudger drew a shrieking, reviving breath and fumbled around behind him for the gun.

It was gone.

He looked up to see Jeanette holding it, waving it from one man to the other. Her wide blue eyes were wild with a sub-zero merciless glint. How she wanted to squeeze the trigger!

Kell, on his knees, still wearing his telephone-cord leash and collar, stared up at her in terror. His flat, deadpan face seemed incapable of containing such emotional intensity; its flesh undulated tautly, as if restraining great internal pressure. "Please, don't let her shoot me!" he pleaded with Nudger, not for a millisecond looking away from Jeanette. His voice was a croaking parody of itself.

"You killed my sister, and now I'm going to kill you!" Jeanette hissed, her jaws locked by fury. Her back was arched tightly with the rigidity of her rage; she was electrified with hate. "I'm going to kill both of you! I'm going to kill all the men I can find, before they kill me again!"

"Hey, listen!" Kell implored frantically, actually quaking now with terror. "I'll pay you to let me go, pay you plenty!" Spittle flew with the force of his plea. He recognized the nearness and implacability of death. He'd had experience.

"Every man I can find," Jeanette was crooning. "You're all rotten, rotten, rotten…"

A dreamy look clouded her eyes. The movement of the gun barrel back and forth from one man to the other slowed. She was ready for blood.

The dark eye of the barrel steadied at Nudger. He was first.

Jeanette spread her feet and tensed to absorb the gun's recoil.

Just then Nudger saw a representative of his much- maligned gender slip quietly through the door behind Jeanette. Knowing his face was registering what he was seeing, Nudger tried to look away and dim the desperate hope in his eyes. He couldn't do it.

Not that it mattered. Jeanette was possessed by her own dark world, and there was nothing in that world but the gun and Kell and Nudger and Death.

And right now Death was in charge.

Hammersmith glided as smoothly and silently toward her as one of those fat helium-filled balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. And he seemed to move about as fast. Nudger was close to screaming.

Jeanette was smiling. She leaned slightly toward Nudger. He thought she was going to say something, but she only licked her lips.

She hadn't the faintest idea Hammersmith was there until his wide pink hand closed on her fist clenching the gun and shoved it toward the carpet. She gave a low whine as Hammersmith squeezed hard.

Then her body sagged, drained by abrupt realization. What she had planned hadn't worked, couldn't work. It was over. Hammersmith calmly removed the gun with his free hand and slipped it into his pocket.

The blue uniforms streamed in then. Kell was jerked to his feet and frisked, revealing a long-bladed pocketknife with a yellowed bone handle. Jeanette stood quietly, her eyes wide and vacant, staring into cold distances beyond the apartment walls. Pain was already becoming resignation.

A Homicide plainclothesman hauled out a dog-eared card and read Kell and Jeanette their rights. They both stood unmoving, deaf to the carefully worded legalese. Neither of them looked back as they were steered from the apartment.

Nudger caught a glimpse of silver high-heeled shoes with black bows, of smooth trim ankles, during the momentary shuffling at the door. Then he heard policemen and prisoners move away down the hall.

Everything had become very controlled and efficient when Hammersmith arrived. Order had been wrought from chaos, in a routine, choreographed manner. Nudger was as impressed as he was grateful and bewildered.

"I could have sworn I didn't complete my call for help to you," he said, struggling up from where he sat on the carpet. The words came out as if they'd been strained through ground glass. His throat and the side of his neck were on fire. He felt a stiffness around his Adam's apple, as if he needed to swallow but couldn't.

"It wasn't you we charged in here to rescue," Hammersmith said. He fired up one of his abominable cigars with a connoisseur's quiet relish. "After our earlier conversation, I assigned a man to watch Jeanette Boyington. He didn't recognize her when she slipped out wearing her dark wig; had her confused with another woman who'd worn a hat going in. But when he finally realized what had happened, he phoned in and we rushed over here for the same reason you no doubt did. There was only one man Jeanette Boyington would want to disguise herself to meet, and this apartment figured to be their eventual destination. Our man stayed in place and saw you, and later the man and the Boyington woman, enter the building. We got here shortly after that. I guess you noticed we were almost too late."

"It hadn't escaped me," Nudger said in his new, hoarse voice.

Hammersmith puffed on the cigar and exhaled a cloud of noxious fumes, smiling through the greenish haze. The apartment would never be the same: Hammersmith was like a dog that had to mark its territory with a foul scent.

"You were right about twins," Nudger said, "about Jeanette's craving for revenge. Look in the bathroom closet. She was going to convert Luther Kell to pre-packaged meat."

Hammersmith looked. When he came back he was gazing musingly at his cigar. "It's a nice change in this job, to prevent a murder instead of investigating one," he said. He puffed, exhaled. "Two murders, actually. And colorful ones at that."

Nudger's mind flashed a slide of the black plastic trash bags and shining hacksaw and cleaver. The thing that had been fluttering in his stomach suddenly sprang claws and dug them in. Automatically he reached for his roll of antacid tablets, nimbly peeling back the foil with his thumbnail.

"Alive though you are," Hammersmith said, "you'll have a tough time collecting your fee."

"That doesn't seem important at the moment," Nudger said.

"It will, though." Hammersmith squinted at him, then motioned with the cigar. "You better have that neck looked at. Guy try to choke you?"

"Tried hard."

"Never know about those things. Lots of tender cartilage in the neck, little bones. Promise me you'll have it looked at?"

"Sure."

Hammersmith smiled his jowly smile. "The tech teams are on the way here, Major Case Squad, news media, everybody. In their numbers will be Leo Springer. We need your statement, say tonight, after you've had a chance to pull yourself together, get your story straight. I'm going downstairs and make some calls. It wouldn't be a bad idea for you to leave. On your own, you understand."

Nudger nodded.

Hammersmith flicked ashes on the carpet and glided out. He left the apartment door open. Nudger could see a blue uniform sleeve outside in the hall.

He jumped as something at his feet buzzed at him like a rattlesnake.

It was the damaged phone, its shattered receiver still off the hook. He picked it up with the futile idea of answering it, knowing he probably should leave it untouched for the print man and photographer, and it gave another dying rattle and was silent and useless. He started to replace it on an end table.

Instead he stood holding it, staring at its base, before finally setting it back down on the floor.

He raked clawed fingers through his tousled hair and drew a deep breath that seared his bruised windpipe. Suddenly he wanted to get as far away as possible from Jeanette's apartment. He wanted to run, but he walked.

At the open door he paused, leaning with a palm pressed high against the doorjamb, and glanced back. His gaze again fell on the phone, and he thought about all the late-night talkers and dreamers, all the agony and loneliness transformed to electronic impulses and sent out over the nightlines, seeking connections, searching for solace of whatever fashion. He thought about blown-glass erotica and a cold, agonized twin who was driven to attempted murder.

He walked out into the hall, nodding at the blue uniform on guard, and made his way unsteadily toward the stairs, wishing the damned building would stay still. There was somewhere else he had to go this evening, and Hammersmith was right; he needed rest and time to think before talking with the police, before walking the high tightrope that Leo Springer was sure to place him on. There would be no net below.