Ride the Lightning Read Online Free PDF

smoke-hazed office. “Maybe it’s an emotional thing. 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 fiancée 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
    fter 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 com plex 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