by Dean Koontz
Fifteen minutes after they left the ridge top, Chase parked in front of police headquarters on Kensington Avenue.
‘Are you feeling well enough to talk with them?’ Chase asked.
‘The police?’
‘Yes.’
She shrugged. ‘I guess so.’ She had recovered remarkably fast. She even thought, now, to take Chase's pocket comb and run it through her dark hair several times. ‘How do I look?’
‘Fine,’ he said, wondering if it were not better to go without a woman than to leave behind one who grieved so brief a time as this.
‘Let's go,’ she said. She opened her door and stepped out, her lovely, trim legs flashing in a rustle of brief cloth.
The door of the small grey room opened, admitting an equally small and grey man. His face was lined, his eyes sunken as if he had not had any sleep in a day or two. His light brown hair was uncombed and in need of a trim. He crossed to the table behind which Chase and the girl sat, took the only chair left and folded into it as if he would never get up again. He said, ‘I'm Detective Wallace.’
‘Glad to meet you,’ Chase said, though he was not glad at all.
The girl was quiet, looking at her nails.
‘Now, what's this all about?’ Wallace asked, folding his hands on the top of the scarred table and looking at each of them, much like a priest or counsellor.
‘I already told the desk sergeant most of it,’ Chase said.
‘He isn't in homicide. I am,’ Wallace said. ‘Who was murdered and how?’
Chase said, ‘Her boyfriend, stabbed.’
‘Can't she speak?’
‘I can speak,’ the girl said.
‘What's your name?’
‘Louise.’
‘Louise what?’
‘Allenby. Louise Allenby,’ she said.
Wallace said, ‘You live in the city?’
‘In Ashside.’
‘How old?’
She looked at him as if she would flare up, then turned her gaze back at her nails again. ‘Seventeen.’
‘In high school?’
‘I graduated in June,’ she said. ‘I'm going to college in the fall, to Penn State.’
Wallace said. ‘Who was the boy?’
‘Mike. Michael Karnes.’
‘Just a boyfriend, or you engaged?’
‘Boyfriend,’ she said. ‘We'd been going together for about a year, kind of steady.’
‘What were you doing on Kanackaway Ridge Road?’ Wallace asked.
She looked at him, levelly this time. ‘What do you think?’
‘Look,’ Chase interjected, ‘is this really necessary? The girl wasn't involved in it. I think the man with the knife might have tried for her next if I - hadn't stopped him.’
Wallace turned more toward Chase. He said, ‘How'd you happen to be there in the first place?’
‘Just out driving,’ Chase said.
Wallace looked at him a long moment, then said, ‘What's your name?’
‘Benjamin Chase.’
‘I thought I'd seen you before,’ the detective said. His manner softened immediately. ‘Your picture was in the papers today.’
Chase nodded.
‘That-was really something you did over there,’ Wallace said. ‘That really took guts.’
‘It wasn't as much as they make out,’ Chase said.
‘I'll bet it wasn't!’ Wallace said, though it was clear that he thought it must even have been more than the papers had made it. He turned to the girl, who had taken a new interest in Chase, studying him from the corners of her eyes. His tone toward her had changed too. He said, ‘You want to tell me about it, just how it happened?’
She did, losing some of her composure in the process. Twice Chase thought that she was going to cry, and he wished that she would have. Her cold manner, so soon afterward, made him uneasy. Maybe she was still trying to deny the existence of death. She held the tears back, and by the time she had finished she was herself again.
‘You saw his face?’ Wallace asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘He had brown eyes, I think.’
‘No moustache or beard?’
‘I don't think so.’
‘Long sideburns or short?’
‘Short, I think.’
‘Any scars?’
‘No.’
‘Anything at all memorable about him, the shape of his face, whether his hair was receding or full, anything?’
‘I can't remember,’ she said.
Chase said, ‘When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt that she was seeing anything and registering it properly.’
Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise turned an angry look at him. He remembered, too late, that the worst thing for someone Louise's age was to lose your cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse to, of all people, a policeman. She would have little gratitude for him now, whether or not he saved her life.
Wallace got up. ‘Come on,’ he said.
‘Where?’ Chase asked.
‘We'll go out there, with some of the lab boys.’
‘Is that really necessary?’ Chase asked.
‘Well, I have to take statements from you, both of you, in more detail than this. It would help, Mr Chase, to be on the scene when you're describing it again.’ He smiled, as if again impressed with Chase's identity, and said, ‘It'll only take a short while. We'll need the girl longer than we will you.’
Chase was sitting in the rear of Wallace's squad car, thirty feet from the scene of the murder, answering questions, when the staff car from the Press-Dispatch arrived. Two photographers and a reporter got out. For the first time Chase realized what they were going to do with the story. They were going to make him a hero. Again.
‘Please,’ he said to Wallace, ‘can we keep the reporters from knowing who helped the girl?’
