Diamond Eyes (Alo Nudger Book 7) Read online

  Also by John Lutz

  BUYER BEWARE

  NIGHTLINES

  THE RIGHT TO SING THE BLUES

  RIDE THE LIGHTNING

  DANCER’S DEBT

  TIME EXPOSURE

  THICKER THAN BLOOD

  DEATH BY JURY

  Diamond Eyes

  An Alo Nudger Mystery

  John Lutz

  SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

  NAPLES, FLORIDA

  2011

  DIAMOND EYES

  Copyright © 1990 by John Lutz

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  9781612321943

  Table of Contents

  Also by John Lutz

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  For Jeff, Wendy, and Ben

  “Stones of small worth may lie unseen by day, But night itself does the rich gem betray.”

  — Abraham Crowley Davideis

  “The lively diamond drinks thy purest rays.”

  —Thomson The Seasons

  1

  “Yellow,” Nudger mumbled to himself as he strode through the airport terminal’s pneumatic glass doors. “I’m parked on the yellow level.” It was easy to forget where you left your car in the airport’s vast and multilayered garage. The doors hissed closed behind him.

  He made his way through the maze of baggage carousels, shops, snack bars, and glass-encased displays to the corridor leading to Gate 43, where TWA Flight 109, bringing Danny back from visiting his cousin in Phoenix, was due to arrive in less than five minutes. He passed through the metal detector without incident, though the uniformed female security guard glared at him, and walked five miles to the gate. Seemed like five, anyway. Lambert St. Louis International Airport was laid out for Paul Bunyon.

  Nudger disdained the use of the People Mover, which was a sort of long, flattened escalator that went neither up nor down, only forward. Standing on the thing saved some effort and massaged the soles. But the people moving alongside the People Mover were moving faster than the people moving on the People Mover. Of course, you could walk on the People Mover, but that meant bumping and being bumped by the carry-on luggage of the people properly standing on the People Mover’s right, and jostling the people improperly standing on the People Mover’s left. They wouldn’t move.

  Nudger finally reached Gate 43. He stood and craned his neck before the rows of monitor screens listing arrival times. Danny’s flight was going to be fifteen minutes late. He had plenty of time after all. As he watched, the screen flickered and the numbers changed. Oops! Flight 109 was going to be half an hour late. Airlines, like medical doctors, had little regard for their clients’ time.

  Sighing, Nudger turned away from the monitors and noticed a nearby snack shop. He walked over and paid too much for a Diet Pepsi in a paper cup, but it had cracked ice, which he preferred over cubes, so he didn’t feel too bad about the price.

  He coaxed a Post-Dispatch newspaper from a balky yellow vending machine that snapped shut and almost cut off his hand at the wrist, as if it wanted the paper back. Then he returned to Gate 43 and settled into one of the many beige plastic chairs facing the wide windows that looked out on the runways and several angled TWA planes being fueled and loaded with luggage. Workers, some of them in coveralls despite the heat, bustled about. Blocky little vehicles, dwarfed to toy size by the aircraft, maneuvered and darted across concrete vistas as if afraid for their mechanical lives. The red-and-white planes glistened in the July sun, and the glare from outside made Nudger’s eyes ache. At least it was cool in the airport; not a bad place to wait. He settled down as comfortably as possible in a tiny molded chair to read the paper.

  Nudger tore out a Hardee’s fast-food coupon from an ad printed in the paper, then he worked his way through national crime and corruption on the front page to local crime and corruption on the inside pages. He’d finished his Pepsi and was munching cracked ice as he read Bill McClellen’s column. McClellen was a dandy columnist; he had a feel and compassion for the common man without being a sentimentalist. Today’s column was about discrimination against a Vietnamese immigrant’s ethnic restaurant on the city’s south side. A smartass alderman was involved, giving the woman the bureaucratic runaround. By the time he finished reading the column, Nudger was mad. He was himself ready to gallop to the rescue of some unfortunate and right a wrong.

  He set the paper aside so his fluttering stomach would calm down, then munched an antacid tablet as he squinted out at a huge 747 touching down. Puffs of dark smoke sprouted behind the landing gear tires as they kissed concrete. Danny’s flight? Nudger rotated his wrist and glanced at his watch. Still too early. People seated close to nearby Gate 42 stirred, anticipating meeting incoming passengers. No one stood up, though. It really didn’t do much good to watch for a landing TWA plane; this was the TWA hub airport, the hive, and hundreds of flights a day arrived and departed like industrious red-and-white bees.

  Nudger wondered how Danny’s visit with his cousin in Phoenix had gone. They hadn’t seen each other since they were kids, Danny had said two days ago over a Dunker Delite. Danny owned and managed Danny’s Donuts, the doughnut shop located directly below Nudger’s second-floor office in Maplewood. The Dunker Delite, a formless sort of sugared half glazed, half cake doughnut, was his specialty. It was short on nutritional value and long on cholesterol. It tasted that way, too, though Nudger would have been the last to say so and injure Danny’s sensitive psyche. He and Nudger were close friends, which worked out well, as Danny often acted as Nudger’s pseudoreceptionist, not to mention lookout and co-conspirator. The downside of the shop’s proximity to the office was that Nudger often smelled like a doughnut. That didn’t drive women wild.

