Panic!

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