Panic!

One

I stand on the porch, supporting myself with my left hand on the stucco wall, and with my right I keep slapping the wood paneling of the door. Open up in there, damn you, I know you’re in there, Phyllis. Open this goddamn door!

And the door opens and she looks out at me with that patronizing, superior expression curling her soft mouth — how could I ever have loved her, how could I ever have thought she was beautiful? Her silver-streaked blond hair is freshly coiffed, even though it is past ten o’clock at night; and the floor-length blue peignoir she wears has fur at the throat and on the sleeves. I know it is expensive, I have never seen it before, she bought it with my money — and she keeps looking at me that way, her eyes reducing me to a pile of soft odorous shit and I feel the rage burning down low in my groin, the flames of it already fanned by the liquor I’ve drunk since the court hearing.

I want to hit her. I want to slap that look away. I’ve never hit her before — any woman before — but God! I want to hit her now...

“Oh, it’s you,” she says with clear distaste. “I might have known it. What do you want, Jack?”

“Want to talk to you.”

“There’s nothing more to be said.”

“Goddamn right there is, goddamn right!”

“You’re drunk,” she says, and starts to close the door.

I lean away from the wall and wedge my shoulder against the wood. She frowns, nothing more. A sculpture fashioned of glacial ice. I push the door wide, moving her backward, and stagger inside, near falling, catching myself on the table in the hall, turning. She has gone out of focus. I shake my head and rub splayed fingers over my face, the nails digging harshly into the skin, and she shimmers, three of her into two into one.

“You’re drunk,” she says again.

“Who has a better right to be drunk, you tell me that.”

“Jack, I don’t want you in my house. Now say what you came to say and get out.”

“Your house! You bitch, your house!”

“That’s right. You heard what the judge said, didn’t you?”

So sweet, so contemptuous, and I think of all the nights with her lying beneath me, warm, whispering, and inside nothing, despising me, playing out a not particularly demanding role while I burst in every way with love for her.

“It’s my house!” I shout at her. “I built this goddamn house with my money!”

“Jack, what’s the point of going over it again and again? It’s settled now. We’re divorced, the judge made a fair evaluation—”

“Fair! Oh my God, fair! He gave you everything, he gave you my guts, he made me a goddamn indentured servant!”

“You’re being melodramatic, Jack,” she says with that cold, empty rationality. “You always were childishly ineffective under stress.”

“You frigging slut!”

“Jack, Jack, I’ve heard all the words before and they don’t mean anything to me. Now please, won’t you leave? If you don’t, I’ll have to call the police, and I really don’t want to do that. Go home and go to bed. You shouldn’t drink, either, you know.”

I grow cunning. I take a step forward, with the room tilting slightly, and I point a finger at her as if it is the blade of a dagger, aiming squarely between the heavy white mounds of her breasts. “I’m not going to pay the alimony, Phyllis,” I say softly, and I smile at her with the only side of my mouth which seems to respond.

“Oh, don’t be absurd.”

“I’m not going to pay it.”

“If you don’t, you’ll go to jail.”

“They have to catch me first.”

“And just what is that supposed to imply?”

“What the hell do you think it implies, huh? I’m leaving town, I’m getting out of this state, I’m going as far away from you as I can go.”

“I don’t believe you. You won’t quit your job, your precious job. Being Humber Realty’s star salesman has always been your one shining ambition.”

“I’ve already quit it,” I say slyly. “I quit it at four this afternoon. Call Ed Humber if you want confirmation. Go ahead, call him.”

She frowns again, and there is a faint touch of incredulity to the set of her mouth. Good! I’m getting through to her now, I’m getting to the core of her.

“I’ll put the police on you if you do a silly thing like going away,” she says coldly. “I’ll have you brought back and thrown in jail.”

“You think the police care about nonpayment of alimony? You think they’ll make much of an effort to find me?”

“I won’t let you deprive me of what’s rightfully mine, Jack.”

“No? How you going to stop me?”

“I’ll stop you.”

“No,” I say, “no, you won’t, Phyllis,” and I feel exultant. I’ve won! I’ve finally won! There are fissures in the ice shell now, I’ve penetrated, I’ve done what I came to do. I move forward, and a kind of loose, liquid laughter finds its way out of my throat, a strident, ecstatic mirth. Her face contorts, mottles, I’ve put it into you and broken it off, Phyllis, you bitch, and I reach out to put my hand on the doorknob.

She slaps me.

She brings her right hand around, palm open, and cracks it across my face with the stinging force of a whip. The sound reverberates through the house, bouncing off walls, coming back like a boomerang to pierce the soft buzzing in my ears. I jerk up convulsively, staring at her, at the cold fiat mask of her face, the hatred in her eyes.

And she stops me again.

I shake my head, and the momentary confusion within gives way to a rebirth of the burning rage which has sustained me all that day. I feel myself shaking, my hands curling into fists, and I open my mouth to tell her not to do it another time, but the words are stillborn in my throat because she slaps me again, and again and again, her hand whipping back and forth across my face like an arcing metronome. The fires consume all reason that the alcohol has not and I know what I’m going to do but I can’t stop it, I bring my right fist up and I watch myself do so as if I have somehow shed the husk of my body, watch the fist come up as if in slow motion and join her face between the aristocratic tilt of her nose and the soft curve of her mouth, watch the lip split, the nose expand, watch blood spurt out to cover my hand, and then she is falling backward, crumpling against the wall by the door, her hands rushing up to cover her red-white face.

I stand frozen with shock, looking numbly at my right fist, and then the silent world in which all of this has happened no longer exists, the sound track comes on at full volume. I can hear Phyllis screaming between her hands, hear her flinging words at me which are not hysterical but merely a brief flare of the hidden emotions which rule her: “You won’t deprive me of what I’m entitled to, you won’t run out on me. I’ll have a warrant sworn out against you for assault, I’ll say that you came in here and beat me and threatened to kill me, the police care about that, Jack, they’ll bring you back and put you in jail and you’ll work in there to pay my alimony!”

She draws her bloodied hands away.

And she is half-smiling redly with her broken mouth.

I reach for the door, blindly, get it open, stagger onto the porch outside. I look wildly around me. Inside, Phyllis is still screaming. Lights begin to go on, one by one, in the neighboring houses, and the black night is consumed by sound. I don’t know what to do, I’m scared, I’m going to be sick, and somebody shouts, moving across a lawn toward me, and then I know what I have to do, I know what I have to do to survive.

Run, Lennox.

Run.

Run.

RUN!

Running...

Running...

Someone was shaking him, calling the name Delaney.

Lennox came out of the dream as he always did: spasmodically, his eyes snapping open but seeing nothing, his body slick with sweat. He sat up, put his palms flat on the wet, rumpled blanket of the cot, pure terror swiveling his head from side to side. He poised to bolt — and then his brain cleared, reoriented itself, and he blinked up at the lean form of Perrins standing over him in the bright early-morning sunlight.

“Christ,” Perrins said, “that must have been some nightmare.”

Lennox fell back on the cot and threw an arm over his eyes. He couldn’t seem to regulate his breathing. “Was I making much noise?” he asked.

“Hell yes.”

“Did I say anything?”

“Not that I could make out. Why?”

“I talk in my sleep sometimes, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, it’s after seven,” Perrins said. “I open this place at eight. Go wash up, and I’ll get you some breakfast. We’ve got plenty of work today.”

“All right.”

Perrins went out, and Lennox lay there with his arm over his eyes for a time, still trying to breathe normally. Oddly, there was the hangover aftertaste of alcohol in his mouth, even though he had not had a drink in several days, and his arms and the back of his neck ached stingingly with sunburn. Perrins had had him up on the roof late yesterday, repainting the weathered sign, and the desert sun, even fading into twilight, had been merciless.

He sat up again, finally, and dry-washed his face with his hands; he had shaved last night, before stretching out on the cot, but he had not done much of a job of it and he could feel the stubble on his chin already. He could smell himself, too, a sour, unhygienic odor that seemed to fold upward from his crotch; he wished vaguely that he had taken some kind of bath. But it had been more than a week now, and what the hell was another day? Like a lot of other once-important, once-carefully-attended-to small details, it no longer mattered very much.

Lennox got somewhat unsteadily to his feet and pulled on his pants and stepped into his shoes. Then he picked up his overnight bag, went through the dining room — Perrins had his back to him, working over the grill, the smell of frying bacon thick in there — and stepped out into the dusty parking area.

The sun, in spite of the early hour, hung low and bright on the eastern horizon. The air was already hot, and as Lennox walked slowly across to the rest rooms, his head began to throb, gently, steadily. He hoped Perrins did not have any more work to be done outside; there were people who were prone to sunstroke, and he had always been one of them, an indoor type, one of the night people, no aptitudes and no inclinations for nature or the elements.

He washed his face and hands in the john, and used a dampened paper towel to sponge over his groin, dispelling some of the sour odor, knowing it would return again long before the day was out. He put on the only white shirt he had — frayed, slightly soiled, with a urine-colored bleach stain on one of the tails — and ran a comb through his tangled hair carelessly. Then he went back inside.

Perrins had a plate of bacon and eggs, a glass of orange juice on the counter. Lennox ate silently, slowly, head bowed over his plate, not looking up. When he finished eating, Perrins came down from where he had been stocking the ice cooler. “All set, Delaney?”

“I guess I am,” Lennox answered.

“First thing, I want you down in the storage basement. It’s a mess down there, and I just haven’t had the time to straighten it out myself.”

They went into the storeroom, and behind several cartons of snack foods at the far end was an old-fashioned trap door with a ring-pull set through an iron eyebolt; Lennox had not noticed it before. Perrins dragged the door up and descended a set of stairs into a darkly musty vault that was only slightly cooler than the rooms upstairs. Following him, Lennox felt the eggs turn in his still-tender stomach — but he did not say anything.

Perrins clicked on a light set into one wall, revealing a rectangular area cluttered with cartons of beer and soft drinks, cases of tinned goods, a chipped enamel freezer for meat and other perishables, and various-sized containers of miscellany. He waved one of his thick arms. “Think you can handle it?”

“Sure,” Lennox said listlessly. “How do you want it arranged?”

“Use your own judgment,” Perrins told him. “Give me as much space as you can.”

“Will do.”

“Yell if you want anything.”

Lennox nodded, and Perrins went back up the stairs and dropped the trap door heavily. It made a hollow, empty sound, like the door of a crypt being closed. Lennox held the eggs on the floor of his stomach with an effort of will, and looked around at the bare, sweating cement walls, the mélange which haphazardly filled the room.

What am I doing here? he thought. I deserve better than this. I fought all my life for position, for security, I made something out of myself and my dreams, and it isn’t right, it isn’t fair. Why me? Why not Phyllis, why not her, why not the bitches and the sons of bitches of this world? Why me?

Oh, goddamnit, why me?

Two

The desk clerk at the Joshua Hotel was a young man with luminous green eyes, dressed in Western garb; the eyes caressed Jana like fat, soft hands. He said, “Are you sure you want to go out into the desert alone, Miss Hennessey?”

“Yes, I’m quite sure,” she answered. She wore a thin yellow blouse and stiff new Levis and high-laced desert boots; a wide-brimmed sombrero covered her pinned-up sable hair.

“Well,” the desk clerk said, and shrugged. He took a dirt-creased map from a drawer beneath the counter and unfolded it. “Some place scenic, you said?”

Jana nodded. “I’m interested in unusual rock formations, or growths of flora, or panoramas.”

“You a painter or something?” the clerk asked curiously.

“Or something.”

“We get a lot of painters staying here. Photographers, too. Lot of unspoiled desert in this area.”

“So I understand.”

“Sure,” the clerk said. His eyes were hungry on the swell of her breasts for a moment, and then, reluctantly, they shifted to the map he had spread out on the counter. He put a forefinger on a thin snakelike line which intersected the county road connecting Cuenca Seco with Kehoe City, just to the east of town; it meandered into the desert in a southwesterly — and then southern — direction some six or seven miles, by the map scale, fading out in the middle of empty white. “This is the road you want to take, Miss Hennessey. It’s a dead end, as you can see, and not much of a road — railroad people built it back in the twenties, for a proposed water stop on the spur line to Kehoe City; but the spur was abandoned before they could finish it, and so they abandoned the road too. Still, you won’t find any finer desert country in these parts.”

“It sounds fine,” Jana said.

“You want to take along some water, and make sure your car’s gassed up before you leave. Road’s not used much any more, and there’s nothing out there but desert.”

“I’ll do that, thank you.”

“Sure,” feasting on her breasts again. “Have a nice time, Miss Hennessey.”

Jana went out quickly and down the dusty steps into the bright white glare of the morning. She carried a large handbag which contained her sketch pad, a loose-leaf notebook, a tin of charcoal, and soft-lead pencils. She had finished the outline for Desert Adventure shortly past dark the night before, and when she had read it over this morning it had seemed to hold up rather decently; she was, in any case, satisfied with it. But before beginning work on the book, she had decided to make a venture into the desert early this morning. Some first-hand research and preliminary sketching would make composition simpler, and would help give the story more of an authentic flavor.

