Panic!

One

It had been this way for Brackeen in San Francisco:

A patrolman with an impressive record in his four years on the force, one soft step from a promotion to plain clothes and an inspectorship, he had been teamed with another good, young officer, Bob Coretti. Their cruise beat was the Potrero District, and the industrial and waterfront area extending from China Basin to Hunters Point; it was not the safest or the cleanest patrol in the city, but they knew it well and they functioned well in its jungle of streets and alleys and dark old buildings. They were known, even respected, as tough but decent heat — and as a result they had even built up a small but dependable stable of informants who would put them on to minor rumbles for a few dollars’ cash.

It was one of these tipsters, a pool hustler named Scully, who gave them the line on Feldman.

They were cruising on South Van Ness, a few minutes before ten of a bleak Thursday in early February. It had been a quiet night, like you can get in early winter, the sky filled with a biting wind and a thin rain; the heater in their patrol car was not working, and Coretti, who was driving, had been complaining about the fact for the past hour. He was telling Brackeen that he was tempted to fix the damned thing himself and send the city a bill for repair costs, when Scully came out of one of the bars along the strip and gave them the high sign.

They met him ten minutes later, in a deserted parking lot, and he told them what the grapevine had. According to the rap, he said, this Feldman was a parlor collector for a string of books in Southern California, who had lost the battle with the obvious temptation. Scully didn’t know exactly how much he’d gotten away with, but since the betting had been unusually heavy at Caliente on Saturday, his guess was five figures. The tip was that Feldman had come into San Francisco, and was grounding in a tenement hotel — room 306 — a couple of blocks off Third, near Hunters Point.

Brackeen gave Scully ten bucks, and then he and Coretti went to check it out. They didn’t say much on the ride over, nor did they radio in to Dispatch their destination and mission, as they should have done. They were tense and excited; both of them knew that taking this Feldman might be the lever they needed to get out of a patrol car and into the General Works Detail at the Hall of Justice. They did not want to share this one — not until they had Feldman in custody. Neither of them even considered the possibility that they might not be able to handle it.

The hotel Scully had named stood between a storage warehouse for one of the interstate truck lines and an iron foundry, midway on the block; it was a three-story wooden affair, well over half a century old, cancerous and dying and yet clinging to its last few years with a kind of bitter tenacity. A narrow alley separated it from the iron foundry on the right. Inside, the sparse lobby contained the strong musty smell of age — the smell of death wrapped in mothballs — and little else; there was no one behind the short desk paralleling the wall on the right.

Brackeen said, “No use making announcements. We’ll do this nice and slow and quiet.”

Coretti nodded, and they went across to a set of bare wood stairs and climbed carefully and soundlessly to the third floor. They stopped in front of 306, and without speaking, moved one on either side of the door, drawing their service revolvers. When they were set, Brackeen reached out with the barrel of his gun and rapped sharply on the door panel.

Momentary silence. And then a faint creaking of bedsprings. The only sound in the hallway was their quiet breathing. Brackeen knocked on the door again, and again there was silence. They looked at one another, and Coretti shrugged and Brackeen moved away from the wall, stepped back to get leverage, and then slammed his foot against the thin wood just above the knob. The lock held. He drove his foot forward a second time, viciously, and the lock pulled from the jamb with a protesting screech of rusted metal and the door kicked inward heavily. Feldman was at the far window, one leg over the sill, and he had a tan pasteboard suitcase in his left hand and a big Colt automatic clenched in his right. He froze momentarily as the door gave; then his arm lifted and the gun jumped once, twice, three times, billowing flame.

Brackeen was the first into the room, and he threw himself to the floor as Feldman fired, landing on his right shoulder and spoiling the shot he had. Coretti was half in and half out of the open doorway, a clear target, but Feldman’s shot was wild, showering plaster dust from high in the wall above the open door. Coretti ducked back into the hallway.

Brackeen gained his knees, brought his service revolver up and on the window — but by then Feldman was just a dim shadow seen through the pelting rain on the fire escape outside. He snapped a quick shot that shattered the window glass, and shards fell and broke on the sill and floor with a sound like the ringing of tiny discordant bells; the bullet whined off into the night and he thought he could hear Feldman’s heavy shoes retreating on the iron rungs of the fire escape.

He turned to yell to Coretti to get downstairs, to block the alley, but Coretti had thought of that already; he was pounding down the stairs at the end of the hall. Adrenalin flowed through Brackeen in a hot, thick rush and he turned back to the window. They couldn’t let Feldman get away, not this one, not the big feather that was going to get him the promotion he’d worked for so long and so hard. Without thinking further, moving on reflex, he ran to the window, threw one leg over the sill, and started out onto the fire escape.

Feldman was standing there, on the second rung down, and the bore of the automatic in his hand was centered on Brackeen’s face.

He couldn’t move. The unexpectedness, the shock of it, petrified him, and in that single instant Feldman — thin face white, frightened, homicidal — squeezed the trigger. The sound of the hammer falling was a deafening explosion in Brackeen’s ears and he thought Oh God, I’m going to die, I’m dead and the sudden fear was like a wiggling, slime-cold thing in his groin and his rectum and his belly, penetrating to the very core of him, touching the soul of him, and a scream that had no voice echoed through every cell and nerve-ending in his body. He looked at death, seemed to look beyond it to a terrible darkness, and his horror was pure and primeval. The second explosion, the ultimate explosion, was monstrously loud and he felt the bullet tear into his face, shattering bones, spurting blood, ending his life, ending the world.

And yet, it was all in his mind.

The explosion, the pain, was illusion. The automatic jammed, miraculously it jammed, and there was only the rain and the great mushrooming sound inside Brackeen’s head. Feldman looked at the gun in disbelief, and then he turned and fled down the slippery metal steps, almost falling, not looking back.

It was not until then that Brackeen realized he was still alive.

The realization came slowly, and at first he refused to believe it. I’m dead, he thought, and felt the cold rain on his face and a sliver of glass cutting into his thigh, sending faint signals of pain from his clouded mind. I’m dead, and his eyes cleared and he could see Feldman reach the bottom of the fire escape — one of those old-fashioned ones that ended flush with the pavement — and start running wildly across the slick alley floor. I’m dead, I have to stop him, two confused and conflicting thoughts, and he tried to raise the gun in his right hand. He had no strength. He felt incredibly weak, worse than he had as a kid after a bout with double pneumonia, but he was alive — accepting it now, the miracle of it — he was alive; and the trembling started. He straddled the window sill, shaking like a malaria victim, and through dulled eyes he saw Feldman disappear into the solid darkness between the hotel and the iron foundry at the alley mouth.

