Bill Pronzini

Panic!

For Bruni — with love

and

For Barry N. Malzberg — gifted, gloomy,

Exasperating, and above all, a friend

What is the use of running,

When you are on the wrong road?

— GERMAN PROVERB

The First Day...

One

The desert surrounded the moving bus like an earthly vision of hell.

Heat shimmered in liquid waves on the polished black ribbon of the highway, in thick tendrils across the arid wastes extending eastward to the horizon, westward to a low stretch of reddish foothills. The noonday sun, in a charred cobalt sky, was a fiery yellow-orange ball suspended on glowing wires. Nothing moved beyond the dust-streaked windows except the heat; the only sign of life was a carrion bird, a black speck lying motionless above something dead or dying in the far distance.

Inside the bus, the air had the same furnacelike quality, smelling of dust, of sweat and cracked leather, of urine from the faulty toilet facility in the rear. It was not crowded. There were only five people riding in addition to the driver: two silent old ladies, with skin that had been dried and cured by twenty thousand appearances of the desert sun outside; a fat man, sleeping, snoring softly; a young, homely girl who sat with her legs splayed wide because the heat had chafed her inner thighs painfully; and, well in the rear on the driver’s side, a lean, hollow-eyed man sitting slouched against the window, breathing through his mouth, thinking about nothing at all.

The hollow-eyed man’s name was Jack Lennox, and he had long, shaggy black hair that hung lifelessly over a high, ascetic forehead, curled around large flat ears, partially draped the collar of a shapeless, sweat-stained blue shirt that had cost twelve dollars new two years before. There were deep, shadowed furrows etched into the once smoothly symmetrical planes of his face, a dissipated sheen to the once affluent healthiness of light olive skin. His eyes, sunken beneath thick, straight brows, were like green Christmas bulbs long burned-out, the whites tinged with a yellow that gave them a sour-buttermilk quality. He was thirty-three years of age, and he was an old, old man.

As he sat staring at the barren wasteland rushing past outside, he reached in an automatic gesture to the pocket of his shirt, fumbled, touched only the thin material and nothing more. He had smoked his last cigarette two hours before. He lowered his thin-fingered hands, untrimmed nails like black half-moons, and rubbed the slickness of them back and forth across the coarse material of his corduroy trousers; then, slowly, without turning his head from the window, he brought the hands up and dry-washed his face, palms grating lightly over the four-day growth of beard stubble there.

I wonder what time it is, he thought then. I wonder what day it is. I wonder where we are. But none of those things really mattered to him, and the questioning thoughts were rhetorical thoughts, requiring no answers. He stopped thinking again.

Outside, in the wavering distance, a second black ribbon had appeared, winding away from the main interstate highway through outcroppings of lava rock, dry washes, rocky and irregular land surface grown heavily with creosote bush and mesquite, porcupine prickly pear and ocotillo, giant saguaro cactus like lonely, entreating soldiers on a mystical battlefield. A moment later he could see the intersection between the county road and the main highway. A large post-supported sign stood there, with a reflectored arrow pointing eastward; below that:

CUENCA SECO 16

KEHOE CITY 34

They passed the sign, and the desert lay unbroken again, as ageless as time, as enigmatic as the Sphinx. Lennox turned from the window then and leaned forward slightly, clasping his hands tightly together in an attitude of imploring prayer and pressing the knot they formed up under his wishbone. The pain which had again begun there was alternately dull and acute, and he rocked faintly against the rigid coupling of his fingers, squeezing his eyes shut, waiting for the agony to ebb and subside. He knew it would be that way because he had experienced deep hunger on several occasions in the past nine months, and the pain came and went in approximately the same way each time. It had been almost two days now since he had last eaten anything of substance, fifteen hours since the three chocolate bars he had bought with his last quarter in the bus station, the bus station where he had gone to use the toilet, the bus station in — what town? what difference? — the bus station where he had gotten the ticket...

No.

He did not want to think about getting the ticket.

Jesus God, he did not want to think about that, but the old man — he could see the old man vividly in his mind — the old man standing there by the urinal, poor old man with a cane, zipping up his fly with gnarled and arthritic fingers, and the rectangle of pasteboard falling out of his baggy pocket and onto the floor, the old man not seeing it, moving away — and he himself moving forward, picking up the rectangle, one-way a long way and he wanted to move again, he wanted to get out of that town, get away from the Polack and the things the Polack had made him do, things like grinding stale bread and adding it to the raw hamburger to make it last longer, things like scraping the remains on the plates of recently departed customers back into the serving pots, things that nauseated and disgusted him.

And then the old man coming back, looking chagrined, looking lost, cane tapping on the tile floor, tapping, tapping, and seeing Lennox there with the ticket in his own trousers now, hidden in there.

“I lost my ticket,” the old man said, “I lost it somewhere, it must have fallen out of my pocket. Have you seen it, son? Have you seen my ticket?”

“No,” he answered, “no, I never saw any ticket.”

“I got to go to my daughter, I got to have that ticket,” the old man said. “She sent me the money, I don’t have any money of my own. How can I get to my daughter now?”

“I don’t know, old man, let me by.”

“What about my ticket? What about my daughter?” pleading with him, eyes blinking silver tears, and he had walked away fast, leaving the old man there, standing there alone and leaning on his cane with the tears in his eyes and the lost’ look on his seamed old face, hurried out of there with the ticket burning in his pocket...

The pain went away.

It receded, faded into calm, and Lennox was able to sit up again. He rubbed oily sweat from his face, blanking his mind once more, shutting out the image of the old man, and leaned back in the seat; he sucked breath between yellow-filmed teeth, and the fetid and stagnant air burned like sulphur in his lungs.

There was a static, humming sound inside the bus now, and Lennox became aware that the loudspeaker system had been switched on. He raised his head, and the flat, toneless voice of the bus driver filtered out from a speaker on the roof above him. “There’s a roadside oasis a few miles ahead, folks, and since it’s past noon we’ll be stopping there a half-hour for lunch. They’ve got hamburgers, assorted sandwiches, beer and soft drinks, reasonably priced...”

Lennox doubled forward again, pressing his forehead against the rear of the seat in front of him, his hands burrowing up under his wishbone. Violently and abruptly, the pain had come back.

Two

In a large city sixty miles to the north, in an air-conditioned downtown restaurant, a short, plump man sat in a corner booth and rubbed stubby fingers across his round paunch, cherubic face twisted into a momentary grimace.

The red-haired waitress standing before the booth said, “Is something the matter, sir?”

The plump man, whose name was Harry Vollyer, sighed audibly. “I’ve got a mild ulcer,” he said. “Gives me trouble, every now and then.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, it’s all part of the game.”

