Panic! (17 page)

He had spent the morning cruising the area west and north of Cuenca Seco, and making periodic radio checks with Bradshaw on the Perrins thing. If the state or county investigations had turned up anything, they were not letting it out, even to the substation in whose district the killing had occurred; Bradshaw had heard nothing at all. Brackeen knew that he was going to have to make a direct inquiry in order to get information—but the desire for both involvement and noninvolvement was still raging ambivalently inside him, and he could not seem to make up his mind one way or the other. He was early coming back in to Cuenca Seco for his lunch break, and he decided to conduct the weekly check of the abandoned dead-end road winding into the desert just east of town; it was always quiet and deserted out there, and you could be alone with your thoughts.

He drove the full length of the road, U-turned, and started back. He still didn’t know what he wanted to do. The indecision continued to anger and frustrate him, and he was mentally absorbed in it so deeply as to be oblivious to his surroundings, driving mechanically. It took the blinding reflection, from well to one side of the road—like a huge blood ruby catching and refracting the sun’s rays—to jerk him out of it.

Brackeen slowed, frowning, and then stopped the cruiser. Instinctive curiosity, a trait police officers learned very early in their careers if they weren’t born with it, made him step out into the harsh glare of midday and cross to where the object glinted in the sunlight near a large boulder; as he approached, he saw that it was a piece of red taillight glass, lying cupped upward in the rocky soil. It did not have a filming of dust, he noticed, as it would have if it had been there for any length of time. No accidents had been reported in this vicinity, and if Forester was as good as he liked you to believe, he would have investigated the reflection had it been here the week previous.

More than curious now, Brackeen began to prowl the area. He saw faint impressions that might have been tire tracks, erratic and irregularly shaped, such as a car would leave if it had gone out of control. He found a streak of yellow paint on one of the boulders nearby. He found another broken section of taillight. And when he saw no sign of a vehicle amongst the granite and sandstone and extended his prowling to the dry wash in the distance, he found the Triumph.

He stood for a moment on the bank, looking down at the battered wreckage, and then made his way carefully into the wash. The convertible top was crushed badly on the passenger side, but when he got down on his knees on the driver’s side, and looked beneath, he could see that it was empty. And he could see, too, where a large-caliber bullet had gouged a deep hole in the dash panel.

A faint excitement stirred inside him. He straightened and walked around the car and saw that it could be righted without a great deal of exertion. He braced his body against the chassis, finding handholds, and the muscles which had once been prominent responded under the layers of soft fat; in less than a minute he had the Triumph tilted crookedly against one of the rocks, on its axles and what was left of its tires.

Brackeen sifted through the tangled metal. He located a rounded hole in the crumpled plastic of the rear window, at the very top, and it was obvious to him that it had been made by the same bullet imbedded in the dash panel. From the angle of trajectory, he determined that it had been fired from a height of several feet. There were no bloodstains in the interior, at least none that he could find, and it seemed reasonable to assume that no one had been seriously wounded either by bullets or in the crash. It was hardly likely that anyone could have crawled out of the Triumph if he had been in it when it went into the wash; the way it looked, the shooting had taken place over on the road and the car had gone off it there, fishtailing into the one boulder where he had found the taillight shard, scraping another and leaving the streak of yellow paint. The TR-6 had been driven or pushed into the wash later on. But by whom? And for what reason?

The car was unfamiliar to Brackeen, and the New York license plates told him the reason for that. There was no registration holder attached to the steering column, nothing in the glove compartment—anywhere in the car—to point to the owner. Behind the front seat, he discovered a bag with a notebook and a sketch pad inside; some of the pages in each were crumpled and torn, but the descriptive notes in the one and the stark desert sketches in the other were discernible. He was no expert, but the handwriting in the notebook appeared to be feminine, and the drawings had a certain feminine quality—but he could be wrong and he knew it. The only things that seemed certain were that whoever owned the Triumph had spent some time out here on the desert, and not long ago.

And that he—or she—was now apparently and unexplain-ably missing.

Brackeen went over the car again and found nothing else of relevance. With his pocket knife, he dug the bullet out of the dash panel and examined it in the palm of his hand; it had been badly damaged on impact, and he wasn’t able to identify it. He put the pellet in the pocket of his uniform shirt and walked slowly back to the cruiser.

Using a clean handkerchief, he toweled his face free of sweat and then called Bradshaw on the car’s short-wave radio. He gave him the TR-6’s license number and told him to have it checked out; he also requested the services of Hank Madison and Cuenca Seco’s county-maintained wrecker. After he had given the ten-four sign-out, he sat there in the heat-washed silence, pulling speculatively at his lower lip. Then, abruptly, he got out of the cruiser again and walked back to where he had found the first piece of broken taillight. From the direction of the tire impressions, it seemed probable that the Triumph had been traveling north, toward Cuenca Seco, when it had suddenly gone out of control. If you assumed that the shooting was what had been responsible, and it was a reasonable assumption, whoever it was had to have been anchored somewhere to the south and somewhere near the road and somewhere on an elevation of several feet.

Brackeen studied the terrain to the south, and then moved in that direction. Fifteen minutes later, five minutes before the wrecker arrived, he found the locked and deserted Buick Electra where it had been hidden behind a jagged sculpture of sandstone.

Di Parma said, “Where are they?
Goddamn
it, where are they?”

Vollyer put the binoculars to his stinging eyes, blinking away sweat, and reconnoitered the area on all sides of them. Stillness. Wavering heat. Great pools of bluish water that were nothing more than layers of heated air mirroring the sky. They were on the far side of the craggy butte now, and the land here was both flat and roughly irregular, both rocky and barren. Cactus and ocotillo and creosote bush dominated the patches of vegetation. The silence was like that in a vacuum: almost deafening.