A moment later there was the sound of a shot. And then silence. And then another shot. The rain drummed hollowly on the metal of the fire escape, and the wind hurled itself against the walls of the narrow canyon like a caged thing. Somewhere in the building, a woman shouted querulously. A long way off, the moan of a siren punctured the wet blackness of the night.

Brackeen sat there for what seemed like an eternity before he was able to move again. When he stood up finally on the iron-slatted platform, the weakness buckled his knees and he nearly fell, bracing himself against the cold wood of the hotel wall. Going down, he held onto the railing with both hands, the service revolver back in his holster although he did not remember putting it there. He reached the alley below and walked toward the gray-black of its mouth; his gait was shuffling, awkward, like one of the wet-brains he had seen on Skid Row. When he reached the street, he saw that several people in various stages of undress were huddled around something on the sidewalk, murmuring and fluttering like sparrows. He went there and looked down.

It was Coretti, and he was dead.

He had been shot in the face.

Brackeen turned away and stumbled back into the alley and puked in the rain until there was nothing left, until another patrol car arrived on the scene. He was better then, and the trembling, though still noticeable, was less violent; the homicide inspectors who came a few minutes later attributed it to nervous reaction and simple shock. Brackeen did not tell them what had happened on the fire escape. He did not tell them how, in a sense, he was responsible for Coretti’s death. He made his report and he let them take him back to the Potrero precinct to change and then he went home and stayed there for three days, thinking about what had happened, examining it, and each time he relived the scene — saw the black hole of the automatic staring at him, death staring at him — he broke out in a cold sweat and began trembling and felt the fear squeezing painfully at his genitals. He took out his gun two dozen times in those three days and held it in his hands two dozen times, and two dozen times he had to put it away because the sight of it, the feel of it, made him sick to his stomach. And when he slept, he dreamed of a scythe blade descending and fleshless fingers beckoning and Coretti pointing at him, saying his name again and again through the gaping, bleeding hole in what had once been his face...

Brackeen went back on duty the fourth day — the day Feldman tried to shoot it out with a team of detectives from the Fresno force and died with nine bullets in his head and torso and a .32 Iver-Johnson back-up gun in his pocket, which a later ballistics report proved was the weapon that had killed Coretti. But it was no good. He could not face his fellow workers any more than he had been able to face himself, despite their sympathy or perhaps because of it. He stuck it out for two weeks, and at the end of that time he knew he was finished as an efficient big-city cop, knew that he would never again be able to face a gun — perhaps not even to use one in any kind of tight situation — without the shaking and the sweating and the petrifying fear. He was a coward, deep down where a man lived he was rancid jelly, and Coretti’s death was a crushing weight on him; he could not take the chance of crapping out in some future crisis, and possibly having the blood of another good cop on his hands and on his soul. He loved police work, he had been born to it; but knowing what he now knew about himself, he simply could not continue.

And so he resigned from the force, quietly, and everyone seemed to understand without anything being said. After a few aimless months in the Bay Area, during which he found and lost several jobs — always for the same reason: listlessness and inattentiveness and disinterest — he drifted south. A year in Los Angeles working the produce market, six months in Dago as a hod carrier, and then, finally, the desert and Cuenca Seco and Marge and marriage. He worked in the freight yards in Kehoe City for a while, and when Marge’s uncle offered him a job in his feed store, Brackeen accepted that.

He had no intention of taking on the resident deputy’s position when it came up. Marge had managed to pry loose from him at one time or another the fact that he had once been a cop, but that was all of his past he would reveal to her; she told her uncle about it, and the uncle had some kind of political pull with the county and offered to finagle the job for Brackeen if he wanted it. Brackeen said no, and he meant it at first; but they worked on him, Marge and the uncle, reminding him of how unhappy he was at the feed store, chipping away at his resistance in a dozen little ways. He began to think about it, and the cop in him — a thing that, like the shame and the guilt, had not died over the years — forced him eventually into doing some checking on the resident’s duties. They consisted, he learned, mostly of sitting behind a desk, making routine patrols, and administering traffic tickets — no hassles, no problems, no crises to face, no partners to watch out for. He wondered if he could wear a gun again. He went with the uncle to the substation in Cuenca Seco and strapped one of the Magnums on and took it out and held it in his hands. Something stirred deep within him, but he did not tremble and he did not sweat and he did not feel sick at his stomach. As long as he wasn’t forced to use it, he thought, he might be all right.

He took the job.

And here he was.

Brackeen lay in the early-morning darkness, the warm pressure of Marge’s hip against his thigh, and thought it all through again for the first time in a decade.

He did not want to think about it, and yet his mind dwelled on it just the same. There was no pain now; time had put a thick skin over the wound even though it had failed to heal it. But what there was, was a deep feeling of incompletion, a kind of vague hunger that seemed to have always been there, unfulfilled. The same emptiness he had experienced that afternoon in Sullivan’s Bar. The past was touching him again, as it had not touched him in a long time, and the ghosts of pride and manhood haunted him vaguely, like wraiths half-felt in the darkness, never quite manifesting themselves and yet never quite vanishing either.

It was this goddamn killing that was responsible; he couldn’t get it out of his head, he couldn’t combat the perverse mental involvement in it. It was as if, strangely, it was a personal thing, demanding his intervention, demanding a commitment on his part that he had been unable and unwilling to make since that cold, wet February night when a part of him died along with Bob Coretti. And he didn’t know why; the reason for it was an enigma that he could not solve.

Brackeen turned his head on the pillow and looked at the luminescent dial of the clock on the bedside table. Five A.M. Another hour and a half before the alarm would ring. Another three hours before he was due at the substation to assign Forester some innocuous paperwork. This was one of the days, of which there were two in each week, when county policy dictated a reversal of roles: the bright-face would sit behind a desk and Brackeen would make the routine patrols. The idea was to give the assistant deputies a taste of office duty, while the residents kept abreast of their districts on the outside. Brackeen had always disliked the patrolling — it reminded him, in an ephemeral but uncomfortable sense, of the days and nights he and Coretti had cruised the Potrero in San Francisco — and the prospect of it on this day was even more unappealing. He wanted to know what was happening in Kehoe City and in the capital on the Perrins thing; he wanted to know what the fingerprint and personal background checks had turned up; he wanted to tell Lydell and the State Highway Patrol investigators what he thought and to make some recommendations and to hell with rocking the boat. Damn it, he wanted to be involved in it.

Even though he did not want to be involved in it.

The ambivalence was so strong in him, so frustrating in him, that it was almost like physical pain.

