Free Ride the Lightning by John Lutz Page B

injured back. Even if he didn’t have an injured back.
    Nudger finished his Egg McMuffin, brushed butter and crumbs from his fingers, and sipped his coffee. Rush-hour motorists stared at him curiously as they drove past on their way to work. It was a matter of time before a cop would happen along, stop, and demand to know what Nudger was doing parked here. Long, dubiously accepted explanations would ensue, maybe a phone call to Benedict and Schill. It might take most of the morning to sort things out.
    Even where Nudger sat, with all the traffic noise, he heard the door in the next block slam, like a gunshot sig naling the start of an event. The Smith family was up and moving; the game had begun. He put down his coffee, spilling most of it on the rubber floor mat, and picked up the camera.
    Just as Harold Benedict had predicted, Calvin Smith’s wife was leaving for her job with a vending-machine company. Calvin, a big, tousle-haired man wearing work pants and a white T-shirt with somebody’s photograph—it looked like Bruce Springsteen’s—emblazoned on the chest, lumbered after her out onto the carport and bent to kiss her good-bye.
    The side door slammed again, and a five-or six-year-old boy came bounding out of the house like a joyous puppy sensing space to romp. The wife, a heavyset woman in white slacks she should have known better than to wear, got into the car and started the engine.
    Calvin seemed to move okay for a guy with a bad back; he walked around the car and leaned on the window frame, talking to his wife. Nudger got a shot of that, twisted the lens, and zoomed in tighter.
    Calvin stepped away and the wife swiveled her head and began backing the car out of the driveway.
    Just then the kid started to gallop around the rear of the moving car to return to the house. Calvin Smith took several catlike strides, stooped low, and scooped the boy up out of real or imagined harm. The camera clicked and the winder whirred three times, freezing the surprising suppleness and grace of the big man, recording the death of an insurance claim; poverty in motion.
    After a sudden stop and some head-shaking, Mrs. Smith backed the rest of the way into the street and drove away. Calvin, carrying the boy easily under one arm, walked to the patio and tossed a clear plastic cover over the barbecue pit, slid some aluminum lawn chairs back against the house, then went inside. The camera followed him all the way, dooming his insurance claim for sure, maybe laying some legal problems on him if Benedict and Schill wanted to get nasty. And they could get nasty.
    Nudger would have the photographs developed by afternoon and get the prints to Harold Benedict. A job well done; easy money for a change. But Nudger drove away not feeling good about it.
    After dropping the film off at the lab, he cut over Shrewsbury to Highway 44 and headed east, toward downtown and the Third District station house. Time to share.
    “It doesn’t wash with me,” Hammersmith said from behind his desk, puffing angrily on his cigar. Angrily because it did wash a little bit; he didn’t like the possibility, however remote, of sending an innocent man to his death. That was every good homicide cop’s nightmare, the thing that would render the hunter not so unlike the hunted. “This Tom character is just trying to keep himself clear of a murder charge.”
    “You could read it that way,” Nudger admitted.
    “You could be an illiterate and you’d have to read it that way,” Hammersmith said. “In any language.”
    Nudger thought the language would make no difference to an illiterate, but he kept quiet.
    “It would help if you gave us a better description of Tom,” Hammersmith said gruffly, as if Nudger were to blame for Curtis Colt’s accomplice still walking around free.
    “I gave you what I could,” Nudger said. “Tom didn’t give me much to pass on. He’s streetwise and scared and knows what’s at stake.”
    Hammersmith nodded, his fit of pique