Panic! (22 page)

Vollyer dragged cool air into his lungs and sat up again, looking around him. The solid objects had faint, dancing perimeter shadows until he stared at one in particular and then the shadow went away. His head ached massively, malignantly, and there were searing needles probing at the retinas of his eyes. He got shakily to his feet and held his hands out in front of him and stared at their backs; the hands were trembling, but there were only two of them and they had no dancing shadows.

Di Parma said, “Was it your eyes, Harry? Mine have been giving me hell, too. It’s the glare of that sun ...”

Vollyer said nothing. He walked slowly to the rock on which Di Parma had been sitting and took the binoculars from it and then went to where he could look out over the desert to the north. He lifted the glasses, squinting through the lens. The moon was gone now, the stars fading, and the landscape lay cold and starkly quiet under the retreating gray-black of the sky. He could see a long way, he could see cactus, rocks, bushy shrubs, distinct and identifiable forms. He released a long, soft breath, turning, calm again.

“Come on,” he said to Di Parma. “It’s time to be moving. We’re close to them, I can feel it. Even with you shooting at that snake last night, we’re close to them. It won’t be long now ...”

Brackeen said, “I can’t take any more of this sitting around. I’m going out and check with the deputy I posted at the junction.”

“If he had anything to report, he would have radioed in,” Gottlieb said. He sat across from his partner, Dick Sanchez, at one of the desks in the substation, drinking his tenth or eleventh cup of coffee and chain-smoking cork-tipped cigarettes. Both men owned tired eyes and disheveled suits, and they were playing two-handed pinochle with no enthusiasm at all.

Brackeen stood at the front counter, looking out through the window. The first pale, cold light of dawn touched the empty street beyond, an inchoate dissolution of the shadows resting in doorways and alleyways and at the corners of the false-fronted buildings. “I know that,” he said without turning. “But I’m ready to climb the goddamn walls.”

“Lydell will have those men I asked for here any minute now,” Gottlieb told him. “Why don’t you wait for him and we’ll all go out together?”

“I’d feel better moving around, that’s all.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“Radio when you’re coming?”

“As soon as we leave.”

“What time are the choppers going up?”

“They should be in the air any minute now.”

“Then we’ll have a report in another hour or less.”

“About that.”

Brackeen passed a hand across his face. There were deep circles etched into the puffy flesh beneath his eyes, and the lack of sleep had made the lids heavy and put a cottony taste in his mouth that was enhanced by the amount of coffee he had drunk and cigarettes he had smoked since last night. His nerves were raw-edged from inactivity, fatigue, caffein, nicotine. But his mind was clear and alert, kept that way by the prospect of movement and accomplishment, and by the presence of Gottlieb and Sanchez; the three of them had passed the hours since the arrival of the state investigators shortly after midnight in talking Brackeen’s theory through, examining every possibility, planning the moves to be made on this day.

As Brackeen picked up his Stetson and crossed to the front door, Gottlieb said mildly, “Stay loose, huh?”

“As loose as the two of you,” Brackeen said, and went out.

He drove to the junction and talked to the deputy again, and there was nothing to report. The sky was much lighter now, splashed with gold and deep red on the eastern horizon, and it would not be long before the rounded rim of the sun edged up there like a huge golden shield. A narrow wash paralleled the county road for a short distance here, beginning just beyond the rutted surface of the abandoned rail company road; a red-topped, black-and-white striped Gila woodpecker swooped low over it, shrieking maniacally all the while. There was no other sound; the county road was deserted at this hour of the morning.

Brackeen stood by his cruiser, looking up into the lightening heavens. The hell with this, he thought. He slid under the cruiser’s wheel and entered the abandoned road, driving slowly, his head moving in careful quadrants from the road surface to the terrain stretching away to the east. He did not expect to see anything, but this was better than just sitting, waiting for Lydell to show up, waiting for the choppers to report.