Two

Dawn.

On the desert, the first light is silvery and cold. The moon and the stars fade as darkness recedes, and the quiet is absolute, almost eerie. Then, slowly, magically, the silver becomes gold and the sun peeks almost shyly between distant mountain crests. There is warmth in the air again as the long shadows of towering saguaros stretch across the desert floor, as the grotesquely beautiful rock formations turn the color of flame.

Once again the light changes, becoming a brilliant yellow-white, as the sun reveals more of itself on the eastern horizon. The stillness is broken now by the chattering of quail, by a half-muffled burst of machine-gun fire that is nothing more than the cry of a cactus wren. The desert begins to shimmer with heat and mirage, and as the temperature rises with the sun and the glare increases, human vision once again blurs and there is no more softness, no more beauty, no more serenity to the land. Illusion is consumed by reality, and reality is a middle-aged whore at high noon: coarse, ugly, and uncompromising.

The runners are there, running there, running since that first silvery light, running now through a sea of cactus — barrel, agave, saguaro, prickly pear, cholla, beavertail. Thorns like tiny needles, like slender jade daggers, like gleaming stilettos rip at their skin, at their clothing, inflicting painful but half-noticed scratches and punctures that bleed for a moment and then dry up almost immediately. They are three-quarters of the way across, and their momentary objective — a low butte — looms reddish-brown and barren in the climbing sun.

They are no longer running blind, they have a direction now. North. Cuenca Seco or the county highway or perhaps even the dead-end road. It is the best choice in spite of the fact that it is the obvious one, this is what Delaney — is that really his name? — told Jana in the fort this morning. She does not know if he is right but she has to believe in him because there is no one else to believe in in the suddenly miniaturized confines of her world. She no longer hates him. Like her, he is here as a result of cruel and bitter circumstance; the fault is not his, there is no fault. She does not want to be alone and she does not want to die out here, even though she is very certain that she is going to die out here. But hope is the foundation of sanity, and there is hope even in the most fatalistic of men if that man is sane. Let the fearful be allowed to hope. To the last breath, to the bitter end, to the final revelation. Ovid said it and Aristotle said it and the New Testament said it and now Jana Hennessey is saying it.

I’m keeping the faith, baby; I’ve got hope.

Her mind is touched by these random thoughts, and random others, as she runs. She wonders what Harold Klein will say when he learns of her death. What Don Harper will say. Even what Ross Phalen at Nabob Press will say. She wonders if there will be much pain or if it will be over quickly. She wonders if God is alive and if He is, what Heaven is like; she has sinned, yes, many times in many ways but she does not believe in the existence of an orthodox Hell, fire and brimstone and all that nonsense, only the truly wicked — which she is not — are unforgiven at the Judgment and their souls are destroyed instantaneously rather than having to suffer eternal damnation.

She wonders what kind of man this Delaney, this drifter, is. She wonders why he asked her about herself last night. She wonders why she was unable to control the violent reaction to his touch, to his offer of warmth, when it was so obviously genuine. She had almost frozen, lying there with the wind chilling her, wanting to go to him and the warmth of him and yet afraid, afraid of the maleness of him, afraid of her own actions — immediate and ultimate. Her loneliness, magnified by the coldly brittle stars, the fat white moon, the velvet blackness, had been immense; and yet, the other thing, the fear of herself, had been stronger. Even with death so apparently imminent, she could not and cannot bring herself to face the question which has been in her mind for the past few weeks, the root of her flight from New York. She would rather die with the question unanswered; it would be better that way.

More thoughts come and go, fleetingly, like subliminal messages on the surface of her brain. Some of them make little sense.

Delaney — somehow, Jana feels that is simply not his real name — stops abruptly and bends into the shadow of a cactus. When he straightens again, he holds in his hand a long, slender piece of granite, smooth and rounded on one end, flared and sharply pointed on the other. It resembles a hunting knife, and it shines wickedly in the sun.

Jana finds words. “What good is that thing?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. “It’s something, at least.”

“I have to rest pretty soon, I can’t go much further without some rest.”

“When we get around that hill.” He puts the granite knife into his belt on the left side.

She tries to compose her thoughts as they run again, but the heat and the malevolent cactus thorns and the hunger and the thirst are anathema to coherent reasoning. The disjointed images come and go as the butte, promising momentary respite, looms larger ahead of them.

Three

Vollyer saw them.

He was standing on an outcropping, scanning the desert with the binoculars as he had done several times that morning, sweeping through a long, flat expanse grown thickly with cactus. His eyes had been bothering him since sunrise and the returning glare — they watered heavily, aching, causing him moments of double vision — and he almost missed the rapid movement in the shining green and brown. He snapped the glasses back, and after a moment he saw them, running toward a craggy mesa or butte or whatever the geological term for a desert hill was. They were a long way off, well out of range of the Remington, but the important thing was their exact location had finally been pinpointed.

There was no excitement in Vollyer as he watched Lennox and the girl. The excitement was in the machinations, the maneuvers, of the game — not in the final and assured victory. But the fatigue he had begun to feel as a result of the draining heat and the rough terrain, the throbbing in his stomach which the few hours’ rest and the last of the fresh fruit had failed to quiet, the burning ache behind his eyes, were each of them forgotten.

He lowered the binoculars, half-smiling, and climbed down to where Di Parma stood waiting.

Four

Brackeen found the wrecked Triumph TR-6 a few minutes before noon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that he — or she — was now apparently and unexplainably missing.

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

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

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

Five

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

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

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

“Are you sure you saw them, Harry?”

“I saw them, all right.”

“And this is where they were heading?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“After one.”

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

“I know it.”

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

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

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

Six

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

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

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

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

He became gradually aware, as he looked out at the silent emptiness, of a large cylindrical cactus, crowned with small scarlet flowers, growing just beyond the blanket of shade cast by the stone arch overhead. He gave it his attention, studying the striated, thorn-covered trunk, the greenness of it, and something — a scrap of knowledge, read or heard at some time in his life and then filed away in the archives of his brain — nudged at his consciousness, evanescent and yet demanding. He groped at it, retrieved it, held it grimly.

There was a kind of cactus which stored moisture in its pulp, enabling it to stay green longer than any of the other varieties. You could get liquid, drinkable liquid, from that pulp. Barrel cactus, that was the name of it. You sliced off the top of the barrel and the pulp was there inside...

