by Dean Koontz
CHASE
The voice on the telephone was tense and ugly. ‘You messed in where you had no right messing . . . I just want to tell you that it doesn't end here. I'll deal with you, Mr Chase, once I've researched your background and have weighed a proper judgment on you. Then, once you've been made to pay, I'll deal with the whore, the Allenby girl.’
‘Deal with?’ Chase asked.
‘I'm going to kill you and her, Chase.’
Also available in Star
WHISPERS
NIGHT CHILLS
PHANTOMS
SHATTERED
CHASE
Dean R. Koontz
A STAR BOOK
Published by
the Paperback Division of
W.H. ALLEN & Co. PLC
A Star Book
Published in 1984
by the Paperback Division of
W.H. Allen & Co. PLC
44 Hill Street, London W1X 8LB
First published in the United States of America by
Random House, Inc., 1972
Copyright © K. R. Dwyer, 1972
Typeset by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Anchor Brendon Ltd, Tiptree, Essex
ISBN 0 352 31489 3
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated without the
publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.
For Bob Hoskins
Preface
Chase was my first suspense novel, written when I was twenty-five, published when I was twenty-six. Like Shattered, which Star Books brought back into print last year, Chase was originally published by Random House under the name K. R. Dwyer, a pseudonym I no longer employ.
This is the first paperback edition in the United Kingdom, and I am delighted that it bears my own by-line, at last. These two novels have been widely translated, published, and reprinted, but because they are among my favourites of my own books, I have always regretted hiding behind the Dwyer identity. Now, that unhappy situation is remedied.
Although Chase and Shattered are self-contained novels that do not share any story or character elements, they do share some thematic components and can be viewed as a two-book exploration of social and psychological conditions in the United States during the early 1970s. At that time, the country was shaken by anti-war protests and civil disobedience (some of it not so civil), and the atmosphere was redolent of paranoia. Benjamin Chase (in Chase) and Alex Doyle (in Shattered) both learn to distrust authority; they both come to believe that politics -whether of the left or the right - offers no solutions; and they are redeemed by their acceptance of self-reliance as the greatest of all virtues.
Most of all, Chase is a thriller. Both I and the late, unlamented Mr Dwyer hope you find it entertaining.
Dean Koontz
Orange, California
1983
CHASE
One
At seven o'clock, seated on the platform as the guest of honour, Ben Chase was served a bad roast beef dinner while various dignitaries talked at him from both sides, breathing over his salad and his half-eaten fruit cup. At eight o'clock the mayor rose to deliver what proved to be a boring panegyric to the city's most famous Vietnam war hero, and half an hour after he had begun, presented Chase with a special scroll detailing his supposed accomplishments and restating the city's pride in him. He was also given the keys to a new Mustang convertible which he had not been expecting, a gift from the Merchants’ Association.
By nine-thirty Chase was escorted from the Iron Kettle Restaurant to the parking lot where his new car waited. It was an eight-cylinder job with a complete sports package that included automatic transmission with a floor shift, bucket seats, side mirrors, white-walled tyres - and a wickedly sparkling black paint job that contrasted nicely with the crimson racing stripes over the trunk and hood, red accent lines on both sides. At ten minutes after ten, having posed for newspaper photographs with the mayor and the officers of the Merchants’ Association, having expressed his gratitude to everyone present, Chase drove away in his reward.
At twenty minutes past ten he passed through the suburban development known as Ashside, doing slightly more than one hundred miles an hour in a forty-mile-an-hour zone. He crossed the three-lane Galasio Boulevard against the light, turned a corner four blocks on at such a speed that he lost control for a moment and sheared off a traffic sign. At ten-thirty he started up the long slope of Kanackaway Ridge Road, trying to see if he could hold the speed above a hundred clear to the summit. It was a dangerous bit of play, but he did not particularly care if he killed himself.
Perhaps because it had not yet been broken in, or perhaps because the car simply had not been designed for that kind of driving, it would not perform as he wished. Though he held the accelerator to the floor, the speedometer registered at eighty by the time he was two-thirds of the way up the winding road and had fallen to seventy when he crested the rise. He took his foot off the gas pedal, the fire momentarily burned out of him, and let the sleek machine glide along the flat stretch of two-lane that edged the ridge above the city.
Below lay a panorama of lights to stir the hearts of lovers. Though the left side of the road lay against a sheer rock wall, the right was maintained as a park. Fifty yards of grassy verge, dotted with shrubs, led to a restraining rail near the lip of the cliff. Beyond, the sometimes squared and sometimes twisting streets of the city were exposed like an electric map, with special concentrations of light toward the downtown area and out near the gateway Mall shopping centre. Lovers, mostly teenagers, parked here, separated by stands of pine and rows of brambles. An appreciation of the dazzling city turned, in most every case, dozens of times a night, to appreciation of each other.
Once, it had even been that way for Chase.
