Chase

by Dean R. Koontz

  Chase was underweight and out of shape, but he was gaining.

  The road crested a rise and sloped so sharply that Chase was forced to put less effort into his pursuit lest he pitch forward and lose his balance.

  Ahead, a red Volkswagen was parked along the shoulder of the highway. Judge reached the car, got behind the wheel, and swung the door shut. He had left the engine running. The Volkswagen instantly pulled away. Its tires hit the asphalt, spun briefly, shrieking and kicking up thick smoke; then the car shot down Kanackaway Ridge Road.

  Chase didn't have a chance to catch even part of the license-plate number, because he was startled by an air horn frighteningly close behind.

  He leaped sideways off the road, tripped, rolled on the gravel verge, hugging himself for protection from the stones.

  Brakes barked just once, like the cry of a wounded man. A large moving van — with dark letters against its orange side: U-HAUL — boomed past, moving much too fast on the steep incline of Kanackaway Ridge Road, swaying slightly as its load shifted.

  Then both the car and truck were out of sight.

  7

  A two-inch scratch on his forehead and a smaller scratch on his cheek, inflicted by the thorns in the bramble row, were already crusted with dried blood. The tips of three fingers also were scarred by the brambles, but with all his other pains, he didn't even feel these minor wounds. His ribs ached from the roll he'd taken on the gravel shoulder of Kanackaway Ridge Road — although none seemed broken when he pressed on them — and his chest, back, and arms were bruised where the largest stones had dug in as he tumbled over them. Both his knees were skinned. He had lost his shirt, of course, when he ripped it in two as protection from the thorns, and his trousers were fit only for the trash can.

  He sat in the Mustang by the edge of the park, assessing the damage, and he was so angry that he wanted to strike at something, anything. Instead, he waited, cooled off, settled down.

  Already, in the early darkness, a few cars had arrived at lovers' lane, driving over the sod to the hedges. Chase was amazed that all these young lovers were returning unfazed to the scene of the murder, apparently unconcerned that the man who had knifed Michael Karnes was still on the loose. He wondered if they would bother to lock their car doors.

  Since police patrols might be out along Kanackaway, hoping for the killer to return to the scene as well, a man sitting alone in a car would be highly suspicious. Chase started the engine and headed back into the city.

  As he drove, he tried to recall everything that he had seen, so no clue to Judge's identity would slip by. The guy owned a silencer-equipped pistol and a red Volkswagen. He was a bad shot, but a good driver. And that was about the sum of it.

  What next? The police?

  No. To hell with the cops. He had sought help from Fauvel and received nothing but bad advice. The cops had been even less help.

  He would have to handle the whole business himself. Track Judge down before Judge killed him.

  * * *

  Mrs. Fielding met him at the door but stepped backward in surprise when she saw his condition. "What happened to you?"

  "I fell down," Chase said. "It's nothing."

  "But there's blood on your face. You're all skinned up!"

  "Really, Mrs. Fielding, I'm perfectly all right now. I had a little accident, but I'm on my feet and breathing."

  She looked him over more carefully. "Have you been drinking, Mr. Chase?" Her tone had gone swiftly from concern to disapproval.

  "No drinks at all," Chase said.

  "You know I don't approve."

  "I know." He went past her, heading for the stairs. They appeared to be a long way off.

  "You didn't wreck your car?" she called after him.

  "No."

  He climbed the stairs, looking anxiously ahead toward the turn at the landing-blessed escape. Strangely, he did not feel nearly as oppressed by Mrs. Fielding as usual.

  "That's good news," she said. "As long as you have your car, you'll be able to look for jobs better than before."

  After a glass of whiskey over ice, he drew a tub of water as hot as he could tolerate it, and he settled in as though he were an old man with arthritis. Water slopped over his open wounds and made him sigh with both pleasure and pain.

  Later, he dressed the worst abrasions with Merthiolate, then put on lightweight slacks, a sports shirt, socks, and loafers. With a second glass of whiskey, he sat in the easy chair to contemplate his next move.

  He looked forward to action with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

  First, he should speak with Louise Allenby, the girl who had been with Michael Karnes the night he was killed. She and Chase had been questioned separately by the police, but brooding on the event together, they might be able to remember something useful.

  The telephone book listed eighteen Allenbys, but Chase recalled Louise telling Detective Wallace that her father was dead and that her mother had not remarried. Only one of the Allenbys in the book was listed as a woman: Cleta Allenby on Pine Street, an address in the Ashside district.

  He dialed the number and waited through ten rings before Louise answered. Her voice was recognizable, although more womanly than he remembered.

  "This is Ben Chase, Louise. Do you remember me?"

  "Of course," she said. She sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. "How are you?"

  "Coping."

  "What's wrong? Is there anything I can do to help?"

  "I'd like to talk to you, if possible," Chase said. "About what happened Monday night."

  "Well, sure, all right."

  "It won't upset you?"

  "Why should it?" Her hardness continued to amaze him. "Can you come over now?"

  "If it's convenient."

  "Fine," she said. "It's ten o'clock now — in half an hour, at ten-thirty? Will that be all right?"

