Panic!

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.

Listen, it’s too bad they took the cigarette commercials off television. You could, do one where these two beautiful people are running in slow motion through the desert instead of through a grassy meadow. They stop beside a dry stream bed and light up, holding hands, laughing, and two men jump out with guns and shoot them. Very symbolic, you see. The American Cancer Society would love it.

Do you know what happens when you drink too much water? Well, what happens is, you keep having to pee. And if you have to stop to pee, how can you keep on running? Ergo, not drinking any water allows you to keep on running, and not eating any food—well now, let’s not get vulgar, remember that writers of children’s books must never be vulgar. That’s what Ross Phalen says and I wonder what Ross Phalen would say if he knew just how vulgar writers of children’s books could get. He would crap, excuse me, Ross, he would have a bowel movement or would you prefer defecate, he would crap in his pants and I’m so tired, oh God, I’m so tired. And thirsty, I’m so thirsty my tongue has dried up and fallen out of my mouth like, like, come on, Jana, what’s a writer without his similes and metaphors, like a pistil from a withered flower, there now I knew you could do it ...

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.

Bad guys chasing the hero and heroine across the barren wastes. The situation appears hopeless, all appears lost. But wait—what’s that? Hoofbeats? A bugle? We’re saved! It’s Roy and Trigger, Gene and Champion, Batman and Robin; it’s Superman and Sam Spade and the boys from Bonanza. Here we are, gang! Look here, over here! Do you see us, do you see us over here ... ?

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