He pulled the car to the berm, braked and cut the motor. The stillness of the night seemed complete for a moment, deep and noiseless. Then he heard the crickets, a call of an owl somewhere close by, the occasional laughter of young people muffled by closed car windows.
Until he heard that laughter, it did not occur to Chase to wonder why he had come here. He had felt oppressed by the mayor, the Merchants’ Association and all the rest of them. He had not really wanted the banquet, and certainly not the car, and he had only gone because there seemed no gracious way to reject them. Confronted with their homespun patriotism and their sugar-glazed vision of the war, he felt burdened down with some indefinable load, smothering. Perhaps it was the past, the realization that he had once shared their parochialism. At any rate, free of them, he had struck for that one place in the city that represented quietude and joy, the much-joked-about lovers’ lane atop Kanackaway. But there was no quietude here now, for silence only gave his thoughts a chance to build volume. And the joy? There was none of that, either, for he had no girl with him - and would have been no better off even if he were accompanied.
Along the shadowed length of the park, half a dozen cars were slotted against walls of shrubbery, the moonlight glinting on the bumpers and windows. If he had not known the purpose of this retreat, he would have thought all the vehicles were abandoned. But his knowledge and the trace of mist on the inside of the windows gave everyone away. Now and again a shadow moved inside one of the cars, exaggerated and twisted out of proportion by the steamed glass. That and an occasional rustle of leaves as the wind swept down from the top of the ridge were the only things that moved.
Because of this somewhat
breathless quality to the scene, and because he viewed it dispassionately, withdrawn from its purpose, he noticed the other bit of movement immediately. Something dropped from a low point on the rock wall to the left and scurried across the blacktop toward the darkness beneath a huge weeping willow tree a hundred feet in front of Chase's car. Though it was bent and moved with the frantic grace of a frightened animal, it had very clearly been a man.
In Vietnam he had developed what almost amounted to a sixth sense, a perception of imminent danger that was uncanny. That alarm was clanging now.
The one thing that did not belong in a lovers’ lane at night was a man alone, on foot. The car was a mobile bed, such a part of the seduction, an extension of the seducer, that there was no modern Casanova successful without one.
It was possible, of course, that the man was engaging in some bird-dogging, spotting parkers for his own amusement and their surprise. Chase had been the victim of that game enough times in his high school years to remember it well. However, it was a pastime usually associated with the mannerless or ugly or immature, those kids who hadn't the opportunity to be inside the cars where the real action was. It was not, so far as Chase knew, something adults found pleasure in. And this man, easily six foot, had the bearing of an adult, none of the awkwardness of youth. And, too, bird-dogging was a sport most often played in groups as protection against a beating from one of the surprised lovers. This, Chase was suddenly sure, was something else altogether.
The man came out from beneath the willow, still doubled over and running. He stopped against the edge of a bramble row and looked along it at a three-year-old Chevrolet parked at the end, near the safety railing.
Not sure what was happening or what he should do about it, Chase turned in his seat and worked the cover off the ceiling light in the car. He unscrewed the tiny bulb and dropped it in a pocket of his jacket. When he turned front again, he saw that the man was at the same place, watching the Chevrolet, leaning into the brambles as if unaware of them.
A girl laughed, the sound of her voice clear in the night air. Some of the lovers must have found it too warm for closed windows.
The man by the brambles moved again, closing in on the Chevrolet.
Quietly, because the man was no more than a hundred and fifty feet from him, Chase opened the door and got out of the Mustang. He let the door stand open, for he was sure the sound of its closing would alert the intruder. He went around the car and started across the grass, which had recently been mown and was slightly damp and slippery underfoot.
Ahead, a light came on in the Chevrolet, diffused by the steamed windows. Someone shouted, and a young girl screamed. She screamed again.
Chase had been walking, and now he ran as the sounds of a fight burgeoned ahead. When he came up on the Chevrolet, he saw the door on the driver's side was open and the intruder was halfway into the front seat, flailing away at something. Shadows bobbled up and down, dipped and pitched against the frosted glass.
‘Hold it there!’ Chase shouted, almost directly behind the man now.
The stranger reared back, and as he rose from the car Chase saw the knife. The man held it in his right hand, raised as if to plunge it forward into something. His hand and the weapon were covered in blood.
Chase stepped forward the last few feet, slammed the man against the window post. He slipped his arm around and brought it up beneath the man's neck, drew his head back and forced him out onto the grass.
The girl was still screaming.
The stranger swung his arm down and back, trying to catch Chase's thigh with the point of the blade. He was an amateur. Chase twisted, moving out of the arc of the weapon, simultaneously drawing his arm more tightly across the other's windpipe.
Around them, cars were starting up. Trouble in lovers’ lane brought guilt aflowering in every teenage mind nearby. No one wanted to stay to see what the problem was.
‘Drop it,’ Chase said.
The stranger, though he must have been desperate for breath, stabbed backward and missed again.
