Chase: Roman

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 want?’
        The stranger was silent for so long that Chase almost asked the same question again. Suddenly, the amusement gone from his voice, the killer said, ‘You messed in where you had no right messing. You don't know the trouble I went to, picking the proper targets out of all those young fornicators, the ones who most deserved to die. I planned it for weeks, Chase, and I had given that young sinner his deserved punishment. The young woman was left, and you saved her before I could perform my duty, saved a whore like that who had no right to be spared.’
        ‘You're not well,’ Chase said. He realized the absurdity of that statement the moment he had spoken, but the killer had reduced him to clichés.
        ‘I just wanted to tell you, Mr Chase, that it doesn't end here, not by a long shot.’ The killer either did not hear or pretended not to hear what Chase had said.
        ‘What do you mean?’
        ‘I'll deal with you, Chase, once I've researched your background and have weighed a proper judgment on you. Then, when you've been made to pay, I'll deal with the whore, that girl.’
        ‘Deal with?’ Chase asked. The euphemism reminded him of all the similar evasions of vocabulary he had grown accustomed to in Nam. He felt much older than he was, more tired than he had a moment earlier.
        ‘I'm going to kill you, Chase. I'm going to punish you for whatever sins are on your record, and because you've messed in where you had no right.’ He waited a moment. ‘Do you understand?’
        ‘Yes, but -’
        ‘I'll be talking to you again, Chase.’
        ‘Look, if-’
        The man hung up.
        Chase put his own receiver in the cradle of the phone and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. He felt something cold and awkward in his hand, looked down and was surprised to find the glass of whiskey. He raised it to his lips and took a taste. It was slightly bitter.
        He had to decide what to do about the call.
        The police would be interested, of course, for they would see it as their first solid lead to the man who had killed Michael Karnes. They would probably want to monitor the line in hopes the man would call again -especially since he had said that Chase would be hearing from him again. They might even station an officer in Chase's room, and they were certain to put a tail on him both for his own protection and for a chance to nab the murderer if he should try for a second victim. Yet…
        The last few weeks, since the news about the Medal of Honor, Chase's day-to-day routines had been utterly destroyed. He had been accustomed to a deep solitude, disturbed only by his need to talk to store clerks and to Mrs Fiedling, his landlady. In the mornings he went downtown and had breakfast at Woolworth's. He bought a paperback, occasionally a magazine - but never a newspaper - picked up what incidentals he required, stopped twice a week at the liquor store, spent the noon hour in the park watching the girls in their short skirts as they walked to and from their jobs, then went home and spent the rest of the day in his room. He read during the long afternoons, and he drank. By evening he could not clearly see the print on the pages, and he turned on the small television set to watch the old movies he had almost memorized detail by detail. Around eleven o'clock at night he finished the day's bottle, having eaten little or nothing for supper, and then he