“Game?”

“Life,” Vollyer told her. “The greatest game of them all.”

“I guess so,” the waitress said. “Would you like to order now?”

“A grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk — cold milk.”

“Yes, sir. And your friend?”

“He’ll have a steak sandwich, no fries, and black coffee.”

The waitress moved away, and Vollyer belched delicately, if sourly, and sighed again. He wore a tailored powder-blue suit and a handmade silk shirt the color of fresh grapefruit juice; his tie was by Bronzini, dark blue with faint black diamonds, fastened to his shirt by a tiny white-gold tack; his shoes were bench-crafted from imported Spanish leather, polished to a high gloss. On the little fingers of each hand he wore thick white-gold rings, with platinum-and-onyx settings in simple geometric designs. He had wide, bright blue eyes that gave him the appearance of being perpetually incredulous, and silvered hair that was cut and shaped immaculately to the roundness of his skull. The curve of his lips was benign and cheerful, and from the faint wrinkles at each corner you could tell that he laughed often, that he was a complacent and happy man.

There was movement from across the room, and Vollyer saw that Di Parma was finally coming back from the telephone booth. He smiled in a fatherly way. He had felt paternal toward Di Parma from the moment he met him, he didn’t know exactly why; Livio was thirty-six, only fifteen years younger than Vollyer, but he gave the impression of being just a youth, of needing constant guidance and direction. It wasn’t that his actions, his thoughts, were juvenile, it was just that he had this habitual look of being lost, of being about to burst into tears, which got right down and pulled at your heart. Vollyer liked Di Parma. He had only been working with him for eight months now, but he liked him considerably more than any of the others he had worked with over the years; he hoped that they could stay together for a while, that nothing would come up to necessitate a severance of their relationship. There were a lot of things he could teach Di Parma, and Livio was a willing student. It gave you a sense of well-being, of completion, when you had somebody like that to work with, somebody who didn’t claim to know all the answers because he’d been around in some of the other channels for a while, somebody who could follow orders without back-talking or petulance.

Di Parma slipped into the booth across from him, a frown tugging at the edges of his mouth, corrugating the faintly freckled surface of his forehead. He was a very tall man with crew-cut brown hair and medium-length sideburns, dressed in a dove-gray suit that managed to look rumpled most of the time, in spite of the fact that it had cost as much money as Vollyer’s powder-blue one. His shirt and tie were striped, colors harmonious, but he wore no clip or tack, no jewelry of any kind; he had an intense personal aversion to it and he refused to wear it, even refused to wear a wedding ring — a fact which never ceased to amaze Vollyer. He possessed a slender, aquiline nose that gave the illusion of turning up like an inverted fishhook when you faced him, and liquid brown eyes that conveyed the sense of bemusement which Vollyer found so appealing. His hands were oversized, spatulate, and he was self-conscious about them; he put them under the table now, because he had the inveterate feeling that everybody, even Vollyer, would stare at them if they were in plain sight, although Harry had told him on a number of occasions that his hands were not anywhere near as conspicuous as he imagined.

Vollyer smiled paternally and said, “Did you get through to Jean all right?”

“No,” Di Parma answered, frowning, “no, she wasn’t home. I called back twice but she didn’t answer.”

“Maybe she went out shopping.”

“She does her shopping on Tuesdays and Fridays,” Di Parma said. “This is Monday, Harry.”

“A movie then, or a walk.”

“Jean doesn’t like movies, and she’s been having this trouble with her arches. She’s been to a podiatrist three times already this month.” He worried his lower lip. “Damn, I don’t know what to think.”

“Livio, Livio, you just talked to her this morning. She was fine then, wasn’t she?”

“Sure. Sure, she was okay.”

“Then she’s okay now, too,” Vollyer said reasonably. “It’s only been four hours.”

“But she’s not home and she’s always home this time of day.”

“Are you sure she didn’t say something to you this morning about going out? Or maybe last night? Think about it, Livio.”

Di Parma thought about it — and then he blinked and looked surprised and said, “One of the neighbors asked her to come over to some kind of luncheon. Us being new in the neighborhood and all.”

Vollyer nodded tolerantly. “You see? Nothing to get excited about.”

Di Parma was embarrassed. “Hell, Harry, I—”

“Forget it,” Vollyer said. He made a dismissive gesture. “You’re too tense all the time. Relax a little.”

“Well,” Di Parma said, and cleared his throat. “Did you order yet? I’m hungrier than I thought I was.”

“All taken care of.”

“A steak sandwich for me, no fries?”

“Just like always.”

Vollyer settled back comfortably against the cool leather of the booth, folding his hands across his paunch. That Livio. Thirty-six years old, married a full five months now, and he went around like a kid on the third day of his honeymoon, calling Jean two and three times in a twenty-four-hour period whenever they were away from the city, worrying about her, talking about her incessantly. There was nothing wrong with love, Vollyer supposed, even though he had never experienced it and did not feel particularly cheated because he hadn’t — there was nothing wrong with love but there were limits, and he could not understand how a grown man could become that hung up on a woman. Women had their purpose, Vollyer had never been one to put women down, but you had to treat them as simple equals — or inferiors if they deserved it; you just didn’t put them up on pedestals like Roman goddesses or something.

Even though he could not understand Di Parma’s constant preoccupation with his wife, he condoned it, he was indulgent of it. The thing was, Livio had not let this personal hang-up of his interfere in any way with the efficiency of his professional life; when he was working, he was cool and thinking, following orders, making all the right moves. That being the case, how could you put him down for a simple character flaw? Vollyer had decided that Di Parma’s shortcomings were just a part of the game, and as such, had to be accepted, tolerated, because he liked Di Parma, he really did like Di Parma. He hoped that nothing would happen to change things; he hoped Livio would keep right on being cool and efficient when it counted.

The waitress came around with their lunch and set the plates down and went away again. Di Parma said, “What happens after we eat, Harry? Do we stay here or do we make the rest of the drive today?”

“Better if we stay here,” Vollyer answered. “We’ll find a motel, something with a pool and a nice lounge. We’ve only got sixty miles left, over the desert, and we can make that in an hour in the morning.”

“What time do we leave?”

“Seven. We want to get there around eight.”

“There shouldn’t be much doing that early.”

“We don’t want anything doing.”

“How soon do you figure we can get back home?”

“If everything goes okay, the day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll call Jean tomorrow night,” Di Parma said. “She’ll meet us at the airport. Listen, Harry, why don’t you come out to the house then? You haven’t seen the new house.”

Vollyer had no particular desire to see the new house, but he smiled and said, “Sure, Livio, all right.”

There was no getting around it, he really did like Di Parma.

