Strange Highways (63 page)

In Vietnam, Chase had developed an uncanny sense of imminent danger. His inner alarm was clanging.

The one thing that did not belong in a lovers’ lane at night was a man alone, on foot. A teenager’s car was a mobile bed, such a necessity of seduction, such an extension of the seducer, that no modern Casanova could be successful without one.

It was possible, of course, that the interloper was engaging in some bird-dogging: spotting parkers for his own amusement and to their embarrassment. Chase had been the victim of that game a few times in his high-school years. That was, however, a pastime usually associated with the immature or the socially outcast, those kids who hadn’t the opportunity to be
inside
the cars where the real action was. It was not, as far as Chase knew, something that adults enjoyed. And this man creeping through the shadows was easily six feet tall; he had the carriage of an adult, no youthful awkwardness. Besides, bird-dogging was a sport most often played in groups as protection against a beating from one of the surprised lovers.

Trouble.

The guy came out from beneath the willow, still doubled over and running. He stopped against a bramble row and studied a three-year-old Chevrolet parked at the end, near the cliff railing.

Not sure what was happening or what he should do, Chase turned in his car seat and worked the cover off the dome light. He unscrewed the tiny bulb and dropped it into a pocket of his suit jacket. When he turned front again, he saw that the bird-dogger had not moved: The guy was still watching the Chevrolet, leaning into the brambles as if unfazed by the thorns.

A girl laughed, the sound of her voice clear in the night air. Some of the lovers must have found it too warm for closed windows.

The man by the brambles moved again, closing in on the Chevrolet.

Quietly, because the stalker was no more than a hundred fifty feet from him, Chase got out of the Mustang. He left the door open, because he was sure that the sound of it would alert the intruder. He went around the car and across the grass, which had recently been mown and was slightly damp and slippery underfoot.

Ahead, a light came on in the Chevrolet, diffused by the steamed windows. Someone shouted, and a young girl screamed. She screamed again.

Chase had been walking. Now he ran as the sounds of a fight rose ahead. When he came up on the Chevrolet, he saw that the door on the driver’s side was open and that the intruder was halfway into the front seat, flailing away at someone. Shadows bobbled, dipped, and pitched against the frosted glass.

“Hold it!” Chase shouted, directly behind the man now.

As the stranger pulled back out of the car, Chase saw the knife. The bird-dogger held it in his right hand, raised high. His hand and the weapon were covered with blood.

Chase raced forward the last few feet, slammed the stalker against the Chevy’s window post. He slipped his arm around the guy’s neck and tried to get a hammerlock on him.

The girl was still screaming.

The stranger swung his arm down and back, trying to catch Chase’s thigh with the blade. He was an amateur.

Chase twisted out of the arc of the weapon. Simultaneously he drew his arm more tightly across the other’s windpipe.

Around them, cars started. Trouble in lovers’ lane aroused all the repressed sexual guilt in every teenager nearby. No one wanted to stay to see what the problem was.

“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.