  His right leg was going to sleep; he gingerly shifted his weight. His pelvis was almost numb from contact with the hard plastic chair. He thought about standing up, but swiveled his body to the side instead, lifting his left buttock off the unyielding surface.

  That was when he noticed the crying woman.

  She was one of maybe twenty people seated in the waiting area. A small woman with short blond hair, wearing a white sleeveless blouse and a dark skirt with blue high-heeled shoes. She was clutching a wadded white tissue in a red-nailed hand. Nudger noticed she had trim ankles and a runny nose. Not crying, she would be very attractive.

  She seemed to sense his eyes on her, the way women do, and pressed her knees together so tightly the flesh around them became pale and mottled. After dabbing at her reddened eyes with the tissue, she used it to give her nose a swipe. She sniffled and bowed her head. Mucus misery, all right. He wondered why.

  She had no carry-on luggage around her, so Nudger figured she was waiting for someone, maybe on the same flight as Danny’s. But more likely it was one of the other flights. There were half a dozen gates—which were really no more than doors—served by the same waiting area. Nearby were a couple of counters with co
mputers, behind which stood airline agents who assigned boarding passes as departure times neared. No one was checking in at either counter right now, so the woman appeared to be alone and not waiting for a traveling companion who was arranging for boarding passes. There was no sign of a ticket protruding from pocket or purse. She was a St. Louisan, then.

  Stop being a detective, Nudger admonished himself.

  Huh? He was always a detective, whether his nervous stomach liked it or not. It was his curse and his meager means of support.

  He got up and walked over to the woman. She didn’t look up at him. This was awkward. He said, “Listen, whatever’s wrong, if there’s anything I can do to help ...”

  She glared at him, her blue eyes brimmed with tears. “Nobody can help.” The pain in her voice was almost palpable.

  He sat down next to her. “Hey, I’ve heard that before. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes not. But whoever says it always thinks it’s true. At the time, anyway. So maybe you wanna talk about it.”

  She said, “Go away.”

  Well, that was fairly plain.

  Nudger stood up and drew his wallet from his hip pocket. Got out one of the three dog-eared business cards he carried tucked behind his driver’s license, and held it out for her. “Take this, please. In case you need my kind of help.”

  She accepted the card and held it at arm’s length, as if she needed glasses to read but didn’t want to bother putting them on. Then she listlessly laid it on the chair where Nudger had been sitting. “Just go away.”

  He did. Returning to the chair where he’d read the paper, he picked up the section with the comic strips and tried to read it. Even The Far Side failed to give him a chuckle. He gave up on the effort and laid the paper back down.

  Several people in the waiting area turned their heads to stare out the wide, bright windows. A young woman led her two small children over to stand close to the glass. Pointed out at another 747 dropping toward the runway. There were the puffs of black smoke rising behind the plane’s tortured tires. One of the kids, the boy, began yammering something Nudger couldn’t understand and jumping up and down with excitement. Probably Daddy was on the plane, bringing home a souvenir T-shirt.

  The aircraft disappeared from view for about five minutes, then taxied into sight and veered toward the deplaning area. Sunlight glanced blindingly off its smooth fuselage; shimmering heat fumes danced like wild spirits behind its powerful engines.

  Nudger sat forward suddenly. Hey, that was incredible! His eyes saw but his mind rejected.

  A brilliant orange flower was blooming behind the plane’s swept-back wing, just above where it joined the fuselage. He could see, quite clearly, the pale face of one of the passengers pressed to a window, watching what he was watching, so it must be real.

  The orange flower blossomed with astonishing rapidity. Then everything outside the window was a blinding orange. A roar shook the waiting area. Shock and heat radiated through the wide expanse of glass. The floor sprang to life and vibrated.

  Nudger had stood up without realizing it, his right arm flung across his face. He was barely aware of people screaming, of the crashing, musical sound of shattering glass, a melody of terror.

  It all seemed to be happening slowly and at a great distance, in another place and to other people. But some part of his mind knew it was happening here and he was in the middle of it.

  Instinctively he turned his face sharply away from the heat and glare, as if he’d been slapped.

  He noticed remotely through his shock that the crying woman was gone, and he was lying on the floor.

  Time gave a lurch, and he heard himself say, “Oh, good Christ! Danny!”

  Wondering with a thrust of dread if the plane that exploded was Flight 109 from Phoenix.

  2

  Nudger sat up and looked around vaguely, as if trying to distinguish dream from reality. A shrill sound was echoing around the inside of his skull: a woman screaming over and over, mindlessly. Then came silence, the trauma of shock washing over the corridor like a wave.

  Nudger, perhaps more used to sudden violence than most, cautiously took stock. No one seemed to be seriously hurt. The boy who’d been standing at the window was on his mother’s lap now, and she was holding a handkerchief pressed to his arm. Cut by flying glass, probably, when the window was blown in. Nudger saw now that several people were nursing cuts. He looked and felt over his own body, using anxious hands to explore; he seemed to be uninjured.

