Chase: Roman Read Free Page B

was shallow, already clotted and beginning to dry into a thin scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed Merthiolate over it. In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack Daniel's over two ice cubes, and sank down on the bed with the wonderful stuff. He usually consumed a fifth of it a day. Today, because of that damned banquet, he had been forced to stay off it. Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor was the only time he felt clean.
        He was pouring his second glassful over the same half-melted ice cubes when the telephone rang.
        When he first moved into the apartment, he had protested that he did not require a telephone, since no one would be calling him and since he had no wish to contact anyone else. Mrs Fiedling had not believed him, and envisioning a situation wherein she would become a messenger service for him, insisted on a telephone hook-up as a condition of occupancy.
        That was long before she knew that he was a hero. It was even before he knew it.
        For months the phone went unused, except when she called up from downstairs to tell him mail had been delivered or to invite him to dinner. Since the announcement by the White House, however, since all the excitement about the medal, he received two and three calls a day, most of them from perfect strangers who offered congratulations he did not want or sought interviews for various publications he had never read. He cut most of them short. Thus far, no one had gall enough to ring him up this late at night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude he had grown used to in those first months after his discharge.
        He considered ignoring the phone, concentrating on his Jack Daniel's until it had stopped crying. But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized the caller was a good bit more persistent than he, and he answered it. ‘Hello?’
        ‘Chase?’
        ‘Yes.’
        ‘Do you know me?’
        ‘No,’ he said, unable to place the voice. The man sounded tired - but aside from that one clue, he might have been anywhere between twenty and sixty years old, fat or thin, tall or short.
        ‘How's your leg, Chase?’ His voice contained a hint of humour, though the reason for it escaped Chase.
        ‘Good enough,’ Chase said. ‘Fine.’
        ‘You're very good with your hands.’
        Chase said nothing, could not bring himself to speak, for he had begun to understand just what the call was all about.
        ‘Very good with your hands,’ the stranger repeated. ‘I guess you learned that in the army.’
        ‘Yes,’ Chase said.
        ‘I guess you learned a lot of things in the army, and I guess you think you can take care of yourself pretty well.’
        Chase said, ‘Is this you?’
        The man laughed, momentarily shaking off the dull tone of exhaustion. ‘Yes, it's me,’ he said. ‘I've got a badly bruised throat, and I know my voice will be just awful by morning. Otherwise, I got away about as lightly as you did, Chase.’
        Chase remembered, with a clarity his mind reserved for moments of danger, the struggle with the killer on the grass by the Chevrolet. He tried to get a clear picture of the man's face but could not do any better for his own sake than for the police. He said, ‘How did you know that I was the one who stopped you?’
        ‘I saw your picture in the paper,’ the man said. ‘You're a war hero. Your picture was everywhere. When you were lying on your back, beside the knife, I recognized you and got out of there fast.’
        Chase said, ‘Who are you?’
        ‘Do you really expect me to say?’ There was a definite note of amusement in the man's voice.
        Chase had forgotten his drink altogether. The alarms, the goddamned alarms in his head, were ringing at peak volume. It might have been a national holiday, judging by that mental clangor. Chase said. ‘What do you