Strange Highways (70 page)

He was still gazing at that corroded curve of metal when he heard a sharp whine. And again. The steel handrail shivered under his hands. An old war sound: a bullet slapping metal, ricocheting.

With a quickness honed in combat, he dropped to the ground, surveyed the park, and decided that the nearest row of shrubs was the best cover. He rolled toward that hedgerow and came up against the thorns so hard that he tore his cheek and forehead.

He lay motionless. Waiting.

A minute passed. Another. No sound but the wind.

Chase crawled on his stomach to the far end of the bramble row, which paralleled the highway. He eased into the open, looked to his right, and saw that the park appeared to be deserted.

He started to get up and turn toward the highway, then fell back again. Instinct. Where he’d been, the grass flew into the air, torn loose by a bullet. Judge had a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.

No one in civilian life could have legal access to a silencer. Evidently, Judge had black-market resources.

Chase scrambled back along the shrubs, the way he had come, to the middle of the hedgerow. Swiftly he took off his shirt, tore it in two pieces, and wrapped his hands with the cloth. Lying on his stomach, he pressed the thorny vines apart until he opened a chink through which he could survey the land immediately beyond.

He saw Judge at once. The man was huddled by the front fender of Chase’s Mustang, down on one knee, the pistol held at arm’s length as he waited for his prey to appear. Two hundred feet away, in the weak light of the dusk, he was well shielded from Chase, little more than a dark figure; his face was but a blur in veils of shadow.

Chase let go of the brambles and stripped the cloth from his hands. He had minor nicks on the tips of three fingers, but he was for the most part unscathed.

To his right, no more than four feet away, a bullet snapped through the brambles, spraying chopped leaves. Another passed at the level of Chase’s head, no more than two feet to his left, and then another still farther to the left.

Judge did not have the nerves of a professional killer. Tired of waiting, he had begun to fire blindly, wasting ammunition, hoping for a lucky hit.

Chase crawled back toward the right end of the row.

He peered out cautiously and saw Judge leaning against the car, attempting to reload his pistol. His head was bent over the gun, and although it should have been a simple task, he was fumbling nervously with the clip.

Chase went for the bastard.

He had covered only a third of the distance between them when Judge heard him coming. The killer looked up, still a cipher in the waning light, twisted around the end of the car, and sprinted along the highway.

Chase was underweight and out of shape, but he was gaining.

The road crested a rise and sloped so sharply that Chase was forced to put less effort into his pursuit lest he pitch forward and lose his balance.

Ahead, a red Volkswagen was parked along the shoulder of the highway. Judge reached the car, got behind the wheel, and swung the door shut. He had left the engine running. The Volkswagen instantly pulled away. Its tires hit the asphalt, spun briefly, shrieking and kicking up thick smoke; then the car shot down Kanackaway Ridge Road.

Chase didn’t have a chance to catch even part of the license-plate number, because he was startled by an air horn frighteningly close behind.

He leaped sideways off the road, tripped, rolled on the gravel verge, hugging himself for protection from the stones.

Brakes barked just once, like the cry of a wounded man. A large moving van—with dark letters against its orange side: U-HAUL—boomed past, moving much too fast on the steep incline of Kanackaway Ridge Road, swaying slightly as its load shifted.

Then both the car and truck were out of sight.

7

A TWO-INCH SCRATCH ON HIS FOREHEAD AND A SMALLER SCRATCH ON his cheek, inflicted by the thorns in the bramble row, were already crusted with dried blood. The tips of three fingers also were scarred by the brambles, but with all his other pains, he didn’t even feel these minor wounds. His ribs ached from the roll he’d taken on the gravel shoulder of Kanackaway Ridge Road—although none seemed broken when he pressed on them—and his chest, back, and arms were bruised where the largest stones had dug in as he tumbled over them. Both his knees were skinned. He had lost his shirt, of course, when he ripped it in two as protection from the thorns, and his trousers were fit only for the trash can.