A half-mile, by the odometer, beyond the place where he had found the rental Buick the day before, Brackeen U-turned and started back again. He passed the sandstone formation which had concealed the Buick, passed the dry wash where the wrecked yellow Triumph had lain, and followed the gentle curve in the road from due north to northeasterly. Less than a mile from the junction, he slowed, remembering the all but obliterated shortcut from the rail company road to the county highway several miles to the east of the junction; trucks carrying road-grading equipment and the men who operated it had made the cut across the flatland here in order to save some eight miles in the haul out of Kehoe City. Brackeen had been over the rutted surface several times. It skirted a long, deep arroyo, over which the railroad, in the early days of the century, had built a trestle for a proposed spur to Cuenca Seco; the trestle had long since collapsed into the arroyo, and there was little else remaining of the abortive line of tracks branching off the later-abandoned line to Kehoe City. The railroad had not had much luck in this area of the desert over the years.

Brackeen did not want to return to the junction just yet; it only meant more passive waiting. He swung the cruiser off the road, onto the creosote-choked flatland. It wouldn’t do any harm to check the area out here, he thought; there was always the chance that he might spot something, and even if he didn’t it would consume some time until the air reconnaissance could be made and Lydell could get off his fat ass and into Cuenca Seco with the team of men.

Slowly, dust blossoming in lazy plumes behind him, Brackeen drove toward the flaming brass light in the eastern sky.

Lennox and Jana left the tank at the first fading of darkness, rested and with regathered strength, and began moving toward a long sloping rise to the north. The air was no longer cold, though still cool, and they went as swiftly as their stiffened, aching bodies would allow; they had drunk deeply of the pulp of another barrel cactus outside the tank, and the moisture would stay with them for a while, until the sun climbed into the sky and set fire to the desert again.

They had passed the long night wrapped in each other’s arms, insulated against the biting wind, against the terror which lay without. The need for words had not come to either of them, and they had slept, and when they had awakened there was still no need to put voice to what they had shared. Jana had met Lennox’s gaze when he looked at her, and smiled faintly and nodded, thanking him with her eyes, telling him that she was all right now, that she knew and accepted the truth about herself.

As they ran, Lennox found himself wondering how deeply his feelings for Jana were rooted—if he could possibly be in love with her. There was none of the wild, joyous exhilaration he had felt with Phyllis in the beginning, none of the electricity, the chemical magnetism that draws and fuses two individuals; there was only the peace she generated within him, the bond that was theirs, the tenderness that overwhelmed him each time he looked at her and touched her. Was that love? Or the beginnings of love? He didn’t know, but he wanted to know. He wanted to know her better, he wanted her to know him, he wanted them to get out of this place, this trap, so that the understanding and the perception each seemed to have of the other’s inner self could be nurtured and developed.

He gripped Jana’s hand tightly, looking over his shoulder at her, trying to smile with his cracked mouth. She returned the pressure of his fingers, touching him with her eyes, and he knew that she felt some of the same things about him—and the knowledge filled him with hope and with pleasure and with urgency.

They approached the crest of the rise, threading their way between scattered boulders and thick clumps of mesquite; the sky was bright with the building haze of heat now, and Gam-bel’s quail and an occasional jackrabbit scurried away before them, startled by their presence in a world that belonged to creatures instead of men. Finally, minutes later, they topped the rise, and Lennox stopped abruptly, staring at what lay beyond. “Oh God,” he said softly.

Flat, semi-barren land stretched away from them, void of all but transitory cover; there was a line of rocky outcroppings to the west, but they were some distance away and he and Jana would have to cross a great expanse of open ground to get to them. Naked, they would be naked ...

Jana said sharply, “Jack, look!”

“What is it?”

“Down there! Is that a road?”

