Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  10

  GLENDA ANSWERED BEN’S KNOCK, READ THE ANXIETY IN HIS EYES, AND said, “What’s wrong?”

  Once inside, he closed the front door and engaged both the latch and the deadbolt.

  “Ben?” She was wearing a pink T-shirt, white shorts, and tennis shoes. Her golden hair was pulled back in a pair of ponytails, one behind each ear, and even as tall as she was, she still seemed like a little girl. In spite of what she’d told him in the darkness last night, she was the personification of innocence.

  “Do you own a gun?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. Didn’t want to see a gun after the war. Now nothing would make me happier than to have one in my hand.”

  In the dining area off the kitchen, at the table where they’d had dinner the previous night, he told her about Judge, everything since the murder of Michael Karnes. “Now … because of me … you’re part of it.”

  She reached across the small table and took his hand. “No. That’s the wrong way to look at it. Now, because we met, we’re in it together—and you’re no longer alone.”

  “I want to call Detective Wallace, ask him to provide you with protection.”

  “Why should he believe you any more now than he did before?” she asked.

  “The damage to my car, when the guy sideswiped it out at the mall, trying to run me down.”

  “He won’t believe that’s how it happened. You don’t have any witnesses. He’ll say you were drinking.”

  Ben knew that she was right. “We need to get help somewhere.”

  “You were handling it on your own, tracking him down on your own. So why not the two of us now?”

  He shook his head. “That was all right when it was only my life on the line. But now-“

  “People in books,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We can trust people in books. But here, right now—we can’t trust anyone but ourselves.”

  He was scared as he had not been in a long time. Not scared only for her. Scared for himself. Because at last he had something to lose.

  “But how do we find the creep?” he wondered.

  “We do whatever you were going to do on your own. First, call Louise Allenby. Find out if she got the name of the guy who dated her mother, the guy with the Aryan Alliance ring.”

  “He won’t be Judge. Louise would have recognized him.”

  “But he might be a link to Judge.”

  “That would be too neat.”

  “Sometimes life is neat.”

  Ben called the Allenby house, and Louise answered. When she heard who it was, her voice dropped into a seductive purr. She had the name he wanted, but she wouldn’t give it to him on the telephone.

  “You’ll have to come around and see me,” she said coquettishly. “My mom’s away for the weekend with this guy. Got the place all to myself.”

  * * *

  When Louise answered the bell, she was wearing a yellow bikini, and she smelled of coconut tanning lotion. Opening the door, she said, “I knew you’d be back to get the reward-“

  When she saw Glenda, she fell silent.

  “May we come in?” Ben asked.

  Louise stepped back, confused, and closed the door behind them.

  Ben introduced Glenda as a close friend, and Louise’s face soured into a pout.

  Heading to the living room, rolling her hips to show off her tight butt, the girl said, “Will you have a drink this time?”

  “Early, isn’t it?”

  “Noon.”

  “No, thanks,” Ben said. “We’ve only got a couple of questions, and we’ll be going.”

  At the wet bar, Louise stood with her right hip cocked, mixing her drink.

  Ben and Glenda sat on the sofa, and Louise carried her drink to an armchair opposite them. The girl slouched in the chair, with her legs spread. The crotch of her skimpy swimsuit conformed to the folds of flesh that it was supposed to conceal, leaving nothing to the imagination.

  Chase felt uncomfortable, but Glenda seemed as serene as ever.

  “The name you wanted,” Louise said, “is Tom Deekin. The guy who dated my mom, the guy with the ring. He sells insurance. Has an office over on Canby Street by the firehouse. But he isn’t the guy who knifed Mike.”

  “I know. Still … he might be able to give us the names of other people in the brotherhood.”

  “Fat chance.” She was holding her drink in one hand and lightly caressing one well-tanned thigh with the other, trying to make her self-appreciation seem unconscious but being too blatant by half. “These guys are committed to something, you know, they have ideals—and you’re an outsider. Why’re they going to tell you anything?”

  “They might.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “You think maybe you can squeeze a few names out of Tom Deekin? Listen, these guys have steel balls. They have to be tough, getting ready to defend against the nappy-heads and the kikes and the rest of them.”

  Ben supposed that some members of the Aryan Alliance might be dangerous—but most of them were probably playing at this master-race stuff, drinking beer and gassing about racial Armageddon instead of watching football games on the tube.

  Glenda said, “Louise, as I understand it, you’d gone with Mike for a year before …”

  “Before that fruitcake gutted him?” Louise said, as if to prove that she was as tough as anyone. Or maybe the coldness in her was as real as it seemed. “A year—yeah, that’s about right. Why?”

  “Did you ever notice anyone following you—as if they were keeping a watch on you?”

  “No.”

  Ben knew what Glenda was after. Judge researched his potential victims to discover their sins, to attempt to justify his murderous urges as righteous judgments. He had followed Mike and Louise; he’d told Ben as much; therefore, they might have noticed him.

