Chase Read Online Free Page A

would take him to the end of his meagre resources. If, during that same time, he had to share his room with an officer of the law and be followed everywhere he went, he would not hold up. Already he felt the same vague emptiness filling him that had filled him so completely in the hospital. It was that lack of purpose, that loss of desire to go on that he must stave off at all costs. Even if it meant withholding information from the authorities.
    He wouldn't tell the police about the call.
    He took more of his drink, went to the cupboard and refreshed it with another slug from the dark bottle.
    After all, it was unlikely that the killer was serious. He had to be a madman, for no sane person would attack a couple in a parked car and hack one of them nearly to pieces with a long-bladed butcher knife. Madmen were dangerous, to be sure, but they rarely ever did what they promised to do. Or, at least, that was what Chase thought.
    He understood that he was keeping a lead from the police, a contact they might make good use of. But the police were clever. They would find the man without Chase's aid. They must have fingerprints from the door handle of the Chevrolet, from the handle of the murder weapon. They had already thought to issue a statement that the killer would be suffering from a badly bruised throat and the resultant laryngitis. What he was keeping from them would do little to speed up their efficient system of detection and apprehension.
    He finished his drink. It had gone down quickly, smoothly.
    It was decided.
    He poured more whiskey and went back to bed, slid beneath the covers and stared at the blank eye of the television set. In a few days everything would be back to normal. He could settle into old routines, living comfortably on his disability pension and the moderately ample inheritance from his parents’ estate. There would be no need to get a job or to talk to anyone or to make decisions. His only task would be to consume enough whiskey to be able to sleep despite the nightmares.
    He finished his glassful. He slept.
     

Two
     
     
    Chase rose early the next morning, frightened awake by nightmares full of dead men who were trying to talk to him. After that, the day deteriorated.
    His mistake was in trying to go on with it in a manner that denied anything unusual had happened. He rose, bathed, shaved, dressed and went downstairs to see if there was any mail on the hall table for him. There was none, but Mrs Fiedling heard him and hurried out of the perpetually darkened living room to show him the first edition of the Press-Dispatch. His picture was on the front page, turned half toward Louise Allenby getting out of the squad car. She looked as if she was crying, one hand gripping his arm, far more full of grief than she had actually been.
    ‘I'm so proud of you,’ Mrs Fiedling said. She sounded like his mother. Indeed, she was old enough for the post, in her mid-fifties. Her hair was curled tightly in an old-fashioned style and shot through with grey. Her doughy face had been rouged and lipsticked and had, peculiarly, been made to look ten years older by those cosmetic tricks. She was twenty or thirty pounds too heavy and carried nearly all of it in her hips.
    ‘It wasn't anything like they said, not as exciting as that,’ Chase told her.
    ‘How do you know? You haven't read it.’
    ‘They always overwrite. I know, because they did it the last time.’
    ‘Oh, you're just too modest,’ Mrs Fiedling said. She was wearing a blue and yellow housedress with the two top buttons opened. He could see not only the pallid bulge of her breasts, but the edge of a yellowed brassiere as well.
    Though he was much larger and much younger than Mrs Fiedling, with three times her strength, she frightened him. It was, he had once decided, because he did not know what she wanted from him.
    She said, ‘I bet this brings twice the job offers that the last article brought!’
    Mrs Fiedling was much more interested in Chase's