Jana was in somewhat better spirits than she had been after the call to Harold Klein the previous day, and she supposed it was because she had immersed herself so completely in the making up of the outline for Desert Adventure as to be physically exhausted by the time she had finished. When she had gone to bed and immediately to sleep, there had been no dreams, no subconscious intrusion of the affair with Don Harper and... the other thing. For the first time in weeks she had gotten a full night’s rest.

She walked along the street to a market just opening, and bought a bottle of mineral water, some cheese and crackers for lunch. Then she returned to where she had parked the TR-6 and drove rapidly out of Cuenca Seco, to the east.

She had no difficulty locating the road the desk clerk had pointed out to her on the area map. It was unpaved, narrow, rutted, and as she turned onto it in second gear, the sports car’s tires raised thick alkali dust. As early as it was, the sun was a radiating yellow sphere that bathed the surrounding desert in hot, shimmering luster.

Nothing moved on the barren reaches, and as she drove deeper into them Jana had the brief, disquieting thought that she was traveling across a landscape void of life, of movement of any kind — an explorer set down alone on an alien world long dead. And then, on her left, she saw a small covey of Gambel’s quail scurrying into a thick clump of mesquite to take refuge from the gathering heat — and overhead, a red-tailed hawk gliding smoothly against the lush blue backdrop — and she smiled ironically, thinking: City-bred girls, not to mention professional writers, who keep having profound literary thoughts are most definitely pains in the ass. Far larger pains in the ass than publishers like Ross Phalen, to be sure.

Three

The dark blue rented Buick Electra passed the intersection of the state highway and the county road leading to Cuenca Seco at four minutes past eight. Harry Vollyer shifted his weight lightly on the passenger side of the front seat, yawned, and said, “We’re almost there.”

Di Parma nodded silently, hands firm on the wheel, eyes unblinking as he watched the retreating ribbon of the highway. Vollyer looked at him fondly. Livio was all business today, just the way he should be; hell, he hadn’t even called his wife before they left the motel that morning — and that fact filled Vollyer with satisfaction. Di Parma was a good boy when the chips were down, when the job was close at hand, and you could count on him not to make mistakes, not to let personal matters interfere. A good kid, all right. Damn, just a fine kid.

Smiling, Vollyer leaned forward and withdrew the small black leather case from beneath the seat. He lifted it onto his lap, worked the catches. Inside, wrapped in chamois, were two Smith & Wesson Centennial Model 40 snub-nosed revolvers, 38 caliber; and a modified Remington XP-100, chambered for the Remington .221 Fireball and mounted with a Bushnell 1.3X Phantom scope. The latter weapon looked like nothing so much as one of those ray-gun blasters Flash Gordon used to carry in the movie serials Vollyer had seen as a youth, but for all its ludicrous appearance, he was inordinately proud of the gun, of its capabilities; it was the best long-range handgun-scope combination made, as far as he was concerned, and he had put in long hours practicing with it, mastering the difficult cross-arm method of accurate shooting. He had had the Remington for more than two years now, and he had had occasion to use it only once on a job — in a suburb of Kansas City, eleven months ago. But he carried it on each assignment nonetheless. He liked to be well prepared for any situation he might encounter, any unexpected occurrence, any potential emergency. That was why he was one of the best in the country, and why he commanded the kind of fee he did; when you brought in Vollyer, you were guaranteed results — one hundred percent.

He let his fingers caress the rough-textured grip of the Remington for a moment; then, quickly, he removed the twin .38s and refastened the case, sliding it under the seat again. He handed one of the belly-guns, butt first, across to Di Parma, watched as Livio took it, dropped it into the pocket of his suit coat without taking his eyes from the road. Vollyer put the other weapon into the pocket of his own jacket, an off-white cashmere, and peered ahead through the windshield.

Even with the smoke-tinted sunglasses he wore, the reflected glare from the already bright-hot desert sun irritated the sensitive membranes of his eyes. He wondered, as he had begun to do of late, if he needed glasses, and he made a mental note to get in to see an optometrist as soon as they got back home. In a profession like his, perfect vision was vital; you didn’t want to screw around where your eyes were concerned.

The buildings of the roadside oasis appeared as faint specks in the distance, gained size, took on discernible dimensions. They were nearing the access road. Automatically, Di Parma took his foot off the accelerator, slowing, as Vollyer studied the oasis.

“No cars,” Vollyer said.

“We go?”

“We go.”

They turned onto the access road, proceeding slowly. Di Parma asked, “How do we work it?”

“Stop the car off on the side,” Vollyer told him. “I’ll go inside. You check the rest rooms there, on the right, and then go around and look into the cabin in back, where he lives. If he’s alone, and if the highway is clear when you come inside, we make the hit.”

“And if he’s not alone?”

“We get something to drink and walk out,” Vollyer said. “We drive south a couple of towns, get a motel, and come back again tomorrow morning.”

“Okay.”

Di Parma took the Buick up near the rest rooms and shut off the engine. The two of them got out. Wordlessly, Di Parma moved away toward the lattice-fronted building. Vollyer watched him for a moment, nodding, pleased; then, straightening his jacket, he walked quickly across to the screen door, opened it with his shoulder, and stepped inside the café.

The tables, the lunch counter were deserted. The target was behind the counter, cutting pie into wedges. He looked up, put on a professional smile, and Vollyer returned it.

“Morning,” the target said.

“Morning,” Vollyer answered cheerfully. He moved several steps into the room, his eyes searching it without seeming to do so. He noticed a door partially ajar at the far end of the room, apparently leading to a storeroom, and he walked casually in that direction. He put his head around the half-open door. Storeroom, all right. Stacked cartons. Cot pushed up against the wall beneath an open window. Empty. Vollyer turned and went up to the lunch counter.

The target was frowning. “Looking for something, mister?”

“The john,” Vollyer said apologetically. He was the picture of guilelessness.

“Outside,” the target told him.

“Oh. Well, thanks.”

“Something I can get for you?”

“A glass of milk,” Vollyer said. “Nice and cold.”

“Coming up.”

Vollyer leaned against the counter and watched the target open a refrigerator unit, take out a bottle of fresh milk, pour from it into a tumbler. The bottle went back into the refrigerator, and the tumbler was set before Vollyer on the counter top. He lifted it, tasted, drank deeply. There was nothing like a cold glass of milk in the morning, especially on a hot morning like this one.

The door opened and Di Parma came inside. He crossed to where Vollyer stood, looked at the target, and then said, “Okay.”

“No cars?”

“Nothing.”

“Clean in here,” Vollyer said. “Let’s get it done.”

The two men backed off several steps, and their hands went down to the pockets of their jackets. The target had his mouth open to ask Di Parma if he wanted anything, but when he saw the expressions on the faces of the two men, he pressed his lips together. His eyes narrowed, and his forehead wrinkled into deep horizontal lines.

Vollyer and Di Parma took out their guns.

The target made a half-step backward, involuntarily, and his buttocks came up hard against the refrigerator unit. His eyes bulged with understanding, and a thin stream of saliva worked its way out over his lower lip and trailed down along his chin. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus.”

The two guns were steady on him, and he couldn’t run, there was no place for him to go. He knew he was going to die, and the knowledge released his sphincter muscles; the odor was strong and sour in the hot, still room.

“No,” he said, “no, there’s some kind of mistake.”

“No mistake,” Vollyer said quietly.

“Listen, please, they promised me it was all right. They said I could get out; they said nothing would happen. Listen, I’m clear, I’m out of it, I never said a word, I’m no fink. Listen, don’t you understand? For Christ’s sake!”

“All right, Livio,” Vollyer said.

“No!” the target screamed. “No, no, no, no!”

They shot him six times, three times each, the bullets transcribing a five-inch radius on his upper torso. The target died on his feet, the way he was supposed to die, without making another sound.

Four

Lennox finished stacking crates of tinned goods against the near wall of the storage basement, and rubbed sweat from his eyes with the back of one arm. It was close in there, the air thick with fine particles of dust. The back of his throat felt hot and parched.

He tried to work saliva around inside his mouth, but the ducts seemed to have dried up. A spasm of brittle coughing seized him, and he pushed away from the wall to stand in the middle of the still-cluttered room. His mind felt sluggish, and yet somehow claustrophobic. He had an irrational impulse to rush headlong into one of the walls and pound it with his fists. He wanted to cry. The need to vent the deep brooding futility in some tangible way, to rid himself of the pressure building in heavy waves within the shell of him, was almost overpowering.

He thought: What’s happening to me? Why can’t I get straight with myself any more?

He dragged air into his lungs in open-mouthed suckings, and the paroxysm of coughing subsided. The impression of crushing entrapment retreated with it, and he felt a little better, a little more in control. His hand trembled only slightly when he raised it to wipe away the fresh sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Phyllis, you bitch, he thought.

And then he wondered if Perrins would let him have a beer. Christ, he needed one; his throat was so dry it was abrasively sore. Well, why wouldn’t Perrins let him have one? He was working for wages, wasn’t he? If he couldn’t get one gratis, then let the bastard take it out of his salary.

Lennox drew a shuddering breath and moved slowly to the set of stairs. He climbed them, working the rough edge of his tongue over his lips, and pushed the trap door up; its hinges were new, oiled, silent. Once in the storeroom, he lowered the trap, stepped around the cartons toward the door leading into the café — a soft-moving man by nature, creating no sound on his rubber-soled shoes.

He heard Perrins’ voice just before he reached the door. “Listen,” it said, “don’t you understand? For Christ’s sake!”

The tone, the inflection, of those words caused Lennox to pull up next to the door, concealed by it but close enough so that he could lean forward and look around it into the café. He did that curiously, cautiously. He saw Perrins standing there behind the lunch counter, face the color of buttermilk, and he saw two neatly dressed men positioned in front of the counter, partially turned away from him. But their faces were clear in profile, hard and impassive, faces carved in stone, and he heard one of them say “All right, Livio,” and he saw Perrins put up his hands as if to ward off a blow, heard him begin screaming “No!” again and again. Lennox saw the guns then, for the first time, saw them and understood, in that fraction of a second before the room became filled with smoke and explosive sound, just what kind of scene was being enacted before him.

He watched in a kind of numbed horror as the deafening echo of the gunshots faded and red blossoms appeared on the front of Perrins’ white shirt, trailing down like thickly obscene tear streams over the white apron, the white trousers. Perrins stopped jerking with the impact of the bullets and stood very still for a long, uncertain moment — and then he fell, like a tree, like a small and not particularly significant tree cut down by a woodsman’s saw, straight, rigid, toppling sideways, disappearing with a sound that was not very loud at all.

The two men put their guns away, and Lennox watched one of them — the fat one — nod and motion to the other, watched that one move across to the door, look out through the window. The fat one was smiling. He went over to the counter, wiped off a half-filled glass of milk with a pocket handkerchief, and then looked down at the slats behind. He was still smiling when he straightened up again.

Lennox pulled his head back. He wanted to vomit. Cold blood, they shot him down, killers and they, God what if, search they’ll search and they’ll find me and they’ll, oh God God God

He shook his head, and shook it again. No. No! He had to get out of there, they couldn’t find him, he had to get away from there. His head swiveled wildly, and his eyes touched the open window, the window, and beyond — the desert.

Slowly he backed away, staring at the door, and the sweat broke and ran like water from skin blisters the length of his body. Cheeks gray-white, hands palsied, he reached the window, swung one leg over the sill, and nobody came through the door. The other leg, soft now, hurry, hurry, and he was outside, shoes sibilant on gravel, careful, moving away, moving to safety, the desert out there big and empty, hot, the sun spilling fire down on the grotesque cacti, the spindly brush, the strange and awesome formations of rock — waiting for him.

Run, Lennox.

Run!

Five

Di Parma said, “All clear,” and stepped away from the window.

Vollyer brushed a speck of something from the sleeve of his cashmere jacket and went over to join him at the door. They passed through the fly screen, letting it bang shut behind them, the sound like a faint, tardy echo of the gunshots a few moments earlier. Neither of them looked back.

They walked out from under the shade of the wooden awning into the white radiance of the sun. Vollyer blinked rapidly against the hot, strong glare which penetrated the smoky lens of his sunglasses; he was going to have to see an optometrist, all right. Nothing to worry about, of course, like with the mild ulcer — all part of the game — but you still had to be careful, you still had to observe the basic rules.

When they reached the car, Vollyer started quickly around to the passenger side. He had gotten to the rear deck when Di Parma said sharply, “Harry!”

Vollyer stopped, turned, and Di Parma was pointing off toward the stretch of desert behind the café, visible between there and the rest rooms. The harsh light made Vollyer’s eyes sting as he followed the extension of Di Parma’s arm — and then he saw what Livio was pointing at, on high ground a few hundred yards distant.

There was somebody out there.

Somebody running.

Di Parma said, “What the hell?” as Vollyer hurried up beside him. “What the hell, Harry?”

Vollyer did not answer. Behind the sunglasses, his eyes glittered in their watered sockets. The runner was gone now, vanished on the other side of the high section — but Vollyer’s quick, sharp mind had registered several facts from his single prolonged glimpse: white shirt, long sleeves rolled up, tails pulled out and fluttering over dark blue trousers; lean, agile, but not particularly young, he didn’t move like a kid; long, shaggy dark hair.

