Then he was yanked to his feet. The camera he'd used that morning was still strapped around his neck. His assailant grabbed it and laughed loudly, having a high old time. He twisted the strap about Nudger's neck, then began swinging him around like a bucket on a rope. Nudger heard himself gasp for breath as he stumbled in a circle, scrambling wildly to keep his balance. The revolving office began to fade into a deep and dizzying blackness pinpointed with beautiful, silent explosions of red, like hundreds of roses that kept blooming and blooming.
The strap, or one of the brackets where it was attached to the camera, broke. Nudger flew like something discarded into a corner, slumped on the floor, and began a rasping struggle for oxygen. Through hazed and distorting eyes he saw the big man hurl the camera onto the desk, pick it up and slam it down again, grunting as it broke into pieces that slid onto the floor. The guy sure liked to break things.
He walked over to Nudger, bent low, and gripped the front of Nudger's shirt, wadding it into a ball that tightened the fabric and made Nudger's head loll back. "Can you hear me?" he asked in a surprisingly soft voice. The words seemed muffled by distance.
Nudger somehow managed a ludicrous nod.
"A message from Western Union," the man said, grinning. He was witty as well as muscular. His breath smelled as bad as his deodorant, only different. "Back off the case, asshole. You understand? Leave it alone. Com-fuckin'- pletely alone."
He stood up, seeming to float, and Nudger, with that odd numbness, felt the back of his head hit the floor and bounce.
"You understand?" a voice asked from up near the ceiling.
"Complete fuckly alone," Nudger stammered, wondering if the hoarse, dutiful voice was his own.
"No. com-fuckin'-pletely alone." Trying to be patient.
"Fuck… com… 'lone."
"Oh, well. You got the message."
A boot toe dug into Nudger's thigh; there was another low, primal grunt.
After a moment Nudger heard the rear window scrape- squeak open. The big guy had figured it all out; he was parked in back and had known from the beginning he was going to use the fire escape to leave.
Nudger listened to the faint ringing clatter of leather heels on the steel fire escape, the muted metallic scream of the drop ladder levering down to the alley. Then he heard nothing but a high-pitched buzzing that he knew was inside his head, and he sank into a cold and dark place that scared him. "I thought somebody was playing racquetball upstairs," Danny was saying next to Nudger. Nudger sat with his eyes closed, concentrating on not letting the pain make him vomit. He was in a soft seat that vibrated and rocked; there was a low humming sound. A car engine. He slowly opened his eyes.
He was slumped low in the passenger seat of Danny's old blue Plymouth. So low that he couldn't see much out the windshield except the tops of trees and telephone poles zipping past.
Danny glanced over, caught his eye, and smiled his sad hound smile. But there was concern in his watery brown eyes. And something else. Anger.
"The guy had already got out the back way, Nudge," Danny said. "I didn't call the police; I figured I oughta ask you about that first. I couldn't identify him anyway, didn't even get a look at his car. And I only got a glimpse of him earlier when I seen him go up to your office. He musta been driving away while I was running up the front steps to see what all the bumping and bouncing around upstairs was."
"It was me," Nudger said. He raised his head to look around. A pain like a sharp slab of ice cut deep into his right side and made him suck in his breath.
Danny's pale right hand patted him gently on the knee. "You okay, Nudge?"
"My guess is that I'm not." His head began pounding with slow-pulsing force, as if someone were hammering long nails into his temples. "Where are we?" Pound! Pound! Pound!
"On the Inner Belt. I'm taking you to the County Hospital emergency room. You need some X rays. And they'll give you some pain pills." Dr. Danny. "Guy did a job on your camera, Nudge. I cleaned up the pieces."
Nudger didn't answer. He settled deeper into the Plymouth's worn upholstery and closed his eyes again, trying to stay as detached as possible from his throbbing head, from the playfully malicious pain that moved around his body and seemed to take a bite here, a bite there.
The message the human mountain had delivered to him was clear only up to a point. Had the man set out to smash Nudger's camera in order to expose the film? Or had he simply found himself holding the camera after the strap broke and in his orgy of destruction hurled it down on the desk? He might not know that Nudger had already dropped off the Smith shots at a film lab, that Nudger always reloaded his camera immediately after removing film, that the film in the camera was a fresh, unused roll.
Nudger had to consider the man's emphatic warning. "Hero" was a title he didn't particularly want. It was so often preceded by "dead." But even if he wanted to back away from the case rather than face another beating, he couldn't do it.
His problem was that he didn't know which case the big man had warned him about.
If it was the Smith case, the man's visit had been too late. The photos of Calvin Smith scooping up his kid and carrying him around were probably developed and printed by now, and would soon be in the clever hands of Harry Benedict.
Once Smith realized that, it would be pointless to have Nudger beaten again unless for the pure pleasure of revenge. And a pro like the bone crusher who'd plied his trade on Nudger didn't work cheap.
Nudger hoped the case in question was the Smith matter; not only would he see no more of his violent caller, but Benedict and Schill would pay the portion of Nudger's medical expenses not covered by insurance.
But if it was the Curtis Colt case he'd been warned to get out of, Nudger was probably still in danger. Because he wouldn't back away from that one.
He swallowed, fighting down the nausea that was hitting him now in waves. Persistence was all he seemed to have left in this confusing world; it was his constant, his religion. It was what his half-assed occupation was about, and somehow it had become what he was about. The sick and wrong ones could crush and grind him until he had nothing left but the ability to breathe. He would be scared and his stomach would turn on itself like coiled cable and he'd walk in where even fools feared to tread. Because he knew this about himself: if he couldn't make himself crawl back to the dotted line, he was nothing. Everything else had been taken away from him. His work was the albatross around his neck that sustained him.
He was on the Curtis Colt case at least until Saturday, when there would be no more Curtis Colt.
The car slowed, then rocked to a stop. Nudger opened his eyes and saw a sun-brightened brick wall with half a dozen fingers of grasping ivy growing up it, a bank of wide, green-tinted glass doors with gently sloping ramps leading to them. A brilliant monarch butterfly touched down for a second on the ivy, thought better of it, and fluttered away.
"We're here, Nudge," Danny said. "I'll come around and help you out."
But Nudger had already opened the passenger-side door and was sitting straddling a yellow line in the parking lot.
XII
A Filipino doctor and a husky blond nurse argued about Nudger's X rays. Nudger and another emergency patient, a calm man with a fishhook in his arm, watched as the nurse kept trying to poke at the X rays with her finger while the doctor waved them around. Finally they decided that one of Nudger's lower ribs might be cracked. They also thought he might have suffered a concussion.
The guy who'd beat him up had been very professional. He could have hurt Nudger much more seriously. Nudger's face was unmarked except for a long red scratch, probably from a thumbnail, leading to his mangled and swollen right ear. There were fast-developing, huge bruises on his sides and on his right leg, where he'd been kicked. He was colorful.