Strange Highways

into your bedroom, just to look you over and leave. And none of my enemies would send a killer who would chicken out after he got that far.
     I finished the shower at four-thirty and did my exercises until five. Then I showered again - cold, this time - toweled hard enough to raise blisters, combed my mop into a semblance of order, and dressed.
     By five-thirty, I was sliding into a booth down at the Ace-Spot, and Dorothy, the waitress, was plopping a Scotch and water in front of me before the smell of the place was properly in my nose.
     "What'll it be, Jake?" she asked. She has a voice like glass dropped into a porcelain basin.
     I ordered steak and eggs with a double helping of french fries, then topped it off with a question: "Anybody been asking around about me, Dory?"
     She wrote half the question down on the order pad before she realized that I had stopped ordering. Dory was supposed to have been a fine-looking street girl in her day, but no one ever said she had many smarts.
     "Not me," she said. "I'll ask Benny."
     Benny was the bartender. He was smarter than Dory. Some days, he was capable of winning a debate with a carrot.
     I don't know why I tend to hang around with so many chumps, saps, and blockheads. Maybe it makes me feel superior. A guy who's dumb enough to be trying to make a living as an old-fashioned shamus in the late twentieth century, in the age of computers and space-age eavesdropping equipment and drug thugs who'd kill their grandmothers for a nickel - hell, he needs some reason to feel good about himself.
     When Dory came back, she brought a negative from Benny, plus the food. I took it down in large bites, thinking about the stranger who had walked through the wall into my bedroom.
     After two more big Scotches, I went home to look the place over again.
     Just as I reached my apartment door and thrust the key toward the lock, this dude opened it from the inside and started coming out.
     "Hold it right there, creepo," I said, leveling my .38 on his big belly. I pushed him back into the living room, closed the door behind us, and turned on the light.
     "What do you want?" he asked.
     "What do I want? Look, buster, these are my digs, see? I live here. And the last time I looked, you didn't."
     He was dressed like something out of a Bogart film, and I might have laughed except that I was angry enough to chew up a little bunny rabbit and spit out good-luck charms. He had a huge hat pulled down over half his face. The overcoat might have been tailored for Siamese twins. It hung to his knees, and after that there were wide, sloppy trousers and big - I mean BIG - stuffy tennis shoes. The tennis shoes didn't fit Bogart, but the air of mystery was there.
     For size, this guy reminded me of that actor from the old movies, Sidney Greenstreet, though with a serious gland condition.
     "I don't want to harm you," he said. His voice was about a thousand registers below Dory's, but it had that same harsh sound of something breaking.
     "You the same dude who was here earlier?" I asked.
     He hunched his head and said, "I never been here before."
     "Let's see what you look like."
     I reached for his hat. He tried to pull away, discovered I was faster than he was, tried to slug me in the chest. But I got the hat off and managed to take the clip on the shoulder instead of over the heart where he had aimed it.
     Then I smiled and looked up at his face and stopped smiling and said, "Good God!"
     "That kicks it!" His face contorted, and his big square teeth thrust over his black lip.
     I was backed up against the door. And though I was terrified for the first time in years, I wasn't about to let him out. If my threats didn't keep him where he was, a hot kiss from the .38 would manage just fine - I hoped.
     "Who ... what are you?" I asked.
     "You were right the first time. Who."
     "Answer it, then."
     "Can we sit down? I'm awful tired."
     I let him sit, but I stayed on my feet to be able to move fast, and while he walked to the sofa and collapsed as if he were on his last legs, I looked him over good. He was a bear. A bruin. He was a big one too, no little Teddy, six feet four. His shoulders were broad, and under those baggy clothes he probably had a barrel chest and legs like tree