  “You answered too fast, without thinking,” Ben said. “Glenda doesn’t mean was someone following you recently. Maybe it was even weeks ago, even months ago.”

  Louise hesitated, sipping her drink. Her free hand slid from her thigh to the crotch of her bikini. Her fingertips moved in slow circles over the yellow fabric.

  Though she stared mostly at Ben, the girl occasionally glanced assessingly at Glenda. She clearly felt that they were engaged in a competition.

  Glenda, in her serenity, had won all the necessary races years ago—and had never run against anyone but herself.

  Louise said, “The beginning of the year, about February and March, there was something like that. Some creep hanging around—but it never amounted to anything. It turned out not to be any mysterious stranger.”

  “Not a stranger? Then who?”

  “Well, when Mike first said he was following us, I just laughed, you know? Mike was like that, always off on one fantasy or another. He was going to be an artist, did you know? First he was going to work in a garret and become world famous. Jesus. Then he was going to be a paperback-book illustrator. Then a film director, paint with the camera. He never could decide—but he knew whatever it was he would be famous and rich. A dreamer.”

  “And he thought someone was watching you together?” Ben asked.

  “It was this guy in a Volkswagen. A red Volkswagen. After a week or so I saw it wasn’t another fantasy. There really was this guy in the VW.”

  “What did he look like?” Ben asked.

  “I never saw him. He stayed far enough away. But he wasn’t dangerous. Mike knew him.”

  Ben felt as if the top of his head were coming off, and he wanted to shake the rest of the story out of her without having to go through this question-and-answer routine. Calmly he said, “Who was the guy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Mike wouldn’t tell me.”

  “And you weren’t curious?” he asked.

  “Sure I was. But when Mike made up his mind about something, he wouldn’t change it. One night, when we went to the Diamond Dell—that’s a drive-in hamburger joint on
Galasio—he got out of the car and went back and talked to the guy in the VW. When he came back, he said he knew him and that we wouldn’t have any more trouble with him. And he was right. The guy drove away, and he didn’t follow us any more. I never knew what it was about, and I forgot about it till you asked.”

  “But you must have had some idea,” Ben insisted. “You can’t have let it drop without having found out something more concrete.”

  She put down her drink. “Mike didn’t want to talk about it, and I thought I knew why. He never said directly, but I think maybe the weasel in the VW made a pass at him once.”

  “A pass?” Ben said.

  “I only think so,” she said. “Couldn’t prove it. Anyway, it couldn’t be the same guy that killed him, the guy with the ring.”

  “Why not?” Glenda asked.

  “These Aryan Alliance guys, they hate fags every bit as much as they hate all the coloreds. No way they’re ever going to let some pansy-ass wear the ring.”

  “One more thing,” Ben said. “I’d really like a list of Mike’s friends, five or six guys his own age that he was close to. Someone he might have told about this guy in the red Volkswagen.”

  “Five or six—you’re wasting your time. Mike wasn’t close to very many people. Fact is, Marty Cable was his one best friend.”

  “Then we’ll need to talk to Cable.”

  “He’s probably at Hanover Park. Summers, he works as a lifeguard at the municipal pool.” She looked more directly at Glenda than she had since they’d entered the house. “You think Ben here is ever going to screw me?”

  “Probably not,” Glenda said, evincing no surprise whatsoever at the question.

  “Am I a package or not?” Louise asked.

  Glenda said, “You are a package, all right.”

  “Then he must be nuts.”

  “Oh, he’s okay,” Glenda said.

  “You think so?” the girl asked.

  “Yeah,” Glenda said. “He’s a good guy.”

  “If you say so, then he must be.”

  The two women smiled at each other.

  Then Louise took her hand from her crotch, looked at Ben, and sighed. “Too bad.”

  In the car, driving away from the house, Ben said, “Is the world going to hell or what?”

  “You mean Louise?”

  “Are girls like that now?”

  “Some. But there have always been some like her. She’s nothing new. She’s just a child.”

  “She’s almost eighteen, going to college in the fall, old enough to have some sense.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. She’s just a child, and she always will be. Perpetually immature, always needing to be the center of attention. Don’t waste your time disliking her, Ben. What she needs is sympathy, and lots of it, because she’s going to have a bad life, a load of pain. When her looks eventually start to go, she won’t know what to be.”

  “She liked you, even if she didn’t want to,” he said.

  “A little, yeah.”

  “You liked her?”

  “No. But we’re all God’s children, right? None of us deserve what life’s going to dish out to her.”

  They drove along a street lined with enormous trees. Sunlight and shadow flickered across the windshield. Light and shadow. Hope and despair. Yesterday and tomorrow. Flickering.

  After a while, he said, “She’s a perpetual child, but you’ve been grown up forever.”

  “In spite of everything,” she said, “I’m the lucky one.”