‘Why?’
‘I'm tired of reporters,’ Chase said.
Wallace said, ‘But you did save her life. You ought to be proud of that.’
‘I don't want to talk to them,’ Chase said.
‘That's up to you,’ Wallace said. ‘But I'm afraid they'll have to know who interrupted the killer. It'll be in the report, and the report is open to the press.’
Later, when Wallace was finished with him and he was getting out of the car to join another officer who would take him back to town, the girl put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
At the same instant a photographer snapped a picture, the flashbulb spraying light that lasted for what seemed an eternity.
In the car, on the way back to town, the uniformed officer behind the wheel said his name was Don Jones, that he had read about Chase and that he would like to have Chase's autograph for his kids. Chase signed his name on the back of a homicide report blank, and at Jones's urging, prefaced it with To Rick and Judy Jones.’ The officer asked a lot of questions about Nam which Chase answered as shortly as courtesy would allow.
In his Mustang, he drove more sedately than he had before. There was no anger in him now, nothing but an infinite weariness.
At a quarter past one in the morning he parked in front of Mrs Fiedling's house, relieved that there were no lights burning. He unlocked the front door as quietly as the ancient lock would permit, stepped knowingly around most of the loose boards in the staircase, and finally made his way to his attic apartment - one large room which served as a kitchen, bedroom and living room, a walk-in closet and a private bath. He locked his door. He felt safe now. He did not have to talk to Mrs Fiedling or, against his will, look down her perpetually unbuttoned housedress at the fish-belly curves of her sagging and altogether unerotic breasts, wondering why she had to be so casually immodest at her age.
He undressed, washed his face and hands, studied the knife wound in his thigh, which he had neglected to mention to the police. It was shallow, already clotted and beginning to dry into a thin
scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed Merthiolate over it. In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack Daniel's over two ice cubes, and sank down on the bed with the wonderful stuff. He usually consumed a fifth of it a day. Today, because of that damned banquet, he had been forced to stay off it. Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor was the only time he felt clean.
He was pouring his second glassful over the same half-melted ice cubes when the telephone rang.
When he first moved into the apartment, he had protested that he did not require a telephone, since no one would be calling him and since he had no wish to contact anyone else. Mrs Fiedling had not believed him, and envisioning a situation wherein she would become a messenger service for him, insisted on a telephone hook-up as a condition of occupancy.
That was long before she knew that he was a hero. It was even before he knew it.
For months the phone went unused, except when she called up from downstairs to tell him mail had been delivered or to invite him to dinner. Since the announcement by the White House, however, since all the excitement about the medal, he received two and three calls a day, most of them from perfect strangers who offered congratulations he did not want or sought interviews for various publications he had never read. He cut most of them short. Thus far, no one had gall enough to ring him up this late at night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude he had grown used to in those first months after his discharge.
He considered ignoring the phone, concentrating on his Jack Daniel's until it had stopped crying. But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized the caller was a good bit more persistent than he, and he answered it. ‘Hello?’
‘Chase?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know me?’
‘No,’ he said, unable to place the voice. The man sounded tired - but aside from that one clue, he might have been anywhere between twenty and sixty years old, fat or thin, tall or short.
‘How's your leg, Chase?’ His voice contained a hint of humour, though the reason for it escaped Chase.
‘Good enough,’ Chase said. ‘Fine.’
‘You're very good with your hands.’
Chase said nothing, could not bring himself to speak, for he had begun to understand just what the call was all about.
‘Very good with your hands,’ the stranger repeated. ‘I guess you learned that in the army.’
‘Yes,’ Chase said.
‘I guess you learned a lot of things in the army, and I guess you think you can take care of yourself pretty well.’
Chase said, ‘Is this you?’
The man laughed, momentarily shaking off the dull tone of exhaustion. ‘Yes, it's me,’ he said. ‘I've got a badly bruised throat, and I know my voice will be just awful by morning. Otherwise, I got away about as lightly as you did, Chase.’
Chase remembered, with a clarity his mind reserved for moments of danger, the struggle with the killer on the grass by the Chevrolet. He tried to get a clear picture of the man's face but could not do any better for his own sake than for the police. He said, ‘How did you know that I was the one who stopped you?’
‘I saw your picture in the paper,’ the man said. ‘You're a war hero. Your picture was everywhere. When you were lying on your back, beside the knife, I recognized you and got out of there fast.’
Chase said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Do you really expect me to say?’ There was a definite note of amusement in the man's voice.
Chase had forgotten his drink altogether. The alarms, the goddamned alarms in his head, were ringing at peak volume. It might have been a national holiday, judging by that mental clangor. Chase said. ‘What do you want?’
