Ride the Lightning by John Lutz

someone else’s client. When Nudger mentioned Curtis’ name, Colt’s gaunt, strong features darkened and his body tensed, but he smiled.
    “Who hired you to hash over my brother’s case?” he asked.
    “A woman who cares about him,” Nudger said. You had to play your cards tight with these legal types.
    “I see. What happened to your ear, Mr. Nudger?”
    “An accident. I was listening to Tina Turner and the earphone on my Walkman exploded.”
    Colt grunted and nodded. He knew when not to press. He walked across the plush carpet of the reception area to the window, then studied something down in the street. He was a tall man, but built wiry like his brother Curtis. There was a muscular bounce to his walk. He had hair like Curtis’, too, dark and wavy, only his was styled shorter, razor-groomed, and receding and swept back in a way that lent him a dashing matinee-idol look that was almost caricature.
    “I wondered why you weren’t in on your brother’s defense,” Nudger said, not very tactfully but to the point.
    Colt turned and gave him a measured look that he had probably practiced before the mirror as a law student. Great eyebrow work. “We do corporation work here, Mr. Nudger, not criminal law.” There was the barest trace of Ozark twang in his voice.
    “Some might say that’s a contradiction in terms.”
    “Sometimes it is,” Colt said.
    “Have you been in touch with Charles Siberling?”
    “Curtis’ attorney? No, I haven’t.” He appeared uncomfortable, then leaned his weight far back on his heels and tucked the fingertips of both hands into the vest pockets of his three-piece, pinstripe lawyer’s uniform. It was a portly old man’s posture that didn’t look right on a lean young man. “Curtis . . .” he said thoughtfully. “Crazy bastard wouldn’t settle down. Couldn’t.”
    “Why not?”
    Welborne Colt straightened up and removed his fingertips from his pockets, as if his stance were a pose he could affect only so long. He shrugged. It was one of the most elegant shrugs Nudger had ever seen; Welborne was young and limber inside his skin again. “Who knows? We didn’t come from a wealthy family, Mr. Nudger. My father sacrificed to send me to college at the state university, and he never let me forget it. Him and my momma, neither.”
    The abrupt country dialect startled Nudger. It went like a black roach on a white rug.
    “You were the oldest brother,” Nudger said. He didn’t mention Lester. “So Curtis never had the same opportunity. That’s the way it is in some families.”
    Welborne smiled and shook his head. “The little shit had opportunity. Made straight A s in high school when he wasn’t jerking around with junk cars and becoming part of the drug scene. There’s a college near Branson, Missouri, Mr. Nudger, The School of the Ozarks. It’s self-sufficient; the students farm it and take care of the livestock while they study agriculture. It’s a damned good school. Curtis had himself a scholarship to go there, but he didn’t even bother taking them up on it. Didn’t even bother showing up to graduate from high school.”
    “Maybe he didn’t want to ranch or raise corn.”
    “Wanted to raise hell is what Curtis wanted. What he did. Especially after coming to the city.”
    “Have you seen him since the trial?”
    “No. I don’t want to see him, and I don’t think he’d want to see me. There’s bad blood between us.”
    “He’s your brother,” Nudger said. “They’re going to execute him. That’s a forever thing.”
    “He did it to himself, Mr. Nudger. The way once a cue ball is stroked by the stick in a certain direction, everything is inevitable. It’s going to bounce off a cushion, strike this ball at an angle and send it into that ball, and send that ball into another ball that will drop into a pocket. Curtis set his own direction and destiny early; what happened to him was in his future the way the pocket is in the future of a billiard