by Dean Koontz
Wallace said, ‘Can you remember what he said, each time he called?’
‘Approximately.’
‘Tell me, then.’ He slumped down in the only easy chair in the room and crossed his legs before him. He looked as if he had fallen asleep, though he was only conserving his energy while he waited.
Chase told him everything that he could remember about the strange conversations with Judge, then revealed some things he had forgotten as Wallace asked a few more probing questions.
‘He sounds like a religious psychotic,’ Wallace said. ‘All this stuff about fornication and sin and passing judgments.’
‘Maybe,’ Chase said. ‘But I wouldn't look for him at tent meetings. I think it's more of a moral excuse to kill than a genuine belief.’
‘Maybe,’ Wallace said. ‘Then again, we get his sort every once in a while, more regularly than any other brand of madman.’
Five minutes later, as Wallace and Chase sat in silence, Tuppinger finished his work. He explained his listening and recording equipment to Chase and further explained the tracery network the telephone company had in use to seek Judge when he called.
‘Well,’ Wallace said, ‘tonight I intend to go home when I'm supposed to.’ Just the thought of eight hours’ sleep brought his lids down further and increased the red tint in his eyes.
‘One thing,’ Chase said.
‘What's that?’
‘If this leads to something - do you have to tell the press about my part in it?’
‘Why?’ Wallace asked.
‘It's just that I'm tired of being a celebrity, of having people bother me all hours of the day and night.’
‘It has to come out at the trial, if we nab him,’ Wallace said.
‘But not before?’
‘I guess not.’
‘Id appreciate it,’ Chase said. ‘In any case, I'll have to appear at the trial, won't I?’
‘Probably.’
‘So, if the press didn't have to know until then, it would cut down on the news coverage by half.’
‘You're really modest, aren't you?’ Wallace asked. Before Chase could respond to that, the detective smiled, clapped him on the shoulder and left.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Chase asked Tuppinger.
‘Not on duty.’
‘Mind if I-?’
‘No. Go ahead.’
Chase noticed that Tuppinger watched him with interest as he got new ice cubes and poured himself a large dose of whisky. It wasn't as large as usual. He supposed he'd have to restrain his thirst a bit with the policeman around.
When Chase sat on the bed, Tuppinger said, ‘I read all about your exploits over there.’
‘Oh?’
‘Really something,’ Tuppinger said.
‘Not really.’
‘Oh, yes, really,’ Tuppinger insisted. He was sitting in the easy chair, which he had moved close to his equipment. ‘It had to be hard over there, worse than anybody at home could ever know.’
Chase nodded.
‘I'd imagine the medals don't mean that much. I mean, considering how much you had to go through to earn them, they must seem kind of insignificant.’
Chase looked up from his drink, surprised at the insight. ‘You're right,’ he said. They don't mean anything.’
Tuppinger said, ‘And it must be hard to come back from a place like that and settle into a normal life. Memories couldn't fade that quickly.’
Chase started to respond, then saw that Tuppinger was looking meaningfully at the glass of whisky in his hand. He closed his mouth, bit off his response. Then, hating Tuppinger as badly as he hated Judge, he lifted the drink and took a very large swallow of it.
He said, ‘I'll have another, I think. You sure you don't want one?’
‘Positive,’ Tuppinger said.
When Chase returned to the bed with another glassful, Tuppinger cautioned him against answering the phone without first waiting for the tape to be started. Then he went into the bathroom, where he remained almost ten minutes.
When he came back, Chase asked, ‘How late do we have to stay up?’
‘Has he ever called this late - except that first night?’
‘No,’ Chase said.
‘Then I'll turn in now,’ Tuppinger said, flopping in the easy chair. ‘See you in the morning.’
In the morning the whispers of the dead men woke Chase, but they turned out to be nothing more than the sound of water running in the bathroom sink. Tuppinger had risen first and was shaving. When he opened the door and came out a few minutes later, looking refreshed, he nodded at Chase. ‘All yours!’ He seemed remarkably energetic for having spent the night in the easy chair.
