"The Aryan Alliance," Ben said. "You and Eric Blentz. You and a lot of other moronic assholes who think you're the master race."
"You don't want to cross certain people, Mr. Chase."
"You don't scare me. I've been dead for years anyway. You've got a dead man looking for you, Judge, and we dead men never stop."
With sudden anger hotter than the July morning, Judge said, "You don't know anything about me, Chase, not anything that matters — and you're not going to get a chance to learn anything more."
"Whoa, easy, easy," Ben said, enjoying being on the delivery end of the needle for a change. "You master-race guys, you come from a lot of inbreeding, cousins lying with cousins, sisters with brothers, makes you a little unstable sometimes."
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.
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.
Heading to the living room, rolling her hips to show off her tight butt, the girl said, "Will you have a drink this time?"
"Early, isn't it?"
"Noon."
"No, thanks," Ben said. "We've only got a couple of questions, and we'll be going."
At the wet bar, Louise stood with her right hip cocked, mixing her drink.
Ben and Glenda sat on the sofa, and Louise carried her drink to an armchair opposite them. The girl slouched in the chair, with her legs spread. The crotch of her skimpy swimsuit conformed to the folds of flesh that it was supposed to conceal, leaving nothing to the imagination.
Chase felt uncomfortable, but Glenda seemed as serene as ever.
"The name you wanted," Louise said, "is Tom Deekin. The guy who dated my mom, the guy with the ring. He sells insurance. Has an office over on Canby Street by the firehouse. But he isn't the guy who knifed Mike."
"I know. Still… he might be able to give us the names of other people in the brotherhood."
"Fat chance." She was holding her drink in one hand and lightly caressing one well-tanned thigh with the other, trying to make her self-appreciation seem unconscious but being too blatant by half. "These guys are committed to something, you know, they have ideals — and you're an outsider. Why're they going to tell you anything?"
"They might."
She smiled and shook her head. "You think maybe you can squeeze a few names out of Tom Deekin? Listen, these guys have steel balls. They have to be tough, getting ready to defend against the nappy-heads and the kikes and the rest of them."
Ben supposed that some members of the Aryan Alliance might be dangerous — but most of them were probably playing at this master-race stuff, drinking beer and gassing about racial Armageddon instead of watching football games on the tube.
Glenda said, "Louise, as I understand it, you'd gone with Mike for a year before…"
"Before that fruitcake gutted him?" Louise said, as if to prove that she was as tough as anyone. Or maybe the coldness in her was as real as it seemed. "A year — yeah, that's about right. Why?"
"Did you ever notice anyone following you — as if they were keeping a watch on you?"
"No."
Ben knew what Glenda was after. Judge researched his potential victims to discover their sins, to attempt to justify his murderous urges as righteous judgments. He had followed Mike and Louise; he'd told Ben as much; therefore, they might have noticed him.
"You answered too fast, without thinking," Ben said. "Glenda doesn't mean was someone following you recently. Maybe it was even weeks ago, even months ago."
Louise hesitated, sipping her drink. Her free hand slid from her thigh to the crotch of her bikini. Her fingertips moved in slow circles over the yellow fabric.
Though she stared mostly at Ben, the girl occasionally glanced assessingly at Glenda. She clearly felt that they were engaged in a competition.