Three

From the window of her room at the Joshua Hotel, Jana Hennessey stood looking down the length of Cuenca Seco’s dusty main street to the spanning arch of the huge wooden banner marking the town’s westward entrance. Even though the black lettering on the front of the sign was not visible from there, she had taken her yellow Triumph TR-6 beneath it late the previous afternoon — after better than fifty miles of desert driving — and she remembered clearly what it said:

Welcome to Cuenca Seco

Gateway to a Desert Wonderland

As far as Jana was concerned, the wording was misrepre-sentational. The Wonderland it spoke of was little more than a dead sea sustaining grotesque cacti with spines like razor-edged daggers, a haven for vultures and scorpions and fat brown venom-filled snakes, an arid and polychromatic graveyard strewn with the very bones of time. And the Gateway — well, the Gateway was an anachronism in a world of steel-and-glass, of hurtling chrome-toothed machines, of great, rushing, ant-busy throngs of people; it was an elaborate set for an Old West movie, with too many false-fronted buildings and sun-bonneted women and Stetsoned men moving ponderously beneath a demoniacal sun, with dust-caked metal extras miscast in the roles of horses and carriages; it was make-believe that had magically become a reality, and been given an aura of antiquity that was somehow a little frightening.

Jana expelled a long, soft breath. The trouble with me is, she thought, I’m a big-city girl. I can’t appreciate native Americana because I’ve never seen any of it face-to-face; I’ve never really been out of New York City until now. How much of the grass roots can you see in Brooklyn or Long Island or downtown Manhattan? It’s not so easy to adjust to a different way of life, it’s not so easy to surround yourself with nature instead of with people, with life-in-the-raw instead of life-insulated-by-luxury; it’s not so easy to break away, to change, to forget.

To forget...

Abruptly, Jana turned from the window — tall and lithe in her mid-twenties, figure reminiscent of a lingerie model’s, sable hair worn long and straight, with stray wisps falling over her shoulders, almost to the gentle swell of her breasts. A pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses gave her narrow face a quality of introspective intelligence that was enhanced by the prominence of delicately boned cheeks, by the firm set of a small, naturally pink mouth. Her eyes, behind the lens of the glasses, were an intense brown that contained, like an alien presence, a small dull glow of pain.

The room was small and hot, in spite of a portable air-conditioning unit mounted in the frame of the window; but since the Joshua Hotel was the only lodging in town — and since this was considered one of its finer accommodations — she had not had much choice in the matter. It contained a brass-framed double bed, two nightstands, a small private bathroom, and a child-sized writing desk; the walls were of a varnished blond wood, decorated with desert lithographs. The white bedspread depicted a stoic, war-painted Indian astride a pinto horse, a feathered lance in one hand.

Jana crossed the room, stood behind the desk, and studied the typewritten sheets laid out beside the portable Royal, the first two pages of the outline she had begun earlier that morning. Then she looked at the half-filled third page rolled into the platen of the machine, at the x-ed out lines there. She turned again and went to the bed and sat down, staring at the telephone on the nightstand nearest the door.

She had put off calling Harold Klein for a week now, and she knew that that had been a mistake. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him because of the book, the fact that she hadn’t even started it; and, more important, because he represented an integral part of the life in New York from which she had so completely severed herself. Time to think, uninterrupted, had been what she desperately needed during the two thousand five hundred miles she had driven this past week — time to sort things out in her mind so that she would be able to work again. And Harold would not have understood, would still not understand. Oh, he knew about Don Harper, of course — the bare facts of the affair — but that was all he knew. He was a fine agent, a good friend, but she had just never been able to talk to him on a personal level — and the things which had been on her mind of late were such that she would have found it almost impossible to discuss them with a priest, much less a man of Harold’s uncomplicated nature.

But that did not alter the fact that her failure to call him had been a mistake. He was undoubtedly worried, and with good cause; he had done a lot for her, after all, had been responsible for a large percentage of her current success. He had a stake in her future — was a prospectively important part of her future — and to continue to shun him would be, ultimately, to shun whatever prospects for renewed normalcy lay ahead of her.

She had been thinking about rectifying her mistake all morning, and now she knew that she would not be able to get back to her outline until she had done so. She picked up the phone and asked the desk clerk to dial Klein’s personal office number in New York, nervously tapping short, manicured nails on the glass top of the table as she waited. What would she tell him? How would she—?

A soft click. “Harold Klein,” his voice said distantly, metallically.

She drew a quiet, tremulous breath. “Hello, Harold, this is Jana.”

Momentary silence — and then Klein said with deceptive calm, “Well, hello, Jana. How nice of you to call.”

“Harold, I—”

“For God’s sake,” Klein interrupted, anger replacing the subtle sarcasm, “where have you been the past week? You just disappeared, without a word, without a trace. We’ve been so damned worried we were about ready to call in the police.”

“I’ve been... traveling,” she told him vaguely.

“Traveling where?”

“Cross country.”

“Well, where are you now?”

She explained, briefly.

“What are you doing there?”

“Getting ready to write Desert Adventure.”

“You mean you haven’t even started it yet?”

“No,” she said.

“You’re a week past deadline now,” Klein said with exasperation. “I’ve gotten at least one phone call a day from Ross Phalen—”

“Ross Phalen is a pain in the ass,” Jana said bluntly.

“That may be true, but his word is law at Nabob Press. Do you want to lose them, Jana? They’re paying a hell of a lot more money than I can get you from any of the other juvenile publishers.”

“I know that, Harold, and I’m sorry. But I’ve had some... problems the past month. I tried to work and I couldn’t, and so I decided to come out here and see if the location would stimulate me.”

“Problems? What sort of problems?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

Klein exhaled audibly. “Don Harper, I suppose. Well, all right. How long will it take you to finish the book? I’ve got to have something to tell Phalen when he calls again.”

“About a week,” Jana said.

“And the illustrations?”

“Another week.”

“Is that definite?”

“I think so, yes.”

Klein sighed a second time. “When you get back to New York, girl, you and I are going to have a nice long talk about the facts of life. You’ve got to understand that running off unannounced this way—”

“Harold, I’m not coming back to New York.”

“What?”

“I’m not coming back,” Jana repeated.

Silence hummed over the wire for a moment, and then Klein said half-incredulously, “You’re not serious.”

“I’m very serious.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“I’ve had it with New York, that’s all, I’m sick to my soul of New York. I feel as if I’m... suffocating there.”

“Where do you expect to go? What do you expect to do, a young girl alone?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll travel, I’ll go to Canada, to Mexico, I’ll see some of the great wide world.” She tried to make her tone light, but she had the feeling that her voice was strained and uncertain.