Chase took his time bathing and shaving, for the longer he remained in the bathroom, the less he would have to talk to the cop. When he was finally finished, the clock by his bed read 9:45. Judge had not yet called.
‘What have you got for breakfast?’ Tuppinger asked.
Chase said, There isn't anything here.’
‘Oh, you've got to have something. Doesn't have to be breakfast food; I'm not particular in the morning.’
Chase opened the refrigerator and took out the bag of Winesap apples. He said, ‘Only these.’
Tuppinger stared at the apples, at the empty refrigerator. His eyes flicked to the whisky bottle on the cupboard. He did not say anything, for he did not need to say anything. Indeed, if he had remarked according to his thoughts, Chase might have struck him.
‘They'll do fine,’ Tuppinger said enthusiastically. He took the clear plastic bag from Chase and chose an apple. ‘Want one?’
‘No.’
‘You ought to eat breakfast,’ Tuppinger said. ‘Even something small. Gets the stomach working, sharpens you up for the day ahead.’
‘No thanks,’ Chase said.
‘Tuppinger carefully peeled two apples, sectioned them and ate them slowly, chewing well.
By 10:30 Chase was beginning to worry. Suppose Judge did not call today? The idea of having Tuppinger here for the afternoon and the evening, of waking up to the sound of Tuppinger in the bathroom shaving, was all but intolerable.
‘Do you have a relief man?’ Chase asked.
‘Unless it gets too protracted,’ Tuppinger said, ‘I'll stick with it myself.’
‘How long might that be?’
‘Oh,’ Tuppinger said, ‘if we don't have it wrapped up in forty-eight hours, I'll call in my relief.’
Though another forty-eight hours with Tuppinger was in no way an attractive prospect, it was probably no worse, and perhaps better, than it would have been with another cop. Though Tuppinger was a bit too observant for comfort, he did not talk very much. Let him look, then. And let him think whatever he wanted to think about Chase. So long as he could keep his mouth shut, they wouldn't have any major problems.
At noon Tuppinger had two more apples and cajoled Chase into eating most of one. It was decided that Chase would go out for some fried chicken and slaw to bring back for supper.
At 12:30 Chase had his first drink.
Tuppinger watched, but he did not say anything.
Chase didn't offer him a drink this time.
At three in the afternoon the telephone rang. Although this was what they had been waiting for since the night before, Chase did not want to answer it. Because Tuppinger was there, urging him to pick it up while he adjusted his own earphones, he finally lifted the receiver.
‘Hello?’ His voice sounded cracked, strained.
‘Mr Chase?’
‘Yes,’ he said, immediately recognizing the voice. It was not Judge.
‘This is Miss Pringle, calling for Dr Cauvel, to remind you of your appointment tomorrow at three. You have a fifty-minute session scheduled, as usual.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. This double-check was a strict routine with Miss Pringle, though he had forgotten about it.
‘Tomorrow at three,’ she repeated, then hung up.
At four o'clock Tuppinger complain
ed of hunger and of a reluctance to consume a fifth Winesap apple in order to stave it off. Chase did not object to an early supper, accepted Tuppinger's money, which, the cop said, would be paid him from the petty-cash account at headquarters, and went out to buy the chicken, French fries and slaw. He purchased a large Coca-Cola for Tuppinger but nothing for himself. He would drink his usual.
They ate at twenty minutes to five, not bothering with dinner conversation, watching the silent phone.
Two hours later Wallace arrived, looking thoroughly weary though he had only come on duty at six, less than an hour earlier. He said, ‘Mr Chase, do you think I might have a word, alone, with Jim?’
‘Sure,’ Chase said. He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. As an afterthought, he turned on the water in the sink and listened to the dead men whisper, though the noise put him on edge. He lowered the lid of the commode and sat down facing the empty bathtub, and he saw that it needed to be scrubbed out. He wondered if Tuppinger had noticed.