Vollyer stared intently at the empty, rugged landscape. No flash of white, no movement. The terrain grew steadily rougher in the distance, sprinkled thickly with formations of rock, heavy with prickly pear, creosote bush, giant saguaro. There were hundreds of places to hide out there — and conversely, the irregularity of the land made an effective shield to cover continued flight.

Di Parma moistened his lips, put his right hand into the pocket of his jacket. “Where did he come from? Christ, we checked everything here.”

“He wasn’t running for the exercise,” Vollyer said. “He came from here, all right.”

“You think he saw us make the hit?”

“Maybe.”

“Harry, we’ve got to go after him.”

“Soft now, soft,” Vollyer said. “There’s no cause to panic. You take the car and pull it around behind the café, up close against the building so it can’t be seen from the highway. Then you go out there and see if you can find him. I don’t think there’s much chance of it now, but maybe you’ll get lucky. Fifteen minutes, and then you come back. Understood?”

Di Parma nodded. “Where’ll you be?”

“Back inside.”

“What for?”

“Move, Livio, move.”

Di Parma hesitated for a moment; then he brought his lips into a flat line and slipped in under the wheel. Vollyer was already moving across the sun-baked lot, pulling on a pair of thin doeskin gloves, when Di Parma jerked the Buick into gear and drove it around behind the café.

A little spice to liven up a routine assignment, Vollyer thought as he pulled open the fly screen and stepped inside again. The game takes on added dimensions, added excitement. His eyes still glittered, and there was a half-smile on his plump mouth.

Moving quickly, not looking at the buzzing ring of flies circling hungrily above the lunch counter, he reversed the placard in one of the windows so that it read Closed facing outward; then he pulled the shades down and switched off all the lights at a fuse box located to one side of the counter. He set the bolt lock on the door, crossed through the half-gloom — his steps echoing hollowly in the heavy, oppressive silence — to where a pay phone was located on the rear wall. He cut the cord on it with a penknife from his pocket, put the knife away, and entered the storeroom.

His eyes prowled the interior briefly before he went to the open window and looked out. He could see the Buick pulled in close to the rear wall of the building, and when his gaze swept over the desert Di Parma was moving along the high ground in quick, jerky steps. Nothing else moved on the radiant terrain.

Vollyer turned from the window, and as he did so, his eyes drifted down to the cot which was pressed up against the wall beneath it. The edge of something, a small bag, protruded slightly from under the cot. He knelt and pulled the bag out and zippered it open: soiled laundry, a shaving kit, a few miscellaneous items. And, at the bottom, a small flat manila envelope.

The envelope contained a full-color portrait photograph, 5x9 size, of a man and a woman. They were smiling at one another, hands entwined, and in the background was a table piled with brightly wrapped presents, a crystal punchbowl containing a burgundy-colored liquid and slices of citrus fruit, a double-tiered anniversary cake. The woman was slim, fair, with blond hair streaked in silver; the man was lean, dark-haired, vaguely handsome. He was the right size and coloring to be the one running out on the desert.

Vollyer turned the photograph over. Across the top, in light blue fountain ink, was written: The Lennoxes, Two Down and Forty-Eight to Go. Below that was a photographer’s stamp — Damon Studio — but no listing of city or state.

He put the portrait in his pocket, rezippered the bag, and returned it beneath the cot. Then he straightened, glancing around again. After a moment he went to the large stack of cartons on the far side of the storeroom — and behind it, he found the lowered trap door.

There was no need for him to raise the door. He knew what would be beneath it, and he knew now where he and Di Parma had made their mistake. Well, no, not a mistake exactly, how could you figure the target putting up a transient just prior to their arrival? They had been careful; it was just one of those things. All part of the game.

Vollyer retraced his steps to the window, climbed out ponderously, and pulled the sash down after him. When he turned, he saw that Di Parma was coming back now, running awkwardly across the stark earth. He went down to the corner of the building and looked at the highway, and it was still void of traffic; then he moved out to meet Di Parma.

Livio’s face was dust-streaked, and there was a three-cornered tear in the sleeve of his suit coat. He was tired and sweating and strung up tight. He said grimly, unnecessarily, “There’s no sign of the son of a bitch.”

Vollyer inclined his head speculatively. The fact that Di Parma had not flushed Lennox — the odds were good that it was this Lennox — indicated that the runner had kept on running, that he hadn’t chosen to hide in the rocks, waiting to make his way back to the oasis after Vollyer and Di Parma had gone. Of course, there was still the possibility that he had been hiding out there, was at this moment hiding, and that Livio had overlooked him; but Vollyer knew something about human nature, and as far as he was concerned, the runners would always run, the hiders would always hide, the fighters would always fight. People reacted in the same way time after time; they were predictable. This Lennox was obviously not a fighter, and he was obviously not a hider; if he had been either one, he would have remained out of sight in the storeroom or in that cellar until he had the place to himself — and then he would have gone directly to the cops to volunteer help or he would have gathered up his belongings and slipped out of there quickly and quietly. But instead, he had run; and that made him a runner, and the bet a safe one that he was still running.

This fact made him no less dangerous to the two of them; but the way Vollyer saw it, he and Di Parma had time — just how much time he could not be sure, but enough so that he was not particularly worried, not yet. In fact, the challenge of the situation seemed to stimulate him in an oddly perverse way; it was at times like this that the game really became intriguing, when you were forced to use every bit of knowledge and strategy at your disposal in order to emerge the winner, again the winner.

He told Di Parma what he had done inside the café, what he had found there, how it figured to give them some time and an edge to find this Lennox. He told him not to worry. He told him things were going to be just fine.

Di Parma was not convinced. He said, “Harry, if that guy gets to the cops—”

“He’s not going to get to the cops.”

“We’ll never find him out there.”

“Maybe not.”

“Then what do we do?”

Vollyer said, “We go take a look at that map we’ve got in the car.”

Six

The rock formation was a small, oblique confusion of wind- and sand-eroded granite, situated some two hundred yards to the south of the little-used dirt road, six and a half miles out from Cuenca Seco. At one end of the formation, a tapered flat-topped extremity pointed accusingly at the sky; in the shadow of this, Jana finished spreading out a heavy blanket from the trunk of the TR-6 and looked out over the desert.

In the distance, an irregular blue coloration, darker than the sky itself, appeared like a gigantic wet spot across the horizon — the reflection of the bright blue sky off the surface of a highway, the most common of all desert mirages. Except for the wavering of distant mountains in the blur of heat, movement seemed not to exist. Less than twenty feet away, a giant saguaro stood tall and majestic, like a patriarch overseeing his vast holdings, its accordion-pleated trunk dotted with holes made by Gila woodpeckers in search of insect larvae. To the left, dense stands of rabbit bush carpeted a wide swath of the desert floor in a brilliant mantle of gold; to the right, several clusters of ocotillo, their thorny stalks reminiscent of bundles of sticks tied at the bottom, grew in regulated rows, as if planted by the hand of man. There was reddish soil and bluish basalt rock and small black lava cones; there were natural bridges, arches, mounds, knobs, shapes of every description — a fairyland or a nightmare, depending on the direction of the viewer’s imagination. And to Jana’s continuing surprise, there were few totally barren patches, and no sand dunes at all.

As she watched, a sudden flurry of activity occurred almost directly in front of her. A small dun-colored roadrunner, moving with great speed, flashed out of a clump of mesquite, raced thirty or forty yards across the rocky earth, and then struck with a slashing motion of its long sharp bill; its feathered head jerked up a moment later, a gecko lizard held firmly by the head, struggling in vain. The roadrunner carried its prey off quickly, vanishing as rapidly as it had appeared.

Jana repressed a shudder and went to where she had parked the Triumph a few yards away. From inside, she took the handbag with her sketch pad, notebook, and writing and drawing implements — and the sack containing the food and water she had purchased in Cuenca Seco. She arranged these on the blanket and sat down in the exact center of it, Indian fashion, with the sketch pad open across her lap.

Well, she thought, here we are. The wide-open spaces. Nature in the raw. The Wild, Wild West. Beats the stifling, sweating, polluted canyons of New York City all to hell, doesn’t it?

Sure it does.

You bet.

She picked up a piece of thick charcoal and began to draw the patriarchal saguaro with rapid, fluid strokes.

Seven

The runner, running:

There, among the pinnacles of rock, the element-polished stone like slick glass beneath his feet, stumbling, falling now and then, the palms of his hands cut by razor-edged chunks of ancient granite. There, looking over his shoulder, eyes afraid, face coated with dry alkali dust through which flowing sweat has created meandering streams. There, emerging from a profusion of rocks momentarily to cross a shallow wash, churning legs digging up small geysers from the sand, half-blind with the sweat and the constant yellow-white glare of the sun. There, among rocks again, knee lancing painfully off a projection of sandstone, elbow scraping another projection, looking over his shoulder again, tripping again, falling again, getting up again, single thought, single purpose.

The labored gasping of his breath, the raging beat of his heart, the hammering pulse of his blood fill the tiny vacuum in which he moves with nightmarish sound, even though he is surrounded by stillness. His body is a mass of twisted nerve ends and small aches, and his eyes are painful under heat-inflamed lids. How much longer can he keep moving? How much further can the blind panic carry him?

Not long, not far. Less than five minutes has elapsed when he falls again, and this time he cannot seem to regain his feet. He kneels on the rough ground, resting forward on his hands, his head hanging down and his mouth open to drink of the burning air. As he crouches there, animal-like, the urgency begins to suddenly die in him — as it had finally died that night he struck Phyllis; exhaustion has dulled the sharp, bright edge of the panic, and the urge to flight is no longer indomitable within his brain.

He mewls for breath until the pace of his heart decelerates, until the blood ceases throbbing in his temples, his ears. Then he turns his body and looks behind him and sees nothing; there is nothing but the rocks and the heat and the desert vegetation. He allows his weight to fall wearily onto his right hip, but the lambent rays of the sun burn his face, burn his neck, and the stones there in the direct shine are like bits of molten metal. He drags himself a few feet distant, to where an arched and delicately fanned sandstone ledge, like a giant ostrich plume, offers shade; it is cooler there, and the intense glare of light diminishes.

Lennox wipes sweat from his aching eyes, and again looks back the way he has come. Emptiness. He does not know how far he has run, or where he is in relation to the oasis, or how long he has been running. His thoughts are sluggish from the grip of terror, from the heat, and he tries to shape them into coherency.

The first thing he thinks of is his overnight bag.

A fresh tremor of fear spirals through him. He knows exactly what is in that bag, he knows the photograph is there, the photograph of Phyllis and him and what is written across the back — Jesus, why hadn’t he gotten rid of it a long time ago, what was he trying to do to himself keeping it as he had? If the two men, the killers, searched the storeroom they had found the bag, they had found it and — what? They hadn’t seen him running away, had they? They didn’t know anybody was there, or they wouldn’t have killed Perrins as they had — why had they? They hadn’t known he was there, maybe they’d think the bag belonged to some customer, forgotten there, articles were always being left at cafés, weren’t they? Yes, that is what they would think if they searched the storeroom, if they found the bag. He shouldn’t have panicked like that, he shouldn’t have run...

Well, he’s all right now, he’s in control now, and he doesn’t have anything to — oh Christ, oh sweet Christ, the police, the cops, they’ll come eventually and if the killers didn’t find the bag the cops will, the bag and the photograph and his name and maybe he had left his fingerprints there, they would check and they would find out he was wanted, a fugitive, his bag there and Perrins lying behind the lunch counter, murdered, shot, maybe they would think he had killed him! Maybe they would put that up against him, too, and what if they caught him and he couldn’t make them believe he was innocent...?

No, no, they won’t catch him, he’ll get away, he’ll get out of this desert, steal a car if he has to, he knows enough about them to be able to hot-wire an ignition. Yes, that’s the answer, that’s the only answer, because he can’t go back, the two killers might still be there, they might have seen him after all and they might be looking for him right now, and even if they were gone the cops might have come, a motorist might have stopped, he can’t go back, he has to keep running, he has to get out.

Think, Lennox, plan your moves, figure out what to do next.

And he thinks — and remembers. He remembers the furnacelike interior of the bus the day before, and the desert landscape rushing past the dust-stippled window, and the junction of the county road extending to the east, and the sign in the fork there, the sign: CUENCA SECO 16 mi. There is a town in the vicinity then, sixteen miles from the highway at that point, but is that county road straight, does the town lie due east or to the south or to the north? How far is he from the town now, from the county road, from any other road that might lead to safety? East by northeast, that has to be the direction, and he looks up into the burning sky, looks for the sun climbing slowly toward the zenith. Rises in the east, sets in the west, rises in the east, there, over there, east by northeast.

Lennox gets shakily to his feet, stands for a moment in the shade of the overhanging arch. He drags fluttering breath into his quieted lungs, shields his eyes, looking up, and steps out. The sun covers him with a canopy of fire as he begins hurrying once again over the rocky terrain, toward the glowing ball, keeping to cover, looking furtively over his shoulder as he has done so many times before.

The runner: still running.

