Dean Koontz - 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.