He sat in the Mustang by the edge of the park, assessing the damage, and he was so angry that he wanted to strike at something, anything. Instead, he waited, cooled off, settled down.

Already, in the early darkness, a few cars had arrived at lovers’ lane, driving over the sod to the hedges. Chase was amazed that all these young lovers were returning unfazed to the scene of the murder, apparently unconcerned that the man who had knifed Michael Karnes was still on the loose. He wondered if they would bother to lock their car doors.

Since police patrols might be out along Kanackaway, hoping for the killer to return to the scene as well, a man sitting alone in a car would be highly suspicious. Chase started the engine and headed back into the city.

As he drove, he tried to recall everything that he had seen, so no clue to Judge’s identity would slip by. The guy owned a silencer-equipped pistol and a red Volkswagen. He was a bad shot, but a good driver. And that was about the sum of it.

What next? The police?

No. To hell with the cops. He had sought help from Fauvel and received nothing but bad advice. The cops had been even less help.

He would have to handle the whole business himself. Track Judge down before Judge killed him.

* * *

Mrs. Fielding met him at the door but stepped backward in surprise when she saw his condition. “What happened to you?”

“I fell down,” Chase said. “It’s nothing.”

“But there’s blood on your face. You’re all skinned up!”

“Really, Mrs. Fielding, I’m perfectly all right now. I had a little accident, but I’m on my feet and breathing.”

She looked him over more carefully. “Have you been drinking, Mr. Chase?” Her tone had gone swiftly from concern to disapproval.

“No drinks at all,” Chase said.

“You know I don’t approve.”

“I know.” He went past her, heading for the stairs. They appeared to be a long way off.

“You didn’t wreck your car?” she called after him.

“No.”

He climbed the stairs, looking anxiously ahead toward the turn at the landing-blessed escape. Strangely, he did not feel nearly as oppressed by Mrs. Fielding as usual.

“That’s good news,” she said. “As long as you have your car, you’ll be able to look for jobs better than before.”

After a glass of whiskey over ice, he drew a tub of water as hot as he could tolerate it, and he settled in as though he were an old man with arthritis. Water slopped over his open wounds and made him sigh with both pleasure and pain.

Later, he dressed the worst abrasions with Merthiolate, then put on lightweight slacks, a sports shirt, socks, and loafers. With a second glass of whiskey, he sat in the easy chair to contemplate his next move.

He looked forward to action with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

First, he should speak with Louise Allenby, the girl who had been with Michael Karnes the night he was killed. She and Chase had been questioned separately by the police, but brooding on the event together, they might be able to remember something useful.

The telephone book listed eighteen Allenbys, but Chase recalled Louise telling Detective Wallace that her father was dead and that her mother had not remarried. Only one of the Allenbys in the book was listed as a woman: Cleta Allenby on Pine Street, an address in the Ashside district.

He dialed the number and waited through ten rings before Louise answered. Her voice was recognizable, although more womanly than he remembered.

“This is Ben Chase, Louise. Do you remember me?”

“Of course,” she said. She sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. “How are you?”

“Coping.”

“What’s wrong? Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’d like to talk to you, if possible,” Chase said. “About what happened Monday night.”

“Well, sure, all right.”

“It won’t upset you?”

“Why should it?” Her hardness continued to amaze him. “Can you come over now?”

“If it’s convenient.”

“Fine,” she said. “It’s ten o’clock now—in half an hour, at ten-thirty? Will that be all right?”

“Just right,” Chase said.

“I’ll be expecting you.”

She put the phone down so gently that for seconds Chase did not realize that she had hung up.

He was beginning to stiffen from his injuries. He stood and stretched, found his car keys, and quickly finished his drink.

When it was time to go, he did not want to begin. Suddenly he realized how completely this assumption of responsibility would destroy the simple routines by which he had survived in the months since his discharge from the army and the hospital. He would have no more leisurely mornings in town, no more afternoons watching old movies on television, no more evenings reading and drinking until he could sleep—at least not until this mess was straightened out. If he just stayed here in his room, however, if he took his chances, he might remain alive until Judge was caught in a few weeks or, at most, in a few months.

