Strange Highways

"Did you tell Wallace about this?"
     "No, I just now thought of it. You loosened me up, and it just came back to me in a flash."
     Chase imagined nothing more gratifying than establishing a body of information about Judge - working from this essential bit of data - and then presenting it to the detective.
     "It may be helpful," he said.
     She slid next to him with the oiled smoothness of a machine made for seduction, all sleek lines and golden tan. "Do you think so, Ben?"
     He nodded, trying to decide how best to excuse himself without hurting her feelings. He had to keep on the good side of her until she got that name from her mother.
     Her thigh was pressed against his. She put her drink down and turned to him, expecting to be embraced.
     Chase stood abruptly. "I ought to be going. This has given me something concrete to consider, more than I had hoped for."
     She rose too, remaining close to him. "It's early. Not even midnight. Mom won't be home for hours."
     She smelled of soap, shampoo, a pleasant perfume. It was such a clean smell - but he knew now that she was corrupted in her heart.
     He was fiercely aroused - and sickened by his arousal. This cheap, coldhearted, hate-filled girl reached him in a way that no woman had reached him in longer than a year, and he despised himself for wanting her so intensely. At that moment, of course, virtually any attractive woman might have affected him the same way. Perhaps the pent-up sexual energy of many lonely months had become too great to repress, and perhaps the reawakening of sexual desire was the result of being forced out of his self-imposed isolation. Once he admitted to a healthy survival instinct, once he decided not to stand still and be a target for Judge, he was able to admit to all the desires and needs that were the essence of life. Nevertheless, he despised himself.
     "No," he said, edging away from her. "I have other people to see."
     "At this hour?"
     "One or two other people."
     She pressed against him, pulled his face down to hers, and licked his lips. No kiss. Just the maddeningly quick flicking of her warm tongue - an exquisitely erotic promise.
     "We've got the house for several hours yet," she said. "We don't even have to use the couch. I've got a great big white bed with a white canopy."
     "You're something else," he said, meaning something other than what she thought he meant.
     "You don't know the half of it," she said.
     "But I can't. I really can't, because these people are waiting for me."
     She was experienced enough to know when the moment for seduction had passed. She stepped back and smiled. "But I do want to thank you. For saving my life. That deserves a big reward."
     "You don't owe me anything," he said.
     "I do . Some other night, when you don't have plans?"
     He kissed her, telling himself that he did so only to remain in her good graces. "Definitely some other night."
     "Mmmmm. And we'll be good together."
     She was all polish, fast and easy, no jagged edges to get hung up on.
     He said, "If Detective Wallace questions you again, do you think you could sort of ... forget about the ring"
     "Sure. I don't like cops. They're the ones who put the guns to our heads, make us kiss the asses of the nappy-heads and the Jews and all of them. They're part of the problem. But why are you carrying on with this by yourself? I never did ask."
     "Personal," he said. "For personal reasons."

     At home again, he undressed and went directly to bed. The darkness was heavy and warm and, for the first time in longer than he could remember, comforting.
     Alone, he began to wonder if he had been a fool not to respond to Louise Allenby's offer. He had been a long time without a woman, without even a desire for one.
     He had told himself that he'd rejected Louise because he'd found her as personally repulsive as she was physically attractive. But he wondered if, instead, he'd retreated from the prospect because he feared it would draw him even further into the world, further away from his precious routines. A relationship with a woman, regardless of how transitory, would be one more crack in his carefully mortared walls.
     On the edge of sleep, he realized that something had happened that was far more important than