Panic!

gave his position, and what he had heard, and asked for immediate assistance; then he signed out before any questions could be asked; there was no time for questions.

The line of rocks loomed directly ahead. Brackeen replaced the mike and drew the .357 Magnum from the holster at his belt, holding it on the seat beside him, palm sweating on the textured butt. His mind was blank now, relying on instinct and training to dictate his actions, and the fear that was in him was tempered with a kind of anticipation ...

Six

The first bullet cut hot and burning through Lennox’s right side, and the unexpectedness of it, the sudden biting pain, caused him to stagger, to lose his balance. He went down, rolling, his head striking a glancing blow on a rock, thinking fuzzily, My God, my God, what, and then there was billowing sound to take away the early-morning stillness and he knew what it was, he realized he had been shot, he realized that their luck had finally run out.

Panic, the old familiar shrieking panic, clutched at him and he reached out blindly and caught onto a heavily thorned prickly pear, slicing open the heel of his hand, slowing himself. And then Jana screamed, he could hear her screaming, he could hear more echoes of sound, and he managed to check his forward momentum, to twist his body so that he could see upward along the slope.

She was down, she was on her hands and knees and crawling toward him. Lennox felt the added emotions of hatred and rage and futility as he scrambled to his feet, looking up at Jana and beyond her, fighting down the urge to immediate flight, and the two of them were up there, scrambling down the slope, you dirty sons of bitches, why don’t you finish it, why don’t you sit up there and get it over with! He heard Jana cry his name, cry it again, and he ran to her and pulled her to her feet and there was no blood on her, there was only blood on him, blood soaking the remnants of his shirt, blood flowing down from his cut palm to drip thickly crimson from his fingertips. The second shot had missed her, it had been the shock of seeing him fall or the bad footing which had sent her to her knees; her eyes were huge puddles of terror, pleading mutely, and he flung his arm around her shoulders and dragged her with him down the slope.

There was no place to go, the rutted trail was useless, they were trapped; the avenue of escape had opened only briefly, to tempt them, and then it had closed and there was nowhere for them to go. It had all been for nothing, all the running and the hiding, and last night, too, the insight and moments of peace and ecstasy and salvation, the growing thing that might be love between them—all for nothing, all too late. Fate had played a monstrous joke on them, tantalizing them with a chance, a future, and then presenting them with nothing but a certain death ...

Seven

“You missed them!” Di Parma screamed. “Damn you, damn you, you missed them both!”

He ran past Vollyer, arms flung wide, spitting obscenities in a release of the pent-up frustration he had known the past two days. They’re not going to get away this time, they’re not going to get away, oh you prick, Harry, damn your bad eyes and your boss-man superior attitude, you missed them, they should be dead now but they’ll be dead pretty soon ...

Vollyer was up and stumbling after him, frantically trying to chamber one of the .221 cartridges into the Remington, but Di Parma paid no attention to him. He was watching Lennox and the girl, watching them reach the wheel ruts below and start across them, a hundred yards away, just a hundred yards. He lengthened his strides, summoning all the strength left in his body, gaining on them, opening up his lead on the struggling Vollyer, and he was twenty yards from the trail when he became aware of the rumbling whine of an automobile engine coming out of the west, increasing in magnitude as the machine drew closer.

Di Parma turned his body without slackening his pace, looking toward the line of rocks in that direction, and then the car was there, he saw the car, he saw its unmistakable black-and-white markings, the red-glassed dome light, heard the deafening roar of its engine as it hurtled forward. He tasted momentary panic and his thoughts were sharply confused. Cops, oh Jesus, cops, how did they find us, I knew this was all wrong, I knew it!—and the cruiser veered off the road, coming straight at him, the gleaming chrome of its grill like bared teeth in the expanding brightness. He reversed himself, scrambling backward, eyes searching wildly for cover, not finding any, and the cruiser came to a shuddering stop nose up to a boulder fifty feet from where he was.

He dropped to his knees in the rocky soil, holding the .38 steadied in both hands, and opened fire.

Eight

Brackeen was through the driver’s door, moving with amazing speed for his bulk, before the cruiser stopped rocking.

In the distance, he caught a glimpse of the two figures—a man and a woman, the drifter and Jana Hennessey—that he had seen running the moment he’d emerged from the rocks. He felt a grim, fleeting elation that he had been in time, that they were still alive.

He crouched along the front fender, the Magnum heavy in the wetness of his hand, and a bullet dug its way metallically into the far side of the car, another spiderwebbed the near corner of the windshield. He forgot the runners then, thinking: It’s happening, it’s happening, but that was all he thought. A curious sense of detachment spread over him, as if he were suddenly witnessing all of this from some distant place, as if he were not really part of it at ail.

Another bullet furrowed across the cruiser’s hood, making a sound like fingernails being drawn across a blackboard. Brackeen knelt by the near headlight, looking around it, and the one he had taken out after with the cruiser was kneeling there fifty or sixty yards away. He was doing all the shooting. The other one, further up the slope, was running at an angle toward a thick-bodied cactus; something long and misshapen glittered in his hand.

The kneeling one fired again, and the headlamp in front of Brackeen exploded, spraying glass that narrowly missed his eyes, forcing him back. When he got his head up again, the slugger was on his feet, trying to run up the slope, clawing at the jagged earth with his free hand. Brackeen moved out a little, not thinking, setting himself at the edge of the bumper, and the Magnum recoiled loudly. Dust kicked up at the slugger’s heels. He raised the muzzle and squeezed off again.

The shooter jerked, leaned forward, fell, and then slid backward on his belly with his arms spread- eagled.

One, that’s one.

Brackeen looked up at the cactus for the other, swinging the Magnum over, and he saw the sunlight glinting again and there was, all at once, white agony in his chest and he toppled backward with thunder detonating in his ears and he was looking up at the bright, hot sky, jarred into thinking now, trying to understand. Roll over, get up, but his limbs would not obey the command of his brain; he wanted to touch his chest, he knew that there would be a hole there, that thick, warm blood would be there, that he had been shot and that he was badly wounded and yet, with all of it, he was strangely calm, the feeling of detachment still lingered. The pain spread malignantly through his body, numbing his mind now in a dark gray haze; but the sky was still hot, so blue and hot the morning sky, what did he shoot me with? Not a rifle, what he was carrying was too small for a rifle—a handgun, then? Sure, with a scope sight, I should have known, but you can’t figure all the angles, you’ve got to do the best you can and sometimes that’s not good enough, but the important thing is doing your duty, the important thing is not crapping out—listen, I did it, didn’t I? I did it, Coretti, I faced their guns and I didn’t panic and I didn’t freeze up, oh Marge, there’s so much I have to make up to you, to both of us, and the one who had shot him ran up and extended the scope-sighted handgun and blew away the side of Brackeen’s head.

Nine

When they heard the oncoming car, Jana and Lennox checked their headlong flight, looking back. Shattered hope re-formed and re-cemented as they recognized the vehicle, saw it skid off the wheel ruts in a spume of dust