Strange Highways (77 page)

Night had fallen.

“I better go,” he said.

She got off the edge of the bed and came into his arms. For a while he held her.

By unspoken mutual consent, they didn’t kiss. A kiss would have been a promise. In spite of his combat training, however, he might not leave Linski’s house alive. He didn’t want to make a promise to her that he might be unable to fulfill.

He unlocked the door, took the chain off, and stepped outside onto the concrete promenade. He waited for her to close the door and engage the deadbolt.

The night was warm and humid. The sky was bottomless.

He left the motel in his Mustang.

* * *

At ten o’clock, Ben parked two blocks from Richard Linski’s house and put on a pair of gardening gloves that he had purchased earlier. He made the rest of the journey on foot, staying on the opposite side of the street from the house.

The well-kept house was the second from the corner: white brick with emerald-green trim and dark-green slate roof. It was set on two well-landscaped lots, and the entire property was ringed with waist-high hedges that were so even they might have been trimmed with the aid of a quality micrometer.

Some windows glowed. Linski was apparently at home.

Ben walked the street that ran perpendicular to the one on which the bungalow faced. He entered a narrow, deserted alleyway that led behind the property.

A wrought-iron gate punctuated the wall of hedges. It wasn’t locked. He opened it and went into Linski’s backyard.

The rear porch was not so deep as the one at the front. It was bracketed by large lilac bushes. The boards didn’t creak under his feet.

Lights were on in the kitchen, filtered through red-and-white-checkered curtains.

He waited a few minutes in the lilac-scented darkness, not thinking about anything, geared down and idling, preparing himself for confrontation as he had learned to do in Nam.

The back door was locked when he quietly tried it. But both kitchen windows were open to admit the night breeze.

Deeper in the house, a radio was playing big-band music. Benny Goodman.
One O’clock Jump.

Stooping low, he brought his face to the window and peered between the half-drawn curtains, which stirred in the gentle breeze. He saw a pine table and chairs, a straw basket full of apples in the center of the table, a refrigerator, and double ovens. Cannisters for flour and sugar and coffee. A utensil rack holding scoops and ladles and big spoons and cooking forks. A blender plugged into a wall outlet.

No Judge. Linski was elsewhere in the house.

Glenn Miller.
String of Pearls.

Ben examined the window screen and found that it was held in place by simple pressure clips. He removed the screen and set it aside.

The table was just beyond the window. He had to climb onto it as he went inside, careful not to knock over the basket of apples. From the table he eased himself silently to the vinyl-tile floor.

The music on the radio covered what small noises he made.

Acutely aware that he was without a weapon, he considered trying the drawers in the cupboard by the sink and securing a sharp knife, but he quickly dismissed that idea. A knife would bring events to an unnerving point, full circle, except that now he himself would be the slasher—and would be forced to confront directly the issue of not Linski’s sanity but his own.

He paused at the archway between the kitchen and the dining room, because there were no lights in that intervening space except what spilled into it from the kitchen and living room. He didn’t dare risk stumbling over anything in the dark.

When his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he edged across the room. Here, a deep-pile carpet absorbed his footsteps.

He stood at the threshold of the front room, letting his eyes adjust to the brighter light.

Someone coughed. A man.

In Nam, when a mission was especially tense, Ben had been able to devote his mind to its completion with a singleness of purpose that he had never achieved before or since. He wanted to be as brisk and clean and quick about this as he had been about those wartime operations, but he was bothered by thoughts of Glenda waiting alone and surely wondering if the motel-room door would be one of those
special
doors beyond which lay the thing that she needed.

He flexed his gloved hands and drew a slow breath. Preparing himself.

The smart thing to do was to turn around right now, cross the darkened dining room as quietly as possible, cross the kitchen, leave by the back door, and call the police.

But they would be real police. Not like the police in books. Perhaps reliable. Perhaps not.

He stepped into the living room.

In a large armchair near the fireplace sat a man with an open newspaper on his lap. He wore tortoiseshell reading glasses pushed far down on his thin, straight nose, and he was humming along with Glenn Miller’s tune while reading the comics.