Lennox pulled his legs under him and staggered to his feet, staring at the cactus growing that short distance away. It was barrel-shaped, all right, it looked like a barrel, all right, and he stumbled toward it, coming into the direct glare of the sun again, wincing as the furnacelike air struck him savagely across the face and neck. He fumbled at his belt and got the knife-contoured piece of granite free and stepped up to the cactus; he drove the pointed end into the barrel’s trunk a few inches below the crown, plunging it deeply, sawing with it, unmindful of the needle-sharp spines jabbing at his hands and wrist and forearm, sweat streaming down into his eyes, his mind blank. The trunk was thick, but its fibers yielded to the desperate hackings and finally the top broke free and dropped to the sandy earth, resembling a fresh scalp with a vividly festooned bonnet, the flowers like splashes of blood in the brilliant light.

Lennox dropped the granite knife and reached inside the cactus with his hand cupped, touched cool wet pulp, seized it, pulled it out and up to his face, squeezing the juice past his parted and eroded lips. It was bitter, it was ambrosial, it dripped into the back of his throat and soothed the constricted passage and returned feeling to the swollen blob that was his tongue. Again and again he dipped out handfuls of the heavy pulp, and after a time he could swallow again, there was less complaint from the contracted muscles of his stomach.

He scooped out a double handful, then, and hurried back to where Jana lay prone in the shade. Using his knee, he turned her and held the barrel pulp low over her mouth, squeezing lightly, letting a few droplets fall on lips that were almost as deeply split as his own. She stirred immediately, her eyes fluttering open, and he said gently, “Open your mouth, Jana. I’ve found something we can drink.”

Thickly, painfully: “What... what is it?”

“Cactus pulp. Open your mouth.”

Obediently she parted her lips and he pressed out the juice carefully, trying not to waste any. When the pulp yielded no more, he tossed it aside and helped her into a sitting position. She swallowed and coughed dryly. “More,” she said.

“Can you stand up? Can you walk?”

“I... don’t know.”

He drew her to her feet and supported her to the decapitated barrel cactus; she moved gracelessly, jerkily, like a wooden-jointed marionette, but she remained upright. Lennox cooped free another double handful of pulp and squeezed the juice into her mouth — a third and a fourth. She was better now, he could see that; there was an alertness to her eyes once more, and she could stand without assistance, without swaying.

He retrieved the granite knife and returned it to his belt. Then he and Jana each took handfuls of the pulp back into the shade and sat down cross-legged in the sand and drank. When there was no more moisture, they used the pith to rub some of the caked dust and sweat from their faces.

At length Lennox said, “How do you feel?”

“Light-headed,” she answered.

“Can you go on?”

“Do we have any choice?”

“No.”

“Then I can go on.”

He touched her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers. “You’ve got a lot of courage,” he said softly.

“Sure.” She did not look at him. “Can we get juice from all the cactus like that one?”

“I think so.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“It’s something.”

“How did you think of it?”

“One of those scraps of knowledge you hear somewhere and file away and forget about. When the time is right, you remember it again.”

“Do you know of some way to get food, too?”

“No — unless we could catch a squirrel or a jackrabbit or something. But we’d have to eat the meat raw if we did.”

Jana shuddered faintly.

“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Lennox said. “We’ll be out of here before too much longer. Maybe by nightfall.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“I believe it.”

“No,” Jana said, and she was looking at him now. “No, you don’t.”

“Jana...”

“Do you know where we are? Do you have any idea at all where we are? Tell me the truth.”

He wanted to lie to her, to reassure her, but he could not seem to do it; it was as if honesty was a vital thing between them now, as if their kinship had become so strong that lying was completely unnecessary. “No,” he said, “I don’t know where we are. And I don’t think we’ll get out of here by nightfall. I don’t know if we’ll ever get out of here.”

She continued to look at him, and he saw a kind of confusion flickering across her features, as if a small, incomprehensible battle were being waged inside her. He wanted desperately to know what she was thinking in that moment; and as if a certain telepathic communion had been established between them, she put words to her thoughts, she said, “What’s your real name? It’s not Delaney, is it?”

And before he could consider consequences, before he could think anything at all, he answered, “No. No, it’s Lennox, Jack Lennox...”

Seven

Seen through the substation’s long front window, the main street of Cuenca Seco was dusty and quiet; the elongated shadows cast by buildings on both sides of the thoroughfare met in the exact center, touching one another and then merging like lovers unable to wait for darkness, finding magic in the golden stillness of late afternoon. But Brackeen, standing just beyond the front counter, listening intently to a crackling voice that originated in the state capital, was not in the least interested in what lay outside the window; he had far more important things on his mind than the capriciousness of shadows.

He had made his decision.

He was in it now, he was in it all the way.

The crackling voice stopped talking, finally, and Brackeen muttered a thanks and dropped the phone back into its cradle. He turned to look at the tall, rangy figure of Cuenca Seco’s night deputy, Cal Demeter. “I’ll take any calls that come in myself — for a while anyway. I’ll be in my office.”

Demeter nodded sourly. He did not care for Brackeen at all, and the less contact he had with him the better he liked it; but it was past six-thirty now, an hour and a half since Brackeen had officially gone off duty, and he was still hanging around, throwing out orders. It wasn’t like Brackeen, not that slob. Neither was it like him to jump all over Forester the way he’d done at five o’clock, telling him he was a snot-nosed bright-face with a lot to learn about being a cop, telling him he was sick and tired of his half-assed opinions and smart-assed remarks, telling him to get the hell home and not to go out tonight because he wanted Forester on stand-by. And all because the kid had done a little more bragging about finding this dead guy, Perrins, at Del’s Oasis the day before. That fat son of a bitch had something biting him, biting him so hard it was going to bite him right out of a job. Forester was one of Lydell’s fair-haired boys, the kind of kid who could hold a grudge, too, and he didn’t like Brackeen any more than Demeter did. Lard-belly had made a big mistake opening up to Forester like that, sure and sweet enough he had; wouldn’t be long now before he’d have to find some other source besides the county to pay for his beer and his whores in Kehoe City...

Brackeen went into his partitioned cubicle across the office. He sat down behind his desk and lit a cigarette and stared at the clock on the wall without seeing it. He had enough facts now to be fairly sure of the validity of the conclusions he had formed earlier that afternoon, conclusions which had forced his decision to involve himself. Carefully, he went over all of it in his mind.

