“Take it easy, son,” Wallace said.
“Get out right now.”
Wallace looked around the room and let his attention come to rest on the bottle of whiskey. “Tuppinger tells me you haven’t any food on hand, but that there are five bottles in that cupboard.” He did not look at Chase. He seemed to be embarrassed by Tuppinger’s obvious spying. “You look thirty pounds underweight, son.”
“Get out,” Chase repeated.
Wallace was not ready to leave yet. He was searching for some way to soften the accusation implicit in their departure. But then he sighed and said, “Son, no matter what happened to you over there in Vietnam, you aren’t going to forget about it with whiskey.”
Before Chase, infuriated at the homespun psychoanalysis, could order him out again, Wallace finally left with Jim Tuppinger at his heels.
Chase closed the door after them. Quietly.
He locked it.
He poured a drink.
He was alone again. But he was accustomed to being alone.
6
THURSDAY EVENING AT SEVEN-THIRTY, HAVING SUCCESSFULLY EVADED Mrs. Fielding on his way out of the house, Chase drove his Mustang to Kanackaway Ridge Road, aware and yet unaware of his destination. He stayed within the speed limits through Ashside and the outlying districts, but floored the accelerator at the bottom of the mountain road, taking the wide curves on the far outside. The white guardrails slipped past so quickly and so close on the right that they blurred into a continuous wall of pale planking, the cables between them like black scrawls on the phantom boards.
On the top of the ridge, he parked where he had pulled off the road Monday night, killed the engine. He slouched in his seat, listening to the whispering breeze.
He should never have stopped, should have kept moving at all costs. As long as he was moving, he did not have to wonder what to do next. Stopped, he was perplexed, frustrated, restless.
He got out of the car, uncertain of what he expected to find here that would be of any help to him. A good hour of daylight remained in which to search the area where the Chevy had been parked. But, of course, the police would have combed and recombed it far more thoroughly than he ever could.
He strolled along the edge of the park to the bramble row where the Chevy had been. The sod was well trampled, littered with half-smoked cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and balled-up pages from a reporter’s notepad. He kicked at the debris and scanned the mashed grass, feeling ridiculous. Too many morbid curiosity seekers had been here. He wouldn’t find a clue in all this mess.
Next he went to the railing at the edge of the cliff, leaned against it, and stared down the wall of rock to the tangled patch of brambles and locust trees far below. When he raised his head, he could see the entire city spread along the valley. In the late-afternoon light, the green copper dome of the courthouse was like a structure out of a fairy tale.
He was still gazing at that corroded curve of metal when he heard a sharp whine. And again. The steel handrail shivered under his hands. An old war sound: a bullet slapping metal, ricocheting.
With a quickness honed in combat, he dropped to the ground, surveyed the park, and decided that the nearest row of shrubs was the best cover. He rolled toward that hedgerow and came up against the thorns so hard that he tore his cheek and forehead.
He lay motionless. Waiting.
A minute passed. Another. No sound but the wind.
Chase crawled on his stomach to the far end of the bramble row, which paralleled the highway. He eased into the open, looked to his right, and saw that the park appeared to be deserted.
He started to get up and turn toward the highway, then fell back again. Instinct. Where he’d been, the grass flew into the air, torn loose by a bullet. Judge had a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.
No one in civilian life could have legal access to a silencer. Evidently, Judge had black-market resources.
Chase scrambled back along the shrubs, the way he had come, to the middle of the hedgerow. Swiftly he took off his shirt, tore it in two pieces, and wrapped his hands with the cloth. Lying on his stomach, he pressed the thorny vines apart until he opened a chink through which he could survey the land immediately beyond.