Eight

Vollyer had the area map he and Di Parma had picked up the day before spread open on the Buick’s front seat; he scanned it without haste, his thick forefinger touching the long curve of the highway, the location of the oasis at the head of the curve, the black dot that was Cuenca Seco, the county road leading there, the dead-end road that — from above the town — led to the southwest and then hooked gradually to the south. His moving finger followed the thin line that was the dead-end road, beginning to end, back again.

He thought: If he knows the area, he’ll make directly for the town, for this Cuenca Seco. If he doesn’t know it, he’ll run more or less in a straight line to put as much distance between himself and the oasis as he can. Either way, the odds are good that he’ll hit this dead end at some point on a three- or four-mile radius.

Vollyer was aware that several other possibilities existed as well: the area to the south, southeast and part of the southwest was unbroken desert, and Lennox could conceivably become lost out there, wandering aimlessly; he could move to the north, either by design or by accident, and eventually encounter the county road — although due north from there, deep canyons bordered the road on the near side; he could are back, again either by design or by accident, and reach the intrastate highway above or below the oasis. But Vollyer had to play the percentages, because he and Di Parma had no way of covering every one of the potentialities, and the percentages had Lennox, runner that he surely was, moving east or northeast — and coming on that dead-end trail.

Strategy, that was the name of this particular aspect of the game: move and countermove, anticipate your opponent, put yourself inside his mind. And you had to be bold, you had to take the offensive; only the losers played defense, only the losers failed to employ tactical gambits. You had to make your decision, and quickly, without reservations. That was the winning way, the only way.

Vollyer made his decision.

He refolded the map, returned it to the glove compartment, and went to where Di Parma was stationed at the corner of the building, watching the highway. He said, “Still clear?”

“So far,” Di Parma told him. His large hands were nervous, agitated, like grotesque and misshapen wings. “Harry, when are we going to get out of here?”

“Pretty soon now.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“Stay cool, Livio.”

Vollyer turned again and moved quickly past an old dirty-white Chevrolet to the small cabin. The door was locked. He broke a pane of glass with the butt of the .38 and slipped inside. He spent four minutes in there, the first thirty seconds to locate the second telephone and cut its wires. When he came out again, he had a pair of Japanese-made, high-powered binoculars, a pocket compass, and a small canvas knapsack. He tossed the binoculars into the rear seat of the Buick, looked down at Di Parma; when Livio nodded continued clearance, Vollyer crossed to the storeroom window, slid it up, and climbed back over the sill.

Three minutes this time. The knapsack was now filled with six plastic bottles of water, a few pieces of fresh fruit, and some key-open tins of meat and fish. He took the sack to the Buick, dropped it onto the back seat with the binoculars.

Di Parma said urgently, “Car coming!”

Vollyer hurried to the corner of the building. A dusty late-model Ford was approaching along the access road, dust like rolling clouds of smoke billowing up on either side of it. There were no official markings on the car. As it drew closer, he could see that there were two people inside, a man and a woman, the man driving.

“Goddamn it!” Di Parma said.

“Easy. They’ll leave when they see it’s closed up.”

“What if they don’t? What if they’re out of gas or something, and they come nosing around back here?”

Vollyer looked at him sharply. Come on, he thought, don’t go rattled on me now. He said, “Just keep your head.”

“But what if they come around here?” Di Parma insisted.

“Then we kill them,” Vollyer said, and shrugged.

The Ford pulled onto the parking area and drew up near the pumps. Vollyer could no longer see it. He heard one of the doors slam in the hot quiet morning, and then only heavy silence. Standing next to him, Di Parma was sweating profusely; but Vollyer’s own face was dry, and his eyes were flat and hard. He listened intently, watching, waiting, his right hand on the .38 revolver in his jacket pocket.

A long minute passed, and then the car-door sound was repeated. The Ford’s engine made a loud, growling roar, a sign of the driver’s displeasure, and there was the harsh grating of tires spinning on gravel; the car came into view again, moving onto the access road, a moment later making the turn south on the highway.

Di Parma said, “Christ!”

Vollyer gave him an indulgent smile. “Come on, it’s time to move out.”

At the Buick, Di Parma looked into the rear seat at the items Vollyer had taken from the cabin and the café. “What’s all this, Harry?”

“Insurance,” Vollyer told him.

“I don’t follow.”

“You will, Livio, you will.”

Di Parma drove out from behind the café and along the access road to the now-deserted highway. Vollyer told him to turn north, and then leaned back and closed his eyes. There were faint liquid sun patterns behind the lids, pulsating, and the balls themselves felt too large for their sockets. Damned bright glare.

He hoped his aim wouldn’t be affected if he had the opportunity to use the Remington a little later on.

Nine

Brackeen was half-dozing in his partitioned office when Forester radioed in shortly before noon.

He was in good spirits. The hangover of the day before had all but disappeared by five o’clock, when he’d gone off duty, and four beers before supper had chased the last remnants of it. Later, he’d made up with Marge — damn, but she was still fine in bed, she was a hell of a lot better and hotter at forty than any of those young whores he’d had in Kehoe City — and he’d gotten a good night’s sleep for a change. This morning had been quiet; he’d done half an hour’s paperwork, looked into a minor vandalism complaint, and spent most of the rest of the time leafing through circulars from the FBI and State Police. When Bradshaw, the clerk and radio man, came in to tell him Forester was calling, he had been working up a mild thirst sleepily thinking of Sullivan’s and the upcoming lunch hour.

He got ponderously out of his chair, his soft belly swaying, and followed Bradshaw out to the PBX unit in the main room of the substation. He scratched himself sourly. Forester was due in pretty soon, and him calling now meant he’d gotten onto something — Christ only knew what piddly-ass thing it was — and that in turn meant that Brackeen was probably going to get a late lunch.

He sighed and took the hand mike Bradshaw proffered. He said, “Brackeen.”

Forester’s voice said excitedly, amid gentle static, “Listen, we’ve got a murder.”

A half-formed yawn died on Brackeen’s mouth. “A what?”

“A murder, a murder!”

“The hell you say. Where?”

“Del’s Oasis, out on the Intrastate.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Al Perrins, the guy bought Del out about six months back.”

“How do you know it’s murder?”

“Well, Jesus Christ, he’s got six bullet holes in his chest,” Forester snapped. “What else would you call it?”

Oh, these goddamn snotty bright-faces. “Any sign of who did it?”

“No. But I haven’t had the chance to go over the place yet.”

“You find Perrins yourself?”

“Yeah. I was cruising the area, and I thought I’d stop in for a quick Coke to take the edge off the heat, like I sometimes do.”

A Coke, Brackeen thought. You silly bastard, you.

Forester went on, “But the place was dark, all shut up, and the Closed sign was in the window. It didn’t figure for Perrins to be closed up on a weekday like this, and I thought maybe he was sick or something. I went around back, to that cabin he lives in, and the door glass had been broken in. The place was empty, but the phone wires had been cut and it had been gone through a little; hard to tell if anything was taken. I found the rear window to the café storeroom open, and crawled in to have a look around. Perrins was lying in a pool of blood behind the lunch counter.”

They’re always lying in a pool of blood, Brackeen thought. If you looked at ten thousand violent-homicide reports made by bright-faces like Forester, you’d find that in nine thousand of them the victims were found quote lying in a pool of blood unquote. He said, “All right, hang loose. I’ll be out there in about twenty minutes.”

Forester didn’t respond immediately, and Brackeen took satisfaction in the knowledge that the idea didn’t appeal to him. Finally Forester said, “Maybe you’d better get the county people and State Police out here.”

“Sure,” Brackeen said. “Twenty minutes, Forester.”

He gave the mike back to Bradshaw and told him to put the news of the homicide on the air to the county sheriff’s office — and to the Highway Patrol office — in Kehoe City. Then he located his Stetson and went out to where his cruiser was parked in front. He drove very fast, the way he liked to drive, windows down and the hot, thick air blowing against the textured leather of his face; the siren, shrill and undulatory, turned heads and cleared away the few cars which dotted the streets of Cuenca Seco and the county road beyond.

Brackeen felt a faint, half-forgotten stir of excitement as he sent the cruiser hurtling along the heat-spotted road. There had been a time when the commission of a crime such as murder set the juices flowing warm and deep within him, a time when his position as a representative of the law — of Justice — had inspired grim determination, a need to protect the citizenry from the lawless and the desperate. That time was long dead now — let the bright-faces inflate themselves with righteous vigor — but still, he could not help being interested in what Forester had had to report. A murder, any violent death, was an unheard-of occurrence in Cuenca Seco and environs, the last one having taken place in 1962 and that a husband-wife thing resulting from a protracted drought and flaring tempers, and a revolver kept too handy and too well supplied with bullets; in fact, any kind of overt crime was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent. There was no challenge to the job of law enforcement in Cuenca Seco, and that was the way Brackeen wanted it; but the fact remained that he had been a trained city cop once, dedicated in his own way, and a murder was something he couldn’t take with his usual indifference. That was why he was going to the scene personally, instead of letting Forester and Lydell and the State Highway Patrol have it all to themselves...

Forester was waiting for him under the wooden awning in front when Brackeen arrived at Del’s Oasis. He had a slender, athletic build and ash-blond hair and intense eyes the color of forged steel; in spite of the heat, his khaki uniform was fresh and crisp except for patches of dust on the trousers that he had apparently gotten from climbing through the storeroom window. He stood officiously, unmoving, watching the approach of his immediate superior without expression.

Brackeen parked his cruiser behind Forester’s, stepped out into the wash of heat from the perpendicular desert sun. He pushed his hat back and crossed under the awning. Forester nodded curtly, his sharp eyes now registering disapproval at what they beheld; he said, “The county and state people coming?”

“They’ll be along,” Brackeen answered. He moved past Forester and entered the oppressive warmth of the café. The shades had been pulled up and the lights were on; the air was thick with flies, buzzing angrily, circling. Brackeen went to the lunch counter and around behind it. Forester had apparently found a blanket somewhere and had used it to cover Perrins; the dead man lay sprawled on his back, one leg twisted under him, arms outflung. Wedging his big buttocks against the shelving beneath the counter, Brackeen knelt and drew the blanket back. Pool of blood, hell; there wasn’t much blood at all. Well, that figured. But the guy had been shot six times, all right, you could count each one of the scorched holes in the dark-spotted front of Perrins’ shirt.

Brackeen frowned slightly. Each of the holes was on the upper chest, left side and middle, over and around the heart, with maybe five inches between the two outside wounds. Some nice shooting — or some careful shooting. He replaced the blanket, stood up, and came out from behind the counter.

Forester was watching him from just inside the screen door. Brackeen looked at him and asked, “You go over the premises?”

“Naturally.”

“Find anything?”

Forester hesitated, and then shrugged, and then said, tight-lipped, “I think so.”

“What?”

“In the storeroom.”

Brackeen followed him across and into the storeroom. Near the window, a cot was pressed against the wall; on top of the cot, the handle of a broom wedged through two leather carry loops, was a battered overnight bag, zippered open.

Forester said, “Found that bag under the cot. Probably prints on it.”

“Probably,” Brackeen agreed dryly.

“Clothing and some other stuff inside. Clothes are too small to belong to Perrins.”

“All right,” Brackeen said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“Your theory.”

Forester smiled grimly. “I figure the bag belongs to a transient, a guy Perrins put up for the night, maybe had do some work around here. The sign up on the roof is freshly painted.”

Well, the bright-face was observant, at least. Brackeen said, “And so you think this transient shot Perrins.”

“That’s right.”

“Where did he get the gun?”

“Could have had it with him. Maybe stolen.”

“And the motive?”

“Robbery — what else?”

“Register cleaned out, is it?”

“Well, no, but that doesn’t have to mean much.”

The hell it doesn’t, Brackeen thought. But he said only, “Why not?”

Forester said, “Maybe the transient didn’t intend to kill Perrins. Maybe he only wanted to intimidate him with the gun. But Perrins could have tried to take it away from him, and the transient panicked and emptied all six loads into Perrins’ chest. Then he ran, so damned shook up he forgot his bag and the money. Panic does that to a man.”

What the hell do you know about panic? Brackeen thought with sudden, vicious anger. You son of a bitching wet-nose, what do you know about anything? Your theory is piss-poor, it’s got holes shot all through it. I was studying law enforcement when you were still crapping your diapers, and even on my first day on the force I could have told you no man in panic ever put six bullets within five inches of each other in another man’s chest. Whoever this transient is, if he exists at all, had nothing much, if anything at all, to do with Perrins’ death. You want to know what this thing looks like? It looks like a professional hit, a contract job, six slugs placed like that is the kind of bull’s-eye shooting hired sluggers go in for — but you’re such a smart-assed one you don’t even see it for your own self-importance.

Brackeen’s eyes smoldered as he looked at Forester — but then, as abruptly as it had come, the anger drained out of him. The old, comfortable apathy returned at once, and he thought: Oh Christ, what’s the use? As contemptuous as he was of Forester, he remembered that he did not want to antagonize him, not with his job hanging the way it was; and the quickest way to give a bright-face like that a potentially disastrous hard-on for him would be to explode his nice pat little theory.

