Dean R. Koontz - Chase

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CHASE
By Dean R. Koontz
1
1971.
Bruce Springsteen wasn't famous in 1971. Neither was Tom Cruise, a mere
schoolboy. Julia Roberts haunted no young men's dreams. Robin Williams, Steve
Martin, Arnold Schwarzenegger - their fortunes were as yet unmade.
Richard Milhous Nixon was President of the United States. The war in
Vietnam raged. In Wilmington, North Carolina, January was a time of violence
against black citizens-arson, bombings, shootings. At the Attica Correctional
Facility in New York State, the bloodiest prison riot in U.S. history claimed
forty-three lives.
The best-seller list of The New York Times included The Winds of War by
Herman Wouk and Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins.
The movies: The French Connection, A Clockwork Orange, Klute, Carnal
Knowledge, The Last Picture Show.
The music: Carole King, John Denver, John Lennon on his own, Led Zeppelin,
Elton John just beginning.
Cigarette sales in the United States topped five hundred and forty-seven
billion. J. C. Penney died at the age of ninety-five. As many as five hundred
thousand Soviet citizens perished in the Gulags during those twelve months -
evidence of government restraint.
It was a different time. A different world.
The term "serial killer" was unknown. And "sociopath."
2
AT SEVEN O'CLOCK, SEATED ON THE PLATFORM AS THE GUEST OF HONOR, Ben Chase was
served a bad roast-beef dinner while 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 a boring panegyric to the city's
most famous Vietnam War hero. Half an hour after he began, he finally
presented Chase with a special scroll detailing his supposed accomplishments
and restating the city's pride in him.
Chase was also given the keys to a new Mustang convertible, which he had
not been expecting. It was a gift from the Merchants' Association.
By nine-thirty Benjamin 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 sports package that included automatic transmission with a floor shift,
bucket seats, side mirrors, white-wall tires - and a wickedly sparkling black
paint job that contrasted nicely with the crimson racing stripes over the
trunk and hood.
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 three-lane Galasio Boulevard against the
light, turned a corner at such speed that he briefly lost control, 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 at one hundred all the way to the summit. It
was a dangerous bit of play, but he did not care if he killed himself.
Perhaps because the car had not yet been broken in, or perhaps because it
simply had not been designed for that kind of driving, it wouldn't perform as
he wished. Although he held the accelerator to the floor, the speedometer
registered only eighty miles per hour by the time that he was two thirds of
the way up the winding road; it fell to seventy when he crested the rise.
He took his foot off the accelerator - the fire of anger having burned out
of him for the moment - and let the sleek machine glide along the flat stretch
of two-lane blacktop along 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, separated the
street from an iron and concrete railing near the brink of the cliff. Beyond
the railing, the streets of the city far below seemed like a miniature
electric map, with special concentrations of light toward the downtown area
and out near the Gateway Mall shopping center.
Lovers, mostly teenagers, parked here, separated by stands of pine and rows
of brambles. Their appreciation for the dazzling city view turned - in almost
every case and dozens of times each night - to an appreciation of the flesh.
Once, it had even been that way for Chase.
He pulled the car to the shoulder of the road, braked, and cut the engine.
The stillness of the night seemed complete and deep. Then he heard crickets,
the cry of an owl somewhere close, and the occasional laughter of young people
muffled by closed car windows.
Until he heard the laughter, it did not occur to Chase to wonder why he had
come here. He felt oppressed by the mayor, the Merchants' Association, and the
rest of them. He had not really wanted the banquet, certainly not the car, and
he had gone only because he could find no gracious way to decline them.
Confronted with their homespun patriotism and their sugar-glazed vision of the
war, he felt burdened with an indefinable load, smothered. Perhaps it was the
past on his shoulders - the realization that he'd once shared their innocence.
At any rate, free of them, he had struck out for that one place in the city
that represented remembered pleasure, the much-joked-about lovers' lane atop
Kanackaway.
Now, however, the comparative silence only gave his thoughts a chance to
build toward a scream. And the pleasure? None of that, either, for he had no
girl with him - and would have been no better off with one at his side.