Slowly Vollyer lowered the glasses and touched his parched lips with the back of his free hand. He sank exhaustedly onto a granite shelf in the shade of an overhang. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “We should have found them by now. There aren’t that many places they could have gone.”

“Are you sure you saw them, Harry?”

“I saw them, all right.”

“And this is where they were heading?”

“How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Your eyes can play tricks on you out here—”

“My eyes are fine, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes.”

“Okay,” Di Parma said. “Okay.” He sank to his knees in the shade near where Vollyer sat and pulled the knapsack off his shoulders. He got the last container of water from it and drank a little, resisting the urge to drink it all, knowing that Vollyer was watching him. His legs and arms felt awkward, as if he had only partial control of them, and there was a thrumming pain in his temples.

It was all wrong, this whole thing had a bad feel to it. Three times this Lennox had gotten away, twice with the girl, and it was like an omen, like something was trying to tell Harry and him that it was useless, warn them to give it up and get out while they were still able. He didn’t like it, he was scared, he wanted civilization, people, a cool place to sleep, he wanted Jean—God, he wanted Jean! But the chase had become like an obsession with Harry, you couldn’t reason with him, you couldn’t talk to him; he’d tried that last night, and the way Vollyer had looked at him had been almost murderous, almost as if he was thinking about using the belly-gun or that frigging Remington. It had shaken him and he’d kept his mouth shut since, remembering those stories he had heard, remembering that look in Harry’s eyes. Still, how long could they keep up the hunt? The water was almost gone, you couldn’t live very long without water on the desert. Why didn’t they just call it off? Lennox and the girl had been without water, without food, for almost two days now; they couldn’t last much longer, the heat would do the job of silencing as effectively as they could ...

Vollyer said, “Give me a little of that water, Livio.”

Di Parma handed him the container and watched while he drank sparingly. When Vollyer handed it back to him, he asked, “What time is it, Harry?”

“After one.”

“We’ve been out here almost twenty-four hours.”

“I know it.”

Di Parma lifted the tattered remains of his suit jacket and stared at it. Jean had picked it out for him; she said he looked very dashing—that was the word she used, dashing—in a light blue weave. He would have to throw it away now, and how was he going to explain the loss of it to Jean? Maybe he wouldn’t have to, maybe he could replace it from one of the shops off the Loop before he went home; if they could match the style and color, she’d never know the difference—that was what he would have to do, all right.

He wondered what Jean was doing now and if she was okay. She would be worried about him, that was for sure, because he hadn’t called her since yesterday morning and he always called her every night and every morning when he was on the road. He hoped she wouldn’t be too upset, he hated to see her upset, when she cried it was like little knives cutting away at his insides and he felt big and helpless. The first thing he had to do when they got out of this desert, the very first thing was to call Jean and let her know that everything was fine, he could make up some story about entertaining a buyer to explain his silence. She would understand, she would accept his word without question; that was one of the beautiful things about Jean: she trusted him, she knew he would never violate that trust. He hated the lying to her, but there was no other way without hurting her and he would never hurt her.

Kneeling there, loving her, wanting her, Di Parma thought: Damn Lennox and that bitch from the Triumph! Damn them for keeping Jean and me apart ...

Exhausted, bodies puckered like raisins from the dehydrating sun, Lennox and Jana lay belly down in the shade tunnel created by a low, eroded stone bridge. The sand there was cool and powdery, soft against their fevered skin, and they had been lying in it for the better part of an hour. When they had reached the butte and skirted it at its base, Lennox had begun looking for a place to rest immediately, realizing the girl’s near-prostration, knowing that he, too, was approaching collapse—but it seemed to have taken hours before they found the sanctuary here beneath the bridge.

Lennox stirred now, rolling painfully onto his back, and he wondered vaguely if his legs would support him when he tried to stand again. The familiar burning pangs of hunger stabbed harshly at his belly, intensified by the added bodily deprivation of liquids, and he knew that unless they found food shortly—at the very least, some water—they would be physically unable to continue. It was a small miracle that they had managed to come this far; and it was amazing how much the human body could endure if put to a major test.

He moved his head, looking at Jana. She had slept—passed out?—the moment she was prone in the sand, and she lay motionless now, her face somehow pale beneath the dust and the sweat and the sunburned mosaic of red and brown patches, and for a moment he had the feeling that she was dead. He sat up convulsively, leaning toward her. One of her hands twitched then, like the slim paw of a sleeping kitten, and he knew a sense of relief. The protectiveness, the responsibility, he felt toward her was an odd sort of thing; he had never really committed himself, he thought with a kind of detached and yet vivid insight, to anyone but himself in all his thirty-three years—not even to Phyllis in the beginning, when he had loved her intensely, not even to Humber Realty except where it could further his own ends. Jack Lennox had been his entire life, his sole purpose—Jack Lennox’s feelings, needs, triumphs, and defeats, pleasures and pains. No one else had ever really mattered, witness that poor old man in the bus depot, witness him. And now, inexplicably, a girl he barely knew, a girl who might die because of him, a girl who shared his pain and his loneliness, this girl mattered. She had, unwittingly, broken through to touch the core of him, and there was suddenly an awareness in him of his own self-centeredness, of his limitations and his failings, a vague understanding of what he was and why he was what he was. The revelation was not a pleasant one, but the sluggishness of his mind, while it refused to allow him to dwell on it, also refused to allow him to reject it.

Sitting with his legs splayed out in front of him, his hands folded between his knees, Lennox stared out at the bright, stark desert world. A line of ancient, element-carved rocks stretched away to the north—he had learned to read the sun like a compass in the past two days; interesting, the little tricks a running man picks up—and when he and Jana were able to move again, those rocks would serve as cover.