  "Just right," Chase said.

  "I'll be expecting you."

  She put the phone down so gently that for seconds Chase did not realize that she had hung up.

  He was beginning to stiffen from his injuries. He stood and stretched, found his car keys, and quickly finished his drink.

  When it was time to go, he did not want to begin. Suddenly he realized how completely this assumption of responsibility would destroy the simple routines by which he had survived in the months since his discharge from the army and the hospital. He would have no more leisurely mornings in town, no more afternoons watching old movies on television, no more evenings reading and drinking until he could sleep — at least not until this mess was straightened out. If he just stayed here in his room, however, if he took his chances, he might remain alive until Judge was caught in a few weeks or, at most, in a few months.

  Then again, Judge might not miss the next time.

  He cursed everyone who had forced him out of his comfortable niche — the local press, the Merchants' Association, Judge, Fauvel, Wallace, Tuppinger — yet he knew that he had no choice but to get on with it. His sole consolation was the hope that their victory was only a temporary one: When this was all finished, he would come back to his room, close the door, and settle once more into the quiet and unchallenging life that he had established for himself during the past year.

  Mrs. Fielding did not bother him on his way out of the house, and he chose to see this as a good omen.

  * * *

  The Allenbys, mother and daughter, lived in a two-story neo-Colonial brick home on a small lot in middle-class Ashside. Two matched maples were featured at the head of the short flagstone walk and two matched pines at the end of it. Two steps rose to a white door with a brass knocker.

  Louise answered the door herself. She was wearing white shorts and a thin white halter top, and she looked as if she had spent the past thirty minutes putting on makeup and brushing her long hair.

  "Come in," she said.

  The living room was more or less what he had expected: matched Colonial furniture, a color television in a huge con
sole cabinet, knotted rugs over polished pine floors. The house was not dirty but carelessly kept: magazines spilling out of a rack, a dried water ring on the coffee table, traces of dust here and there.

  "Sit down," Louise said. "The sofa's comfortable, and so's that big chair with the flowered print."

  He chose the sofa. "I'm sorry to bother you like this, so late at night-"

  "Don't worry about that," she interrupted breezily. "You're no bother, never could be."

  He hardly recognized her as the shaken, whimpering girl in Michael Karnes's car on Monday night.

  She said, "Since I'm finished with school, I only go to bed when I feel like it, usually around three in the morning. College in the fall. Big girl now." She grinned as if she'd never had a boyfriend knifed to death in front of her. "Can I get you a drink?"

  "No, thanks."

  "Mind if I have something?"

  "Go ahead."

  He stared at her trim legs as she went to the wet bar in the wall of bookcases. "Sicilian Stinger. Sure you wouldn't like one? They're delicious."

  "I'm fine."

  As she mixed the drink with professional expertise, she stood with her back to him, her hips artfully canted, her round butt thrust toward him. It might have been the unconscious stance of a girl not yet fully aware of her womanliness, with only a partial understanding of the effect her pneumatic body could have on men. Or it might have been completely contrived.

  When she returned to the sofa with her drink, Chase said, "Are you old enough to drink?"

  "Seventeen," she said. "Almost eighteen. No longer a child, right? Maybe I'm not of legal age yet, but this is my own home, so who's going to stop me?"

  "Of course."

  Only seven years ago, when he'd been her age, seventeen-year-old girls seemed seventeen. They grew up faster now — or thought that they did.

  Sipping her drink, she leaned back against the couch and crossed her bare legs.

  He saw the hard tips of her breasts against the thin halter.

  He said, "It's just occurred to me that your mother may be in bed, if she gets up early for work. I didn't mean-"

  "Mother's working now," Louise said. She looked at him coyly, her lashes lowered and her head tilted to one side. "She's a cocktail waitress. She goes on duty at seven, off at three, home about three-thirty in the morning."

  "I see."

  "Are you frightened?"

  "Excuse me?"

  She smiled mischievously. "Of being here alone with me?"

  "No."

  "Good. So… where do we begin?" With another coy look, she tried to make the question seductive.

  For the following half hour, he guided her through her memories of Monday night, augmenting them with his own, questioning her on details, urging her to question him, looking for some small thing that might be the key. They remembered nothing new, however, though the girl genuinely tried to help him. She was able to talk about Mike Karnes's murder with complete detachment, as though she had not been there when it happened but had only read about it in the papers.

  "Mind if I have another one?" she asked, raising her glass.

  "Go ahead."

  "I'm feeling good. Want one this time?"

  "No, thank you," he said, recognizing the need to keep his head clear.

  She stood at the wet bar in the same provocative pose as before, and when she returned to the couch, she sat much closer to him than she had previously. "One thing I just thought of — he was wearing a special ring."

  "Special in what way?"

  "Silver, squarish, with a double lightning bolt. A guy Mom dated for a while wore one. I asked him about it once, and he told me it was a brotherhood ring, from this club he belonged to."

  "What club?"

  "Just for white guys. No blacks, Japs, Jews, or anybody else welcome, just white guys."

  Chase waited as she sipped her drink.

