Chase

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.