Along the shadowed length of the park, half a dozen cars were slotted
against walls of shrubbery. Moonlight glinted on the bumpers and windows. If
he had not known the purpose of this retreat, he would have thought that all
the vehicles were abandoned. But the mist on the inside of the windows gave
the game away.
Occasionally a shadow moved inside one of the cars, distorted by the
steamed glass. Those silhouettes and the rustle of leaves as the wind swept
down from the top of the ridge were all that moved.
Then 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 bent and moving with the
frantic grace of a frightened animal, the new arrival was clearly a man.
In Vietnam, Chase had developed an uncanny sense of imminent danger. His
inner alarm was clanging.
The one thing that did not belong in a lovers' lane at night was a man
alone, on foot. A teenager's car was a mobile bed, such a necessity of
seduction, such an extension of the seducer, that no modern Casanova could be
successful without one.
It was possible, of course, that the interloper was engaging in some
bird-dogging: spotting parkers for his own amusement and to their
embarrassment. Chase had been the victim of that game a few times in his
high-school years. That was, however, a pastime usually associated with the
immature or the socially outcast, those kids who hadn't the opportunity to be
inside the cars where the real action was. It was not, as far as Chase knew,
something that adults enjoyed. And this man creeping through the shadows was
easily six feet tall; he had the carriage of an adult, no youthful
awkwardness. Besides, bird-dogging was a sport most often played in groups as
protection against a beating from one of the surprised lovers.
Trouble.
The guy came out from beneath the willow, still doubled over and running.
He stopped against a bramble row and studied a three-year-old Chevrolet parked
at the end, near the cliff railing.
Not sure what was happening or what he should do, Chase turned in his car
seat and worked the cover off the dome light. He unscrewed the tiny bulb and
dropped it into a pocket of his suit jacket. When he turned front again, he
saw that the bird-dogger had not moved: The guy was still watching the
Chevrolet, leaning into the brambles as if unfazed by the thorns.
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 stalker was no more than a hundred fifty feet from
him, Chase got out of the Mustang. He left the door open, because he was sure
that the sound of it would alert the intruder. He went around the car and
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. Now he ran as the sounds of a fight rose ahead.
When he came up on the Chevrolet, he saw that the door on the driver's side
was open and that the intruder was halfway into the front seat, flailing away
at someone. Shadows bobbled, dipped, and pitched against the frosted glass.
"Hold it!" Chase shouted, directly behind the man now.
As the stranger pulled back out of the car, Chase saw the knife. The
bird-dogger held it in his right hand, raised high. His hand and the weapon
were covered with blood.
Chase raced forward the last few feet, slammed the stalker against the
Chevy's window post. He slipped his arm around the guy's neck and tried to get
a hammerlock on him.
The girl was still screaming.
The stranger swung his arm down and back, trying to catch Chase's thigh
with the blade. He was an amateur.
Chase twisted out of the arc of the weapon. Simultaneously he drew his arm
more tightly across the other's windpipe.
Around them, cars started. Trouble in lovers' lane aroused all the
repressed sexual guilt in every teenager nearby. No one wanted to stay to see
what the problem was.
"Drop it," Chase said.
Although the stranger must have been desperate for breath, he stabbed
backward again and missed again.
Suddenly furious, Chase jerked his adversary onto his toes and applied the
last effort necessary to choke him unconscious.
In the same instant, the wet grass betrayed him. His feet slipped, 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. But it was torn from the assailant's hand as Chase bucked and tossed
him aside.
The stalker rolled and scrambled to his feet. He took a few steps toward
Chase, seeking the knife, but then he seemed to realize the formidable nature
of his opponent. He ran.
"Stop him!" Chase shouted.
But most of the cars had gone. Those still parked along the cliff reacted
to this latest uproar just as the more timid parkers had reacted to the first
cries: lights flicked on, engines started, tires squealed. 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 he was
bleeding slowly from a shallow wound - not the fearsome spurt of a torn
artery. When he tried, he was able to stand and walk with little trouble.
He went to the car, peered in, and then wished that he hadn't been curious.
The body of a young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty, was sprawled half on the
seat and half on the floor. Blood-soaked. Mouth open. Eyes glazed.