“Jana, I think you’re making a rash and foolish decision. Your place is here, with people you know, with people you can equate with.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Harold, I’ve made up my mind. Now I don’t want to discuss it any more. I’ve got to get to work on Desert Adventure if you want a manuscript in a week.”

“All right, we won’t discuss it any more,” Klein said, and Jana detected an irritating note of patronage in his voice. “What’s the name of the place where you’re staying? The telephone number?”

She told him.

“I’ll call you in a day or so, to see how you’re coming along. Sooner, if anything urgent comes up.”

“Fine.”

“You won’t go running off again, now?”

“No, I’ll stay right here.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

They said parting words, and Jana put the receiver down quickly. The telephone conversation had gone about as she had expected it to, but it had upset her nonetheless. Harold meant well, but he was a prober, a man who tried to burrow his way into your soul, to examine each cell of your being in an effort to determine its relationship with every other cell. And that was exactly the kind of thing which frightened her, which she wanted desperately to avoid.

Harold must never know.

No one must ever know.

Hers was a private hell, and it could be shared by no one — no one at all.

Four

The roadside oasis was situated just outside the crest of a long curve in the main interstate highway, like a detached nipple on some gigantic contour drawing of a woman’s breast.

It was set something over two hundred yards from the highway, umbilically connected to it by a narrow, unpaved access road that blended into a rough-gravel parking area in front. There were, in actuality, three buildings: the main structure, old and sprawling, unpainted, with two weathered gas pumps under a short wooden awning; at the right edge of the parking area, a lattice-fronted, considerably smaller construction that obviously housed rest rooms; and a cabinlike dwelling set directly behind the main building — living quarters for the owner or owners. A large wooden sign, mounted on rusted steel rods on the roof of the main building, read Del’s Oasis in heat-eroded blue letters.

Lennox saw all of this through dulled eyes as the bus turned off the black glass of the highway, onto the access road. It bounced jarringly, raising heavy clouds of dust, and he clutched at the armrests with both hands, his teeth clamped tightly together at the intensification of the pain which still burned deep within his belly. The bus slowed as it swung onto the surface of the parking lot, and the driver maneuvered it to parallel the gas pumps directly in front, switching off the diesel immediately. The doors whispered open, and heat-shrouded silence crept in.

Lennox got sluggishly out of his seat and followed the other passengers and the driver onto the gravel beneath the wooden awning. He saw that a screen door was set into the front of the structure, above which was a warped metal sign: Café. There were two windows, dust-caked, with green shades partially drawn inside, one on either flank of the door. In the left window was a Coca-Cola sign and a card that said Open; in the right was a shield advertising Coors beer.

The driver pulled open the screen door, and his passengers trooped in after him like a line of weary foot soldiers, Lennox entering last. It was not much cooler inside. There was an overt stuffiness in the barnlike interior that had not been dispelled by the large ceiling fan whirring overhead, or by the ice-cooler placed on a low table to one side. On the left was a long, deserted lunch counter with yellow leatherette-topped stools arranged before it; the remainder of the room was taken up with wooden tables covered in yellow-checked oilcloth, all of them empty now, and straight-backed chairs. The rough-wood walls were furbished with prospecting tools — picks, shovels, nugget pans, and the like — and faded facsimiles of venerable Western newspapers announcing the discovery of gold in California, silver in Nevada and Arizona. At the foot of the far wall, next to an open door leading to a storeroom, were a rocking cradle and portions of a wooden sluice box that a placard propped between them claimed to have been used at Sutter’s Mill, California, circa 1850.

Behind the lunch counter, dressed in clean white, a middle-aged, balding man with thick jowls stood slicing potatoes on a scarred sandwich board. To one side of him, tacked to the wall, was a square of cardboard: We Accept All Major Credit Cards. Lennox thought bitterly of the wallet full of credit cards he had destroyed months ago, because they had his name on them and were links with the dead past, because using them would be like leaving a clear, fresh trail to his current whereabouts, because he might never be able to pay the accumulated sums, and that was considered fraud and he did not want any more threats to his tenuous freedom. But Jesus, he should have kept just one card — Diner’s or Carte Blanche — for emergencies like this, for the moments of burning hunger...

The balding man put down the heavy knife he was using as the string of customers — not Lennox — moved to the lunch counter and took stools in an even row; he wiped his hands on a freshly laundered towel, smiling professionally with thick lips that were a winelike red in the sallow cast of his face. “What’ll it be today, folks?”

Lennox could smell the pungency of grilled meat hanging heavily in the hot, still air, and the muscles of his stomach convulsed. He backed to the door, turning, and stumbled outside, moving directly across to the bus, leaning unsteadily against the hot metal of its side. After a moment he re-entered the coach and took his small, cracked blue overnight bag from the rack above the seat. Then he crossed under the bright glare of the sun to the rest rooms.

Inside the door marked Men, he ran cold water into the lavatory basin and washed his face and neck, cupped his hands under the tap and rinsed his mouth several times; he resisted the urge to drink, knowing that if he swallowed any of the tepid, chemical-tasting liquid his contracted stomach would throw it up again immediately. From the overnight bag he took his razor and a thin sliver of soap; but the idea of shaving, which had been his intention, evaporated when he looked at himself in the speckled mirror over the basin. A close shave would have been incongruous with his unkempt hair, his sweat-dirty clothes, his hollow eyes — and he would still have looked like a derelict. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with all of it.

He returned the razor and soap to the bag, and then opened the door to one of the two stalls, closing it behind him as he entered, and sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat, his head in his hands. The pain, which had fluctuated into a muted gnawing as he splashed himself with water at the basin, again disappeared from his stomach; but he kept on sitting there, drinking air through his mouth.

Several minutes passed, and finally Lennox got weakly to his feet. He hoped to God that they would finish eating in the café before long. He wanted to get to some town, any town, a town where there were dishes to be washed or floors to be swept, a town where they had a mission or a Salvation Army kitchen; if he did not get something to eat very soon, he was afraid that he would collapse from lack of nourishment — you could die from malnutrition, couldn’t you? How long could a man live without food? Three days, four? He wasn’t sure, exactly; he was sure only of the pain which attacked his belly more and more frequently, more and more intensely, and that in itself was enough to frighten him.

He picked up his overnight bag and opened the door and went outside, blinking against the glinting sunlight. He moved toward the bus. As he came around on the side of it, he saw the driver lounging against the left front wheel, working on his teeth with a wooden pick. Lennox wet his lips with a dry tongue, pulling his eyes away, and put one foot on the metal entrance step.

The driver said, “Just a minute, guy.”

Lennox stopped, and electricity fled along the nerve synapses in the saddle of his back. There was something — a terse authority — in the driver’s voice that portended trouble. He turned, slowly, and faced the other man. “Yes?”

