Strange Highways

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