Beyond the victim, curled in the corner by the far door, a petite brunette,
a year or two younger than her murdered lover, was moaning softly. Her hands
gripped her knees so tightly that they resembled claws latched around a piece
of game. She wore a pink miniskirt but no blouse or bra. Her small breasts
were spotted with blood, and her nipples were erect.
Chase wondered why this last detail registered more vividly with him than
anything else about the grisly scene.
He expected better of himself. Or at least - there had been a time when he
had expected better.
"Stay there," Chase said from the driver's door. "I'll come around for
you."
She did not respond, though she continued to moan.
Chase almost closed the door, then realized that he would be shutting off
the light and leaving the brunette alone in the car with the corpse. He walked
around the Chevy, leaning on it to favor his right leg, and he 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. Theirs was the same generation that
was supposed to live life so fully that they all but denied the existence of
death.
Their generation. Chase was only a few years older than they were. But he
did not consider himself to be part of their generation or any other. He was
alone in the flow of time.
"Where's your blouse?" he asked.
She was no longer fixated on the corpse, but she was not looking at Chase
either. She stared at her knees, at her white knuckles, and she mumbled.
Chase groped around on the floor under her legs and found the balled-up
garment. "You better put this on."
She wouldn't take it. She continued murmuring wordlessly to herself.
"Come on, now," he said as gently as he could.
The killer might not have gone very far.
She spoke more urgently now, coherently, although 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 hurt me."
" I won't hurt you," Chase assured her, straightening up. "I didn't do that
to your boyfriend. But the man who did it might still be hanging around. My
car's back there. Will you please come with me?"
She blinked, nodded, and got out of the car. He handed the blouse to her.
She unrolled it, shook it out, but could not seem to get it on. She was still
in a state of shock.
"You can dress in my car," Chase said. "It's safer there."
The shadows under the trees were deeper than they had been.
He put his arm around her and half carried her back to the Mustang. The
door on the passenger's side was locked. By the time he got her to the other
door and followed her inside, she seemed to have recovered her senses. She
slipped one arm into the blouse, then the other, and slowly buttoned it.
When he closed his door and started the engine, she said, "Who are you?"
"Passerby. I saw the bastard and thought something was wrong."
"He killed Mike," she said hollowly.
"Your boyfriend?"
She didn't respond but leaned back against the seat, chewing her lip and
wiping absentmindedly at the few spots of blood on her face.
"We'll get to a phone - or a police station. You all right? You need a
hospital?"
"No."
Chase swung the car around and drove down Kanackaway Ridge Road as fast as
he had driven up. He took the turn at the bottom so hard that the girl was
thrown against the door.
"Buckle your seat belt," he advised.
She did as directed, but she appeared to be in a daze, staring straight
ahead at the streets that unrolled before them.
"Who was he?" Chase asked as he reached the intersection at Galasio
Boulevard and crossed it with the light this time.
"Mike," she said.
"Not your boyfriend."
"What?"
"The other one."
"I don't know," she said.
"Did you see his face?"
She frowned. "His face?"
"Yes.
"Face." As if the word were meaningless to her.
"Have you been doing anything?" he asked.
"Anything?"
"Drugs?"
"A little grass. Earlier."
Maybe more than a little, he decided.
He tried again: "Did you see his face? Did you recognize him?"
"Face? No. Yes. Not really. A little."
"I thought it might be an old lover, rejected suitor, something like
that."
She said nothing.
Her reluctance to talk about it gave Chase time to consider the situation.
As he recalled the killer's approach from the top of the ridge, he began to
wonder whether the man had known which car he was after or whether any car
would have done, whether this was an act of revenge directed against Mike
specifically or only the work of a madman. Even before he had been sent
overseas, the papers had been filled with stories of meaningless slaughter. He
had not read any papers since his discharge, but he suspected that the same
brand of senseless murder still flourished.
The possibility of random, unmotivated homicide unnerved him. The
similarity to Nam, to Operation Jules Verne and his part in it, stirred bad
memories.
Fifteen minutes after they had left the ridge, Chase parked in front of the
divisional police headquarters on Kensington Avenue.
"Are you feeling well enough to talk with them?" Chase asked.
"Cops"
"Yeah."
She shrugged. "I guess so."
She had recovered remarkably fast. She even had the presence of mind to
take Chase's pocket comb and run it through her dark hair. "How do I look?"