Less than five minutes passed before Wallace knocked on the door. He said, ‘Sorry to have pushed you out of your own place like that.’ He smiled as if they were being very conspiratorial, and said, ‘Police business.’
Chase said, ‘We haven't been lucky, as Tuppinger may have told you.’
Wallace nodded. He looked peculiarly sheepish, and for the first time he could not meet Chase's gaze. ‘I've heard,’ he said.
‘It's the longest he's gone without calling.’
Wallace nodded. ‘It's possible, you know, that he won't be calling at all, now.’
‘You mean, since he passed judgment on me?’
Wallace said nothing, backed into the living room and turned to look at Tuppinger. When Chase followed, he saw that the other man was disconnecting wires and packing his equipment into the suitcase. Wallace said, ‘I'm afraid you're right, Mr Chase. The killer has passed his judgment, and he isn't going to try to contact you again. We don't want to keep a man tied up -’
‘You're leaving?’ Chase asked.
Wallace did not even look in his direction. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘But another few hours might -’
‘Might produce nothing,’ Wallace said. ‘What we're going to do, Mr Chase, is we're going to rely on you to tell us what Judge says if, as seems unlikely now, he should call again.’ He smiled at Chase.
In that smile was all the explanation that Chase required. He said, ‘When Tuppinger sent me out for supper, he called you, didn't he?’ Not waiting for a response, he went on: ‘And he told you about the call from Dr Cauvel's secretary - the word “session” probably sparked him. And now you've talked to the good doctor.’
Tuppinger finished packing the equipment and stood up. He hefted the case and looked quickly about the room to be sure he had not left anything behind.
‘Judge is real,’ Chase told Wallace.
‘I'm sure that he is,’ Wallace said. ‘That's why I want you to report any calls he might make to you.’ But his tone was that of an adult pretending with an adolescent.
‘You stupid bastard, he is real!’
Wallace coloured from the neck up. When he spoke, there was tension in his voice, and the even tone was false. He said, ‘Mr Chase, you saved the girl, and you deserve to be praised for that. But the fact remains that no one has called here in nearly twenty-four hours. Also fact: if you believed such a man as Judge existed, you would have contacted us before this, after he first called. It was only natural to respond that way - especially for a duty-conscious young man like yourself. These things, examined in the light of your psychiatric record and Dr Cauvel's explanations, make it clear that the expenditure of one of our best men is not now required. Tuppinger has other duties.’
Chase could see how overwhelmingly the evidence seemed to point to Dr Cauvel's thesis, just as he could see how his own behaviour - his fondness for whisky in front of Tuppinger, his inability to carry on a conversation, his anxiety to avoid publicity that might have appeared the protestation of a man who wanted just the opposite - could have reinforced it. Still, with his fists balled at his sides, he said, ‘Get out.’
‘Take it easy, son,’ Wallace said.
‘Get out, now.’
Wallace looked around the room and let his eyes stop on the bottle of whisky. He said, ‘Tuppinger tells me you haven't any food on hand, but that there are five bottles in that cupboard.’ He did not look at Chase; he seemed to be embarrassed both by
Tuppinger's obvious spying and by his own inability to sympathize properly with another human being. He said, ‘You look thirty pounds underweight, son.’
‘Get out,’ Chase said. He did not want to shout and draw Mrs Fiedling's attention, but he could not think of any other way to make Wallace listen to him.
Wallace was not ready to leave yet. He was searching for some way to make his departure seem more warranted, and he looked as if he might tell Chase how understaffed they were down at police headquarters. He avoided that cliché, though, and said, ‘No matter what happened to you over there, in Vietnam, you aren't going to forget about it with whisky. Don't drink so much.’ Before Chase, infuriated at the homespun psychoanalysis, could order him out again, Wallace left with Tuppinger at his heels.
Chase slammed the door after them, went to the cupboard and poured himself a drink. He was alone again. But he was used to that.