Item: one Triumph TR-6, registered to a Daryl Setlak in New York City. But Setlak was a college kid who had sold the Triumph three weeks before, for cash, to a Manhattan used-car dealer; it had obviously been purchased since then, but the bureaucratic red tape involved in any state or federal agency had delayed the entry into the records of the new owner. A telephone call to the used-car dealership had gone unanswered; with the three-hour time difference in the East, it had been past six there when Brackeen called and the place was obviously closed for the night. An appeal had been made to the New York police, but there was no report from them as yet; the current owner of the TR-6 was still unknown. And still missing. All he knew was that the car had been ambushed, fired upon with some kind of high-powered weapon. Later it had been pushed or driven into the dry wash, so as to hide it, apparently, from view of anyone passing on the road.

Item: one Buick Electra hardtop, current model, rented in the capital two days ago by a man named Standish, who had possessed a valid Illinois driver’s license and other necessary identification. The name was being checked through Illinois channels; no report as yet. Except for a small empty case under the front seat, passenger side — and two expensive suitcases, containing quality men’s clothing in two different sizes but nothing which could be used for immediate identification purposes — the car had been clean. Fingerprints were possible, but since Lydell had refused to listen to a request to send Hollowell and his equipment to Cuenca Seco, the interior had not been dusted as yet.

Item: a dead man who had used the name A1 Perrins and whose effects had borne out that identity — but whose fingerprints were those of a man named George Lassiter, a native of St. Louis, two convictions for the sale and possession of narcotics, one in 1951 and the other in 1957. Lassiter was or had been a purported member of the Organization, but was rumored to have severed his affiliations recently by mutual consent. But he had been shot six times in the chest, all six bullets within a five-inch radius, and that was a mark of a contracted professional hit.

Item: a man named Jack Lennox, the drifter, whose fingerprints — taken from the oasis and the overnight bag found in the storeroom there — revealed him to be a fugitive from justice in the Pacific Northwest. He was wanted for assault and battery, and for assault with intent to commit murder, both charges having been filed by his ex-wife; he was also wanted for nonpayment of alimony to the same ex-wife. At present he, too, was still missing; law enforcement agencies had been alerted in a dozen western states, asking his detainment for questioning in connection with the Perrins/Lassiter murder, but there had been no reports to date on his possible whereabouts.

Item: the owner of the Triumph, gender unknown, presence in this area unknown but thought to be innocent — a tourist, or perhaps an artist or writer on assignment if the notebook and sketch pad discovered in the Triumph were indicative of profession. Current whereabouts also unknown.

Item: a man named Standish, hirer of the Buick. Presence in this area unknown. Current whereabouts unknown.

Add it all up and what did you get? A connection. A corroboration of the idea Brackeen had had all along that Perrins/Lassiter had been murdered by a pair-figuring two now, from the suitcases in the Buick’s trunk — of professional sluggers. Extrapolating: Lennox had witnessed the killing of Lassiter, and had run, and had given himself away in the process. He had gone straight across the desert, maybe with close pursuit. Somewhere along the abandoned road he had met the Triumph’s owner and talked him into a ride out. The sluggers had discovered this in some way and ambushed the TR-6, but the bullets and the subsequent crash had failed to do the job for them; Lennox and the car’s owner had managed to escape, again with close pursuit. And now? Well, now they were somewhere out on the desert, all of them, the hunters and the hunted; that was why the Buick had still been there, hidden behind the rocks.

All of it made sense, all of it dovetailed — too perfectly to be a pipe dream. The only other possible answers involved heavy coincidence, and Brackeen did not trust coincidence on that level of occurrence. Every known fact substantiated his theory; there were no discrepancies.

The thing was, could he convince the State Highway Patrol boys — screw Lydell and the goddamn county — that he was right? Could he convince them to send out helicopters, search parties, before it was too late? He did not have the authority to do anything on his own; the most he could do, and he had already done that, was to post a special deputy at the junction of the county road and the abandoned road. If the sluggers came back for their Buick, they would find it gone and they would have no choice but to hike out. But Brackeen did not want that to happen. Because if it did, and if his previous knowledge of the operating code of the professional assassin still held true today, it would mean that Lennox and the Triumph’s owner were certainly dead. As it stood now, one or both of them might still be alive, might still be saved — if he could juice the state investigators into acting as soon as possible.

That might not be easy, he knew. When he had finally come in off the desert, after two hours of abortive reconnaissance of the area where he had discovered the two cars, and the reaching of his decision to intervene, he had called Lydell for information — and the sheriff had told him to tend to his duties and to stay out of the murder investigation; it wasn’t his problem, Lydell said, in spite of the fact that the killing had happened in his district. Brackeen had tried to argue, but Lydell had simply hung up on him. He had had to go around the old bastard, to a deputy he knew from the poker games at Indian Charley’s, in order to obtain the information on Perrins/Lassiter and on Lennox. He had had no better luck when he’d called the Highway Patrol office. Neither Gottlieb nor Sanchez was there, and the sergeant on duty had referred him to the main investigative office in the capital. They had come through with the information on the rented Buick — that was what the call a few minutes previous had been about — but only because to them it had no bearing on the murder. When he had tried to press for facts on the case, they had told him the same thing as Lydell: stay out of it.

But now that he had committed himself, he couldn’t stay out of it. There was anger in him again, and a sense of duty, and a sense of purpose. The emptiness was gone, and he felt whole again for the first time in fifteen years, he felt like a resurrection of the old Andy Brackeen, the proud one, the one with guts. And yet, it was not the kind of feeling that he could rejoice in, not with the source of his immediate rebirth unresolved.

He reached out for the telephone. And it rang just as his fingers touched the receiver.

He caught it up, said, “Sheriff’s substation, Cuenca Seco. Brackeen.”

“My name is Harold Klein, I’m calling from New York’,” a man’s excited voice said. “I want to report a missing person.”

“New York, did you say?”

“Yes, yes, that’s right.”

Brackeen gripped the handset a little tighter. “The name of this missing person?”

“Jana Hennessey. Miss Jana Hennessey.”

“Is she a visitor in Cuenca Seco?”

“Yes, she’s researching a book, she writes children’s books, you see, I’m her agent, and I called this Joshua Hotel where she’s staying just now and the clerk said she went out into the desert yesterday and hasn’t come back, he didn’t think anything of it, the damned fool, but I’m worried, she promised me faithfully she’d be working, she’s just a girl...”

“What kind of car does she own?” Brackeen asked tightly.

“Car? A little yellow sports model, she bought it a couple of weeks ago...”

That’s it, Brackeen thought, that’s all I need. The bastards will listen to me now. He took Klein’s number and told him he would be in touch; then he switched off and dialed the State Highway Patrol office in Kehoe City. And as he waited, his eyes, sunken in deep pouches of fat, were bright and alert and alive.

Eight

Di Parma almost stepped on the rattlesnake.