"Fine."
Maybe it was better to be without a woman than to die and leave behind one
who grieved so briefly as this.
"Let's go," she said. She opened her door and stepped out, her lovely, trim
legs flashing in a rustle of brief cloth.
* * *
The door of the small gray room opened, admitting a small gray man. His
face was lined, and his eyes were sunken as if he had not slept in a day or
two. His light-brown hair was uncombed and in need of a trim. He crossed to
the table behind which Chase and the girl sat, and he took the only chair
left. He folded into it as if he would never get up again. "I'm Detective
Wallace."
"Glad to meet you," Chase said, though he was not glad at all.
The girl was quiet, examining her nails.
"Now, what's this all about?" Wallace asked, folding his hands on the
scarred table and regarding them wearily, as if he'd already heard their story
countless times.
"I already told the desk sergeant most of it," Chase said.
"He isn't in homicide. I am," Wallace said.
"Someone should be on the way out there. The body-"
"A car's been despatched. Your report's being checked out. That's what we
do. Maybe not always well, but we do it. So you say someone was murdered."
"Her boyfriend, stabbed," Chase told him.
Wallace studied the girl as she studied her nails. "Can't she speak?"
"She's in shock maybe."
"These days?" Wallace joked, exhibiting a disregard for the girl's feelings
that Chase found disconcerting.
The girl said, "Yeah, I can speak."
"What's your name?" Wallace asked.
"Louise."
"Louise what?"
"Allenby. Louise Allenby."
Wallace said, "You live in the city?"
"In Ashside."
"How old?"
Anger flared in her, but then she damped it and turned her gaze back to her
nails. "Seventeen."
"In high school?"
"I graduated in June," she said. "I'm going to college in the fall. Penn
State."
Wallace said, "Who was the boy?"
"Mike."
"That's it?"
"That's what?"
"Just Mike? Like Liberace. Like Picasso? One name?"
"Michael Karnes," she said.
"Just a boyfriend, or you engaged?"
"Boyfriend. We'd been going together for about a year, kind of steady."
"What were you doing on Kanackaway Ridge Road?" Wallace asked.
She looked boldly at him. "What do you think?"
Though Wallace's bored tone was disconcerting, Chase found the girl's
detachment so unnerving that he wanted to be away from her as quickly as
possible. "Look, Detective Wallace," he interjected, "is this really
necessary? The girl wasn't involved in it. I think the guy might've gone for
her next if I hadn't stopped him."
Wallace said, "How'd you happen to be there in the first place?"
"Just out driving," Chase said.
A light of interest switched on in the detective's eyes. "What's your
name?"
"Benjamin Chase."
"I thought I'd seen you before." His manner softened and his energy level
rose. "Your picture was in the papers today."
Chase nodded.
"That was really something you did over there," Wallace said. "That really
took guts."
"It wasn't as much as they make out," Chase said.
"I'll bet it wasn't!" Wallace said, though it was clear that he thought
Chase's actions in Vietnam must have been even more heroic than the papers had
portrayed them.
The girl had taken a new interest in Chase and was studying him openly.
Wallace's tone toward her changed too. He said, "You want to tell me about
it, just how it happened?"
She told him, losing some of her eerie composure in the process. Twice
Chase thought that she was going to cry, and he wished that she would. Her
cold manner, so soon after all the blood, gave him the creeps. Maybe she was
still in denial. She repressed the tears, and by the time she had finished her
story, she was calm again.
"You saw his face?" Wallace asked.
"Just a glimpse," she said.
"Can you describe him?"
"Not really."
"Try. "
"He had brown eyes, I think."
"No mustache or beard?"
"I don't think so."
"Long sideburns or short?"
"Short, I think."
"Any scars?"
"No."
"Anything at all memorable about him?"
"No."
"The shape of his face-"
"No."
"No what?"
"It was just a face, any shape."
"His hair receding or full?"
"I can't remember," she said.
Chase said, "When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt she
was registering anything."
Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise scowled at him.
He realized, too late, that the worst embarrassment for someone Louise's
age was to lose her cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse
to, of all people, a cop. She would have little gratitude for him now, even
though he had saved her life.
Wallace got up. "Come on," he said.
"Where?" Chase asked.
"We'll go out there."