  * * *

  Under the trees in Hanover Park, every patch of shade had been claimed by families with picnic hampers. Sunbathers lounged on big beach towels on the lawns, and games of volleyball were under way.

  The Olympic-size municipal pool was full of screaming, splashing children. A lifeguard was posted at each end, on a raised chair, and half a dozen admiring teenage girls were gathered at each station, hoping to be noticed.

  Ben led Glenda through the flesh market and introduced himself to Martin Cable.

  The lifeguard was lean and muscular. He had a lot of long dark hair, but his face was as beardless as that of a much younger boy.

  “Sure, me and Mike were buddies,” he said when Ben asked him about Karnes. “What’s it to you?”

  ” I don’t think the cops are doing enough to nail the killer, and I don’t like the idea of some lunatic running around with a grudge against me.”

  “Why should I care?”

  “Your friend was killed.” ‘

  “Everybody dies. Don’t you watch the evening news?”

  Because Cable was wearing mirror sunglasses, Ben couldn’t see the teenager’s eyes. He found it unnerving to watch his twin reflections in those silvered lenses and be unable to tell for sure whether Cable’s attention was focused on him, on the parade of girls, or on the swimmers in the pool.

  “I wasn’t there when it happened,” Cable said, “so how could I know anything that would help?”

  Glenda said, “Don’t you want Mike’s killer to be caught?”

  Because Cable didn’t move a fraction of an inch or even tilt his head one degree to answer her, it was obvious that behind his mirror glasses, his attention was already on Glenda. “Whatever happens,” he said cryptically.

  “We talked to Louise Allenby,” Chase said.

  “Entertaining, huh?”

  “You know her?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “She said maybe Mike had some trouble with a guy a while ago.”

  Cable didn’t reply.

  Ben said, “She thinks this guy made a pass at him.”

  Cable frowned. “Mike, he was your fundamental pussy hound.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “Man, he didn’t even get laid till he was halfway through his junior year, and then once it happened, he just went nuts for it. Couldn’t keep his mind on anything else.”

  Ben looked around uneasily at the teenage girls vying for the lifeguard’s attention. Some were as young as fourteen or fifteen. He wanted to tell Cable to watch his language—but that would mean the end of their conversation.

  “You know his parents,” Cable said, “you can see why Mike would go off the deep end over something—pussy, drugs, booze, something just to prove he was alive.”

  “I’ve never met his folks,” Ben said.

  “Ma and Pa Tightass. He just sort of broke loose, all at once. After that, his grades dropped. He wanted to get into State, but he wasn’t going to make it if he didn’t pull up his grade-point average. No college deferral. Hello, Vietnam.”

  Screams rose from the pool. They could have been the shrieks of a hyperkinetic child at play or the frantic cries of a drowner. Marty Cable didn’t turn to see which. He still seemed to be focused on Glenda.

  “Physics was his worst subject. He had to get a tutor Saturdays. The guy was a sleaze.”

  “This was who made the pass at him?” Glenda asked. “The tutor?”

  “Tried to convince Mike there was nothing wrong with swinging both ways. Mike got another tutor, but this guy kept calling him.”

  “You remember the name?”

  “No.”

  “Not even the first name?”

  “No. Mike, he got another tutor, passed physics. But you stop and think about it, what was all the trouble for? He’s never going to go to State after all, is he? He might’ve been better off just forgetting about physics and screwing his brains out. Better use of what time he had left.”

  “With that attitude, then what’s the point of doing anything?” Glenda asked.

  “Is no point,” Cable said, as if he thought she was agreeing with him. “We’re all meat.” To Chase, he said, “You know how things really are—you were in Nam,” as if he himself understood the horrors of the war thanks to his monthly subscription to Rolling Stone. “Hey, you know how many nuclear bombs the Russians have aimed at us?”

  “A lot,” Chase said, impatient with the boy’s cynicism.
/>   “Twenty thousand,” Cable said. “Enough to kill every one of us five times over.”

  “I’m not too worried until it’s six times.”

  “Cool,” Cable said with a small laugh, impervious to sarcasm. “Me neither. Not worried about a damn thing. Take what you can get and hope you wake up in the morning—that’s the smart way to look at it.’

  As a pair of squabbling crows flew low overhead, the lifeguard tilted his face toward the sky. The sun was a ferocious white fire on his mirror glasses.

  * * *

  Lora Karnes apparently didn’t believe in makeup. Her hair was cut short and carelessly combed. Even in the July heat, she wore loose khaki slacks and a long-sleeve blouse. Although she must have been in her early forties, she seemed at least fifteen years older. She perched on the edge of her chair with her knees together, her hands folded in her lap, hunched forward like a gargoyle that was queerly disturbing yet insufficiently grotesque to be used on a cathedral parapet.

  The house was as drab and quiet as the woman. The living-room furniture was heavy and dark. The drapes were shut against the July glare, and two lamps shed a