Judge was silent again, and when he finally spoke, he sounded as if he was shaking with the effort to control his anger. “Do you like your new bitch, Chase? Isn’t that the name of the good witch in the land of Oz? Glenda the good witch?”
Ben’s heart felt as if it had turned over. He tried to fake bafflement: “Who? What’re you talking about?”
“Glenda, tall and golden.”
There was no way that he had been followed to her apartment.
“Works in a morgue,” said Judge.
He couldn’t know.
“Dead newspapers. I think I’ll send the fornicating bitch to another kind of morgue, Chase, a morgue where the dead have some real meat on them.”
Judge hung up.
He couldn’t know.
But he did.
Suddenly Chase felt pursued by a supernatural avenger. Justice had come for him at last. Out of those faraway, long-ago tunnels.
10
GLENDA ANSWERED BEN’S KNOCK, READ THE ANXIETY IN HIS EYES, AND said, “What’s wrong?”
Once inside, he closed the front door and engaged both the latch and the deadbolt.
“Ben?” She was wearing a pink T-shirt, white shorts, and tennis shoes. Her golden hair was pulled back in a pair of ponytails, one behind each ear, and even as tall as she was, she still seemed like a little girl. In spite of what she’d told him in the darkness last night, she was the personification of innocence.
“Do you own a gun?” he asked.
“No.”
“Neither do I. Didn’t want to see a gun after the war. Now nothing would make me happier than to have one in my hand.”
In the dining area off the kitchen, at the table where they’d had dinner the previous night, he told her about Judge, everything since the murder of Michael Karnes. “Now … because of me … you’re part of it.”
She reached across the small table and took his hand. “No. That’s the wrong way to look at it. Now, because we met, we’re in it together – and you’re no longer alone.”
“I want to call Detective Wallace, ask him to provide you with protection.”
“Why should he believe you any more now than he did before?” she asked.
“The damage to my car, when the guy sideswiped it out at the mall, trying to run me down.”
“He won’t believe that’s how it happened. You don’t have any witnesses. He’ll say you were drinking.”
Ben knew that she was right. “We need to get help somewhere.”
“You were handling it on your own, tracking him down on your own. So why not the two of us now?”
He shook his head. “That was all right when it was only my life on the line. But now-”
“People in books,” she said.
“What?”
“We can trust people in books. But here, right now – we can’t trust anyone but ourselves.”
He was scared as he had not been in a long time. Not scared only for her. Scared for himself. Because at last he had something to lose.
“But how do we find the creep?” he wondered.
“We do whatever you were going to do on your own. First, call Louise Allenby. Find out if she got the name of the guy who dated her mother, the guy with the Aryan Alliance ring.”
“He won’t be Judge. Louise would have recognized him.”
“But he might be a link to Judge.”
“That would be too neat.”
“Sometimes life is neat.”
Ben called the Allenby house, and Louise answered. When she heard who it was, her voice dropped into a seductive purr. She had the name he wanted, but she wouldn’t give it to him on the telephone.
“You’ll have to come around and see me,” she said coquettishly. “My mom’s away for the weekend with this guy. Got the place all to myself.”
* * *
When Louise answered the bell, she was wearing a yellow bikini, and she smelled of coconut tanning lotion. Opening the door, she said, “I knew you’d be back to get the reward-”
When she saw Glenda, she fell silent.
“May we come in?” Ben asked.
Louise stepped back, confused, and closed the door behind them.
Ben introduced Glenda as a close friend, and Louise’s face soured into a pout.