"Is that really necessary? For me, anyway?" Chase asked.
"Well, I have to take statements from both of you, in more detail than
this. It would help, Mr. Chase, to be on the scene when you're describing it
again. It'll only take a short while. We'll need the girl longer than we'll
need you."
* * *
Chase was sitting in the rear of Wallace's squad car, thirty feet from the
scene of the murder, answering questions, when the staff car from the
Press-Dispatch arrived. Two photographers and a reporter got out.
For the first time, Chase realized that there would be local newspaper and
television coverage. They would make a reluctant hero of him. Again.
"Please," he said to Wallace, "can we keep the reporters from learning who
helped the girl?"
"Why?"
"I'm tired of reporters," Chase said.
Wallace said, "But you did save her life. You ought to be proud of that."
"I don't want to talk to them," Chase said.
"That's up to you. But they'll have to know who interrupted the killer.
It'll be in the report."
Later, when Wallace was finished and Chase was getting out of the car to
join another officer who would take him back to town, he felt the girl put a
hand on his shoulder. He turned, and she said, "Thank you."
Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought that her touch had the quality of
a caress and that her hand lingered. Even the possibility sickened him.
He met her eyes. Looked away at once.
At the same instant, a photographer snapped a picture. The flashbulb
sprayed light. The light was brief - but the photograph would haunt him
forever.
In the car, on the way back to town, the uniformed officer behind the wheel
said that his name was Don Jones, that he had read about Chase, and that he
would like to have Chase's autograph for his kids. Chase signed his name on
the back of a blank homicide report, and at Jones's urging, he prefaced it
with "To Rick and Judy Jones." The officer asked a lot of questions about Nam,
which Chase answered as curtly as courtesy would allow.
In his prize Mustang, he drove more sedately than he had before. There was
no anger in him now, only infinite weariness.
At a quarter past one in the morning, he parked in front of Mrs. Fielding's
house, relieved to see that no lights were on. He unlocked the front door as
quietly as the ancient deadbolt would permit, stepped knowingly around most of
the loose boards in the staircase, and made his way to his attic apartment:
one large room that served as a kitchen, bedroom, and living room, plus one
walk-in closet and a private bath.
He locked his door.
He felt safe now.
Of course, he knew that he would never be safe again. No one ever was.
Safety was an illusion.
This night at least, he hadn't been required to make polite conversation
with Mrs. Fielding as she posed coyly in one of her half-unbuttoned
housedresses, revealing the fish-belly-white curves of her breasts. He never
understood why she chose to be so casually immodest at her age.
He undressed. He washed his face and hands. In fact, he washed his hands
three times. He washed his hands a lot lately.
He studied the shallow knife wound in his thigh. It was already clotted and
beginning to scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed it with
Merthiolate, and bandaged it.
In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack
Daniel's over two ice cubes. He sank onto the bed with the whiskey. He usually
consumed half a bottle a day, minimum. This day, because of the damn banquet,
he'd tried to stay sober. No longer.
Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor - that
was the only time he felt clean.
He was pouring his second glassful when the telephone rang.
When he had first moved into the apartment, he hadn't wanted a telephone.
No one would ever call. And he had no desire to make contact with anyone.
Mrs. Fielding had not believed that he could live without a phone.
Envisioning herself becoming a messenger service for him, she had insisted
that he have a telephone hooked up as a condition of occupancy.
That had been long before she knew that he was a war hero. It was even
before he knew it.
For months the phone went unused except when she called from downstairs to
tell him that 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 calls every day, most of them from
perfect strangers who offered congratulations that he did not deserve or
sought interviews for publications that he had never read. He cut most of them
short. Thus far, no one had ever had gall enough to ring him up this late at
night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude to which he had
grown accustomed in those first months after his discharge.
He considered ignoring the phone and concentrating on his Jack Daniel's.
But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized that the caller was
too persistent to be ignored, 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 humor, 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 now he understood
what the call was about.
"Very good with your hands," the bird-dogger 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 his dispirited tone. "Yes, it's
me. I am me. Exactly right. I've got a badly bruised throat, Chase, and I know
my voice will be just awful by morning. Otherwise, I got away about as lightly
as you did."