But a small perversity made him press it just a little. “How do you explain the place being shut up the way it was? And the phone wires being cut? A guy jammed up with panic doesn’t take the time to do those things.”

Forester had an answer for that. “He could have done them first, maybe forced Perrins to close up at the point of the gun. He probably figured to tie Perrins up, and leave him here in the closed café. That would buy him enough time to get away.”

“Was the front door locked?”

“From the inside. He went out through the storeroom window, looks like — same way I got in.”

“How do you think he left here?”

“On foot.”

“Where? Up to the highway?”

“Sure, looking to hitch a ride.”

“Did Perrins have a car?”

“Naturally.”

“Is it here now?”

“Around back, by the cabin.”

“Then why didn’t this transient take the car?”

“Well, maybe he planned to,” Forester said, and there was anger in his voice now. “But it’s not running. I talked to Perrins yesterday, and he was working on it in his spare time. Listen, what’s the idea of all these questions? If you’ve got a better idea about what happened here today, why don’t you say so?”

Brackeen subsided. If he pushed it any further, Forester was liable to get peeved and put Lydell down on him for fair. Lydell was one of these Bible-thumping bigots, and a political hack on top of that, and he demanded harmony in his office and between his men — not to mention what he considered strict moral and ethical behavior; he wasn’t particularly fond of Brackeen to begin with, and it would not take much prodding to open his eyes all the way and then to make that final cut of the thread. So the hell with it; Lydell could chew up the bright-face’s presumptions, if he cared to, though he was such a goddamned incompetent that that wasn’t likely. Or maybe the State Highway Patrol investigators, who were pretty facile if too bloody plodding for Brackeen’s taste, might deflate him a little later on. In any case, the thing for Brackeen to do was to keep his mouth shut and fade into the background, especially when Lydell arrived.

He said, “No, I don’t have a better idea, Forester. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to start interrogating you.”

Forester looked at him steadily for a moment, and then made a magnanimous gesture that almost contemptuously reversed their roles. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, that’s all right.”

They went outside again, and Forester resumed his former position under the awning, waiting for the county units and the Highway Patrol, ready to send any arriving and curious citizens on their way. Brackeen left him and wandered around behind the café. The ground was rough and graveled there, but he could make out what looked to be faint tire impressions up close beside the rear wall. So it could be this transient of Forester’s had a car, he thought. Or it could be Perrins had some broad out recently to spend the night.

Or it could be a professional slugger parked his car around here just this morning, for one reason or another.

He went to the cabin and stepped inside. It had been gone through, for a fact, but the job had been a methodical one. Guys under panic, or pressure of any kind, didn’t conduct searches as neat and businesslike as this one had obviously been; guys looking for money, valuables, were always in a hurry, always sloppy. The only ones who were careful, unhurried, were the professionals, after a particular item or items. Transient, Forester’s skinny ass. A pro — one, possibly two. Why? Well, maybe Perrins had a past. Maybe Perrins had been hooked in with the Organization, or some independent outfit, in one way or another. Maybe Perrins had been dangerous to somebody.

Any way you wanted it, a professional hit.

And the hell with it.

Brackeen went out and around to the front again, and two county cars and two Highway Patrol cars and an ambulance had arrived from Kehoe City. Lydell was there, fat, sixtyish, as officious as Forester, eyes brightly excited at the prospect of his involvement in a violent death. A man named Hollowell was there, a special investigator attached to the sheriff’s office — short, balding, jocular, carrying two camera cases and a large bag which contained, as he made a point of explaining to Brackeen and Forester, the latest in fingerprinting and evidence-gathering equipment. Two plain-clothes State Highway Patrol investigators were there; their names were Gottlieb and Sanchez — which did not particularly endear them to Lydell — and they were both tall and dark and stoic.

All of them went inside and looked at the body, and Forester recounted how he had discovered it and showed them the overnight bag and told them what he thought had happened. Hollowell snapped several photographs of Perrins, from different angles, and then took his fingerprints; Gottlieb signed a release, and the ambulance attendants removed the body for Kehoe City. Sanchez prowled around and Gottlieb prowled around and Hollowell began lifting prints off suitable surfaces in the café and storeroom. Forester had Lydell in one corner, talking animatedly to him. Brackeen sat on one of the stools at the lunch counter and smoked and tried to look alert; he was wishing he had a cold beer.

Gottlieb and Sanchez went out and poked through the cabin in the rear and came back and said nothing to anyone. They ignored Forester when he tried to give them his theory again. Hollowell discovered a couple of clear latents off the handles of the overnight bag, and another off the window frame in the storeroom; the prints did not belong to Perrins. He told Lydell, and Gottlieb and Sanchez, that he would run them through the state and FBI files as soon as they got back to Kehoe City.

Brackeen stood it as long as he could, and then he went to Lydell and respectfully told him that he thought it was about time he returned to Cuenca Seco. Lydell, preoccupied, looking important, agreed that that was a good idea and dismissed him perfunctorily. No one paid any attention to Brackeen when he left.

He drove back to Cuenca Seco and parked the cruiser in front of the substation. The small perversity was with him again. He entered, told Bradshaw he was taking his lunch break, and walked down to Sullivan’s. He drank the first beer to Forester and the second to Lydell and the third to Hollowell and the fourth to Gottlieb and Sanchez and the fifth to crime.

He felt lousy.

And for the first time in a long time, he felt curiously empty.

Ten

The sun is fire above, and the rocks are fire below. The heat drains moisture from the tissues of Lennox’s body, drying him out like a strip of old leather, swelling his tongue, causing his breathing to fluctuate. It is almost three o’clock now, and the floor of the desert wavers with heat and mirage; midafternoon is the hottest part of the day out here, temperatures soaring to 150 degrees and above, and there is no sound.

The mind wanders.

He is nine years old, walking home from school, and in his right hand he holds clenched two dozen baseball cards which he has traded for that afternoon. He has several Dodgers and this particularly delights him, the Dodgers are his favorite team — Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox and Carl Furillo; and he has a rare Bob Feller, too.

He walks quickly, because he wants to get home and arrange these cards with the others he has, he is very close to the complete set, perhaps he even has it now with these new acquisitions. He turns the corner, and Tommy Franklin is there, hands on pudgy hips, scowling.

A tremor of fear rushes through him and he stops. “Hey, Lennox,” Franklin yells at him, and advances several steps. “You got my baseball cards.”

“These are mine,” he shouts back. “I traded for them.”

“No, they’re mine, I was supposed to get ‘em first and you butted in and now I want ’em.”

“It’s not fair, it’s not fair...”

“You better give me my cards, Lennox. I’ll beat you up if you don’t give me my cards.”

He tries to stand his ground. He tries to tell himself he can lick Tommy Franklin. But the fear is too strong within him. He chokes back the sob that rises in his throat and flings the cards down on the sidewalk — Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox and Carl Furillo and the rare Bob Feller, scattered out like bright leaves.

And he turns and flees, with Tommy Franklin’s derisive laughter ringing in his ears.

He runs all the way home.

How many hours has it been now? Five, six, a dozen? He does not know. He knows only that the skin of his neck and face and arms is painfully blistered, knows only that a burning thirst rages in his throat, knows only that the sun has swollen his eyelids to mere slits and the dusty sweat streaming in is like an acid-based astringent blurring and distorting his vision.

He has no idea where he is, the terrain all looks the same to him, he could be wandering in endless circles and yet he has been following the sun, angling toward it until it climbed to the center of the amethyst sky, and then moving away from it, keeping it at his left shoulder, as it began its descent. East, he knows he has been moving that way even though he has never been much good at directions — east, not in a circle, he is not lost.

And yet — where are the roads? Where is the town? He should have come upon them by now, he should have found help by now, maybe he is lost, oh God, maybe he’ll never find his way out, maybe he’ll die out here with the juices of his life sucked out of him by that monstrous sphere overhead—

The panic rears up inside him again, a flashing burst of it, and he cries out softly between lips that have long ago cracked and bled and dried and cracked and bled again. But the exhaustion, the dehydration of his flesh prevent him from plunging into headlong flight. He stumbles sideways, into a long shadow cast by a protuberance of granite, and clings to the hot stone with clawed fingers until the fear ebbs and leaves him weak and breathless.

The desert shimmers, shimmers, and a memory dances once more across the surface of his mind.

He is seventeen and very drunk. He and some of his friends are drinking beer in the prewar Ford which his father has bought him, road-racing in an abandoned development known as Happy Acres north of town. The radio is playing Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino, and empty bottles fly periodically out of the open windows, and scrawny little Pete Tamazzi is telling this story about how he got into Nancy Collins the week before, Nancy Collins being a very proper Catholic girl and president of the Student Body and obviously a virgin and obviously intending to stay that way, Pete being full of bullshit as usual and as usual the others urging him on to more and more graphic lies.

He sends the Ford into a sliding curve, and over his shoulder he shouts to Hal Younger, “Crack me another one, bartender.”

Hal opens a bottle and starts to pass it forward, and suddenly the interior of the car is filled with eerily fiashing red light. He looks up at the rear-view mirror, and laughter dies on his lips and the beer turns sour in his stomach. “Oh Christ!” he says.

The others are looking out through the rear window, and Pete says “Cops” and begins to hiccup.

“Well,” Hal says, “we’re screwed, guys.”

He knows he should stop. The police car is not far behind them, coming fast, the red light swirling hellish shadows over the black weed-tossed development, turning the faces of the boys in the car into demonic caricatures, visions in a nightmare.

He knows he should stop — and yet his beer-numbed thoughts are those of blue uniforms with shiny brass buttons, and small barred cells, and his mother crying and his father shouting. His hands grip the wheel and his foot bears down on the accelerator. The Ford has been modified, bored and stroked, three jugs, Mallory ignition, but it is no match for the new Chryslers the local police are using and he knows it. Still, he can’t stop himself, he can’t slow down, and now there is the sound of a siren to splinter the night around them, feeding his need to escape, to be free of these sudden pursuers.

He fights the wheel into a turn, gearing down, switching off the headlights. There is a pale moon, but it does not shed enough light by which to see sufficiently. But he knows the crosshatched roads in Happy Acres, he has been here many times with Cassy Sunderland and Karen Akers and with Hal and Pete and the others...

“Jack, what are you doing, for God’s sake!” Hal shouts.

And Gene Turner’s voice: “You can’t outrun them, you’ll kill us all!”

And Pete’s: “Jack, those are cops, they’re cops!”

He hears the voices and yet they are meaningless, they do not penetrate the thick haze of desperation which seems to have gained control of him. The Ford spins wildly forward under his guiding hands, rocking, pitching, engine whining, plunging through darkness into darkness, gear down, gear up, skid right, fishtail left, shortcut across that flat grassy stretch, and now he can see the road, the Western Avenue Extension. He looks into the rear-view mirror — and suddenly there are no stabbing white cones seeking out the Ford, no crimson wash to the landscape. He’s lost them, he’s beaten them, he’s won!

Exhilaration sweeps through him. He down-shifts into second as he reaches the Extension, slowing, but instead of turning right, toward town, he turns left and drives two thousand yards and swings down a rutted tractor lane; the lane borders a grassy-banked stream in which he had once picked watercress when he was younger, and there is a small grove of willows there. He takes the Ford in amongst the low-hanging branches, cuts the engine, and the black of the night enfolds them.

He turns to look at the others then, grinning, and their faces seem to shine whitely through the ebon interior of the car. The smile fades. He is looking not at admiration, not at gratitude — he is looking at trembling anger.

“You crazy bastard!” Hal says thickly.

“What the hell?” he says. “I saved you guys, didn’t I? Those cops were too far back to get a clear look at the car or the license. They don’t know who it was. If I’d stopped we’d be busted now, on our way to jail.”

“You could have killed us, you could have rolled this car right off the road,” Pete says.

“And suppose they’d caught us?” Gene snaps. “It would have gone twice as bad for trying to run away.”

He stares at them. “Listen,” he says, “we did get away. We had to get away and we got away. That’s all that matters. Don’t you see that, you guys? That’s all that matters, getting away.”

But they do not answer, and they do not speak again even after he leaves the willows a half-hour later and drives them slowly back to town.

Lennox pushes away from the granite profusion, again into the blinding glare of the sun. The few moments in the shade have helped his vision, and he can see again in a wavering focus. His eyes sweep the terrain: strange outcroppings of rock, tall cacti, mesquite and creosote bush and cat-claw, thick clumps of cholla climbing halfway along a volcanic cone—

What’s that?

There, there, off to the right?

Something... bright yellow, fiendishly reflecting the rays of the sun. Something made of metal — a car? the hood of a car? Is there a road over there? Are there people? A car means both, a car means help, a car means escape — is that a car?

Lennox feels the welling of relief, but tempered by the dim reminder of mirage, of other possible explanations for the brilliant reflection, of shattered hope. He fights down the urge to fling himself in that direction; it is a half-mile or more to where he sees the glare and he cannot run a half-mile, not now. Steadily, that is how he has to move, steadily.

But it is no more than a hundred yards before he breaks into a staggering and painful run...

Eleven

For Jana, it had been a quiet day.

