Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

by Steven Leonard

  "Drop it," Chase said.

  Although the stranger must have been desperate for breath, he stabbed backward again and missed again.

  Suddenly furious, Chase jerked his adversary onto his toes and applied the last effort necessary to choke him unconscious.

  In the same instant, the wet grass betrayed him. His feet slipped, and he went down with the stranger on top.

  This time the knife took Chase in the meaty part of his thigh, just below the hip. But it was torn from the assailant's hand as Chase bucked and tossed him aside.

  The stalker rolled and scrambled to his feet. He took a few steps toward Chase, seeking the knife, but then he seemed to realize the formidable nature of his opponent. He ran.

  "Stop him!" Chase shouted.

  But most of the cars had gone. Those still parked along the cliff reacted to this latest uproar just as the more timid parkers had reacted to the first cries: lights flicked on, engines started, tires squealed. In a moment the only cars in lovers' lane were the Chevrolet and Chase's Mustang.

  The pain in his leg was bad, though not any worse than a hundred others he had endured. In the light from the Chevrolet, he could see that he was bleeding slowly from a shallow wound - not the fearsome spurt of a torn artery. When he tried, he was able to stand and walk with little trouble.

  He went to the car, peered in, and then wished that he hadn't been curious. The body of a young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty, was sprawled half on the seat and half on the floor. Blood-soaked. Mouth open. Eyes glazed.

  Beyond the victim, curled in the corner by the far door, a petite brunette, a year or two younger than her murdered lover, was moaning softly. Her hands gripped her knees so tightly that they resembled claws latched around a piece of game. She wore a pink miniskirt but no blouse or bra. Her small breasts were spotted with blood, and her nipples were

  erect.

  Chase wondered why this last detail registered more vividly with him than anything else about the grisly scene.

  He expected better of himself. Or at least - there had been a time when he had expected better.

  "Stay there," Chase said from the driver's door. "I'll come around for you."

  She did not respond, though she continued to moan.

  Chase almost closed the door, then realized that he would be shutting off the light and leaving the brunette alone in the car with the corpse. He walked around the Chevy, leaning on it to favor his right leg, and he opened her door.

  Apparently these kids had not believed in locks. That was, he supposed, part of their generation's optimism, part and parcel with their theories on free love, mutual trust, and brotherhood. Theirs was the same generation that was supposed to live life so fully that they all but denied the existence of death.

  Their generation. Chase was only a few years older than they were. But he did not consider himself to be part of their generation or any other. He was alone in the flow of time.

  "Where's your blouse?" he asked.

  She was no longer fixated on the corpse, but she was not looking at Chase either. She stared at her knees, at her white knuckles, and she mumbled.

  Chase groped around on the floor under her legs and found the balled-up garment. "You better put this on."

  She wouldn't take it. She continued murmuring wordlessly to herself.

  "Come on, now," he said as gently as he could.

  The killer might not have gone very far.

  She spoke more urgently now, coherently, although her voice was lower than before. When he bent closer to listen, he discovered that she was saying, "Please don't hurt me, please don't hurt me."

  " I won't hurt you," Chase assured her, straightening up. "I didn't do that to your boyfriend. But the man who did it might still be hanging around. My car's back there. Will you please come with me?"

  She blinked, nodded, and got out of the car. He handed the blouse to her. She unrolled it, shook it out, but could not seem to get it on. She was still in a state of shock.

  "You can dress in my car," Chase said. "It's safer there."

  The shadows under the trees were deeper than they had been.

  He put his arm around her and half carried her back to the Mustang. The door on the passenger's side was locked. By the time he got her to the other door and followed her inside, she seemed to have recovered her senses. She slipped one arm into the blouse, then the other, and slowly buttoned it.

  When he closed his door and started the engine, she said, "Who are you?" "Passerby. I saw the bastard and thought something was wrong." "He killed Mike," she said hollowly. "Your boyfriend?" She didn't respond but leaned back against the seat, chewing her lip and wiping absentmindedly at the few spots of blood on her face. "We'll get to a phone - or a police station. You all right? You need a hospital?" "No." Chase swung the car around and drove down Kanackaway Ridge Road as fast as he had driven up. He took the turn at the bottom so hard that the girl was thrown against the door. "Buckle your seat belt," he advised. She did as directed, but she appeared to be in a daze, staring straight ahead at the streets that unrolled before them. "Who was he?" Chase asked as he reached the intersection at Galasio Boulevard and crossed it with the light this time. "Mike," she said. "Not your boyfriend." "What?" "The other one." "I don't know," she said. "Did you see his face?" She frowned. "His face?" "Yes. "Face." As if the word were meaningless to her. "Have you been doing anything?" he asked. "Anything?" "Drugs?" "A little grass. Earlier." Maybe more than a little, he decided. He tried again: "Did you see his face? Did you recognize him?" "Face? No. Yes. Not really. A little." "I thought it might be an old lover, rejected suitor, something like that." She said nothing.

