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.