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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
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