Briefly, Ben thought that he had made a grave mistake, because he couldn’t quite believe that a psychotic killer, like anyone else, could become happily engrossed in the latest exploits of Snoopy and Charlie Brown and Broom Hilda. Then the man looked up, surprised, and he fit Judge’s description: tall, blond, ascetic.

“Richard Linski?” Ben asked.

The man in the chair seemed frozen in place, perhaps a mannequin propped there to distract Ben while the real Judge, the real Richard Linski, crept up on him from behind. The illusion was so complete that Ben almost turned to see if his fear was warranted.

“You,”
Linski whispered.

He wadded the comic pages in his hands and threw them aside as he exploded out of the armchair.

All fear left Ben, and he was unnaturally calm.

“What are
you
doing here?” Linski asked, and his voice was without doubt the voice of Judge.

He backed away from the chair, toward the fireplace. His hands were feeling behind him for something. The fireplace poker.

“Don’t try it,” Chase said.

Instead of making a grab for the brass poker, Linski snatched something off the mantel, from beside an ormolu clock: a silencer-fitted pistol.

The clock had hidden it.

Ben stepped forward as Linski brought the weapon up, but he did not move quite fast enough. The bullet took him in the left shoulder and twisted him sideways, off balance, and into the floor lamp.

He fell, taking the lamp with him. Both bulbs smashed when they struck the floor, plunging the room into near-total darkness that was relieved only by the weak light from distant streetlamps outside and the faint glow from the kitchen.

“Fornicator,” Judge whispered.

Ben’s shoulder felt as if a nail had been driven into it, and his arm was half numb. He lay still, playing dead in the dark.

“Chase?”

Ben waited.

Linski stepped away from the mantel, bent forward as he tried to make out Ben’s body in the jumble of shadows and furniture. Ben couldn’t be certain, but he thought the killer was holding the pistol straight out in front of him, like a teacher holding a pointer toward a chalkboard.

“Chase?”

Weak, trembling, cold, sweating, Ben knew that shock accounted for his sudden weakness more than the wound did. He could overcome shock.

“How’s our hero now?” Judge asked.

Chase launched himself at Linski, ignoring the flash of pain in his shoulder.

The pistol fired—the
whoosh
of the silencer was clearly audible in such close quarters—but Ben was under the weapon by then, and the round passed over him, shattering glass at the other end of the room.

He dragged Linski down, past the fireplace, into the television, which toppled off its stand. It struck the wall and then the floor with two solid thumps, though the screen did not shatter.

The pistol flew from Linski’s hand and clattered into the gloom.

Ben bore Linski all the way down onto the floor and drove a knee into his crotch.

With a dry and nearly silent scream of pain, Linski tried to throw Ben off, but he couldn’t manage more than a weak shudder of protest.

Ben’s wounded shoulder seemed afire. In spite of the pain, he throttled Linski with both hands, unerringly finding the right pressure points with his thumbs, as he’d been trained, applying as little pressure as possible but enough to put Linski out.

Getting to his feet, swaying like a drunk, Ben fumbled in the darkness until he found a lamp that hadn’t been knocked over.

Linski was on the floor, unconscious, his arms out like wings at his sides, as if he were a bird that had fallen from the sky and broken its back on a thrust of rock.

Ben wiped his face with one gloved hand. His stomach, knotted with fear, now loosened too quickly, and he felt as if he might be sick.

Outside, a car full of shouting teenagers went by, screeched at the corner, sounded its horn, and peeled off with a squeal of rubber.

Ben stepped across Richard Linski and looked out the window. There was no one in sight. The lawn was dark. The sounds of the struggle had not carried any distance.

He turned from the window and listened to Linski’s breathing. Shallow but steady.

A quick examination of his shoulder indicated that the bullet probably had passed straight through. He wasn’t bleeding much, but he’d have to take a closer look at the wound as soon as possible.

In the half bath off the kitchen, he found two rolls of first-aid adhesive tape, enough to securely bind Linski. He dragged the killer into the kitchen and bound him to one of the breakfast chairs.