  "Bunch of guys who're willing to stand up for themselves, if it ever comes to that, guys who aren't going to let the nappy-heads or the Jew bankers or anybody else push them around and take what they have." She clearly approved of any such organization. Then she frowned. "Did I just screw up my chances?"

  "Chances?"

  "Are you maybe a Jew?"

  "No."

  "You don't look like a Jew."

  "I'm not."

  "Listen, even if you were a Jew, it wouldn't matter much to me. I find you real attractive. You know?"

  "So the killer might be a white supremacist?"

  "They're just guys who won't take any crap the way everyone else will. That's all. You have to admire that."

  "This guy who dated your mother — did he tell you the name of this club?"

  "The Aryan Alliance."

  "You remember his name?"

  "Vic. Victor. Don't remember his last name."

  "Could you ask your mom for me?"

  "Okay. When she gets home. Listen, you're absolutely sure you're not a Jew?"

  "I'm sure."

  "Because ever since I said it, you've been looking at me sort of funny."

  As he might have looked at something pale and squirming that he'd discovered under an overturned rock.

  He said, "Did you tell Wallace about this?"

  "No, I just now thought of it. You loosened me up, and it just came back to me in a flash."

  Chase imagined nothing more gratifying than establishing a body of information about Judge — working from this essential bit of data — and then presenting it to the detective.

  "It may be helpful," he said.

  She slid next to him with the oiled smoothness of a machine made for seduction, all sleek lines and golden tan. "Do you think so, Ben?"

  He nodded, trying to decide how best to excuse himself without hurting her feelings. He had to keep on the good side of her until she got that name from her mother.

  Her thigh was pressed against his. She put her drink down and turned to him, expecting to be embraced.

  Chase stood abruptly. "I ought to be going. This has given me something concrete to consider, more than I had hoped for."

  She rose too, remaining close to him. "It's early. Not even midnight. Mom won't be home for hours."

  She smelled of soap, shampoo, a pleasant perfume. It was such a clean smell — but he knew now that she was corrupted in her heart.

  He was fiercely aroused — and sickened by his arousal. This cheap, coldhearted, hate-filled girl reached him in a way that no woman had reached him in longer than a year, and he despised himself for wanting her so intensely. At that moment, of course, virtually any attractive woman might have affected him the same way. Perhaps the pent-up sexual energy of many lonely months had become too great to repress, and perhaps the reawakening of sexual desire was the result of being forced out of his self-imposed isolation. Once he admitted to a healthy survival instinct, once he decided not to stand still and be a target for Judge, he was able to admit to all the desires and needs that were the essence of life. Nevertheless, he despised himself.

  "No," he said, edging away from her. "I have other people to see."

  "At this hour?"

  "One or two other people."

  She pressed against him, pulled his face down to hers, and licked his lips. No kiss. Just the maddeningly quick flicking of her warm tongue — an exquisitely erotic promise.

  "We've got the house for several hours yet," she said. "We don't even have to use the couch. I've got a great big white bed with a white canopy."

  "You're something else," he said, meaning something other than what she thought he meant.

  "You don't know the half of it," she said.

  "But I can't. I really can't, because these people are waiting for me."

  She was experienced enough to know when the moment for seduction had passed. She stepped back and smiled. "But I do want to thank you. For saving my life. That deserves a big reward."

  "You don't owe me anything," he said.

  "I do. Some other night, when you
don't have plans?"

  He kissed her, telling himself that he did so only to remain in her good graces. "Definitely some other night."

  "Mmmmm. And we'll be good together."

  She was all polish, fast and easy, no jagged edges to get hung up on.

  He said, "If Detective Wallace questions you again, do you think you could sort of… forget about the ring"

  "Sure. I don't like cops. They're the ones who put the guns to our heads, make us kiss the asses of the nappy-heads and the Jews and all of them. They're part of the problem. But why are you carrying on with this by yourself? I never did ask."

  "Personal," he said. "For personal reasons."

  * * *

  At home again, he undressed and went directly to bed. The darkness was heavy and warm and, for the first time in longer than he could remember, comforting.

  Alone, he began to wonder if he had been a fool not to respond to Louise Allenby's offer. He had been a long time without a woman, without even a desire for one.

  He had told himself that he'd rejected Louise because he'd found her as personally repulsive as she was physically attractive. But he wondered if, instead, he'd retreated from the prospect because he feared it would draw him even further into the world, further away from his precious routines. A relationship with a woman, regardless of how transitory, would be one more crack in his carefully mortared walls.

  On the edge of sleep, he realized that something had happened that was far more important than either his strong physical response to Louise or his rejection of her. For the first time in longer than Chase could recall, he hadn't needed whiskey before bed. A natural sleep claimed him — although it was still populated by the grasping dead.

  8

  When he woke in the morning, Chase was racked with pain from the fall that he had taken the previous evening on Kanackaway Ridge Road. Each contusion and laceration throbbed. His eyes felt sunken, and his headache was as intense as if he'd been fitted with an exotic torture device — an iron helmet — that would be slowly tightened until his skull imploded. When he tried to get out of bed, his muscles cramped and spasmed.