  Outside, the blackened shell of the aircraft was still burning. It was surrounded by emergency equipment and scurrying figures. White foam was being sprayed on it from a yellow-and-chrome pumper. Two men in bright yellow slickers were hosing what appeared to be water onto the tail section, pumped from a fire engine with flashing red-and-blue lights. What looked like three scorched bodies were lying near the plane. As Nudger watched, another man in a yellow slicker methodically spread a blue tarpaulin over one of the bodies. Black smoke hovered above the airport like a low and menacing storm cloud, but the lightning had already struck.

  Nudger stood up, swayed, then found his balance. Glass crunching beneath his shoes, he made his way over to the monitors displaying arriving flights. Because of delays, half a dozen flights other than Danny’s were due in at approximately the time of the explosion. A man standing next to Nudger was staring in quiet horror at the monitors, suffering the same apprehension as Nudger. Fate had done something terrible; no one knew yet quite what. The TWA ticket agents had disappeared, probably to aid in rescue efforts. Within a few minutes several dozen people were standing beneath the monitors, gazing up at them like supplicants seeking mercy from a deity. No one made a sound other than ragged breathing.

  Finally, the arrival time after Flight 243 from New York to St. Louis, flickered away and was replaced by SEE AGENT. The great god Microchip had spoken. Several people groaned. A woman fainted and a knot of people gathered around her.

  Nudger heard his own breath trail from his lungs. Relief was tainted by his compassion for the woman on the floor, moaning now that she’d lost her husband. “Charles! ...”

  A voice said, “Nudge, what happened?”

  Nudger turned. Danny was standing there with his black garment bag slung over his shoulder, basset-hound features more somber than usual, sad dark eyes bewildered. Nudger gave him a hug and pumped his hand. Danny backed away a few steps and looked even more confused. Something was going on, but he wasn’t sure what. Danny was used to that.

  “The plane from New York blew up,” Nudger said.

  Danny didn’t seem to comprehend this. He said, “They let us out at Gate Thirty-five instead of this one. Told us there was some kinda emergency in the airport and hustled us outa the plane. I figured you’d be waiting down here for me.” He turned his head and gazed out at the smoking turmoil beyond the glassless windows, understanding at last. “Jesus! Blew up, huh? A bomb?”

  “Maybe,” Nudger said. He’d dropped Danny off at the airport two days ago and knew the garment bag was his only luggage. “Let’s get outa here. I’m parked on the orange level.”

  When they’d finally located the car on yellow, Nudger paid his way out of the parking garage and took Interstate 70 east, then the Inner Belt south. Wailing emergency vehicles passed them, speeding in the opposite direction. He switched the old Granada’s air conditioner to High but it didn’t help much; needed a charge of Freon, the guy at the service station had told Nudger. Nudger would take care of that as soon as his bank account got a charge of currency. Money, the glue and grease of society.

  “Hot out in Phoenix, too,” Danny said, staring out at the sunstruck oncoming traffic flashing past on the other side of the median rail. He still didn’t seem to grasp the significance of what had occured.

  “I’ll bet.” Nudger saw again the brilliant orange blast and the silhouettes of the mother and her two kids etched against the glowing window overlooking the runways. Heard the brittle music of the glass caving in.

&nbs
p; “You think terrorists blew up that plane, Nudge?”

  “Too early to know. The FAA will examine the wreckage. Then the FBI will investigate.”

  “Doesn’t look like they’ll be able to tell much from what’s left,” Danny said. “Nothing there but a lotta burned metal and stuff.”

  “You’d be surprised. They can tell if it was a bomb. Maybe even what kinda bomb it was.”

  “You think it was a bomb?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nudger said. “I saw where the explosion started. Above where the left wing joined the plane’s body. A bomb, though, I dunno. It’d be speculation. Have to know about airplanes to figure a bomb for sure.”

  “Terrorists or whatever, the guys that blow up planes, don’t get caught very often, do they?”

  “Doesn’t seem so,” Nudger said, exiting the highway at Eager Road. His stomach was pulsating.

  He waited parked in the shade, perspiring and listening to blues on KDHX, while Danny left the garment bag in his apartment and changed clothes. Then they drove east on Manchester to the doughnut shop and Nudger’s office. Nudger parked by the broken meter on the other side of the street. That would make up some for being overcharged for parking at the airport. Balance, justice, was important in the world, and lacking.

  “Think you shoulda hung around the airport, Nudge?” Danny asked. “Told what you saw?”

  “Me and a couple hundred people probably saw the same thing,” Nudger said. He slammed the car door. Didn’t bother locking it. He’d managed to pay his insurance this time around.

  They stood in the heat and waited for a break in traffic on Manchester, then jogged across the street, sucking in exhaust fumes. Nudger could feel the excess fat around his middle jouncing with each step. He was far from being fat, but there was no denying he’d developed a slight stomach paunch the past year or so. Old bastard in his mid-forties; gotta get in shape.