Chase, suddenly furious, jerked the man onto his toes and applied the last bit of effort necessary to choke him unconscious. In the same instant, the wet grass betrayed him. His feet slithered, twisted, and he went down with the stranger on top. This time the knife took Chase in the meaty part of his thigh, just below the hip, and it was torn from the other man's hand as Chase bucked up, tossing him aside.
The man rolled and got to his feet. He took a few steps toward Chase, looking for the knife, seemed suddenly to realize the formidable nature of his opponent, turned and ran.
‘Stop him!’ Chase shouted.
But most of the cars had gone. Those still parked along the cliffside reacted to this last uproar just as their more timid comrades had acted to the first cries: lights flicked on, engines started, tyres squealed as they reached the pavement. In a moment the only cars in lovers’ lane were the Chevrolet and Chase's Mustang.
The pain in his leg was bad, though not any worse than a hundred others he had endured. In the light from the Chevrolet, he could see that the bleeding was slow, not ugly and rhythmic like the spurt from a torn artery. When he tried, he could stand and walk with little trouble.
He went to the car and looked in, then wished he had not. The body of a young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty, was sprawled half on the seat and half on the floor. In the generous splashes of blood that covered him, streaming from what looked like two dozen knife wounds, there was proof that he could not be alive. Beyond him, curled in the corner by the far door, a petite brunette, a year or two younger than her lover, was moaning softly, her hands gripped so tightly on her knees that they looked more like claws latched about a piece of game. She was wearing a pink miniskirt but no blouse or bra. Her small breasts were spotted with blood, and the nipples were erect.
Chase wondered why he noticed this last detail more plainly than anything else about the grisly scene.
‘Stay there,’ Chase said. ‘I'll come around for you.’
She did not respond, though she continued to moan.
Chase almost closed the door on the driver's side, then realized that he would thereby shut off the light and let the brunette alone in the car with the corpse. He walked around the car, leaning on it so that he could favour his right leg, and opened her door. Apparently these kids had not believed in locks. That was, he supposed, part of their generation's optimism, part and parcel with their theories on free love, mutual trust and brotherhood. It was the same generation that was supposed to live life so fully that they all but denied the existence of death. The expression on the brunette's face, however, indicated that she was no longer trying to deny anything.
‘Where's your blouse?’ Chase asked.
She was no longer looking at the corpse, but she was not looking at him either. She stared at her knees, at her whitened knuckles, and she mumbled.
Chase groped around on the floor under her legs and found the balled-up garment. ‘You better put this on,’ he said.
She would not take it from him. She continued to mumble.
‘Come on, now,’ he said as gently as he could. He was perfectly aware that the killer might not have gone very far.
She seemed to be saying something, though her voice was lower than before. When he bent closer to listen, he discovered that she was saying, ‘Please don't hurt me. Please don't.’
‘I'm not going to hurt you,’ Chase said, straightening up. ‘I didn't do that to your boyfriend. But the man who did might still be hanging around. My car's up along the road. Will you please come with me?’
She looked up at him then, blinked, shook her head and got out of the car. He handed her the blouse, which she unrolled and shook out but could not seem to get on. She was still in a state of shock
‘You can put it on in my car,’ Chase said. ‘It's safer there.’ All around, the shadows under the trees seemed deeper than before.
He put his arm around her and half carried her back to the Mustang. Th
e door on the passenger's side was locked. By the time he got her around and through the other door and had followed her inside, she seemed to have recovered some of her senses. She slipped one arm in the blouse, then the other, and slowly buttoned it. Apparently she had not been wearing a bra. When he closed and locked his door and started the engine, she said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Passer-by,’ he said, ‘I saw the fellow and thought something was wrong.’
‘He killed Mike,’ she said.
‘Your boyfriend?’
She did not respond to that but leaned back against the seat, chewing her lip and wiping absent-mindedly at the few spots of blood on her face.
Chase swung the car around and started down Kanackaway Ridge Road at the same pace he had come up, took the turn at the bottom so fast that she was thrown painfully against the door.
‘Buckle your seatbelt,’ he said.
She did as he directed, but she appeared to be in the same unresponsive mood, staring straight ahead at the streets that unrolled before them.
‘Who was he?’ Chase asked as they reached the intersection at Galasio Boulevard and took it with the light this time.
‘Mike,’ she said.
‘Not your boyfriend. The other one.’
‘I don't know,’ she said.
‘Did you see his face?’
She nodded.
‘You didn't recognize him?’
‘No.’
‘I thought it might be an old lover, a rejected suitor, something like that.’
She said nothing.
Her reluctance to talk about it gave Chase time to consider the affair. He began to wonder, as he recalled the killer's approach from the top of the ridge, whether the man had known which car he was after or whether any car would have done, whether this had been an act of revenge directed against Mike specifically or if it was only the work of a madman. The papers, even before he had been sent overseas, had been filled with stories of meaningless slaughter. He had not read any papers since his discharge, but he suspected the same brand of senselessness still flourished. That possibility made him uncomfortable. It was so similar to Nam, to Operation Jules Verne and his part in it, that very bad old memories were stirred . . .