They were making their way to higher ground, into towering spires of rock, for a better vantage point of the vicinity. On their left, poised on the western horizon, the setting sun was a flaming hole in the pale fabric of sky, painting the landscape in golds and magentas. Vollyer, legs like thick needles thrusting pain at his groin and hips with every step, had dropped several paces behind; his breath whistled agonizingly in his throat, and there were skittering images playing at the corners of his eyes.

Face set grimly, Di Parma climbed with his shoulders hunched forward, arms swinging loosely at his sides. He came around a thrusting projection and his left foot was upraised for another step when he sensed the movement directly beneath him. He looked down then, and the rattler was there — a huge, pale, indistinctly marked diamondback, slithering out from beneath a rock, thick body gyrating sinuously, head coming around as it sensed danger, hooded, deadly eyes seeming to stare at him and a thinly forked tongue licking agitatedly at the air.

Di Parma recoiled in horror. He staggered backward, nausea rising in his throat, and his hand clawed at the pocket of his jacket draped over his left arm. The diamondback was beginning to coil, still seeming to stare at him, evil, evil, and the belly-gun was in Di Parma’s hand now, triggered once, triggered twice; the snake’s head snapped free of its body, now you see it and now you don’t, and the body jerked, twisted, a hideous danse macabre, and then straightened and was still as the echo of the shots rolled like fading thunder through the quiet dusk. Shuddering violently, Di Parma turned away, stomach muscles convulsed, and vomited emptily.

It had happened very quickly, and Vollyer did not know what it was until he stumbled up and saw the body of the diamondback, spasming again, faintly, in the dust. Savage rage welled up inside him. He went to Di Parma and spun him upright and slapped him across the face, forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. “You son of a bitch! You stupid shithead!”

There was a glazed look in Di Parma’s eyes. “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God, Harry.”

“You let them know where we are. You couldn’t have done a better job of it if you’d raised a signal flag!”

“Harry, the snake, did you see the snake...”

“I don’t care about the bitching snake.”

“It was coiling up, it was going to strike.”

“The hell it was.”

“It was, I tell you!”

“And you panicked.”

“I didn’t have any choice,” Di Parma said whiningly. “God, you don’t know how I hate snakes, Harry. They’re the one thing I’m afraid of, I want to puke every time I see one.”

“You’ll puke, all right,” Vollyer said. “You’ll puke.”

“Harry, for Christ’s sake, I couldn’t help it.”

Vollyer stared at him, and it was as if Di Parma was a stranger, it was as if he had never seen him before in his life. The rage was ebbing, and there was no emotion whatsoever to replace it; he felt nothing for Livio now, no paternity, no friendship, no liking and yet no disliking. Just — nothing. Di Parma had been put to the test out here, and he had shown just what he was made of, and now, as far as Vollyer was concerned, he was a void, a stranger, a lump of clay. Nothing at all.

His hands still shaking, Di Parma put the .38 away in his jacket. He was unable to meet Vollyer’s gaze. “Maybe they didn’t hear the shots, Harry,” he said. “Maybe they’re too far away.”

“They’re not too far away,” Vollyer said tonelessly. “And sounds carry a long way out here.”

“They might not be able to tell where the shots came from.”

“You’d better hope not.”

“Harry, listen—”

“Shut up.”

Di Parma looked at the sun-blistered face, its plumpness swollen almost grotesquely, and a tremor of fear caused another stomach paroxysm; Harry’s eyes, in that moment, were those of the snake’s — cold and hooded and deadly. He shook his head, sharply, and the illusion vanished. Vollyer turned then and started upward, and after a time — circling the dead rattler, avoiding it with his gaze — Di Parma followed on legs that had suddenly been weighted with lead.

Nine

When the two closely spaced gunshots sounded, Lennox pulled Jana behind a wall of rock and they crouched there breathlessly, listening. Silence prevailed again, heavy and unbroken.

She whispered, “That was gunfire, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“And not far off.”

“Too close,” he said. “Too damned close.”

“They weren’t shooting at us, were they? They’re not that close, are they?”

“No, not at us. A snake, maybe. I don’t know.”

“We don’t have much longer, do we?”

“What kind of talk is that?”

“I’m tired, Jack. I’m so tired.”

“Listen, don’t give up on me now.”

“It seems so useless, all this running.”

“Maybe, but I’m not quitting, I can’t quit.”

“Hope springs eternal,” she murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“I won’t let you quit either, Jana.”

“All right.”

“We’ll have to find a place to spend the night,” he said grimly. “We can’t stay here, it’s too open.” His eyes moved over the surrounding terrain. “We’ll follow these rocks to that high ground over there. Should be enough cover, if we’re careful. It’ll be dark pretty soon, and they won’t be able to find us in the dark. They probably won’t even try.”

Jana nodded and he took her hand and she did not pull away; the dry, cracked surface of his palm seemed to comfort her somehow. There was a tenderness in him, a gentleness that she had not expected to exist in a man so obviously plagued by fear — fear that went deeper, went beyond that which their current predicament had generated. It was as if he had lived with fear of one kind or another for a long time, as if it had distorted the genuine qualities he possessed. She wondered again who he was and why he had not told her his real name until that afternoon, why he had hidden his true identity — and why he had finally decided to confide in her. She had wanted to ask him that, in the shade under the stone arch, but he had risen abruptly, telling her it was time to be moving again, they couldn’t afford to stay there any longer.

Now, following him across the rough ground, Jana wanted to ask him again. It was somehow important that she know more about this man, this Jack Lennox who had unwittingly endangered her life, and then saved it — if only for a little while. Maybe, she thought, it’s because he cares. And because he’s the first person I’ve ever known who could possibly understand what it’s like to live within the shell of oneself, lonely and afraid...

The last of the flaming sun had dropped beneath the horizon, and the sky was streaked in smoky pink and tarnished gold, when he found a night refuge for them.

It was a large, flat, sheltered area hollowed out between several sheer pinnacles, a natural water tank that would fill with cool, fresh rainwater during the wet months; seepage and gradual evaporation under the drying sun had left the surface cracked and powder-dry, and so it would remain until the rains came once again. There was only one entrance, a narrow cleft which Lennox had very nearly missed in the sheer rock facing. It would be virtually impossible to locate once darkness settled; even with the wash of moonlight, deep shadows would hide the entrance — the dry stream path which angled upward through the cleft, crested, and dropped away into the hollowed tank several feet below.

