Free Chase by Dean Koontz Page A

thorns so hard he tore his cheek and forehead on them. Then he lay quite still, waiting.
    A minute passed, then another, with no sound but the wind.
    Chase crawled on his stomach, working his way to the far end of the bramble row that paralleled the highway at this point. When he got there, he moved slowly into the open, scanning the ground toward the highway for some sign of the man who had shot at him. The park seemed deserted.
    He started to get up, then fell back again, more out of instinct than cunning. Where he had been, the grass was parted by a bullet that kicked up a puff of earth. Whoever was after him had a pistol with a silencer attached.
    For a moment he considered the implausibility of anyone in civilian life having access to a silencer. Even in Nam, where officers requisitioned unnecessary weapons for black market sale and for shipping home to their own addresses for sale after the war, silencers were not that common. For one thing, most soldiers who carried handguns much preferred the revolver for its higher degree of accuracy and the lesser likelihood that it would jam at a crucial moment. Revolvers could not be silenced effectively, but no one in Nam much cared about the noise of a shot. To own a silenced pistol in civilian life was testament to illegal activity of some sort, and one could not purchase the fixture in just any gunshop.
    He took no time at all to wonder who could be firing at him, for he had known at once who was out there. Judge, of course.
    Turning, he scrambled back along the twisting brambles to a point midway in the length of the row. Swiftly he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, tore it into two pieces and wrapped his hands with the cloth. Lying on his stomach, he carefully pressed the thorny vines apart until he had opened a chink through which he could survey the immediate land beyond.
    He saw Judge almost at once. The man was huddled by the front fender of Chase's Mustang, down on one knee, the pistol held out at arm's length as he waited for his prey to appear. Two hundred feet away, in the weak, last light of the evening, he was fairly well shielded from Chase, little more than a dark figure with a blur of a face, cut over with confusing swaths of shadow.
    Chase let the brambles go and stripped the cloth from his hands. He had nicked the tips of his fingers in a few places, but he was for the most part unscathed.
    To his right, no more than four feet away, a bullet snapped through the brambles, spraying pieces of vinery, and went on, hissing once as it skipped on the concrete walkway by the cliff railing. Another passed at the level of Chase's head, no more than two feet on his left, and then another still farther along the row. Judge did not have the nerves of a professional killer, and obviously tired of waiting, had begun to fire blindly in hopes of making a lucky hit.
    Chase smiled and began to crawl slowly back toward the right-hand end of the row.
    When he got there, he peered cautiously out and saw Judge standing up, leaning against the car, attempting to reload his pistol. His head was bent over his task, and though it should have been a simple matter, he was fumbling nervously with the magazine.
    Chase stood and ran.
    He had covered only a third of the distance between them when Judge heard him coming. The man looked up, twisted around the edge of the car and started down the highway, running for all he had.
    Still smiling, Chase put his head down, gritted his teeth and made a little more effort. Though he was severely underweight and had not exercised or trained for a year, his muscles responded like well-trained animals. He was gaining on Judge.
    The road began to slope as they went over the crest of the rise, then seemed to plummet, so that its angle forced Chase to put less effort into his pursuit lest he pitch forward and lose his balance. Up ahead, a red Volkswagen was parked along the berm, though there was no one to be seen about it. In a moment it was clear that