Panic! (20 page)

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

She was silent for a time, and then, softly, “Are you involved with those men out there?”

“What?”

“That story you told me about seeing them kill somebody—is that really true?”

“Of course it’s true.”

“And that’s why they’re chasing you—us?”

“Yes. What did you think?”

“I don’t know. You lied about your name ...”

“That has nothing to do with this.”

“What does it have to do with?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re running from something else, aren’t you?” she said. “Something besides those men.”

He stiffened slightly. “What makes you say that?”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“Suppose it is. What difference does it make?”

“None, I guess. I just want to know.”

“Well, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not—now?”

“You want my life history, but you won’t say a thing about yourself,” Lennox said. “Let’s try that tack for a while.”

“I told you all there is to know last night.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

Lennox studied her—and, slowly, he realized just what the bond was between them, the kinship he had intuited last night and today. “Maybe we’ve both got something to hide,” he said. “Maybe you’re running away from something else, too.”

A kind of dark torment flickered across Jana’s features, and then was gone. “Maybe I am,” she said.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

“Why?”

“It’s ... I just couldn’t, that’s all.”

“Any more than I can.”

“Any more than you can.”

They fell silent. Lennox wanted to say something more to her, but there did not seem to be anything to say. He thought: I wonder if it would do any good to bring it out into the open, I wonder if I could talk about it? He looked at her, bathed in the soft moonshine—the weary, pain-edged loveliness of her—and suddenly he was filled with an overpowering compulsion to do just that, to unburden himself, to lay bare the soul of Jack Lennox. He had wanted to do it, without consciously admitting the fact to himself, ever since he had impulsively confessed his real name to her that afternoon. It was as if the weight of his immediate past had become dead weight, too heavy to carry any further without throwing it off for just a little while. It had been coming to this for some time now, you can only dam it up inside you for so long, just so long, and then it has to come out; the levees of the human mind can hold it no longer. He was going to tell her. There was a fluttering, intense sensation in the pit of his stomach, the kind of feeling you get when you know you’re going to do something in spite of yourself, right or wrong, wise or foolish, you know you’re going to do it anyway. He was going to tell her, all right, he was going to tell her—

“Phyllis,” he said. The word was thick and hot in his throat.

“What?”

“That’s what I’m running from. A woman and a life and a hell named Phyllis,” and it all came spilling out of him, floodgates opening, words rushing forth—all of it, from the beginning:

The night he had first met Phyllis at a cocktail lounge, she was new in his town then, a secretary with a Seattle firm that had opened a branch office there, and how he had fallen in love with her after their fourth Gibson, a major joke between them when the feeling had been fresh and good and clean in the beginning. The courtship and the love-making, the whispered endearments, the plans, the hopes, the dreams, the promises. The picnics and hikes through giant redwood forests. The afternoon they had gone swimming nude in the Pacific and he had been pinched by a sand crab on his left buttock, another fine private joke to be shared. The engagement, the marriage, the long hours at Humber Realty, the striving for growth and position and monetary security. The house he had built and the things he had bought to fill it. Phyllis’ reluctance to have children—“why don’t we wait a few years, darling, we’re not ready for parenthood just yet.” Her increasing awareness of social standing, her desire to belong to organizations and country clubs and in-groups, her attraction for expensive clothes, expensive appointments, expensive friends.

The change—or the realization of things having changed: The pushing and the pettiness and the mild rebukes of his manners, attitudes, feelings in public and in private that had soon become open ridicule. The breakdown of all communication. The taunting sexual denial. The emergence of a predator, demanding everything and giving nothing, shutting him out, using him, denying his worth as a man and a human being. The sudden, bitter understanding that the thing he had once thought was love in her was only sugared hate.

And, finally, the lover whose identity he had been unable to uncover and whose existence he could never prove except by her mocking eyes. The separation and the divorce. The court hearing. The complete victory she had won at the hands of a sympathetic judge, and the cold and triumphant smile she had given him as they left the courtroom. His decision to quit Humber and the town and the state, to deny her the alimony she so strongly coveted. The drunken late-evening visit to the house that he had built and paid for and which no longer belonged to him. The words and the slaps—the final insult, the last straw. His rage, and the result of that rage. Her words, flung at him through broken and bleeding lips. And his flight; the desperate need to run—the running itself, the panic, the desire to escape, the desire which had carried him along on a blind course through five states in the past nine months, carried him here, to this desert, to now, to
this...

When he stopped talking, finally, Lennox felt as if he had undergone a massive catharsis. There was drying sweat on his forehead despite the cold night breeze. Jana sat motionless, looking at him, and the silence was absolute, pressing in on them from the surrounding rock walls, from the sweeping panorama above; she had not interrupted him while he talked, and she did not speak for a long while now. Then, at last, she stirred slightly in the sand and put her hands on her knees.

She said, “I’ve got no real right to ask you this, but—why did you decide to run away?”

Lennox raised his head. “I told you why. She made it plain what she was going to do, and she did it—oh yes, I know Phyllis and she did it. It wouldn’t surprise me if she lied to the cops to make it look worse than it was. That’s something she would do, all right.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Jana said quietly. “I meant, why did you decide to run away
before
you went to see her that night? Why did you quit your job?”

“I told you that, too. I wasn’t going to pay her that alimony on top of everything else. I just wasn’t going to do it.”

“You let her beat you, Jack.”

“The hell I did. She didn’t get her alimony, did she?”

