Strange Highways

flushed the toilet three times. He put the lid down and sat on it, blotting the cold sweat on his face with his gloved hands.
     Having won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the most sacred and jealously guarded award his country bestowed, he had wanted nothing more than to return to the attic room in Mrs. Fielding's house and resume his penitence.
     Then he met Glenda, and things changed. There was no question about living as a hermit any more, sealed off from experience. All that he wanted now was quietude, a chance for their love to develop, a life. Fauvel, the police, the press, and Richard Linski had not allowed him even that.
     Chase rose and went to the sink. He rinsed his mouth out until the bad taste was gone.
     He no longer had to be a hero.
     He left the bathroom.
     In the front room, he unwound the tape from Richard Linski's wrists and ankles. He let the body slide out of the chair and sprawl onto the floor.
     When he considered the pistol, he realized that there would be three slugs missing from the clip. In the den he found a gun cabinet and drawers of ammunition. He reloaded the clip, leaving out only one round. In the kitchen, he put the gun on the floor, near the dead man's right hand.
     In the living room, he searched for the two slugs that Judge had expended earlier. He found the one that had passed through his shoulder; it was embedded in the baseboard, and he dug it out without leaving a particularly noticeable mark. The other was on the floor behind the portable bar, where it had fallen after striking the bronze frame of the shattered bar mirror.
     It was a quarter of twelve when he reached the Mustang and put the garbage bag and the cotton gloves into the trunk.
     He drove past Linski's bungalow. The lights were on. They would burn all night.

     Ben knocked twice, and Glenda let him into the motel room.
     They held each other for a while.
     "You're hurt." When she realized the nature of the wound, she said, "I'd better get you back to my place. You'll stay with me. I'll have to nurse you through this. We can't risk infection. Doctors have to report gunshot wounds to the police."
     She drove the Mustang.
     He slumped in the passenger seat. A great weariness overcame him - not merely a result of the experiences of the past couple of hours but a weariness of years.
     Heroes need monsters to slay, and they can always find them - within if not without.
     "You haven't asked," he said as they rolled through the night.
     "I never will."
     "He's dead."
     She said nothing.
     "I think it was the right thing."
     "It was a door you had to go through, whether you wanted to or not," she said.
     "Only the Karneses can connect me to him, and they're never going to talk. The cops can't nail me for it."
     "Anyway," she said, "you'll make your own punishment."
     A full moon rode the night sky. He stared at its cratered face, trying to read the future in the destruction of the past.

NOTES TO THE READER

    1

WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, I WROTE SHORT STORIES ON TABLET paper, drew colorful covers, stapled the left margin of each story, put electrician's tape over the staples for the sake of neatness, and tried to peddle these "books" to relatives and neighbors. Each of my productions sold for a nickel, which was extremely competitive pricing - or would have been if any other obsessive-compulsive writers of grade-school age had been busily exercising their imaginations in my neighborhood. Other children, however, were engaged in such traditional, character-building, healthful activities as baseball, football, basketball, tearing the wings off flies, terrorizing and beating smaller kids, and experimenting with ways to make explosives out of ordinary household products such as laundry detergent, rubbing alcohol, and Spam. I sold my stories with such relentless enthusiasm that I must have been a colossal pest - like a pint-size Hare Krishna panhandler in a caffeine frenzy.
     I had no special use for the pittance that I earned from this activity, no dreams of unlimited wealth. After all, I had taken in no more than two dollars before savvy relatives and neighbors conducted a secret and highly illegal meeting to agree that they wouldn't any longer permit trafficking in hand-printed fiction by eight-year-olds. This, of