Five
Thursday evening at seven-thirty, having successfully evaded Mrs Fiedling on his way out of the house, Chase got in his Mustang and drove toward Kanackaway Ridge Road, aware and yet unaware of his destination. He drove well within the speed limits through Ashside and the outlying districts, but floored the accelerator at the bottom of the mountain road, taking the wide curves on the far outside, the white guardrails slipping past so quickly and so close on the right that they blurred into one continuous wall of pale planking, the cables between them like black scrawls on the phantom boards.
On the top of the ridge highway, he parked at the same spot he had been on Monday night, shut off the motor and leaned back in his seat, listening to the soft wind. He realized at once that he should never have stopped, that he should have kept moving at all costs. As long as he was moving, he did not have to wonder what he was going to do next, for he could easily lose himself in the pace of his driving. Stopped, he was perplexed, frustrated.
He opened the door and got out of the car, uncertain what he expected to find out here that would be of any help to him. A good hour or so of daylight remained in which to search the area where the Chevy had been parked. Even so, the police would have combed and recombed it far more thoroughly than he ever could. At least, out of the car, he could walk about, move, and therefore stop thinking unpleasant thoughts.
He strolled along the park edge and then across to the row of brambles where the Chevy had sat. The sod was well tramped, littered with half-smoked cigarette butts, candy wrappers and balled-up pages from a reporter's note pad. He kicked at the debris, scanning the mashed grass, and he felt silly. He might just as well attempt to estimate the number of sightseers who had flocked to the murder scene as to try hunting for a clue in all this mess. The results would probably be more rewarding, if esoteric.
Next, he walked to the railing at the cliff's edge and leaned against it, staring down the jumbled wall of rock at the tangled patch of brambles and locust trees below. When he raised his head, he could see the entire city spread along the valley, but especially the green copper plating of the courthouse dome.
He was still looking at that corroded curve of metal when he heard a peculiar whining sound and felt the rail beneath his hands shiver. Looking to either side, seeing no one, he was about to dismiss it when he heard and felt the same thing again. This time, leaning over the precipice, he recognized the source: a bullet slapping the iron pipe and ricocheting away.
With a quickness honed in combat, he whirled and fell back from the rail and the rim of the cliff. As he dropped to the ground, he evaluated the parklan
d nearby and chose the nearest decorative wall of brambles as the most likely point of safety. He rolled toward them and came up against the thorns so hard he tore his cheek and forehead on them. Then he lay quite still, waiting.
A minute passed, then another, with no sound but the wind.
Chase crawled on his stomach, working his way to the far end of the bramble row that paralleled the highway at this point. When he got there, he moved slowly into the open, scanning the ground toward the highway for some sign of the man who had shot at him. The park seemed deserted.
He started to get up, then fell back again, more out of instinct than cunning. Where he had been, the grass was parted by a bullet that kicked up a puff of earth. Whoever was after him had a pistol with a silencer attached.
For a moment he considered the implausibility of anyone in civilian life having access to a silencer. Even in Nam, where officers requisitioned unnecessary weapons for black market sale and for shipping home to their own addresses for sale after the war, silencers were not that common. For one thing, most soldiers who carried handguns much preferred the revolver for its higher degree of accuracy and the lesser likelihood that it would jam at a crucial moment. Revolvers could not be silenced effectively, but no one in Nam much cared about the noise of a shot. To own a silenced pistol in civilian life was testament to illegal activity of some sort, and one could not purchase the fixture in just any gunshop.
He took no time at all to wonder who could be firing at him, for he had known at once who was out there. Judge, of course.
Turning, he scrambled back along the twisting brambles to a point midway in the length of the row. Swiftly he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, tore it into two pieces and wrapped his hands with the cloth. Lying on his stomach, he carefully pressed the thorny vines apart until he had opened a chink through which he could survey the immediate land beyond.
He saw Judge almost at once. The man was huddled by the front fender of Chase's Mustang, down on one knee, the pistol held out at arm's length as he waited for his prey to appear. Two hundred feet away, in the weak, last light of the evening, he was fairly well shielded from Chase, little more than a dark figure with a blur of a face, cut over with confusing swaths of shadow.