In the master bathroom, Chase took off his gloves and set them aside to avoid getting them bloody. He stripped out of his blood-soaked shirt and dropped it into the sink.

He took a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the medicine cabinet. When he poured it into the wound, he nearly passed out in agony. For a while he bent over the sink, paralyzed by the pain.

When he could move again, he packed the wound with wads of paper towels until the bleeding slowed even further. He slapped a washcloth over the wound and then wound wide adhesive tape over the entire mess. It wasn’t a professional bandage, but it would ensure that he didn’t get blood over everything.

In the bedroom, he took one of Linski’s shirts from the closet and struggled into it. He was stiffening fast from the wound.

In the kitchen again, he found a box of large plastic garbage bags and brought one to the master bathroom. He dropped his bloody shirt into it. He used paper towels to wipe his blood off the sink and the mirror, and threw those in the garbage bag when he was done. Standing in the doorway, pulling on his gardening gloves, he studied the bathroom, decided that there was no trace of what he had done, turned off the light, and closed the door.

On his way downstairs, he stumbled and had to grab the railing for support. A spell of vertigo pulled a spinning darkness into the edges of his vision—but then it passed.

Judge’s second shot had missed Chase, but it had thoroughly smashed a three-foot-square ornamental mirror that had hung on the wall above the bar at the far end of the living room. All the glass had fallen out of the ornate bronze frame, and fragments were scattered over a six-foot radius. In five minutes he had picked up all the major shards, but hundreds of slivers still sparkled in the nap of the carpet and in the upholstery of nearby chairs.

He was considering this problem when Richard Linski awoke and called out.

Ben went to the chair in the kitchen. Linski’s wrists were taped to the arms, each ankle to a chair leg. He twisted and tried to break free, but stopped when he realized that he wouldn’t be able to pull loose.

Ben said, “Where is your vacuum sweeper?”

“What?” Linski was still groggy.

“Vacuum.”

“What do you want that for?”

Ben threatened to backhand him.

“In the cellarway,” Linski said.

Ben took the vacuum to the living room and swept up every piece of shattered mirror that caught his attention. Fifteen minutes later, satisfied with the job that he’d done, he put the sweeper away again, just as he had found it.

He secreted the damaged mirror frame in a corner of the garage, behind a stack of other junk.

“What are you doing?” Judge asked.

Ben didn’t answer him.

In the living room again, he replaced the television on its stand, plugged it in, switched it on. A situation comedy was playing, one of those in which the father is always an idiot and the mother is little better. The kids are cute monsters.

Afraid that his spells of dizziness were soon going to progress to disorientation, Ben righted the overturned floor lamp and examined the metal shade. It was dented, but there was no way to tell that the dent was new. He unscrewed the damaged lightbulbs; along with the larger scraps of the broken mirror, he threw them into the plastic garbage bag on top of the bloody shirt and paper towels. He used the pages of a magazine to scoop up the smaller pieces, and threw those and the magazine into the garbage bag.

Returning to the kitchen, Ben said, “Where do you keep spare lightbulbs?”

“Go to hell.”

Ben noticed that there were no red marks on the skin over Linski’s carotid arteries. The pressure had been pinpoint and too briefly applied to produce bruises.

Without Linski’s help, Ben required almost five minutes to find the spare lightbulbs in the back of a kitchen cabinet. He screwed two new 60-watt bulbs into the living-room lamp. The lamp lit when he switched it on.

In the kitchen again, he got a bucket of water, soap, ammoniated cleanser, and a carton of milk—his mother’s favorite spot remover—from the refrigerator. Back in the living room, with several rags and a sponge, he worked on the few small smears of his blood that marred the carpet. When he was done, the faint stubborn stains that remained were all but invisible in the long dark-brown nap. The room wouldn’t have to pass a full forensic investigation, anyway. As long as it appeared that nothing had happened there, the police wouldn’t take a closer look.

He put the cleaning materials away. He threw the rags into the garbage bag with the other items.