On level ground, where the path began its rise to the rock spires, a barrel cactus grew rounded and green. Once Lennox had discovered and cautiously examined the tank, and returned to tell Jana of what he had found, he used the granite knife to slice off the crown of the barrel; they dipped out pulp hurriedly, watching their backtrail, sucking greedily at the bitter droplets of cactus juice. Then, silently, they soothed the cool pith over their rawly burned faces and climbed into the tank.

They lay on the dry floor of it, weak and spent. Half forgotten in the urgency of their flight, pain came to them again, harsh and lingering — the pain of hunger, the pain of sunburn, the pain of blistered foot soles. Dozens of tears and tiny holes in their clothing marked the location of stinging cuts and abrasions and cactus bites, and their exposed arms and hands were tapestries of scabrous scratches. The cactus liquid had soothed their burning throats, and momentarily appeased the bodily cry for moisture; but they were badly dehydrated and their need had grown greater, would continue to grow greater, with each passing minute.

Darkness settled, erasing the polychromatic sunset from the sky, and the moon leaped high with that surprising desert suddenness. The stars began to burn like fired crystal. Outside the tank, a soft, silvery wraith slipped quickly in and out of shadows — a bushy-tailed kit fox, the size of a large house cat, prowling for wood rats and kangaroo rats and other nocturnal rodents. Overhead, owl wings made faint, faraway sounds in the ghostly silence.

It was pleasantly cool for a time, and the night wind salved Lennox and Jana, soft, gentle. But then it turned cold and disdainful, chilling them, and they stirred and awoke, almost simultaneously. After a moment, without speaking, they left the tank and returned to the barrel cactus and drank again of its pulp. The air, there below, was filled with a heady fragrance that came from a night-blooming cereus somewhere nearby — and if it had not been for the pain and the weakness and the fear that was theirs, the night might have held a deep magic allure.

In the tank again, they sat facing one another, close but without touching. Jana said softly, “Talk to me, Jack. I need something to keep my mind off how hungry I am, and what’s out there behind us. And tomorrow — I don’t want to think about tomorrow.”

“What should I talk about?”

“I don’t know. You — Jack Lennox.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Why not?”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“There’s always something to say.”

“Not in my case.”

“Jack,” she said simply, “I want to know.”

“All right. I’m thirty-three years old, a native of the Pacific Northwest, divorced and a gentleman of the road, as they used to say. I work when I feel like it, and play when I feel like it, and move on to new places when I feel like it.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

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

“What?”

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

“Of course it’s true.”

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

“Yes. What did you think?”

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

“That has nothing to do with this.”

“What does it have to do with?”

“Nothing.”

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

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

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

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

“None, I guess. I just want to know.”

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

“Why not — now?”

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

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

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

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

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

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

“Why?”

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

“Any more than I can.”

“Any more than you can.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You let her beat you, Jack.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh Christ,” Lennox said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said.

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

“No. No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten

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

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

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

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

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

“Here in the substation.”

“I might be pretty late.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Okay,” Gottlieb said. “Listen, Brackeen, you did a hell of a job putting all this together. We’d have got it eventually, but probably not in time; there may still be a chance, now, for Lennox and the Hennessey girl.”

Brackeen said, “There are some things you can’t forget.”

“How’s that?”

“Never mind. You going to want to take charge of things when you get here?”

“Officially, yes,” Gottlieb said. “Unofficially, it’s your district and you’ve got a free wheel.”

“Thanks, Gottlieb.”

“Sure. Later, huh?”

“Later.”

Brackeen put down the phone and stared at it. He should have felt relieved now, or pleased, or satisfied, but he was more keyed up than he had been before the long-distance call from the girl’s New York agent, Klein. He had proven something to the world, which did not matter — and something to himself, which did matter — but that was somehow not enough; this thing wasn’t done with yet, none of it was done with yet, and he knew that the tenseness would not leave him until it was, if it was.

He picked up the phone and called Marge for the second time in the past several hours and told her he would not be home, that he was spending the night in the substation. She didn’t protest; that was one thing about Marge, she never complained, never sat heavy on his back. Talking to her, he felt a trace of guilt — an emotion new to him — for all the times he had cheated on her with the plump young whores in Kehoe City. She was a good woman, she was too goddamn good a woman to have to put up with that kind of thing. Well, she wouldn’t have to put up with it any more, he told himself. Not any more.

There was a lot of time between now and the arrival of Gottlieb and Sanchez — between now and dawn — and Brackeen felt nervous and edgy with inactivity. He left the cubicle, told Demeter that he was going out for a while, and picked up his cruiser. He drove east through the bright moonlight and stopped at the junction of the county road and the abandoned dead end; the special deputy he had stationed there several hours earlier was alert and eager, but he had seen nothing. Brackeen sat with him for a time, debating the idea of patrolling the abandoned road, and then decided against it; wherever they were on the desert, they would not be moving in the darkness — even with the drenching light from the moon. If Lennox and Jana Hennessey were still alive, they would be hiding now, waiting for dawn. Half dead from hunger and thirst, from the burning sun, from fear and from running.

If they were still alive.

Brackeen drove back to the substation to await the arrival of Gottlieb and Sanchez.

Eleven

Jana saw shock and disbelief register on Lennox’s face, and she thought: No, no, I didn’t want to say it, why did you make me say it? She pulled away from him again, rolling her body into a tight cocoon, withdrawing from the sick pain that the almost involuntary revelation had unleashed inside her. But the shell she had so carefully constructed these past ten days was cracked and broken now, irreparably, and she had no defenses. It was in the open now, the word — the fear — had been spoken, he knew, somebody knew. God, oh God, why had she pried into his soul and he into hers, they were like leeches sucking at one another, and for what reason? Strength? Succor? Or was it just that each of them sought to lessen his own misery by exposing that of the other?

She felt his hands touching her again and shrank from them, making a sound that was almost a whimper in her throat; but she was boneless, she was plastic, and he lifted her and held her upright. She would not look at him, she could not. I want to die now, she thought. I can’t face it, I just can’t face it, I was trying to run away from myself, just like Jack, and you can’t escape from yourself—

“Jana,” he said, “Jana, it’s not true, I don’t believe it.”

“Oh yes,” she said woodenly. “Oh yes. Don’t you hate me now? Don’t I disgust you?”

“Why? Because of some mistake you might have made? Jana, I don’t hate you, I could never hate you.”

“I’m a lesbian, don’t you understand?”

“You’re a normal woman, you couldn’t be anything else.”

“A lesbian! I am, I know I am.”

“You know you are? Why do you say it like that?”

Don’t tell him any more, don’t talk about it, don’t, Jana, don’t — but what difference does it make now? He knows, you told him and he knows and what difference does the rest of it make?

“Jana?”

