Free Nightlines by John Lutz

fat, lean, brunette, blonde, straight, or stooped? Nobody’s average. Only people who sell things believe that.”
    He thought she might be annoyed by his persistence, but she wasn’t. “All right,” she said, with subsurface laugh ter in her voice, “I’m thirty-six years old, medium height, brunette with brown eyes, not too fat or thin, with reasonably good posture.”
    “Sounds average,” Nudger said.
    “I warned you. I never claimed I was a finalist in a beauty contest.”
    “Who would want you to be? Anyway, a thing so slight as a twitch in the flank can knock you out of the finals in those contests. And maybe I’m enamored of average. Maybe I like ranch houses, four-door sedans, two-fifty hitters, and plain vanilla ice cream—two scoops.”
    “No,” she said, “you’re not average.”
    “I strive not to be,” Nudger admitted. “For instance, I often wear my brown shoes with my gray suit, just to shake things up. I try to vary my schedule in all things. Maybe it would be a good idea for us to get out of this rut and talk when the sun is out.”
    “I work during the day,” she said simply.
    “Every day?”
    “Almost. But not tomorrow.” Again Nudger heard that soft, peculiar rushing sound on the other end of the connection, a murmur at first, building to a crescendo and then tapering to silence. He considered asking Claudia what the sound was, then decided not to tip her to the one clue he had as to her whereabouts. “Maybe we can talk again tomorrow,” she said, almost grudgingly. “Will you be at your number in the afternoon?”
    “I can’t promise,” Nudger told her. “Why don’t you give me a definite time?”
    “No,” she said. “If you don’t answer the phone, I’ll try to get through to you again.”
    “Do you promise?”
    “Of course not.”
    “It would be easier if we simply met somewhere,” Nudger suggested. “Are you afraid you’ll be disappointed?”
    “No. And I’m not afraid you will. Isn’t that really what you were implying?”
    “Don’t get all defensive on me, please,” Nudger said.
    He heard her breathe out into the receiver. “All right, I’m sorry. It’s just that if we talk in person, there’ll be no way to cut short a gorilla joke.”
    Actually, her defensiveness was exactly the sort of response Nudger wanted from her. She seemed to have acquired a degree of resilience. She seemed to have moved much farther away from the gun, rope, pills, or whatever means she had been considering to furnish her transportation beyond this vale of tears. But Nudger knew the unpredictability of people actually contemplating suicide, the dark cloud on the mind, unexplainable, that came and went as if by whims of capricious breezes. A distorted face flashed vividly in Nudger’s mind. It belonged to a man he and Hammersmith had found over ten years ago hanging in a garage. He was dressed in women’s clothing and had killed that side of himself he loathed. Nudger had been told it wasn’t uncommon.
    “I don’t mean to push,” he told Claudia, still haunted by the macabre memory.
    She must have picked up the concern in his voice. “You don’t push,” she said. “I say ouch too quickly; I admit that.” Again the rushing roar, then silence.
    “Don’t say ouch, Claudia, just push back. I won’t mind. I have a thick skin.”
    She laughed loudly, a little too shrilly. “No, you don’t. That’s one reason you were able to . . . draw me back from where I was going. When we talked that first night, I somehow knew right away that you were as vulnerable as I.”
    Nudger felt the heat of an almost adolescent blush. This was absurd, to form a close electronic relationship with a woman he’d never met. A relationship so intimate that she could make him react this way. This was self-deception raised to an art. This was the masochism of truth.
    “If I’ve touched a sensitive nerve, embarrassed you . . .” Her voice was apologetic.
    “No,” Nudger lied, “you