Her sketch pad was now, in late afternoon, half full with charcoal and pencil drawings of the stark landscape which lay spread out before her, and she had made several notes and observations to be incorporated into the text of Desert Adventure. The intense heat had bothered her considerably after a while, and she had had to periodically relocate the blanket and her position in order to remain in one of the shifting patches of shade; but there had been nothing else to disturb her work — no inquisitive visitors, animal or human — and in spite of her mild aversion to her surroundings, she had immersed herself in the day’s project as completely as she had immersed herself in the outline yesterday.

Sitting now in the shadow of an oddly humped outcropping of granite, she laid the sketch pad aside and drank from the bottle of mineral water. Then she sat leaning back on her hands, feeling hot and drowsy, not quite ready to make the drive back into Cuenca Seco. She allowed her thoughts to drift, and when the image of Don Harper materialized, she did not recoil from it.

Detachedly, as if she were a disinterested third party clinically examining a relationship between two other people, she placed him mentally against a changing background of memories: Washington Square in the Village, gray sky, fluttering pigeons, leafless trees like skeletal fingers reaching upward, his cheeks flushed from the bitter-cold winter wind, laughing; an off-Broadway theatre with no name, a dramatic production with a forgotten title, sitting intently forward, brow creased, eyes shining, totally absorbed in the illusion being enacted under the floodlights below; the sparkling blue of Long Island Sound, streaked with silver afternoon light, cold salt spray flecking his cheeks as the bow of the sleek white sailboat glides through gentle swells, one large soft hand competent on the tiller, the other possessively on her hip, shouting merriment into the wind...

It was good then, she thought, it was fine then, but only because I was in love then. I was in love with fun and with excitement and with handsomeness and with charm and with sophistication — but not with Don Harper, the real Don Harper, the man. I didn’t know him, then, and maybe I wouldn’t have cared if I had. But it could never have lasted, I can see that now, it could never have been for us. Don has no depth, he has a tremendous surface but it is only a thin, thin veneer laid across an empty vacuum. He loves being a hedonist, he loves being an important account executive, he loves things — but not people, I don’t think so. He doesn’t love his wife, his poor wife, he never once mentioned loving her even after he told me about her. No, it was his position that he did not want to jeopardize, his pursuit of pleasure. He cared for me only as a decoration, public on his arm and private in his bed; and when the decoration began to take root, he threw it coldly and carelessly back into the jungle where he had first discovered it.

Lord, she wished she had been able to analyze Don and herself and the affair as objectively then as she seemed to be able to do now. The bitterness might not have been as overwhelming inside her, she might not have been so utterly demoralized, she might not have been so susceptible to—

Jana roused herself sharply. All right now, girl, that’s enough of that. You’re having a quiet day and you don’t want to spoil it by slipping back into the dark caverns of the past and there you go again with those damned literary images you silly broad. Shape up, look at that desert out there, look at that

man?

man out there?

Startled, Jana pulled onto her knees, onto her feet, staring intently at the child-sized figure which seemed to be staggering toward her across the rocky ground. My God! she thought, and then she did not know what to think. She felt a vague apprehension, a tiny cold cube of fright beginning to form in her stomach. Who was he? What was he doing out there? What did he want?

Her first impulse was to conceal herself in the rocks, perhaps he wouldn’t see her; then she thought of gathering up the blanket and the other things and running to the car and driving away very quickly. And then it was too late to do any of those things, even if she had been able, because he was waving his arms awkwardly, loosely above his head — he had seen her, he was coming to her.

Jana moved back against the rock, watching his approach, and as he grew from a child into an adult, his features became clearly defined. He was thin and his face, his clothes, his hair were caked with dust and sweat; he ran as if in great pain, blistered mouth open wide, the dry gasping of his breath audible in the desert stillness.

He came up to her, stopping several yards away, and knuckled his swollen eyes. He seemed to sway slightly, and Jana thought for a moment that he was going to fall. Compassion pressed at the edges of her anxiety, diminishing it. She relaxed somewhat, standing her ground; but she was still ready to bolt at the first sign of provocation.

“Who are you?” she said to him. “What happened to you?”

His mouth formed words, but he had no voice for them. He sank to his knees in the soft sand and braced his hands on his thighs, looking up at her. Relief and entreaty were apparent in his gaze, and the last vestiges of Jana’s wariness transformed into concern. Swiftly she caught up the bottle of mineral water — a little more than half full — and ran to where the man knelt watching her. She extended the bottle. He pulled it from her hands, making a sound that was almost a whimper. Head thrown back, holding the bottle in both hands, he sucked greedily at the neck of it. Water spilled out in his haste and washed away some of the thick dust on his lips, revealing them to be cracked and beaded with flecks of dried blood. Jana looked away.

He finished drinking, allowed the empty bottle to fall into the sand and drew the back of one sun-reddened arm gingerly over his mouth. Then, painfully, he pulled one leg under him and gained his feet, stumbling, finding his balance. Jana took an involuntary step backward, watching him now, but he made no move toward her. One corner of his mouth trembled, and all at once she realized that he was trying to smile.

“Can you talk now?” she asked him.

Soft, shuddering breath. “I... I think...” — testing his dust- and heat-parched vocal cords — “I think so.”

“How long have you been out there, under that sun?”

“All day. Years.”

“What happened?”

“My car quit running,” he said. “And I got lost. I’m not much of an outdoors man.”

“You should have stayed on the highway.”

“I wasn’t on a highway. I was out in the middle of nowhere. I’m a... rock hunter, you see. That’s my hobby.”

“You must be an amateur to go hunting rocks dressed the way you are.”

“Well... this is my first time on the desert.”

“Mine, too, as a matter of fact.”

“You don’t live in this area?”

“No. I’m just a tourist.”

“Are you alone here?”

Her tentative smile faded slightly. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just thought you might be. I saw the sun reflecting off your car, and then I saw you...” He ran a hand through his dusty hair, and looked beyond her to where the roadbed was visible through the rocks. “Where does that road lead?”

“To Cuenca Seco.”

“What about the other direction?”

“It’s a dead end.”

“How far to Cuenca Seco?”

“About seven miles.”

“Can you take me there? Right now?”

“Well...”

“I’ve got to get to a service station or a garage — some place that has a wrecker for my car.”

Jana considered it. He seemed harmless enough, an even worse tenderfoot that she was; and he hadn’t even looked at her as a woman, only as a savior, a beacon in a sea of arid heat. She couldn’t very well refuse him, not after what he had obviously been through today. He looked exhausted, and those blisters and skin cracks and sunburned patches needed medication. She was being too cautious — overreacting. This was the desert, not the streets of New York City. There was a different set of rules applicable out here.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll take you in.”

“Thanks, Miss—”

“Hennessey, Jana Hennessey.”

“Thanks, Miss Hennessey.”

“What’s your name?”

“Delaney,” he said. “Pete Delaney.”

Jana turned and began gathering up the blanket and the other things. She said, “You probably haven’t eaten all day, have you?”

“No,” he answered. “Nothing.”

“There’s some crackers and cheese in my bag. You’re welcome to what’s left.”

“Thanks,” he said again, softly, and followed her across to the waiting Triumph...

Twelve

Di Parma didn’t like what they were doing.

He didn’t like it one single damned bit.

What was the matter with Harry, anyway? He was acting like this was a picnic or something, sitting over there grinning in that funny little way of his, his eyes all bright. Vollyer was the best in the business, everybody said that, and he was a nice guy, too, and a friend. It was a real pleasure to work with him. You learned a lot from Harry, there was no doubt about that. But what kind of thing was this?

They had been on this damned twisting dirt road all day now, driving back and forth at ten miles an hour and all they had seen was some kid in a jeep chasing jackrabbits a half-mile from the county road — and him three hours ago. This guy, this Lennox, wasn’t going to show up around here, Harry was crazy if he thought that’s what was going to happen. The son of a bitch was long gone by now, he had made it back to that oasis or to the intrastate highway to flag down a car. Oh sure, Harry sitting there telling him about percentages and how you had to put yourself in Lennox’s shoes, but it still didn’t make any sense. Di Parma couldn’t see it at all.

What they should have done, they should have cut out. They should have hit the highway and driven straight back to the state capital and caught the first plane home. That’s what they should have done. So all right, the guy saw them make the hit. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as they had first thought. Lennox didn’t know their names, maybe he hadn’t even seen their faces clear enough to make a positive identification. Maybe he wouldn’t even go to the cops at all. A drifter like that, he wouldn’t want to get involved in any killing, he’d probably move out fast if he was a runner the way Harry kept saying he was. It was crazy to hang around on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. When the cops found the target’s body, they’d be leery of any strangers who had no good reason for being in the area. Christ, they were asking for it, they were just asking for it, it was crazy.

Di Parma reached down and turned the air conditioner up a little higher. It was hot inside the Buick, the bitch heat got through the windshield and through the other windows and the sun was so bright it was like having needles poked into your eyes after a while. He had a throbbing headache.

He didn’t want to be here, he wanted to be on that plane, he wanted to be home with Jean. He wanted to be in bed with her, holding her close, telling her how much he loved her. Oh Jesus, he loved her! He was crazy for her, to touch her, to be near her. She was beautiful. She was the most beautiful thing in the world. Her hair was like silk; he ran his fingers through her hair and he thought of silk and kitten fur and everything soft that he had ever touched. And her skin like rich cream and her body so perfect, and her laugh — oh, that laugh she had! Like music playing, sweet and low and warm. She loved him too, she told him that almost as often as he told her. She wanted to give him a kid. Imagine him with a kid; he’d never liked kids much but now he wanted one, he wanted to have one with Jean. A little girl. A little girl that looked like her, sweet and soft, and they would call her Jeannie, what else?

God, he wished he was with Jean!

Di Parma turned to look at Vollyer, and Harry was sitting there with that little smile, that damned little smile, sucking on an orange and looking out at the desert. He would tell Di Parma to stop any minute now, like he’d done a dozen times before, and then he would get out with those binoculars he’d taken from the target’s cabin and he would sweep the desert with them and he wouldn’t see anything this time either. It was crazy, it was just plain crazy.

“Harry,” he said impulsively, “Harry, haven’t we been out here long enough? He’s not going to show, Harry. I tell you, he’s not going to show.”

“We’ll give him a little more time,” Vollyer said, and it was the same thing he had said five or six times already. “You can’t make it five miles across the desert in a couple of hours, Livio.”

“You don’t know that’s what he’s doing,” Di Parma said.

“That’s right, I don’t know it.”

“And what if he is? What if he does reach this road like you figure? Maybe he won’t walk right along it. Maybe he’ll hide in the rocks when he sees a car. How do you know he didn’t spot this one back at the oasis? He might recognize it, keep to ground.”

“It’s a chance we’re taking.” Vollyer said evenly. “He’s a runner, Livio.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Runners don’t think, they just react.”

“Harry—”

“Stop the car,” Vollyer said suddenly.

“What?”

“Stop the car!”

“For Christ’s sake,” Di Parma said. He touched the brakes. Vollyer had the door open before the Buick came to a complete standstill, pulling off his sunglasses and raising the binoculars to his eyes. He was looking straight ahead, down the length of the road.

“There’s a car coming,” he said. “See the dust down there?”

Di Parma stared through the windshield. “Yeah, I see it.”

“Pull off in those rocks there. Hurry it up, Livio.”

Di Parma took the Buick off the road on the left, out of sight behind a jagged formation of sandstone that arched skyward thirty feet or more. Vollyer swung out, the binoculars in one hand, the Remington scope handgun in the other. Di Parma shut off the engine and followed him.

The sandstone arch was smooth and gently sloped on its backside, and Vollyer climbed it hastily, face bright red from the exertion. When he reached the top, he stretched out prone and stared along the road at the growing dust cloud.

Di Parma dropped down beside him. “It’s just another kid in a jeep.”

“Maybe.”

“Who else would it be?”

“Does that matter? We don’t want to be seen out here.”

“Why the gun, Harry?”

“Just in case.”

“We’re taking a hell of a lot of chances.”

“At this point, that’s the name of the game.”

“Harry, this is no goddamn game!”

Vollyer turned his head slowly and looked at Di Parma. “Shut up, Livio,” he said softly.

Di Parma could not see Vollyer’s eyes behind the smoky lens of the sunglasses, but the set of his mouth was hard and white. Harry was wound up tight, that was for sure. He’d never seen him wound up this tight before. His own guts were roped into a knot, because even if he didn’t like to admit it to himself, he was afraid of Vollyer. He had heard stories about what Harry was like when he was strung out, and they weren’t stories you liked to hear about your partner. If he got Harry down on him, he was begging for trouble he might not be able to handle. The thing for him to do was to go along with Vollyer, whether he liked it or not — to trust him as he had in the past. Harry would snap out of it pretty soon; you didn’t stay on top in this kind of business for twenty-five years by making the wrong moves. But this whole assignment had turned into a bummer, and there was no telling what would happen next when the luck was running sour. He had to get out of this, for Jean’s sake; she could never know what he really did for a living, never. She thought he was a salesman for farm tools. He hated lying to her, but it was the only way, she would never have understood—

Vollyer caught his arm. “Sports car,” he said.