“I liked it, you see,” she said, and her eyes were glazed, shining like bright wet stones. “I liked being with Kelly, I liked it the first time and I liked it the last time, I liked being in her arms, I liked her touching me, I liked—”

“Stop it!” Lennox shook her and it was like shaking Raggedy Ann. She did not hear him; she was listening to bitter memories now, and putting voice to them without conscious realization of it, lost and wandering in her own private hell.

“The first time I was drunk and I didn’t know what Kelly was, she was just a casual friend who lived down the hall and I thought she was being sympathetic because I had just broken up with Don and I was angry and soured at the rejection and we were sitting there, in my apartment, sitting there and talking and drinking and I started to cry and she held my head and whispered to me and I put my arms around her, it was all so natural, and then I went to sleep or passed out and when I woke up we were in bed together, my bed, and she was holding me and kissing me and telling me that she loved me and I... I couldn’t stop her, it seemed so good to be loved after what Don had done to me...”

Lennox touched her hair, gently, almost delicately, the way you touch a sleeping child. Jana did not take notice. She no longer knew he was there; the words she was speaking were for herself, a volume-open replaying of a memory tape that had already been played a hundred, a thousand times before.

“The morning after that first night with Kelly, I was sick at what I had done and I thought for a while about taking sleeping pills or cutting my wrists, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought about a psychiatrist but I couldn’t call one, I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d done, and then Kelly came and I didn’t want to let her in but something made me let her in and she was contrite, she said she was sorry, she said she had been a lesbian for a long time and she hadn’t been able to control herself and then she told me that she loved me, she said it just like that, ‘I love you, Jana,’ she said, and suddenly I couldn’t hate her any more, I didn’t want her to go away, I wanted her to stay with me, and we made love that night and a lot of nights afterward and I woke up one morning and looked at myself in the mirror and I thought: You’re a lesbian now, too, you’re turning into a lesbian just like Kelly. Then I went and vomited in the toilet, because I don’t want to be a lesbian, I want to be normal, but I liked it with Kelly, I liked it every time, I liked it as much as I liked making love with Don. I knew I had to do something, I knew I had to stop myself before it was too late, divorce myself from Kelly and from New York, from everything that was turning me into what I didn’t want to be turned into. I had to be alone, I had to have time to think, I had to plan for the future — just me, just Jana, keeping her mind occupied with things, and maybe if enough time goes by I’ll be all right again, maybe if I don’t let myself get involved with anyone, not with anyone, because I think I’m a lesbian now and if I am I’ll reject any man, I’ll be frigid with any man who tries to make love to me and if I have anything to do with a woman no matter how casual maybe I’ll try to seduce her or maybe I’ll let her seduce me, and then I’ll know for sure, I’ll know, and I can’t face it yet, maybe not ever. I’ve got to be alone, I’ve got to be alone...”

The tape had run out now, and Jana’s eyes lost some of their glassy quality. Lennox shook her again, less sharply this time, and when he was sure his words would penetrate, he said, “Jana, listen to me, you’re all right now, don’t you see that? You’re free now. You broke away, and that proves—”

“It proves nothing. It’s not Kelly and it’s not New York any more. It’s me I’m afraid of, it’s me I can’t face.” She began to tremble, violently, and the cold wind was only a small part of the cause; her teeth chattered with little hollow clicking sounds. “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me...”

Lennox put his arms all the way around her, drawing her close. “Jana,” he said, “Jana.”

She could feel the warmth of him, the solidity of him, she could feel his breath against her hair, the way his hands moved on her arms and her back, she could hear his soft, gentle voice. The tremoring began to subside, slowly, but there was something else now, a sensation, a curious inner quivering. “No,” she said. “Oh no.”

“It’s all right,” Lennox whispered. “Jana, it’s all right.”

“Oh my God, no, no.”

Caressing, warm, solid, male, touching her, holding her, no, no, the thought there in her mind, growing, spreading, beginning to command, no no no, and the embers stirring and the fires sparking, a tightness in her chest, a catch to her breathing, a flowing warmth in her loins, oh no oh no, and she wants to pull free of his arms, she doesn’t want this to happen, she can’t let it happen, but he is so warm, his touch is so gentle, she is safe but no, no! she can’t let it happen, she can’t know, but it is happening, does that in itself mean something and is that enough, it is happening inside her, she is letting it happen, she wants it, she wants him, she wants him, him, him, him

and Lennox holds her, rocking, whispering, and he has never known a tenderness like the one which he feels for this girl, this victim, this kin, her body is soft against his and she is still trembling but it is a different kind of trembling now, somehow he senses that and he holds her tighter and she says, “No, oh please,” and her arms go around him and she is holding onto him now, too, she is pressing against him and moving against him and they fall sideways into the dust and fit their bodies tightly to one another, clinging, clinging

and Jana presses her face to the side of his neck, not wanting to press her face there, his pulse beat is soft and irregular against her ear, and she moves her hands along his back, not wanting to move them, and moves her hips against him, not wanting to move them, I don’t want this, she thinks, I don’t want this, and her loins are hungry and eager for the first sign of his arousal

and Lennox becomes aware of her body now, moving, the rippling of her muscles under his fingers, and he understands, he understands what must be happening inside her, the confusion, he doesn’t want to hurt her but he doesn’t know what will hurt her the most — capitulation or rejection, he wants to help, he wants to reassure her, he knows she is normal, he feels it, he has to communicate it to her and there is really only one way now, but he is so tired, the toll of the past two days has been too great, he can’t, and he focuses on her movements, on her body, and his hand slips down and touches her buttocks and then he is lengthening, growing, impossibly and wondrously coming alive

and Jana feels him erect against her, oh no, no, and her hips move faster under his hand now, under his hand, I don’t want this, “No, please no,” and she is burning, she is burning, Love me, no, love me love me love me

and Lennox says her name, “Jana,” and hears her moaning and wants her desperately and his fingers on her clothing are deft, quick, gentle

and Jana helps him, helps them both, the wind blowing cold over naked flesh, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her lips saying “No” and her mind saying Yes, yes! and she is afraid, she is terrified, but he is whispering to her now, calming her, stroking her, and the fire, the need, the need

and they are one, murmuring, clinging, moving, and it is savage, it is tender — together, reaching upward, reaching the zenith, together, together, it happens together, incredibly, perfectly, the way it had to be...

They lie silent, holding tightly to one another, and there is no need for words. Jana knows, and inside she weeps — but the tears are clean and good, purging. Lennox knows, and inside there is a peace, unstable but rich and promising. They are one now, in many ways.

In many ways.