He saw Judge at once. The man was huddled by the front fender of Chase’s Mustang, down on one knee, the pistol held at arm’s length as he waited for his prey to appear. Two hundred feet away, in the weak light of the dusk, he was well shielded from Chase, little more than a dark figure; his face was but a blur in veils of shadow.
Chase let go of the brambles and stripped the cloth from his hands. He had minor nicks on the tips of three fingers, but he was for the most part unscathed.
To his right, no more than four feet away, a bullet snapped through the brambles, spraying chopped leaves. Another passed at the level of Chase’s head, no more than two feet to his left, and then another still farther to the left.
Judge did not have the nerves of a professional killer. Tired of waiting, he had begun to fire blindly, wasting ammunition, hoping for a lucky hit.
Chase crawled back toward the right end of the row.
He peered out cautiously and saw Judge leaning against the car, attempting to reload his pistol. His head was bent over the gun, and although it should have been a simple task, he was fumbling nervously with the clip.
Chase went for the bastard.
He had covered only a third of the distance between them when Judge heard him coming. The killer looked up, still a cipher in the waning light, twisted around the end of the car, and sprinted along the highway.
Chase was underweight and out of shape, but he was gaining.
The road crested a rise and sloped so sharply that Chase was forced to put less effort into his pursuit lest he pitch forward and lose his balance.
Ahead, a red Volkswagen was parked along the shoulder of the highway. Judge reached the car, got behind the wheel, and swung the door shut. He had left the engine running. The Volkswagen instantly pulled away. Its tires hit the asphalt, spun briefly, shrieking and kicking up thick smoke; then the car shot down Kanackaway Ridge Road.
Chase didn’t have a chance to catch even part of the license-plate number, because he was startled by an air horn frighteningly close behind.
He leaped sideways off the road, tripped, rolled on the gravel verge, hugging himself for protection from the stones.
Brakes barked just once, like the cry of a wounded man. A large moving van – with dark letters against its orange side: U-HAUL – boomed past, moving much too fast on the steep incline of Kanackaway Ridge Road, swaying slightly as its load shifted.
Then both the car and truck were out of sight.
7
A TWO-INCH SCRATCH ON HIS FOREHEAD AND A SMALLER SCRATCH ON his cheek, inflicted by the thorns in the bramble row, were already crusted with dried blood. The tips of three fingers also were scarred by the brambles, but with all his other pains, he didn’t even feel these minor wounds. His ribs ached from the roll he’d taken on the gravel shoulder of Kanackaway Ridge Road – although none seemed broken when he pressed on them – and his chest, back, and arms were bruised where the largest stones had dug in as he tumbled over them. Both his knees were skinned. He had lost his shirt, of course, when he ripped it in two as protection from the thorns, and his trousers were fit only for the trash can.
He sat in the Mustang by the edge of the park, assessing the damage, and he was so angry that he wanted to strike at something, anything. Instead, he waited, cooled off, settled down.
Already, in the early darkness, a few cars had arrived at lovers’ lane, driving over the sod to the hedges. Chase was amazed that all these young lovers were returning unfazed to the scene of the murder, apparently unconcerned that the man who had knifed Michael Karnes was still on the loose. He wondered if they would bother to lock their car doors.
Since police patrols might be out along Kanackaway, hoping for the killer to return to the scene as well, a man sitting alone in a car would be highly suspicious. Chase started the engine and headed back into the city.