Then again, Judge might not miss the next time.

He cursed everyone who had forced him out of his comfortable niche—the local press, the Merchants’ Association, Judge, Fauvel, Wallace, Tuppinger—yet he knew that he had no choice but to get on with it. His sole consolation was the hope that their victory was only a temporary one: When this was all finished, he would come back to his room, close the door, and settle once more into the quiet and unchallenging life that he had established for himself during the past year.

Mrs. Fielding did not bother him on his way out of the house, and he chose to see this as a good omen.

* * *

The Allenbys, mother and daughter, lived in a two-story neo-Colonial brick home on a small lot in middle-class Ashside. Two matched maples were featured at the head of the short flagstone walk and two matched pines at the end of it. Two steps rose to a white door with a brass knocker.

Louise answered the door herself. She was wearing white shorts and a thin white halter top, and she looked as if she had spent the past thirty minutes putting on makeup and brushing her long hair.

“Come in,” she said.

The living room was more or less what he had expected: matched Colonial furniture, a color television in a huge console cabinet, knotted rugs over polished pine floors. The house was not dirty but carelessly kept: magazines spilling out of a rack, a dried water ring on the coffee table, traces of dust here and there.

“Sit down,” Louise said. “The sofa’s comfortable, and so’s that big chair with the flowered print.”

He chose the sofa. “I’m sorry to bother you like this, so late at night-“

“Don’t worry about that,” she interrupted breezily. “You’re no bother, never could be.”

He hardly recognized her as the shaken, whimpering girl in Michael Karnes’s car on Monday night.

She said, “Since I’m finished with school, I only go to bed when I feel like it, usually around three in the morning. College in the fall. Big girl now.” She grinned as if she’d never had a boyfriend knifed to death in front of her. “Can I get you a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mind if I have something?”

“Go ahead.”

He stared at her trim legs as she went to the wet bar in the wall of bookcases. “Sicilian Stinger. Sure you wouldn’t like one? They’re delicious.”

“I’m fine.”

As she mixed the drink with professional expertise, she stood with her back to him, her hips artfully canted, her round butt thrust toward him. It might have been the unconscious stance of a girl not yet fully aware of her womanliness, with only a partial understanding of the effect her pneumatic body could have on men. Or it might have been completely contrived.

When she returned to the sofa with her drink, Chase said, “Are you old enough to drink?”

“Seventeen,” she said. “Almost eighteen. No longer a child, right? Maybe I’m not of legal age yet, but this is my own home, so who’s going to stop me?”

“Of course.”

Only seven years ago, when he’d been her age, seventeen-year-old girls
seemed
seventeen. They grew up faster now—or thought that they did.

Sipping her drink, she leaned back against the couch and crossed her bare legs.

He saw the hard tips of her breasts against the thin halter.

He said, “It’s just occurred to me that your mother may be in bed, if she gets up early for work. I didn’t mean-“

“Mother’s working now,” Louise said. She looked at him coyly, her lashes lowered and her head tilted to one side. “She’s a cocktail waitress. She goes on duty at seven, off at three, home about three-thirty in the morning.”

“I see.”

“Are you frightened?”

“Excuse me?”

She smiled mischievously. “Of being here alone with me?”

“No.”

“Good. So … where do we begin?” With another coy look, she tried to make the question seductive.

For the following half hour, he guided her through her memories of Monday night, augmenting them with his own, questioning her on details, urging her to question him, looking for some small thing that might be the key. They remembered nothing new, however, though the girl genuinely tried to help him. She was able to talk about Mike Karnes’s murder with complete detachment, as though she had not been there when it happened but had only read about it in the papers.

“Mind if I have another one?” she asked, raising her glass.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m feeling good. Want one this time?”

“No, thank you,” he said, recognizing the need to keep his head clear.

She stood at the wet bar in the same provocative pose as before, and when she returned to the couch, she sat much closer to him than she had previously. “One thing I just thought of—he was wearing a special ring.”