Di Parma looked along the road, and the machine was nearing them rapidly. It was a sleek yellow Triumph with New York plates; the dust cloud billowed out behind it like a gigantic dun-colored parachute attached by invisible wires. Di Parma squinted against the glare of the sun, and he could see two people inside, a woman driving and the passenger a man sitting hunched forward on the seat.

The Triumph drew parallel to them, and Vollyer and Di Parma were far enough away and at enough of an angle to be able to look through the open window on the passenger side. They saw the dust-streaked, sunburned face of the man, saw it clearly, and it was the same face smiling out from the portrait photograph in Vollyer’s pocket — it was him, Lennox, the witness. Di Parma, staring, was incredulous. Harry had been right, he had been backing a winner after all. Jesus, the guy had come straight across the desert and hit this road...

Vollyer reacted instantly at the moment of recognition. He pulled off his sunglasses and gained his knees, turning slightly, planting his left foot at an angle out from his body to brace himself. He extended his left arm, crooked horizontally, and rested the long barrel of the Remington on his forearm, squinting through the Bushnell scope. The Triumph was pulling away, fifty yards beyond them, and Di Parma sucked in his breath, watching Vollyer, thinking: Squeeze off, squeeze off, Harry, for Christ’s sake!

Vollyer waited a moment longer. And fired.

Again.

Rolling echoes of sound fragmented the brittle late-afternoon stillness. Di Parma saw a hole appear in the dusty plastic of the Triumph’s rear window, saw the spurt of air and dust as the left rear tire blew. The little car began to yaw suddenly, its rear end snapping around, and Di Parma thought for an instant that it was going to roll. But it remained upright, plunging off the road on their side, hurtling through thick clumps of creosote bush, skidding sideways as the girl fought the wheel and the locked brakes, tilting, rear end folding in on itself as it slammed into a chunk of granite, caroming off, a second tire blowing now, driver’s door scraping another boulder, front end fishtailing again to point at still another outcropping, meeting it with a glancing blow and finally coming to a shuddering halt better than a hundred yards off the road.

Vollyer was already halfway down the slope, not looking back. Di Parma scrambled after him, and there was elation soaring through him. We’re all right! he thought. We’re going to come out of it just fine, Jean baby, I’ll be home in the morning...

Thirteen

Inside Lennox, the panic was a living, screaming entity.

It had been reborn the instant the angry, whistling pellet slashed through the rear window and imbedded itself in the dashboard, narrowly missing the girl. He had twisted in the seat and then the tire had blown and Jana had cried out, a keening sound that was a knife blade prodding the belly of the panic, enraging it, spiraling it out of control. The world spun and tilted crazily, and he felt himself thrown forward, felt sharp pain above his right eye as his head struck the windshield, felt blood flowing down to further distort the spinning montage outside the vehicle. Impact, grinding of metal, impact, the girl crying out again, impact, impact, and through it all the bright, hot panic clawing at the cells of his brain. He was not dazed, he was not confused. He knew what had happened, or the fear within him knew it; the equation was so very simple. They had found him: the killers had known about him all along and they had been looking for him and they had found him; he had no idea how, the how was not important, only the why was important and he knew the why.

Even before the car stopped moving, he was preparing flight.

And when it did stop, and the surrealistic movement became once again a motionless desert landscape, his hand was on the door handle, shoving it down, leaning his weight against it. Metal protested, binding, and he kicked at the door savagely, run, run, sweat commingling with the blood to half-blind him, and the girl was moaning words now, saying “My God, oh my God!” He looked at her — even with the panic he looked at her and she was the color of old snow, eyes glazed, still clinging to the wheel, repeating over and over, “My God, oh my God!”

Lennox kicked again at the door, and it gave finally and opened wide with a rending sound, run! and he was half out now, one foot on the ground, and his head jerked around, eyes searching through the dim red haze for the road, locating it. They were there, just as he had known they would be. Sunlight gleaming off metal extensions of their hands. Coming for him. Bringing death.

Run!

He levered his body up, supporting himself on the sprung door, and behind him the girl was still saying “Oh my God!” Suddenly, acutely, Lennox was fully aware of her. He looked at her, sitting rigidly in momentary shock, staring at nothing. Run, run, but something held him back, the girl held him back as if by some subconscious telepathy. He couldn’t leave her here, they would kill her, and even with the panic screaming there inside him, he couldn’t allow it to happen. He was responsible for her, he had gotten her into this, she was innocent. He had to take her with him. There was no inner debate, no real decision, it was simply a thing he was compelled to do.

Lennox reached back inside, and he had developed awesome strength. He locked his fingers on her arm and pulled her out of the seat, out from under the wheel, out of the car. She cried out in pain as a sharp edge of metal gashed her leg, and then he had her on her feet and he was staggering away from the car, half-dragging her behind, feeling her resist in spite of her shock and refusing to yield, dimly hearing her moan something at him but listening only to the shrill, clear voice of the panic now.

Into the rocks, near-falling, gasping, and a long way off a dull cracking sound, and another, and he knew they were shooting without really knowing it — keep moving, dodging, hang onto the girl, get away, get away, escape, fear shriveling his groin, fear gagging his throat, fear clamped onto his brain like a parasitic slug. And through the numbing wash of terror, a disjointed and yet intense feeling that it had always been this way for him, that his entire life had been one headlong flight; but like a wild thing in a wheel, he had never really escaped anything and never really would — and like that same wild thing, he would die running blind and running scared without ever having stopped running for even a little while...

Fourteen

Di Parma raised his arm and fired a third shot from the reloaded .38, but Lennox and the girl had vanished into the jagged mosaic of rocks. Vollyer yelled at him, “Save your ammunition! Think, Livio, think!”

He was a few steps ahead and to one side of Di Parma as they passed the damaged Triumph and plunged into the rocks. In his right hand was the other belly gun; the Remington was tucked into the waistband of his trousers now. It was only a two-shot, and the rest of the ammunition he had brought for it was in the case under the Buick’s front seat.

Pinnacles and arches and knobs jutted up from the sandy earth on all sides of them, and there were sharp-thorned cacti and thick growths of mesquite. They fanned out, probing the terrain with slitted eyes, but there were a thousand hiding places here, a thousand barriers to camouflage flight. They saw nothing. There were small sounds — shoes scraping stone, a muffled cry — but when they pursued they found nothing.

Deeper into the craggy patchwork, moving more slowly now, listening. Silence. The startled cry of a martin. Something reptilian slithering beyond a boulder. A soft, rattling sound — dislodged pebble — directly ahead of them. They converged on the spot, just in time to see a small brown rock squirrel scamper into a crevice; it gave off a high-pitched, frightened whistle and was quiet.

They spent another ten minutes searching — futilely. At the end of that time they paused in the shade under a rocky ledge and Di Parma rubbed at his mouth with his free hand. His face was screwed up as if he were about to cry, lower lip trembling faintly. Vollyer, looking at him, thought that he resembled a pouting little boy; but there was no fondness, no paternal tolerance, in the image now. You’re getting to be an albatross, Livio, he thought. Don’t let it happen. Don’t wind yourself around my neck.

Di Parma said, “Not again, Harry. Goddamn it, not again.”

“We’ll find them.”

“How did they get away? How?”

“They haven’t gotten away.”

“But we had them. We had them cold.”

“Even losers get lucky for a little while.”

“Who do you think that girl is?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. No, I guess not.”

Vollyer was thinking, calculating. “You keep looking, keep moving around. But don’t get lost.”

“All right.”

“If you see them, fire a shot.”

Moving in an awkward run, Vollyer made his way back to the sandstone formation and the Buick; it was undetectable from the road, if anyone chanced by, and he decided to leave it where it was. From the briefcase, he removed the spare ammunition for the Remington and the box of shells for the .38s and slipped them into the knapsack he had taken from Del’s Oasis. The binoculars were on the front seat, and he looped them around his neck. Then, carrying the knapsack, he closed the door and returned to where the battered Triumph had finally come to rest.

He stood beside it, letting his eyes sweep the area. Five hundred yards distant, angling sharply into the rocks, was what looked to be an arroyo. He hurried there and saw that the wash was thirty or forty feet deep and another fifty feet wide, with a boulder-strewn bottom sustaining ironwood and mesquite. He went back to the Triumph, pausing to listen; he heard only silence.

The driver’s door was jammed shut, and he had to move around to the passenger side to get into the car. Wedged behind the front seat was a handbag with a sketch pad and a notebook inside, and Vollyer took a moment to shuffle through them. The keys hung from the ignition lock. He switched it on and pressed the starter. At first, from the dull whirr, he thought that the car was inoperable, that it would have to be pushed out of sight instead; but on his fourth try, the engine caught and held feebly.

Vollyer went through the gears experimentally, and found that the transmission had not been damaged. He let out the clutch slowly, and the car thumped backward on its blown tires, the rims grating sharply, metallically over the rock. He backed and filled, skirting the stone formations at a crawl until he located a clear path to the edge of the arroyo. Once there, he set the hand brake just enough to prevent the car from rolling forward of its own volition, and then slipped out on the passenger side and went around to the rear. He leaned his weight against the crumpled deck, grunting as his soft muscles dissented, and managed to edge the lightweight machine forward until its front wheels passed the rim; momentum took care of the rest.

The Triumph slid in a rush down the steep wall of the arroyo. The front bumper struck a shelf of rock three-quarters of the way down, and the car flipped over and landed on its canvas top, crushing it, filling the air with the reverberation of breaking glass and twisting metal. One of the wheels turned lazily in the bright glare of the falling sun; stillness blanketed the landscape again.

Vollyer returned for the knapsack, which he had placed on the ground before entering the Triumph, and a few moments later Di Parma came out of the stone forest to join him. He had a small wedge of yellow material in his left hand, and he extended it to Vollyer. “Found this on a cactus in there. It must be from the girl’s blouse.”

“No sign of them otherwise?”

“No.”

“You know where you found this?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Vollyer nodded and gave him the knapsack. “Put this on,” he said. “We’ve got water, food, and shells in there — and three guns and a compass and a pair of binoculars. They don’t have a damned thing. We’ll get them, sooner or later.”

“It had better be sooner,” Di Parma said grimly. His big red hands were nervous at his sides. “I’m no good at chases, Harry. I don’t like anything about this.”

They moved forward into the rocks.

Fifteen

Jana and the man she knew as Pete Delaney were on higher ground, running parallel to the dry wash toward a low butte in the distance, when they heard the echoing crash somewhere behind them. It was a brittle and metallic sound, the kind a car would make upon impact with something hard and unyielding — the sound of ultimate destruction.

He stiffened and stumbled to a halt, looking past her, still holding roughly to her wrist. But there was nothing for him to see. He started forward with her again, but Jana held back, fighting breath into her lungs. Her temples pounded rhythmically, and the inside of her head felt as if it were layered in thick cotton. The effects of the shock which had gripped her following the Triumph’s wild flight off the road still lingered, and she could not seem to compose her thoughts; they were sluggish, like fat weevils in the cotton bunting.

She knew that it was no accident that they had gone off the road; she had heard the bullet humming just over her right shoulder, slamming into the dash, had heard reports behind them just before the rear tire exploded. Someone had shot at them, shot at them! But why? Pete Delaney? And those two men on the road running after them — more gunshots? She could not remember, she had been so dazed. Running, the rocks and the cacti, the fingers like steel bands on her wrist. The fear. She could feel it rise within her of its own volition, and, as well, seem to enter her body like an electrical current emanating from this man, Delaney. He radiated fear, it seeped from his pores like an invisible and noxious vapor. His face was a mask of it: gaffed mouth, protuberant eyes, throbbing veins.

She tried, now, to claw her wrist free of his painful grasp. He refused to let go. “You’re... you’re hurting me!”

He did not seem to hear her. His eyes made a furtive ambit of the area; ground cover was thinner here, less concealing. He looked into the wash. It hooked sharply to the left several hundred yards ahead, vanishing into more thickly clustered rocks, and its bottom offered sanctuary in the form of boulders and paloverde and an occasional smoke tree.

Jana tried again to free herself, vainly, as he pulled her down the inclined but not steep bank of the wash. She fell when they reached the rocky floor, crying out softly, putting another tear in her Levis and a gash in the flesh just below her knee; tears formed in her eyes as he jerked her to her feet, and she began to sob in broken, gasping cries.

He ran with her to the closest of the smoke trees and drew her down behind the twisted, multi-trunked base; over their heads, the blue-gray twigs on its thorny branches — nearly leafless now — looked like billows of smoke against the fading blue of the sky. He released her wrist then, and there were angry red welts where his fingers had bitten into her skin. Jana rubbed at the spot gently with her other hand, turning her face away, drinking air hungrily. She was still sobbing, more softly now.

Lying flat on his stomach, the man she knew as Delaney peered through the humped bottom branch of the smoke tree, looking down the wash for a time and then upward, along its western bank to the rocks through which they had come moments ago. Nothing moved. He pulled himself into a sitting position, air whistling painfully through his nostrils, facing Jana. He seemed less wild-eyed now, more in control; the mask of panic had smoothed.

“We can rest a minute,” he said thickly. “Not long. Are you all right?”

“What’s happening?” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“They shot us off the road, those two men.”

“Why? Who are they?”

“They’re killers.”

“What?”

