Panic! (14 page)

Di Parma said, “Nothing, right?” in a dull voice.

“Nothing,” Vollyer answered.

“Now what do we do?”

“We don’t have much choice, Livio.”

“You mean we spend the night out here?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh shit, Harry.”

“We’ve come too far to backtrack to the car now.”

“Snakes come out at night,” Di Parma said, and his voice was that of a complaining child. “I don’t like snakes.”

“You haven’t seen any snakes yet, have you?”

“They don’t move around during the day. Night’s when they hunt. It’s too hot in the daytime.”

“Tell me some more about the desert.”

“I don’t know anything about the desert.”

“You know about the snakes.”

“I told you, I don’t like the goddamn things,” Di Parma said, as if that explained it.

“You can see a long way on the desert at night, isn’t that right?” Vollyer said. “When the moon is up, it can get to be just as bright as day, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know,” Di Parma said.

“It’s right,” Vollyer told him. “We’ll sleep in shifts. Because of the snakes and because Lennox and the girl might try moving after dark, figuring to cross us up.”

Di Parma drank again from the water bottle. He said, without looking at Vollyer, “How long are we going to stay out here looking?”

“Until we find them.”

“That could take a week, a month.”

“It won’t take another full day.”

“I don’t see how you can be so sure.”

“We found where they’d been in that arroyo,” Vollyer said. “We found where they left it again. We’re on their trail.”

“Maybe,” Di Parma said doubtfully. “But I still say they could be anywhere. They could’ve doubled back to the road by now.”

Vollyer looked out over the desert again. A faint glow lingered on the horizon, prolonging the twilight, but the sky directly above them was dark and clear, speckled with the indistinct and precursory images of what would soon be crystal-bright stars. “They’re out there,” he said softly. “Hiding now, maybe, but not any longer than dawn. He’s a runner, Livio, and runners have to run.”

“He’s got the girl with him. Maybe she’ll change his mind, if she hasn’t already.”

“I don’t think so.”

Abruptly, Di Parma stood, picked up his jacket, and walked a few feet away. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and slid his large hands into the pockets.

He said, “It cooled off in a hell of a hurry.”

“One of nature’s little games.”

“You think the Buick will be okay where we left it?”

“It’s well hidden from the road.”

“Suppose somebody sees it?”

“Then they’ll figure it to belong to sightseers. Or hikers.”

“Our suitcases are in the trunk, Harry.”

“There’s nothing in them but a couple of changes of clothes.”

“The girl’s car—what about that?”

“It’ll sit for months in that wash before it’s found.”

“Not if she had somebody waiting for her in town,” Di Parma said. “Not if she’s reported missing and the cops put out a search party. We don’t know what she was doing out here all alone.”

“She was sketching,” Vollyer said.

“What?”

“There was a sketch pad behind the front seat, full of desert landscapes.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that she could have been expected somewhere.”

“Maybe. But she was alone today. She could be alone, period.”

“Damn it, Harry, that’s only a guess. How do we know who she might have told she was coming out here? How do we know what friends she might have?”

Vollyer’s stomach had begun to throb painfully. “Livio,” he said, “Livio, you’re pushing me, Livio, you’re getting on my nerves, Livio. I’m in charge, I’m giving the orders here and you’re taking them and I don’t want to hear any more bitching or any more back-talk, Livio. This is business, this is my business, you’re just a punk kid in my business. Do you understand, Livio? Livio, do you understand?” Voice calm, almost gentle, face showing no emotion at all.

Di Parma opened his mouth, closed it again, and then lowered his eyes. His shoulders were hunched inside his jacket. He took his hands out of his pockets and looked at them and put them away again. Almost inaudibly he said, “I understand, Harry.”

It was the right answer.

Drenched in moonlight, the eroded, multishaped formations of granite and sandstone and occasional lava had a ghostly, otherworld look and the desert held the chilling enchantment of a graveyard at midnight. Overhead, the stars burned in a brilliant display against the backdrop of silken blackness. To the east, under the great pallid gold moon, the yellowish spines of vast clusters of cholla seemed to glow like distant lights, beckoning false sanctuary. The stillness was less acute now, with the first venturings of the night creatures—a horned owl made a questioning lament in silhouette against the moon, a coyote bayed querulously, a small and harmless yellow-breasted chat emitted a wailing shriek that sounded more as if it had been made by some giant beast. And the temperature dropped with almost startling rapidity, ultimately as much as fifty or sixty degrees.

Near a deep, wide wash, in the ineffectual shelter of a kind of natural rock fort, Lennox sat hugging his knees, shivering occasionally when the whispering night wind touched him with cold fingers. He felt weak, feverish, and the inflamed skin of his face and neck and arms burned with a hellish intensity; there was pain in his head, in the muscles and joints of his legs, in the cracked, swollen blisters that were his lips. He kept trying to work saliva through the arid cavern of his mouth, but there was no moisture left within him; his throat was a sealed passage that made swallowing impossible.

But his mind, curiously, was clear. It had been clear from the time he had stopped and hidden behind the smoke tree in that other wash; the panic had abated then, the consuming force of it at least, and the running since that time had been a calculated if desperate thing. There had been more rest stops than he would have liked—because of the girl and because of his own flagging strength—but they had seen no sign of their pursuers. Lennox had not deluded himself, however; he knew they were behind somewhere, and because of the urgency of his flight with the girl, there had been no time to cover their trail; the two men, city-bred or not, would not have had much difficulty in following, especially across the unavoidable open ground they had encountered from time to time.