The driver was darkly powerful in his sweat-stained gray uniform, and there was a grim set to his squared jaw. He studied Lennox with small, sharp eyes, and the distaste at what he saw was clearly defined on his sun-flushed face. “I didn’t see you inside the café,” he said, and the tone of his voice made the words a question that demanded an acceptable answer.

“I... wasn’t hungry,” Lennox answered thickly. “I went to wash up.”

“You’ve been riding with me since six this morning. You didn’t eat when we took the rest stop in Chandlerville at eight, and you don’t eat now. You don’t have much of an appetite, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” the driver said. “Where are you going?”

“Going?”

“That’s right: what destination?”

Lennox tried to remember the name of the city on the old man’s ticket, but his mind had gone blank. He said, “I... the next town. The next stop.”

“Let’s have a look at your ticket.”

“What for?”

“Let’s see it,” coldly.

Lennox got the pasteboard from his pocket, and the driver took it out of his nerveless fingers. He scanned it, his eyes narrowing. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “This is only valid to Gila River, and we passed through there two hours ago. You’re riding on an expired pass.”

He could not think of anything to say. What was there to say? He hadn’t considered the possibility of the ticket being good only to one of the small towns along the bus route; he had been irrationally sure that the old man would be going to one of the larger border cities to the south, that that was where the daughter who had sent him the money would be living. The destination on the pasteboard had meant nothing to him originally, and he remembered only vaguely passing through Gila River; the name had sparked no recognition at that time. He stood there sweating, looking at the driver’s shirt front, trying to think of something to do or say but not coming up with anything at all.

“You owe me four-eighty,” the driver said. “That’s the fare one way from Gila River to Troy Springs.”

“I don’t... have four-eighty,” Lennox said woodenly.

“That’s what I figured, too. You’re nothing but a damned vag, and you’re off my bus as of right now.”

“Listen,” Lennox said, “listen, you can’t leave me here...”

“The hell I can’t,” the driver told him. “You’re left, guy.”

He turned abruptly and went to the café door, calling out to the passengers inside that they would be leaving now. He came back and got in behind the wheel, ignoring Lennox, and after a moment the other passengers filed out and entered the bus. The homely girl with the heat-chafed thighs looked at Lennox with a curious, mild hunger, but she did not say anything to him.

He stood there like a fool, feeling helpless, holding the overnight bag against his right leg. The homely girl pressed her face to the window glass and looked down at him with sad eyes. The bus began to move away, its diesel engine shattering the hot, dead stillness, and Lennox watched it swing around and start down the access road, raising clouds of dry, acrid dust. Sunlight gleamed feverishly off the silver metal of its body as it slowed and made the turn south, a sluggish armored sowbug disappearing along the curve of the highway. What now? he thought. What am I going to do now?

He heard movement behind him, and when he turned he saw that the balding man who had been behind the café counter had come outside. The balding man walked over beside Lennox and took a cigarette from the pocket of his white shirt and set it between his thick lips without lighting it. After a moment he said, “Put you off the bus, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“I was riding on an expired ticket.”

“These bus drivers can be bastards sometimes,” the balding man said. “This is a hell of a place to strand a guy.”

“A hell of a place,” Lennox agreed dully.

The balding man studied him closely without appearing to do so. The heat was thick around the two of them, and from out of the barren plain to the east, something made a fluttering sound. Finally the balding man said, “You a little strapped for money, are you?”

“You could say that.”

“Down on your luck or on the run?”

Lennox started. “What?”

“Cops looking for you?” the balding man asked matter-of-factly.

“No,” he lied. “No.”

“Were you heading any place special on that bus?”

“Just... drifting.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I got some work if you could use it.”

Lennox had been looking out over the desert, at the shimmering jagged floor of it, at the gaunt skeletal range rising on the horizon to the south, at the vast brittle emptiness lying motionless under the canopy of heat. He turned his attention to the balding man again and passed a hand across his mouth. “What kind of work?”

“This and that. A little painting, a little stock reshuffling, a little fixing up.”

“Here?”

“That’s right. I can’t pay much — a few bucks — but you’ll eat for three-four days and you can sleep on a cot in the storeroom. And you’ll be able to buy another bus ticket out when you’re through.”

The pain was omnipresent in Lennox’s stomach, gnawing, gnawing. He did not have to consider the offer at all. “All right,” he said.

The balding man smiled briefly. “My name’s Perrins, Al Perrins.” He kept his hands at his sides.

“Mine’s Delaney,” Lennox said.

“Okay, Delaney. How about a couple of burgers? You can start work afterward.”

Lennox made a dry clearing noise in his throat. His legs felt even weaker now, but it was the weakness of sudden relief. “Sounds good.”

“The food ain’t,” Perrins said, and laughed. “But it’ll fill your belly. Come on.”

They turned and walked slowly inside the café. Lennox was thinking about the burgers Perrins had promised, and he felt nauseous with his hunger; he wondered if he would be able to keep any of the food down.

He was able to — most of it, anyway.

Five

When the young bright-face, Forester, finished his morning patrol and returned to the county sheriff’s substation in Cuenca Seco, Andy Brackeen — the resident deputy-in-charge-went down to Sullivan’s Bar to drink his lunch.

It had been a long morning, and Brackeen was badly hungover and very thirsty. He had gotten into a pointless argument with his wife, Marge, the night before and had driven over to Kehoe City in a huff; there had been a poker game in the back room of Indian Charley’s, and he had lost heavily and drunk too damned much gin in the bargain. He still could not remember driving home, and that was very bad; he was hanging onto his job by a thread now, and the last stroke of the scissors would be a tag by one of the Highway Patrol units or cruising county cars for drunk driving in a county vehicle. He was a goddamned fool for getting into the gin like that; he couldn’t handle gin, he had never been able to handle gin. It did things to his mind, blacked him out so that he could not recall what he had done after a certain point in the evening. But if he stayed with the beer, he was all right. He could drink beer with the best of them, and he was always in full control of his faculties; things were just fine if he stayed with the beer.

Brackeen had no illusions about himself. He knew what he was and why he was what he was. There had been a time when that knowledge had been heavy and consumptive within him, but that had been sixteen years ago, in another world named San Francisco — that had been before the desert and the beer, before Marge. Now the perception was only a dimly glowing ember resting on the edge of his soul.

