Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

"You're safe enough if you stay here," he said. "Linksi can't know where you are."

To avoid giving Judge a chance to find them, they hadn't gone back to her apartment to pack a bag for her. They had checked in without luggage. If everything went well, they wouldn't be staying the whole night anyway. This was just a way station between the loneliness of the past and whatever future fate might grant them.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, still childlike in her pink socks and twin ponytails, she said, "I should go with you."

"I have combat training. You don't. It's that simple."

She didn't ask him why he hadn't called the police. With what they had learned, even Detective Wallace would at least question Linski — and if Linski was the killer, then the evidence would fall into place. Anyone else would have asked him that tough question — but she was not like anyone else.

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.