Lennox followed her pointing arm with his eyes. Near the foot of the long slope falling away into the flatland was a pair of faintly discernible wheel ruts, obliterated in spots, grown over with brush in others, but ruts nonetheless, coming from around the rocks to the west, hooking eastward to parallel a wide arroyo cut deeply, like a jagged scar, into the dry, desolate plain. They would lead somewhere, they would lead to Cuenca Seco or to another road, they would lead out.

Lennox felt a surge of wild hope. He saw the same relief mirrored on Jana’s face, the sudden brightness of her eyes, and she said, “Oh, Jack, a road, a road!” and then they were running down the slope, unaware now of the rocky, treacherous soil and the gleaming cactus needles and the multiple, clutching arms of the mesquite and ocotillo, forgetting the danger of exposure on the open flat, seeing nothing but the wheel ruts, the path to safety ...

The pain in the lids and sockets of Vollyer’s eyes had become excruciating, and the shadows were back at the edges of solid objects, distorting them slightly, putting them vaguely out of focus. The edge of the sun had crawled above the eastern horizon now, and the glare of daylight wavered over the landscape, contracting the pupils, intensifying the agony.

They were coming on a long rise, and he stopped to catch his breath, to rub gingerly at the swollen pits with his pocket handkerchief. Di Parma said, “You sure your eyes are okay, Harry? Jesus, they don’t look too good—”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes!”

“Harry, listen, we’ve got to call it off pretty soon. We can’t stay out here much longer, Harry, not without food and water. We may have gone too far as it is, it’ll take us a full day or more to get back to the car—”

“Shut up, will you shut up?”

Di Parma caught his arm. “Listen, I’m telling you, I don’t want to die on this desert!”

Vollyer pushed him away savagely and swung the binoculars up. At first he could not see anything but blurred images through the lens, and he thought: I can see, I can see, my eyes are all right and I can see, clear up now, you bastards, clear up so I can see! He blinked frantically, and the blur lessened and there was substance, there were shapes; he tried to swallow into a constricted throat, fighting the double vision that would not completely dissipate, moving the glasses in a wide are, west to east, along the top of the rise—

They were there, Lennox and the girl, standing there at the crest and looking down to the other side, just standing there, five hundred yards away.

Vollyer jerked the glasses down, and the Remington scope-handgun was in his right hand. He began to run up the slope. Di Parma hesitated and then ran after him, reaching his side.
“Harry,
what is it, did you see them?” but even as he said the words, Di Parma was looking up at the crest of the rise and the two figures standing there, looking at them for a brief instant before they jumped forward to disappear on the other side. He had been carrying his jacket, and he fumbled the .38 out of the pocket, flung the garment down; his lips pulled away from his teeth, and the fingers of his huge hand were spasmodic on the sweating metal of the belly-gun.

They ran diagonally across the slope, toward the spot where Lennox and the girl had been standing. Vollyer gagged on each breath, running on legs that were like jagged edges of bone, and sweat poured acid agony into his eyes. He fell once and Di Parma slowed automatically and pulled him to his feet, and then they were at the crest and looking beyond and Lennox and the girl were almost to the bottom of the slope on that side, running to the west. Vollyer pawed away sweat, pawed away some of the shimmering blur, but he was still too far away for an accurate shot, he had to get closer, a little closer, and he plunged downward with Di Parma at his heels, slipping, sliding wildly on the incline, moving in a diagonal again to cut off the targets at the bottom.

Vollyer became aware, through the stinging obscurity of his vision, that there was some kind of road or cart track down there—that was what they were running for and they were looking at that, only that, they did not know that he and Di Parma were up here behind them and that was all the edge he needed, the game was definitely over now, no mistake now. The gap was closing, closing, two hundred yards, less, near enough, one bullet for Lennox and one for the girl, and he skidded to his knees on the slope halfway down, bracing himself, washing away sweat with the palm of his free hand, bringing the Remington up into the crook of his arm and sighting with the scope. Two of Lennox and two of the woman, oh you goddamn bastard eyes, blink, blink, concentrate, clear up, there now, there, finger closing on the trigger, steady, steady—