He was a big man, thick-chested, and he had in his youth fought amateur bouts in the heavyweight class, almost but not quite qualifying for the Golden Gloves; but the once-powerful musculature of his body was now overlaid with a soft cushion of fat, and his belly swayed liquidly beneath his dark khaki uniform shirt, partially concealing the buckle of his Sam Browne belt, brushing across the checked grip of the .357 Colt Python Magnum on his right hip. Each of his forty-one years was grooved for all to see on the sun-blackened surface of his face, as the elements had carved the centuries on the desert landscape he had made his home more than fourteen years before. Perpetually damp black hair, speckled with gray and pure white, was thickly visible beneath a deep-crowned white Stetson; gray eyes, red-rimmed and flatly expressionless, seemed as fixed as bright marbles solidified in lucite.

He was not particularly well-liked in the town of Cuenca Seco, but neither was he hated nor feared; he was, for the most part, simply tolerated and ignored. As he moved now along the heat-waved sidewalk toward Sullivan’s Bar, walking slowly because of the throbbing ache in his temples and because of the hot sun, he passed townspeople whom he knew — but there were no exchanges of greeting, no nods of recognition. He walked alone on the busy street, and it was the way Brackeen had come to want it; he could live with himself only as long as he was able to lock the secret of his disintegration as a man deep within, and he knew that friendships, liaisons, often brought probings which, if well-meaning, could still be ultimately destructive. He could never talk about it. He had never told anyone about it, not even Marge, even though she might have understood.

Sullivan’s Bar was crowded with lunch trade, and Brackeen’s eyes narrowed into thin slits at the sudden change in light as he entered. There was an air-conditioning unit behind the simulated kegs-and-plank bar, and the cool air was a salve on his pulsing temples, the feverish skin of his face. He moved across the wooden floor, up to the bar, and the men there made room for him without ceasing conversation, without looking at him, without acknowledging his presence in any way.

Sullivan came down immediately, no smile on his freckled Irish countenance. Brackeen said, “Mighty hot,” the way he did every day when he came in, and took off his hat and put it on the bar face. He passed one of his big, knotted hands through his damp hair.

Sullivan said, “Yeah,” ritualistically.

“Draw a pint, will you, Sully?”

“Sure.”

“And put a Poor Boy in, I guess.”

Sullivan went away and drew the beer and placed one of the foil-wrapped, ready-made sandwiches into the miniature electric oven on the back bar. He was an old-fashioned publican, and he scraped the foaming head off the glass of beer with a wooden spatula before serving it.

Brackeen wrapped both hands around the cold-beaded stein, lifted it, his eyes closing in anticipation. He drank in long, convulsive swallows, filling his mouth with the chill effervescence before letting it flow tingling through the burning passage of his throat and into the unsettled emptiness of his stomach.

The glass was empty. He put it down on the bar and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. Jesus, but he had needed that! And the next one, too. He didn’t really want the Poor Boy at all, but he knew that when he had a hangover as bad as this one, he had to have something solid on his stomach; if not, he would conclude his tour at five o’clock by puking up stale beer, that was what had happened the last time he hadn’t eaten with hell going.

Brackeen looked for Sullivan and caught his eye, lifting the empty stein. When it had been refilled, he drank more slowly, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. What he saw did not disturb him much. If he had been able, as a kid fresh out of the Police Academy, to look twenty years into the future and see himself as he was today, he would have been appalled at the vision; but as a kid, he had had ideals, dreams, he had had a lot of things that he no longer possessed. The fact that he had become a slob offended him not at all.

He ate the Poor Boy slowly, in mincing bites washed down with a third stein of draught. The beer was bringing him out of it, as it usually did. He called to Sullivan for a fourth draw, and while he waited for it he decided that he was strong enough to have a cigarette; he couldn’t touch them in the mornings after a night like he’d had in Kehoe City.

He smoked two cigarettes, one each with the fourth and the fifth glasses of beer, and he was feeling straight with himself again, feeling pretty good. The headache had abated, and his gut was not giving him any more trouble. But it was time to get back, because Forester took his lunch at one-thirty and Forester had big eyes and a bigger mouth, being a bright-face. Brackeen didn’t want to antagonize Forester, you had to pamper these young shits with their new-found authority, because if they went sour on you they could make a lot of trouble. And Forester had never made a secret of the fact that he disliked — disapproved of — Brackeen.

He thought briefly about taking a couple of cans of beer back to the substation with him — Forester was going on patrol again, after his lunch — but he shelved that idea immediately. He had almost gotten caught with a half-quart in his hand that afternoon two months ago, when the county sheriff, Lydell, had come in unannounced. He had learned his lesson from that; there was no point in tempting fate, no percentage in raising already poor odds. He would be able to make it through the day now, with these five beers under his belt — and if he did begin hurting a little later on, maybe he could slip out for a couple of minutes and get back here for a bracer or two, as long as things remained quiet.

He eased off the stool and put his hat back on, adjusting the Magnum on his hip. “See you later, Sully,” he said.

“Yeah, sure.”

Brackeen smiled loosely and went out into the sweltering afternoon without touching his wallet — the final segment of the bitter ritual he and Sullivan enacted almost every day.

Six

Slowly, inexorably, the desert sun traversed its ardent path across the smoky blue heavens. When it reached the lip of the western horizon, it hung there for long minutes as if preparing itself for the descent, radiating, setting red-gold fire to the sky around it. Then, abruptly, it plunged, deepening the red haze into burnished brass, adding salmon and pink threads to the intricate color scheme of a desert sunset. The horizon swallowed it hungrily, and the empyrean modulated to blue-gray, to slate, to expanding black as the shining globe vanished completely.

The first papery whispers of the night wind stirred the mesquite, the bright gold flowers of the rabbit bush, and nocturnal animals — badgers, foxes, peccaries, coyotes, hooded skunks — ventured tentatively from their lairs in search of food and water. Bats and horned owls filled the rapidly cooling air with the flutter of wings.

Darkness hooded the land in a black cloak, and the wind grew chill as the sharp and enigmatic reversal of desert temperature manifested itself. A pale gold moon appeared suddenly in the star-pricked velvet of the sky, as if it had been launched from some immense catapult, casting ghostly white shine across the silent landscape.

Night was full-born.

Another day had perished into infinity.

The Second Day...

One

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

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

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

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

“Want to talk to you.”

“There’s nothing more to be said.”

“Goddamn right there is, goddamn right!”

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

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

“You’re drunk,” she says again.

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

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

“Your house! You bitch, your house!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You frigging slut!”

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

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

“Oh, don’t be absurd.”

“I’m not going to pay it.”

“If you don’t, you’ll go to jail.”

“They have to catch me first.”

“And just what is that supposed to imply?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No? How you going to stop me?”

“I’ll stop you.”

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

She slaps me.

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

And she stops me again.

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

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

She draws her bloodied hands away.

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

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

Run, Lennox.

Run.

Run.

RUN!

Running...

Running...

Someone was shaking him, calling the name Delaney.