  Her reluctance to talk about it gave Chase time to consider the situation. As he recalled the killer's approach from the top of the ridge, he began to wonder whether the man had known which car he was after or whether any car would have done, whether this was an act of revenge directed against Mike specifically or only the work of a madman. Even before he had been sent overseas, the papers had been filled with stories of meaningless slaughter. He had not read any papers since his discharge, but he suspected that the same brand of senseless murder still flourished.

  The possibility of random, unmotivated homicide unnerved him. The similarity to Nam, to Operation Jules Verne and his part in it, stirred bad memories.

  Fifteen minutes after they had left the ridge, Chase parked in front of the divisional police headquarters on Kensington Avenue.

  "Are you feeling well enough to talk with them?" Chase asked.

  "Cops"

  "Yeah."

  She shrugged. "I guess so."

  She had recovered remarkably fast. She even had the presence of mind to take Chase's pocket comb and run it through her dark hair. "How do I look?"

  "Fine."

  Maybe it was better to be without a woman than to die and leave behind one who grieved so briefly 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 gray room opened, admitting a small gray man. His face was lined, and his eyes were sunken as if he had not slept 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, and he took the only chair left. He folded into it as if he would never get up again. "I'm Detective Wallace."

  "Glad to meet you," Chase said, though he was not glad at all. The girl was quiet, examining her nails. "Now, what's this all about?" Wallace asked, folding his hands on the scarred table and regarding them wearily, as if he'd already heard their story countless times. "I already told the desk sergeant most of it," Chase said. "He isn't in homicide. I am," Wallace said. "Someone should be on the way out there. The body-"

  "A car's been despatched. Your report's being checked out. That's what we do. Maybe not always well, but we do it. So you say someone was murdered." "Her boyfriend, stabbed," Chase told him. Wallace studied the girl as she
studied her nails. "Can't she speak?"

  "She's in shock maybe." "These days?" Wallace joked, exhibiting a disregard for the girl's feelings that Chase found disconcerting. The girl said, "Yeah, I can speak." "What's your name?" Wallace asked. "Louise." "Louise what?" "Allenby. Louise Allenby." Wallace said, "You live in the city?" "In Ashside." "How old?" Anger flared in her, but then she damped it and turned her gaze back to her nails. "Seventeen." "In high school?" "I graduated in June," she said. "I'm going to college in the fall. Penn State." Wallace said, "Who was the boy?" "Mike." "That's it?" "That's what?" "Just Mike? Like Liberace. Like Picasso? One name?" "Michael Karnes," she said. "Just a boyfriend, or you engaged?" "Boyfriend. We'd been going together for about a year, kind of steady."

  "What were you doing on Kanackaway Ridge Road?" Wallace asked. She looked boldly at him. "What do you think?"

  Though Wallace's bored tone was disconcerting, Chase found the girl's detachment so unnerving that he wanted to be away from her as quickly as possible. "Look, Detective Wallace," he interjected, "is this really necessary? The girl wasn't involved in it. I think the guy might've gone for her next if I hadn't stopped him."

  Wallace said, "How'd you happen to be there in the first place?" "Just out driving," Chase said.

  A light of interest switched on in the detective's eyes. "What's your name?"

  "Benjamin Chase."

  "I thought I'd seen you before." His manner softened and his energy level rose. "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 Chase's actions in Vietnam must have been even more heroic than the papers had portrayed them.

  The girl had taken a new interest in Chase and was studying him openly.

  Wallace's tone toward her changed too. He said, "You want to tell me about it, just how it happened?"

  She told him, losing some of her eerie composure in the process. Twice Chase thought that she was going to cry, and he wished that she would. Her cold manner, so soon after all the blood, gave him the creeps. Maybe she was still in denial. She repressed the tears, and by the time she had finished her story, she was calm again.

  "You saw his face?" Wallace asked.

  "Just a glimpse," she said.

  "Can you describe him?"

  "Not really."