The stranger was silent for so long that Chase almost asked the same question again. Suddenly, the amusement gone from his voice, the killer said, ‘You messed in where you had no right messing. You don't know the trouble I went to, picking the proper targets out of all those young fornicators, the ones who most deserved to die. I planned it for weeks, Chase, and I had given that young sinner his deserved punishment. The young woman was left, and you saved her before I could perform my duty, saved a whore like that who had no right to be spared.’
‘You're not well,’ Chase said. He realized the absurdity of that statement the moment he had spoken, but the killer had reduced him to clichés.
‘I just wanted to tell you, Mr Chase, that it doesn't end here, not by a long shot.’ The killer either did not hear or pretended not to hear what Chase had said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I'll deal with you, Chase, once I've researched your background and have weighed a proper judgment on you. Then, when you've been made to pay, I'll deal with the whore, that girl.’
‘Deal with?’ Chase asked. The euphemism reminded him of all the similar evasions of vocabulary he had grown accustomed to in Nam. He felt much older than he was, more tired than he had a moment earlier.
‘I'm going to kill you, Chase. I'm going to punish you for whatever sins are on your record, and because you've messed in where you had no right.’ He waited a moment. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, but -’
‘I'll be talking to you again, Chase.’
‘Look, if-’
The man hung up.
Chase put his own receiver in the cradle of the phone and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. He felt something cold and awkward in his hand, looked down and was surprised to find the glass of whiskey. He raised it to his lips and took a taste. It was slightly bitter.
He had to decide what to do about the call.
The police would be interested, of course, for they would see it as their first solid lead to the man who had killed Michael Karnes. They would probably want to monitor the line in hopes the man would call again -especially since he had said that Chase would be hearing from him again. They might even station an officer in Chase's room, and they were certain to put a tail on him both for his own protection and for a chance to nab the murderer if he should try for a second victim. Yet . . .
The last few weeks, since the news about the Medal of Honor, Chase's day-to-day routines had been utterly destroyed. He had been accustomed to a deep solitude, disturbed only by his need to talk to store clerks and to Mrs Fiedling, his landlady. In the mornings he went downtown and had breakfast at Woolworth's. He bought a paperback, occasionally a magazine - but never a newspaper - picked up what incidentals he required, stopped twice a week at the liquor store, spent the noon hour in the park watching the girls in their short skirts as they walked to and from their jobs, then went home and spent the rest of the day in his room. He read during the long afternoons, and he drank. By evening he could not clearly see the print on the pages, and he turned on the small television set to watch the old movies he had almost memorized detail by detail. Around eleven o'clock at night he finished the day's bottle, having eaten little or nothing for supper, and then he slept.
It was not much, he supposed, certainly not what he had once thought would constitute a reasonable life style, but it was bearable. Because it was simple, it was also solid, easy to work within, empty of doubt and uncertainty, lacking in choices and decisions that might bring about another breakdown. Then, when the AP and UPI carried the story of the Vietnam hero who had declined to personally attend a White House ceremony for the awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor (though he had not declined the medal itself, since he felt that would bring more publicity than he could handle), there was no time or opportunity for simplicity.
He had weathered the uproar, the sentiment and enthusiasm, somehow, granting as few interviews as possible, talking in monosyllables on the phone. The only thing for which he was forced to leave his room was the banquet, and he had been able to cope with that only because he knew that once it was over, he could return to his attic apartment and pick up the uneventful life that had so recently been wrenched away from him.
; The incident in lovers’ lane had changed his plans, postponed a return to stability. The papers would carry it again, front page and with pictures. There would be more calls, more congratulations, more interviewers to be turned down. Then it would die out, in a week or two - if he could tolerate it that long - and things would be as they had once been, quiet and manageable.
He took another sip of his drink. It tasted better than it had a short while ago.
There were limits to what he could endure, however. Two more weeks of newspaper stories, telephone calls, job offers and marriage proposals would take him to the end of his meagre resources. If, during that same time, he had to share his room with an officer of the law and be followed everywhere he went, he would not hold up. Already he felt the same vague emptiness filling him that had filled him so completely in the hospital. It was that lack of purpose, that loss of desire to go on that he must stave off at all costs. Even if it meant withholding information from the authorities.
He wouldn't tell the police about the call.
He took more of his drink, went to the cupboard and refreshed it with another slug from the dark bottle.
After all, it was unlikely that the killer was serious. He had to be a madman, for no sane person would attack a couple in a parked car and hack one of them nearly to pieces with a long-bladed butcher knife. Madmen were dangerous, to be sure, but they rarely ever did what they promised to do. Or, at least, that was what Chase thought.
He understood that he was keeping a lead from the police, a contact they might make good use of. But the police were clever. They would find the man without Chase's aid. They must have fingerprints from the door handle of the Chevrolet, from the handle of the murder weapon. They had already thought to issue a statement that the killer would be suffering from a badly bruised throat and the resultant laryngitis. What he was keeping from them would do little to speed up their efficient system of detection and apprehension.