With a clarity reserved for moments of danger, Chase recalled 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 do no better for his own sake than he had for the
police. "How did you know I was the one who stopped you?"
"I saw your picture in the paper. 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."
"Who are you?"
"Do you really expect me to say?"
Chase had forgotten his drink altogether. The alarms, the goddamn alarms in
his head, were ringing at peak volume. "What do you want?"
The stranger was silent for so long that Chase almost asked the 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 just punishment. The slut was left, and you saved her before
I could perform my duty, saved a whore like that who had no right to be
spared. This is not a good thing."
"You're not well." Chase realized the absurd inadequacy of that statement,
but the killer - like all else in the modern world - had reduced him to
clichés.
The killer either did not hear or pretended not to hear what Chase had
said. "I just wanted to tell you, Mr. Chase, that it doesn't end here. You are
not a facilitator of justice."
"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 the similar evasions of vocabulary to which
he had grown accustomed in Nam. He felt much older than he was, more tired
than he had been a moment earlier.
"I'm going to kill you, Chase. I'm going to punish you for whatever sins
are on your record, because you've interfered with the intended pattern. You
are not a facilitator of justice." He was silent. Then: "Do you understand?"
"As much as I understand anything."
"That's all you have to say?"
"What more?" Chase wondered.
"I'll be talking to you again."
"What's the point of this?"
"Facilitation," the killer said - and disconnected.
Chase hung up and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. He felt
something cold in his hand, looked down, and was surprised to see the glass of
whiskey. He raised it to his lips and took a taste. It was slightly bitter.
He closed his eyes.
So easy not to care.
Or maybe not so easy. If it had been as easy as he wanted it to be, he
could have put the whiskey aside and gone to sleep. Or, instead of waiting for
the bird-dogger to come after him, he could have blown out his own brains.
Too easy to care. He opened his eyes.
He had to decide what to do about the call.
The police would be interested, of course, because it was a solid lead to
the man who had killed Michael Karnes. They would probably want to monitor the
telephone line in hope that the killer would call again - especially since he
had said that Chase would be hearing from him. They might even station an
officer in Chase's room, and they might put a tail on him both for his own
protection and to try to nab the murderer.
Yet he hesitated to call Detective Wallace.
The past few weeks, since the news about the Medal of Honor, Chase's daily
routine had been destroyed. He loathed the change.
He had been accustomed to deep solitude, disturbed only by his need to talk
to store clerks and to Mrs. Fielding, 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 passed 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 of his book, and he turned on the small television to
watch old movies that he had memorized virtually scene by scene. Around eleven
o'clock, he finished the day's bottle or portion thereof, after having eaten
little or nothing for dinner - and then he slept as long as he could.
It was not much of a life, certainly not what he had once expected, but it
was bearable. Because it was simple, it was also solid, safe, empty of doubt
and uncertainty, lacking in choices and decisions that might bring about
another breakdown.
Then, after the AP and UPI had carried the story of the Vietnam hero who
had declined to attend a White House ceremony for the awarding of the
Congressional Medal of Honor (though he had not declined the medal itself,
since he felt that would bring more publicity than he could handle), there had
been no hope of simplicity.
He had weathered the uproar, granting as few interviews as possible,
talking is monosyllables on the phone. The only thing for which he had been
required to leave his room was the banquet, and he had been able to cope with
that only because he knew that once it was over, he could return to his attic
apartment and resume the uneventful life that had been wrenched from him.
The incident in lovers' lane had changed his plans, postponed a return to
stability. The papers would carry the Medal of Honor story again, with
pictures, along with the report of his latest act of foolish interference.
There would be more calls, congratulations, interviewers to be turned down.
Then it would die out. In a week or two - if he could tolerate the
spotlight that long - things would be as they had once been, quiet and
manageable.
摘要：

CHASEByDeanR.Koontz11971.BruceSpringsteenwasn'tfamousin1971.NeitherwasTomCruise,amereschoolboy.JuliaRobertshauntednoyoungmen'sdreams.RobinWilliams,SteveMartin,ArnoldSchwarzenegger-theirfortuneswereasyetunmade.RichardMilhousNixonwasPresidentoftheUnitedStates.ThewarinVietnamraged.InWilmington,NorthCar...

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