“No,” Jana said, “but she won, anyway. In the long run, she’s the winner.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If you hadn’t run, if you’d stayed there and paid her the money, you’d have beaten her. If what you told me about her is true, the thing she wanted at the end of it all was to destroy you completely. And she’s doing that now.”

“I’d have been her goddamn slave if I’d stayed and paid that alimony!”

“For a while, maybe. But then you’d have found somebody else, you’d have regained yourself, your spirit. And you’d have been the one who won out in the end, Jack.”

“Oh Christ,” Lennox said.

“What has the running gotten you?” Jana asked. “Are you happy, secure, have you forgotten Phyllis, have you regained your self-respect? What are you now, Jack? A drifter, a lonely man and a frightened one. Filled with hate that keeps on festering inside you. What kind of existence is that?”

He stared at her. He didn’t want to believe what she was saying, what did she know about it, goddamn it, just from listening to him tell it in an encapsulated form? He didn’t want to believe her—and yet, the last nine months, in sober retrospection, had been a nightmare of running and fearing and hating, just as she said. Filled with hate, yes, hate for Phyllis that was cold and complete; and filled with another kind of hate, too, hate for himself and what he was becoming and trying to put all the blame on Phyllis when in reality a part of it was his—
no, that wasn’t true, no, it was Phyllis, Phyllis, Phyllis
—

“I don’t care,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I don’t care any more, do you hear me?”

“You care,” Jana said. “If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t keep running now. You care, Jack, you cling to life too desperately not to care.”

I don’t want to hear any more of this crap, Lennox thought savagely. He said, “Listen, who are you to analyze what I am? You’re running, too, you’re afraid of something, too. Well, why don’t you spit it up the way I just did, get it out into the open, let
me
tell
you
some things then. What do you say, Jana?”

“No,” she said, and she shook her head. “No, we’re talking about you—”

“Not any more, we’re talking about you now. Come on, what are you afraid of? Why are you running? Come on, Jana.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes, it’s easy. Just open your mouth and say it, that’s what I did, let’s play with your guts for a while.”

“No. No.”

Lennox moved closer to her. He felt confused and angry; she had touched and opened something deep inside him with her words and what he had glimpsed within that fissure was repulsive. He wanted to strike back at her, unreasoningly, childishly. “Come on, Jana, talk to me, tell me all about it. I’m a good listener too, you know, I’ve got a good analytical mind—”

“No.” Jana turned away from him, hugging herself, shivering in the cold wind that blew down into the tank. “No!”

He reached out and took her shoulders, firmly, and turned her back to him. He was very close to her now, his eyes looking into hers, his breath warm on her face, his hands pressing her nearer so that her breasts almost touched the ragged front of his shirt. “Tell me about it, Jana! Tell me what you’re afraid of, tell me!”

She struggled in his grip, and in the reflection of bright moonlight he saw raw terror brimming in her eyes. A frown creased his forehead and he released her. She fell away from him, sprawling into the dust, and cradled her head in her arms; her shoulders trembled as if she were crying, but she made no sound.

The anger, the demand for retribution, left him and he felt an immediate return of the compassion that he had experienced throughout the day, the protectiveness; he didn’t want to hurt her, not really, for God’s sake, what was the matter with him? He moved to her side, and his fingers were gentle on her arms this time as he brought her over onto her side, exposing her face to the shine of the moon again. Her features were twisted, a veil of despair.

“Jana,” he said in a low, soft voice, “Jana, what is it?”

He saw the word no form on her lips, but she did not put voice to it. It was, then, as if all her inner defenses crumbled, as if—as with him—the incubus had become too much and the levees had ceased to wall it in. A shuddering sob tremored through her body; and in a voice that was a half-whisper barely audible above the murmuring wind she said:

“I’m a lesbian. God forgive me, God help me, I’m a lesbian!”

It took Brackeen more than two hours to obtain a promise of action from the State Highway Patrol.

Most of that time was spent in locating Fred Gottlieb, the man in charge of the murder investigation; Gottlieb had all the facts, he was told by both Kehoe City and the main Patrol office in the capital, and there could be no authorizations based on speculative evidence—no matter how well it all dovetailed—without his approval. Once Brackeen found him, at the home of a married sister in a nearby community, and outlined the facts and the conclusions he had drawn from those facts, Gottlieb did not require much convincing. He listened attentively, asked several questions, confided that he and his partner, Dick Sanchez, had been looking into the possibility of Perrins/Lassiter’s death being a contracted Organization hit, and agreed without reluctance that the theory had considerable merit. Brackeen’s opinion of the State Highway Patrol went up considerably; he was dealing with a good, competent officer here, not fools like Lydell and the bright-face, Forester.

It was past dark by this time, and both men decided that there was not much that could be done until the daylight hours. Brackeen suggested an airplane or helicopter reconnaissance of the desert area to the east, south, and west of Cuenca Seco, and Gottlieb told him that he would have machines in the air at dawn. He said also that he would contact the county office in Kehoe City and have Lydell arrange for a team of experienced men on standby in Cuenca Seco, in the event the air reconnaissance uncovered anything; even if it didn’t, Gottlieb concurred that a careful foot search should be made of the area surrounding the location of the wrecked Triumph and the rental Buick.

Brackeen said, “Will you be coming down yourself?”

“As soon as I can get back to Kehoe City and round up Sanchez,” Gottlieb answered. “Where will you be?”