He and Jana had been here in the rock fort since dusk. He had wanted to continue, to keep running well into the night, but both of them were exhausted. You could run only so far in a single day, and then you had to have rest; you could run only so far ...

There had been no conversation between them. Jana had sprawled out, face down in the sandy bottom of the fort, and sleep had claimed her immediately. Lennox had found a crevice which allowed a wide view of their backtrail, and he had sat there until just a few minutes ago, when darkness came. Would the two men keep looking in the bright white shine of the moon? He didn’t think so; they would need rest, too, and they would not want to take the chance of missing a sign in the deep pools of shadow the moonlight did not reach. Too, they would figure him and the girl to be exhausted, to seek out a hiding place for the night. No, they were safe now, until morning. And then—

And then.

He did not know what to do. If they kept running as they had today, blindly, they would be no better off than they were now; but he did not know where they were, or how far away the town of Cuenca Seco was—and the killers would be expecting them to move in that direction anyway. Could they double back to the road? Maybe—but there was no guarantee they would not stumble right into the arms of the men who pursued them; and he was not sure any longer in which direction the road lay. They could stay where they were, hidden here in the fort, hope that they were passed by, and then run in the opposite direction; but if their backtrail led to here, and the killers were able to follow it, they would be waiting in self-dug graves—they had no weapons, they could not make a stand. There was only one thing for them to do, then.

Keep running.

Lennox raised his head and glanced over at the girl. She was awake now, sitting up, working at a cactus thorn which had broken off in her ankle. Her face, under its layering of dust, was a grimace of pain. He looked at her—really looked at her for the first time—and he saw that she was very pretty. He remembered her poise, the fluid grace of her movements when he had first stumbled upon her, and he wondered vaguely if she was a model of some kind in New York; the car had had New York plates. But no, her hips were too prominent, her breasts too large; no, she was something else but she was big-city beyond any doubt; she had known the bright lights and the supper clubs and the Broadway opening nights, she had known elegance and luxury. You could see it, even now, even under the coating of alkali dust and dried sweat—like sensing a hotel was grand and proud and ultra-respectable despite a façade of city-produced soot and cinders.

And yet, she had stamina too—she had guts. She had not gone completely to pieces when the car went out of control, or when he had pulled her out of the wreckage and into the rocks, or when he had told her there in the wash what all of this was about; in spite of her shock, her horror at the knowledge of the situation she had suddenly been thrust into, she had not been a hindrance, a danger to his chance for survival as well as to her own.

But he felt responsible for her. If it had not been for him, she would be safe now, in Cuenca Seco or wherever it was that she had been staying in this area. God, he wished now that he had obeyed the transitory impulse which he had felt when he first came upon her. He had thought, then, of simply taking her car, stealing it, leaving her there to walk back to Cuenca Seco; it would have been a quicker, more positive method of escape, he had thought, than trying to find some way out of the town when she dropped him off there. If he had done that, she would be free of this; he would still be alone. But he had not wanted to hurt her in repayment for her kindness, had not wanted her safety on his conscience. And now—ironically, bitterly—her safety weighed far heavier on his mind than it would have if he had followed that original impulse.

The wind seemed to blow colder, murmuring, and across from him Jana hugged herself. A great stillness had settled over the desert now, and her head was cocked slightly to one side, as if she were listening for the next sound. Lennox thought she looked very small and very vulnerable.

In a voice that was cracked and brittle, like glass breaking a long way off, he said, “How are you feeling?”

She stared at him with dull, silent hatred.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry you had to get involved in this.”

“That’s a great deal of consolation.” The dry tremble of her own voice softened the bitterness of the words.

“Do you think I wanted any of this?” he said. “Do you think I wanted to be a witness to a murder?”

She looked away, at the bright face of the moon. A lone, tattered cloud drifted eerily across the lower half of it, giving it for a brief moment a whiskered, ancient appearance. After a long pause she said in what was almost a whisper, “I’m afraid.”

“I know,” Lennox said. “I know.”

“And thirsty. I’ve never been this thirsty in my life.”

“Don’t think about it. It only makes it worse if you think about it.”

“What are we going to do?” softly, plaintively. “How long can we keep running away from them?”

“As long as we have to.”

“I don’t know how much further I can go.”

“You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Will I? Will the thirst and the fear be gone then?”

“I’m sorry,” Lennox said again.

“You’re sorry, oh God, you’re sorry.”

She sat rigidly, her face in profile and soft in the moonlight. Lennox felt strangely drawn to her in that moment, to this woman about whom he knew nothing but to whom he was bonded by a bitter quirk of fate. Since his discovery of the kind of cold and calculating bitch Phyllis was, he had mistrusted women; except for a plump divorcée he had picked up in a bar outside of Reno, and a waitress in a hash joint he had worked in Utah—two biologically initiated liaisons which had left him depressed and unfulfilled on both occasions—he had had little to do with them since the night he had begun running in earnest. But it was not a physical thing, this attraction he felt for the girl named Jana Hennessey. It was, instead, an innate recognition deep within himself that their common bond was far more basic than the immediacy of their plight, that they shared a kind of kinship; he saw something of himself in her, something dark and lonely and empty, and he could not explain what it was.

Impulsively he said, “Tell me about yourself, Jana.”

Her head moved slowly until she was facing him again. “Why?”

“I’d like to know.”

“What difference does it make, now?”

“You come from New York, don’t you?” he said.