  "Try. "

  "He had brown eyes, I think."

  "No mustache or beard?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Long sideburns or short?" "Short, I think." "Any scars?" "No." "Anything at all memorable about him?" "No."

  "The shape of his face-"

  "No."

  "No what?"

  "It was just a face, any shape."

  "His hair receding or full?"

  "I can't remember," she said.

  Chase said, "When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt she was registering anything."

  Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise scowled at him.

  He realized, too late, that the worst embarrassment for someone Louise's age was to lose her cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse to, of all people, a cop. She would have little gratitude for him now, even though he had saved her life.

  Wallace got up. "Come on," he said.

  "Where?" Chase asked.

  "We'll go out there."

  "Is that really necessary? For me, anyway?" Chase asked.

  "Well, I have to take statements from both of you, in more detail than this. It would help, Mr. Chase, to be on the scene when you're describing it again. It'll only take a short while. We'll need the girl longer than we'll need 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 that there would be local newspaper and television coverage. They would make a reluctant hero of him. Again.

  "Please," he said to Wallace, "can we keep the reporters from learning 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. But they'll have to know who interrupted the killer. It'll be in the report."

  Later, when Wallace was finished and Chase was getting out of the car to join another officer who would take him back to town, he felt the girl put a hand on his shoulder. He turned, and she said, "Thank you."

  Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought that her touch had the quality of a caress and that her hand lingered. Even the possibility sickened him.

  He met her eyes. Looked away at once.

  At the same instant, a photographer snapped a picture. The flashbulb sprayed light. The light was brief - but the photograph would haunt him forever.

  In the car, on the way back to town, the uniformed officer behind the wheel said that 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 blank homicide report, and at Jones's urging, he prefaced it with "To Rick and Judy Jones." The officer asked a lot of questions about Nam, which Chase answered as curtly as courtesy would allow.

  In his prize Mustang, he drove more sedately than he had before. There was no anger in him now, only infinite weariness.

  At a quarter past one in the morning, he parked in front of Mrs. Fielding's house, relieved to see that no lights were on. He unlocked the front door as quietly as the ancient deadbolt would permit, stepped knowingly around most of the loose boards in the staircase, and made his way to his attic apartment: one large room that served as a kitchen, bedroom, and living room, plus one walk-in closet and a private bath.

  He locked his door.

  He felt safe now.

  Of course, he knew that he would never be safe again. No one ever was. Safety was an illusion.

  This night at least, he hadn't been required to make polite conversation with Mrs. Fielding as she posed coyly in one of her half-unbuttoned housedresses, revealing the fish-belly-white curves of her breasts. He never understood why she chose to be so casually immodest at her age.

  He undressed. He washed his face and hands. In fact, he washed his hands three times. He washed his hands a lot lately.

  He studied the shallow knife wound in his thigh. It was already clotted and beginning to scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed it with Merthiolate, and bandaged it.

  In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack Daniel's over two ice cubes. He sank onto the bed with the whiskey. He usually consumed half a bottle a day, minimum. This day, because of the damn banquet, he'd tried to stay sober. No longer.

  Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor - that was the only time he felt clean.

  He was pouring his second glassful when the telephone rang.

  When he had first moved into the apartment, he hadn't wanted a telephone. No one would ever call. And he had no desire to make contact with anyone.

  Mrs. Fielding had not believed that he could live without a phone. Envisioning herself becoming a messenger service for him, she had insisted that he have a telephone hooked up as a condition of occupancy.

  That had been long before she knew that he was a war hero. It was even before he knew it.

  For months the phone went unused except when she called from downstairs to tell him that 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 calls every day, most of them from perfect strangers who offered congratulations that h
e did not deserve or sought interviews for publications that he had never read. He cut most of them short. Thus far, no one had ever had gall enough to ring him up this late at night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude to which he had grown accustomed in those first months after his discharge.

  He considered ignoring the phone and concentrating on his Jack Daniel's. But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized that the caller was too persistent to be ignored, 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 humor, 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 now he understood what the call was about.

  "Very good with your hands," the bird-dogger 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 his dispirited tone. "Yes, it's me. I am me. Exactly right. I've got a badly bruised throat, Chase, and I know my voice will be just awful by morning. Otherwise, I got away about as lightly as you did."

  With a clarity reserved for moments of danger, Chase recalled 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 do no better for his own sake than he had for the police. "How did you know I was the one who stopped you?"

  "I saw your picture in the paper. 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."