She thinks that because thought waves are tiny electrical impulses, Colt might experience time warp and all sorts of grotesque thoughts when all that voltage shoots through him. She thinks he might die a long and horrible death. She has bad dreams.'
'I'll bet she does,' Hammersmith said. 'I'll bet Colt has bad dreams, too. Only he deserves his.'
'Is there any doubt the switch is going to be thrown?' Nudger asked.
Hammersmith bit down on his cigar and shook his head. 'No doubt at all. This one is Governor Scalla's personal project. Once Colt became a convicted felon and ceased to be a voter, all hope was lost.'
Though he believed in the necessity of capital punishment, Hammersmith was no fan of Governor Scott Scalla. Hammersmith was a good man and a good cop; he didn't like the methods Scalla had used to put people away when the governor was attorney general.
Early in Scalla's career, he'd seen to it that all the juveniles he'd tried received maximum sentences when convicted; he'd often done this by plea-bargaining and letting their confederates serve lighter terms in exchange for their cooperation and a sure conviction. As long as those terms kept the juveniles in prison until they were twenty- one, it was all fine with Scalla. That way he could brag about juvenile crime statistics decreasing under his special attention, not mentioning that these juveniles were often back out on the streets adding to adult crime statistics. Crime paid for Scalla; it had helped to get him elected governor despite the often-accurate charges by his opponent that he had used his office of state attorney mainly to further his political career, and that he had been bought and was controlled by several special-interest groups.
Scalla blithely denied all of these charges, all the while decrying the evils of crime and espousing the biblical credo of eye-for-an-eye. He belonged to a stiff-backed religion, something called Friends of God, occasionally played piano and sang gospel music, smiled boyishly and often, and had a wife who wore no lipstick. How could you not believe a guy like that?
'Maybe the fiancee is right,' Hammersmith said.
'About what?'
'About all that voltage distorting thought and time. Who's to say?'
'Not Curtis Colt,' Nudger said. 'Not after they throw the switch.'
'It's a nice theory, though,' Hammersmith said. 'I'll remember it. It might be a comforting thing to tell the murder victim's family.'
'Sometimes,' Nudger said, 'you think just like a cop who's seen too much.'
'Any of it's too much, Nudge,' Hammersmith said with surprising sadness. He let more greenish smoke drift from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth; he looked like a stone Buddha seated behind the desk, one in which incense burned.
Nudger coughed and said good-bye. His eyes stung and watered for twenty minutes after he got outside.
V
After leaving Hammersmith, Nudger located and phoned Gantner's drinking buddy, Roy Sanders, at a tire- retreading plant out in Westport where Sanders worked. Sanders was working overtime, as Gantner had been yesterday. Busy, busy. Industry was thriving. Sanders agreed to talk with Nudger during his lunch break, which was in about fifteen minutes.
Nudger got to Westport, a business and warehouse complex in West County, in twenty minutes, and found Sanders sitting with four other men in the employee's lounge of Roll-On Recap City.
The lounge was a long, narrow room, painted workplace green and lined with colorful vending machines that seemed to sell everything from sandwiches to birth-control devices. There were a lot of potted plants suspended from the ceiling in front of the window at the far end, spilling lush viny greenness almost to the floor. On the windowsill sat opened boxes of plant food and a mist-sprayer.
Sanders, a tall, Lincolnesque man with dark smudges on his bare arms, carefully placed his cheese sandwich on a white paper napkin and shook hands with Nudger. Everyone at the table was dressed in a workshirt and dark- stained jeans and was wearing a similarly soiled blue work apron. Picking up his coffee and sandwich, Sanders led Nudger to a table near the end of the long room, where they could talk privately.
'You want a cup of coffee?' he asked Nudger, before they sat down at the gray Formica table.
Nudger said no thanks, and they sat. Neither man said anything while a tall, redheaded woman in a business suit stalked into the lounge, deposited coins in a soup machine near the table, then cursed mightily because the machine hadn't freed the little captive soup can from its glass cell but had kept the proffered ransom. The woman kicked the machine softly but precisely with the pointed toe of a high- heeled shoe, as if aiming for its groin, before moving down the lounge to another bank of machines that might prove more amiable.
Nudger went through the routine he'd pursued with Gantner. The answers were the same. Sanders and Gantner had been in the rear of the store, heard shots, saw the old man on the floor, the old woman staggering around with a bullet wound in her head. Saw her fall, saw Curtis Colt run from the store, gun in hand, and get into a dark green car that screeched away. Sanders had only caught a glimpse of the car as it sped past the display window, and said he didn't hear the shot Colt had allegedly fired from the speeding car.
'Did you get a good look at Colt's face?' Nudger asked, knowing Sanders had testified in court that he had.
Sanders took a big bite of his cheese sandwich, chewing with his mouth open. His melancholy eyes were thoughtful. 'Pretty good.' For a moment Nudger thought he was commenting on the sandwich, then realized Sanders was talking about the look he'd gotten at Colt. 'All this takes a lot of time to tell, but it happened fast, only a couple of seconds. I got as good a look at him as I could have in that short a time.'
Nudger shoved the lakeside photo across the table for Sanders to look at again, the one where Colt was holding a beer can high in a defiant toast. 'And you're sure this is the man?'
Sanders gulped coffee, wiped his mouth as he stared down at the snapshot. 'I don't know that from this photo. You tell me it's Colt, I believe you. I am sure the man I saw in the police lineup, the guy I saw in court, was the one that was in the liquor store with the gun. The one that blasted the old guy and his wife.'
'But it's the same man.'
Sanders shrugged. 'Hell, you know photos. You take my picture, I look handsome.'
Nudger doubted that, but he nodded and put the snapshot back into his pocket. 'Did you see the getaway-car driver?'
'Got a glance, is all. Guy with long darkish hair, leaning over the steering wheel like he was trying to coax more speed outa the car.'
'Colt had dark hair, wavy and almost shoulder-length.'
Sanders grinned. 'I know where you're going with that one, Nudger. Colt's lawyer tried it in court. Tricky little bastard; I gotta give him that. Full of more twists and turns than a double-jointed break dancer. But he couldn't shake me. It was Colt I saw in that liquor store. No doubt whatsoever here. Curtis Colt.'
'How do you feel about capital punishment, Mr. Sanders?'
'I believe in it. Human life's the most precious thing there is; you take somebody's and you oughta die for it. And Colt took somebody's life.'
'But you didn't recognize him positively in the photograph.'
'He wasn't in a photograph when he was in the liquor store.'
That was a good point, Nudger conceded, looking at Sanders and thinking that with a wart on his cheek the man really would look like Lincoln.
Sanders shot a glance at his watch. 'I gotta get back and grade some tires or I get docked; we're slaves here.'
'I suspect someday you'll do something about that,' Nudger said.
Sanders looked around furtively and lowered his voice. 'You mean the union?'
'Exactly,' Nudger said, and thanked him for giving up part of his lunch break and left.
As he drove from Roll-On Recap City's parking lot and turned onto Dorsett Road, Nudger realized that being in the presence of all that glassed-in food had made him hungry. Claudia Bettencourt would be at a faculty meeting