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

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

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

“Hell yes.”

“Did I say anything?”

“Not that I could make out. Why?”

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

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

“All right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess I am,” Lennox answered.

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

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

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

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

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

“Will do.”

“Yell if you want anything.”

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

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

Oh, goddamnit, why me?

Two

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

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

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

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

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

“Or something.”

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

“So I understand.”

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

“It sounds fine,” Jana said.

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

“I’ll do that, thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No cars,” Vollyer said.

“We go?”

“We go.”

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

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

“And if he’s not alone?”

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

“Okay.”

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

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

“Morning,” the target said.

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

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

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

“Outside,” the target told him.

“Oh. Well, thanks.”

“Something I can get for you?”

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

“Coming up.”

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

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

“No cars?”

“Nothing.”

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

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

Vollyer and Di Parma took out their guns.

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

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

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

“No mistake,” Vollyer said quietly.

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

“All right, Livio,” Vollyer said.

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

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

Four

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

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

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

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

Phyllis, you bitch, he thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Run, Lennox.

Run!

Five

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

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

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

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

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

There was somebody out there.

Somebody running.

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

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

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

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

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

“You think he saw us make the hit?”

“Maybe.”

“Harry, we’ve got to go after him.”

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

Di Parma nodded. “Where’ll you be?”

“Back inside.”

“What for?”

“Move, Livio, move.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s not going to get to the cops.”

“We’ll never find him out there.”

“Maybe not.”

“Then what do we do?”

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

Six

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

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

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

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

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

Sure it does.

You bet.

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

Seven

The runner, running:

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

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

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

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

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

The first thing he thinks of is his overnight bag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The runner: still running.

Eight

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

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

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

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

Vollyer made his decision.

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

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

“Pretty soon now.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“Stay cool, Livio.”

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

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

Di Parma said urgently, “Car coming!”

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

“Goddamn it!” Di Parma said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Di Parma said, “Christ!”

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

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

“Insurance,” Vollyer told him.

“I don’t follow.”

“You will, Livio, you will.”

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

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

Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A murder, a murder!”

“The hell you say. Where?”

“Del’s Oasis, out on the Intrastate.”

“Who’s dead?”

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

“How do you know it’s murder?”

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

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

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

“You find Perrins yourself?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Naturally.”

“Find anything?”

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

“What?”

“In the storeroom.”

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

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

“Probably,” Brackeen agreed dryly.

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

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

“Hear what?”

“Your theory.”

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

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

“That’s right.”

“Where did he get the gun?”

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

“And the motive?”

“Robbery — what else?”

“Register cleaned out, is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was the front door locked?”

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

“How do you think he left here?”

“On foot.”

“Where? Up to the highway?”

“Sure, looking to hitch a ride.”

“Did Perrins have a car?”

“Naturally.”

“Is it here now?”

“Around back, by the cabin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any way you wanted it, a professional hit.

And the hell with it.

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

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

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

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

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

He felt lousy.

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

Ten

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

The mind wanders.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s not fair, it’s not fair...”

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

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

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

He runs all the way home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You crazy bastard!” Hal says thickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s that?

There, there, off to the right?

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

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

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

Eleven

For Jana, it had been a quiet day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

man?

man out there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you talk now?” she asked him.

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

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

“All day. Years.”

“What happened?”

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

“You should have stayed on the highway.”

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

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

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

“Mine, too, as a matter of fact.”

“You don’t live in this area?”

“No. I’m just a tourist.”

“Are you alone here?”

Her tentative smile faded slightly. “Why?”

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

“To Cuenca Seco.”

“What about the other direction?”

“It’s a dead end.”

“How far to Cuenca Seco?”

“About seven miles.”

“Can you take me there? Right now?”

“Well...”

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

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

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

“Thanks, Miss—”

“Hennessey, Jana Hennessey.”

“Thanks, Miss Hennessey.”

“What’s your name?”

“Delaney,” he said. “Pete Delaney.”

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

“No,” he answered. “Nothing.”

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

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

Twelve

Di Parma didn’t like what they were doing.

He didn’t like it one single damned bit.

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

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

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

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

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

God, he wished he was with Jean!

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

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

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

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

“That’s right, I don’t know it.”

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

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

“What difference does that make?”

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

“Harry—”

“Stop the car,” Vollyer said suddenly.

“What?”

“Stop the car!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe.”

“Who else would it be?”

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

“Why the gun, Harry?”

“Just in case.”

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

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

“Harry, this is no goddamn game!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vollyer waited a moment longer. And fired.

Again.

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

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

Thirteen

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

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

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

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

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

Run!

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

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

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

Fourteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll find them.”

“How did they get away? How?”

“They haven’t gotten away.”

“But we had them. We had them cold.”

“Even losers get lucky for a little while.”

“Who do you think that girl is?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. No, I guess not.”

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

“All right.”

“If you see them, fire a shot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No sign of them otherwise?”

“No.”

“You know where you found this?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

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

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

They moved forward into the rocks.

Fifteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why? Who are they?”

“They’re killers.”

“What?”

“Killers, professional killers.”

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

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

“Then what do they want with you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sixteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

“Something’s bothering you.”

“It’s nothing, babe.”

“It’s that murder today, isn’t it?”

“You heard about that, did you?”

“The whole town’s talking about it.”

“All right, so they’re talking.”

“Are you investigating?”

“Christ, no.”

“Well, what do you think happened?”

“What difference does it make what I think?”

“Do you think that drifter did it?”

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

“God, you’re in a mood,” Marge said.

“So I’m in a mood, so what?”

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

“It’s too hot for screwing.”

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

“That was last night.”

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

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

Seventeen

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

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

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

Di Parma said, “Nothing, right?” in a dull voice.

“Nothing,” Vollyer answered.

“Now what do we do?”

“We don’t have much choice, Livio.”

“You mean we spend the night out here?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh shit, Harry.”

“We’ve come too far to backtrack to the car now.”

“Snakes come out at night,” Di Parma said, and his voice was that of a complaining child. “I don’t like snakes.”

“You haven’t seen any snakes yet, have you?”

“They don’t move around during the day. Night’s when they hunt. It’s too hot in the daytime.”

“Tell me some more about the desert.”

“I don’t know anything about the desert.”

“You know about the snakes.”

“I told you, I don’t like the goddamn things,” Di Parma said, as if that explained it.

“You can see a long way on the desert at night, isn’t that right?” Vollyer said. “When the moon is up, it can get to be just as bright as day, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know,” Di Parma said.

“It’s right,” Vollyer told him. “We’ll sleep in shifts. Because of the snakes and because Lennox and the girl might try moving after dark, figuring to cross us up.”