“Killers, professional killers.”

“Dear God! What do they want with you? Who are you?”

“I’m not anybody, I’m just... Pete Delaney.”

“Then what do they want with you?”

“I saw them murder a man,” he said. “This morning, at the oasis stop on the highway. That’s why I was on the desert. I ran away but they found me somehow. They’ll kill me if they catch me. They’ll kill both of us now.”

Jana shook her head numbly, disbelievingly. Professional killers? She had always thought they were something conjured up from the imaginations of fiction writers. Murder? Death? Just words, more fiction, a sympathetic shudder at a morning newspaper headline — things that never touched your life, that were somehow not even real. And she felt a sense of unreality sweep over her, as if she were a player in a melodrama, in one of those turgid mystery puzzle things her drama instructor at N.Y.U. had loved to produce. The concept of her life being in danger, of death and menace, was utterly alien. It had all happened so fast, too fast; she had been sucked into a vortex and she no longer had control of her own destiny. She was trapped, helpless, she was terrified.

He said, “We’ve got to keep running. We can’t stay here. As long as we keep moving, we’ve got a chance.”

Jana stared at him, and suddenly she hated him, she wanted to strike out at him, it was his fault that this was happening to her, it was him. “You bastard!” she said, and she slapped him with the open flat of her palm. “Oh, damn you, you bastard, damn you, damn you!”

He caught her wrist as she raised it again, covering her mouth with his other hand. Jana struggled, but he held her tightly. He said, his voice trembling, “Stop it, for God’s sake, stop it! Don’t get hysterical, do you want them to find us?”

As abruptly as it had come, the rage abated within Jana and she slumped loosely in his grasp. She felt the hot tears flooding from her eyes again, and she tried to think, tried to understand, but the cotton had thickened inside her head, filling it completely. Vaguely she felt herself being lifted, felt him steady her with a corded arm about her shoulders. And then they were moving again, moving along the sandy floor of the wash, scattering an army of huge jet-black pinacate beetles which had emerged from their burrows, frightening a sinister-looking but harmless horned lizard.

Jana no longer tried to resist as they ran, and there was soon little moisture remaining in her for tears. Her head pulsated viciously, and the muscles in her thighs and ankles screamed in protest at the stumbling, accelerated movement.

They paused for brief moments of rest when their lungs threatened to burst, and Jana thought once of death — her death — and cried out fearfully; but then the tiny rift in the cotton mended and there were no more thoughts, there was only the running. Up out of the dry wash, through more rocks, across a short open space, veering away from the bluff in the distance, veering back to it, high ground, low ground, rocks and pebbles and sand, heat but not so intense now as afternoon faded into dusk, as a sky they did not see slowly and inexorably changed from blue to a deep, almost grayish violet.

Sixteen

The freshly born night wind blew softly, sibilantly through the low-hanging branches of the willow tree growing in Andy Brackeen’s front yard, and billowed the white front-window curtains in the simple frame cottage beyond. Beneath the willow, settled into an old wooden rocker, Brackeen balanced a can of beer on one thick thigh and held his face up to the fanning caress of the breeze.

Sunset was an hour away, and he had been sitting there, drinking beer, since he had come off duty a few minutes past five. The empty feeling with which he had come back from Del’s Oasis had lingered throughout the afternoon, and it was present in him now. He knew what it was, all right — it was this Perrins murder, the kind of thing he knew it to be — but the knowledge did nothing except increase the inner restlessness he felt.

I should have said something, he thought. I should have said something to Lydell and those state boys, and to hell with Forester. That stupid bastard. It was a professional job, for Christ’s sake, anybody ought to be able to see that, and him playing up to Gottlieb and Sanchez with that cockeyed theory about the drifter. And those two: methodical and noncommittal, just like the goddamn state government, like any goddamn politician you could think of. Wait and see. Check this, look into that, put it all together with a pencil and a slide rule and two weeks of horseshit across an air-conditioned office. That wasn’t police work, that was fat-assed bureaucracy in action. By the time anybody got around to doing anything, the slugger or sluggers could be shacked up with a pair of cooch dancers in the Bahamas and the trail would be ice-cold.

And this poor drifter, whoever he was, was going to take the shaft for it, sure as hell. They had his prints — what they figured were his prints — in Washington now, since the state check had been negative, and as soon as they identified him there would be a pickup order out on him five minutes later. Which was all right, if the thing was handled right — but Brackeen didn’t think that it would be; when they picked this guy up, they would hammer at him on the killing and turn deaf ears to anything else he had to say. There was nothing wrong with slapping a guy around if you figured he was holding out, Brackeen thought this Supreme Court/civil rights/police brutality stuff was so much puckey, but you had to keep an open mind nonetheless, you had to listen to what was being said and figure maybe there was an angle you were overlooking. That was what made a good cop. A good cop had an open mind, and there wasn’t a good cop in this whole bloody state that Brackeen had met in the entire time he had been here.

This drifter — why had he run? Well, you could figure it simply enough: he had seen something. And what had he seen? Perrins getting hit? The guy or guys who did the job? It could be, too, that he had stumbled on the body after the shooting and thought that he might be tagged for it and cut out for that reason; but if that was the case, why had he left his overnight bag there, and fingerprints on a dozen surfaces?

Figure he saw something, then, figure he saw the hit. So he runs. Where does he run? He doesn’t have a car; that doesn’t add. Would he go to the highway the way Forester had it? Or would he head into the desert? Circumstances. If he saw something, and got away clean, he’d head for the highway because that was the quickest potential way out of the area. But if he was spotted by the sluggers, the desert would be his choice; there were innumerable hiding places out there, as long as you had the guts — or enough fear — to risk snakes and the sun and the badlands themselves.

And if that was the case, what would the hit men do? Go after him, in one way or another? It had to be that way: no pro was going to leave a witness, not under any circumstances. If all of this was accurate thinking — and the chances of it were good enough to preclude light dismissal — then maybe the killers of Perrins were still somewhere in this area. And maybe the drifter was, too. If they hadn’t caught him. If he was still alive.

Well, Jesus, this whole thing was giving him a headache. Had it been up to him, he’d have had helicopters out and a couple of roadblocks set up two hours after he’d seen the way things were at the Oasis. But it hadn’t been up to him, he was out of it, he was just a resident-in-charge with his job hanging by a thread and a yen for noninvolvement. The thing for him to do was let it alone, forget about it, but he could not seem to do it; he wanted to be shut of it, he wanted the old status quo, and yet it would not let him alone, it kept eating at him and eating at him...

Brackeen lifted the beer on his thigh and drained it and put the can on the ground beside the rocker. There were six cans there now and he was as sober as he had been when he arrived home. He looked at the house and shouted, “Marge! Marge, bring me another beer!”

The front door opened after a time and a big woman with dark blond hair came out on the porch. She had huge, soft breasts and firmly wide hips and thick thighs that vibrated sinuously when she walked; her face was round and well-tanned, and the age lines were faint, pleasant trails crosshatching its contours. Brackeen, watching her come down the steps toward him, felt the same stirring hunger deep in his loins that he had felt the first time he saw her, here in Cuenca Seco, those many years ago. She was a lot of woman, you, couldn’t deny that — a kitten when you wanted it one way and a hellion when you wanted it the other, a listener instead of a talker, a rock, a wall, uncomplaining and unquestioning, always there, always waiting. She was the kind of woman he had desperately needed after what had happened in San Francisco, the kind of woman he had to have in order to maintain his sanity; he owed a lot to Marge, he owed a hell of a lot to her.

Marge handed him the beer she carried, and then stood looking down at him. “What’s the matter tonight, Andy?” she asked at length.

“Why?”

“Something’s bothering you.”

“It’s nothing, babe.”

“It’s that murder today, isn’t it?”

“You heard about that, did you?”

“The whole town’s talking about it.”

“All right, so they’re talking.”

“Are you investigating?”

“Christ, no.”

“Well, what do you think happened?”

“What difference does it make what I think?”

“Do you think that drifter did it?”

“The hell with the goddamn drifter,” Brackeen said.

“God, you’re in a mood,” Marge said.

“So I’m in a mood, so what?”

“So come in the house and I’ll see what I can do about it.”

“It’s too hot for screwing.”

“You didn’t think it was too hot last night.”

“That was last night.”

“You really are in a mood,” Marge said. She turned and went up on the porch again, moving her hips. When she got to the door, she looked back, but Brackeen was sitting there in the rocker with his eyes focused on the base of the willow tree. She shrugged and went inside and shut the door softly.

Brackeen drank from his fresh beer, and smoked a cigarette, and the night wind blew cool and feathery across his seamed face. After a while he decided that maybe it wasn’t too hot. He got up from the rocker and went into the house, and Marge was waiting for him just the way he had known she would be.

Seventeen

When the last burning edge of the sun vanished in the flame-streaked sky to the west, the harsh desert landscape softened into a serene and golden tableau. Gradually, almost magically, the horizon gentled into a wash of pink and the pale sphere of the moon rose, the desert turning vermilion now — as if infrared light were being cast over it. Shadows lengthened and deepened, and there was an almost reverent hush across the land.

Vollyer stood on a high shelf of rock, the binoculars fitted to his eyes, and turned in a slow pirouette until he had described a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. It was like looking at a particularly vivid three-dimensional painting: the motionlessness was absolute. He lowered the glasses finally, reluctantly, and climbed down to where Di Parma sat drinking from one of the plastic water bottles.

Wordlessly, Vollyer sat beside him and pressed his hand up under his wishbone. The ulcer was giving him trouble again, not enough to hamper him seriously but just enough to be annoying — like an omnipresent but not especially painful toothache. As if that wasn’t enough, his eyes still ached, and even now, with darkness approaching rapidly, they were still watering. Ruefully, he looked down at the dusty, torn material of his expensive trousers and shirt, the now-filthy-gray cashmere of his jacket lying with Di Parma’s suit coat and the knapsack in the dust at their feet. I must look like hell, he thought; I must look like something off the Bowery in New York. I wonder what Fine-berg, the tailor, would say if he could see me now — or one of those bow-and-scrape waiters in the restaurants along the Loop back home. No man can be cultured or refined or genteel — or even respectable — when there’s dirt on his face and a rip in his pants. One of the game’s little axioms.

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.

Eighteen

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.

She did not answer.

“Jana?”

“Yes, I come from New York,” she said wearily.

“What do you do there?”

“I write books.”

“What kind of books?”

“Children’s books.”

“Is that why you’re out here?”

“I... yes. Yes.”

“What were you doing all alone today? Research?”

“I was making some sketches.”

“You do your own illustrating?”

“Yes.”

“It must be a fine thing to have artistic talents.”

“It’s a lot of hard work.”

“Where do you live in New York? Greenwich Village?”

“I don’t live in New York any more.”

“Well, where do you live? Out here? This state, I mean?”

“Oh God,” she said, “what difference does it make? We’re going to die on this desert, you know that, don’t you?”

“We’re not going to die,” Lennox said.

“How are we going to get away?”

“I don’t know. We’ll get away.”

“No,” she said, “no, we won’t.”

He had a sudden thought, and hope touched him faintly, clinging. “Are you living here? Or are you just staying in the area — with friends, maybe?”

“In a hotel,” Jana answered. “Why?”

“In Cuenca Seco?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone know you came out here today?”

She frowned. “The desk clerk. He showed me how to get here on a map.”

“Anyone else?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did the clerk seem interested in you?”

“His eyes were all over me, if that’s what you mean. What are you getting at?”

“I was thinking that when you didn’t come back tonight, he might have gone to the police and reported you missing. And that they might send out some men to look for you.”

“Why should he go to the police if I don’t come back right away? He’d be a fool to do that.”

“It’s a chance, that’s all.”

“Is it the only chance we have?”

“No. No, not the only one.”

“What will we do when we leave here? Keep running the way we did today?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to think what to do.”

The wind whistled in a gentle monotone between the rocks and stroked Jana with chill intimacy; she hugged herself again, shivering. “God, it’s cold. I had no idea it got this cold on the desert at night.”

Lennox watched her rocking slightly and he felt very sorry for her. He crawled stiffly across to her, raised himself up on his knees. “We’d better huddle together for warmth,” he said softly, and put a tentative arm about her shoulders. “If we don‘t—”

She pulled away from him viciously, pushing him off balance, so that he fell on his right elbow. Her eyes, in the moonshine, were wide, flickering pools. “Don’t touch me!” she said. “Damn you, don’t you touch me!”

He stared at her. “I was only thinking—”

“I don’t care what you were thinking.”

“For God’s sake,” Lennox said, “I only wanted to make it a little easier for you, for both of us.”

“Leave me alone, just leave me alone.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

“Just keep your hands off me, that’s all. I don’t like to be touched. I don’t want you to touch me.”

“All right.”

“All right.”

She lay down in the sand, facing toward him but not looking at him, her body pulled into a fetal position, her arms folded tautly over her breasts. He stared at her for a long time, but she did not move and her eyes did not close; finally he rolled onto his back and covered his own eyes with his arm, shielding out the moonlight, embracing the darkness.

What’s the matter with her? he thought. I only wanted to make her warm.

And then he thought: I wonder if I can sleep?

And slept.