Di Parma drank again from the water bottle. He said, without looking at Vollyer, “How long are we going to stay out here looking?”

“Until we find them.”

“That could take a week, a month.”

“It won’t take another full day.”

“I don’t see how you can be so sure.”

“We found where they’d been in that arroyo,” Vollyer said. “We found where they left it again. We’re on their trail.”

“Maybe,” Di Parma said doubtfully. “But I still say they could be anywhere. They could’ve doubled back to the road by now.”

Vollyer looked out over the desert again. A faint glow lingered on the horizon, prolonging the twilight, but the sky directly above them was dark and clear, speckled with the indistinct and precursory images of what would soon be crystal-bright stars. “They’re out there,” he said softly. “Hiding now, maybe, but not any longer than dawn. He’s a runner, Livio, and runners have to run.”

“He’s got the girl with him. Maybe she’ll change his mind, if she hasn’t already.”

“I don’t think so.”

Abruptly, Di Parma stood, picked up his jacket, and walked a few feet away. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and slid his large hands into the pockets.

He said, “It cooled off in a hell of a hurry.”

“One of nature’s little games.”

“You think the Buick will be okay where we left it?”

“It’s well hidden from the road.”

“Suppose somebody sees it?”

“Then they’ll figure it to belong to sightseers. Or hikers.”

“Our suitcases are in the trunk, Harry.”

“There’s nothing in them but a couple of changes of clothes.”

“The girl’s car — what about that?”

“It’ll sit for months in that wash before it’s found.”

“Not if she had somebody waiting for her in town,” Di Parma said. “Not if she’s reported missing and the cops put out a search party. We don’t know what she was doing out here all alone.”

“She was sketching,” Vollyer said.

“What?”

“There was a sketch pad behind the front seat, full of desert landscapes.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that she could have been expected somewhere.”

“Maybe. But she was alone today. She could be alone, period.”

“Damn it, Harry, that’s only a guess. How do we know who she might have told she was coming out here? How do we know what friends she might have?”

Vollyer’s stomach had begun to throb painfully. “Livio,” he said, “Livio, you’re pushing me, Livio, you’re getting on my nerves, Livio. I’m in charge, I’m giving the orders here and you’re taking them and I don’t want to hear any more bitching or any more back-talk, Livio. This is business, this is my business, you’re just a punk kid in my business. Do you understand, Livio? Livio, do you understand?” Voice calm, almost gentle, face showing no emotion at all.

Di Parma opened his mouth, closed it again, and then lowered his eyes. His shoulders were hunched inside his jacket. He took his hands out of his pockets and looked at them and put them away again. Almost inaudibly he said, “I understand, Harry.”

It was the right answer.

Eighteen

Drenched in moonlight, the eroded, multishaped formations of granite and sandstone and occasional lava had a ghostly, otherworld look and the desert held the chilling enchantment of a graveyard at midnight. Overhead, the stars burned in a brilliant display against the backdrop of silken blackness. To the east, under the great pallid gold moon, the yellowish spines of vast clusters of cholla seemed to glow like distant lights, beckoning false sanctuary. The stillness was less acute now, with the first venturings of the night creatures — a horned owl made a questioning lament in silhouette against the moon, a coyote bayed querulously, a small and harmless yellow-breasted chat emitted a wailing shriek that sounded more as if it had been made by some giant beast. And the temperature dropped with almost startling rapidity, ultimately as much as fifty or sixty degrees.

Near a deep, wide wash, in the ineffectual shelter of a kind of natural rock fort, Lennox sat hugging his knees, shivering occasionally when the whispering night wind touched him with cold fingers. He felt weak, feverish, and the inflamed skin of his face and neck and arms burned with a hellish intensity; there was pain in his head, in the muscles and joints of his legs, in the cracked, swollen blisters that were his lips. He kept trying to work saliva through the arid cavern of his mouth, but there was no moisture left within him; his throat was a sealed passage that made swallowing impossible.

But his mind, curiously, was clear. It had been clear from the time he had stopped and hidden behind the smoke tree in that other wash; the panic had abated then, the consuming force of it at least, and the running since that time had been a calculated if desperate thing. There had been more rest stops than he would have liked — because of the girl and because of his own flagging strength — but they had seen no sign of their pursuers. Lennox had not deluded himself, however; he knew they were behind somewhere, and because of the urgency of his flight with the girl, there had been no time to cover their trail; the two men, city-bred or not, would not have had much difficulty in following, especially across the unavoidable open ground they had encountered from time to time.

He and Jana had been here in the rock fort since dusk. He had wanted to continue, to keep running well into the night, but both of them were exhausted. You could run only so far in a single day, and then you had to have rest; you could run only so far...

There had been no conversation between them. Jana had sprawled out, face down in the sandy bottom of the fort, and sleep had claimed her immediately. Lennox had found a crevice which allowed a wide view of their backtrail, and he had sat there until just a few minutes ago, when darkness came. Would the two men keep looking in the bright white shine of the moon? He didn’t think so; they would need rest, too, and they would not want to take the chance of missing a sign in the deep pools of shadow the moonlight did not reach. Too, they would figure him and the girl to be exhausted, to seek out a hiding place for the night. No, they were safe now, until morning. And then—

And then.

He did not know what to do. If they kept running as they had today, blindly, they would be no better off than they were now; but he did not know where they were, or how far away the town of Cuenca Seco was — and the killers would be expecting them to move in that direction anyway. Could they double back to the road? Maybe — but there was no guarantee they would not stumble right into the arms of the men who pursued them; and he was not sure any longer in which direction the road lay. They could stay where they were, hidden here in the fort, hope that they were passed by, and then run in the opposite direction; but if their backtrail led to here, and the killers were able to follow it, they would be waiting in self-dug graves — they had no weapons, they could not make a stand. There was only one thing for them to do, then.

Keep running.

Lennox raised his head and glanced over at the girl. She was awake now, sitting up, working at a cactus thorn which had broken off in her ankle. Her face, under its layering of dust, was a grimace of pain. He looked at her — really looked at her for the first time — and he saw that she was very pretty. He remembered her poise, the fluid grace of her movements when he had first stumbled upon her, and he wondered vaguely if she was a model of some kind in New York; the car had had New York plates. But no, her hips were too prominent, her breasts too large; no, she was something else but she was big-city beyond any doubt; she had known the bright lights and the supper clubs and the Broadway opening nights, she had known elegance and luxury. You could see it, even now, even under the coating of alkali dust and dried sweat — like sensing a hotel was grand and proud and ultra-respectable despite a façade of city-produced soot and cinders.

And yet, she had stamina too — she had guts. She had not gone completely to pieces when the car went out of control, or when he had pulled her out of the wreckage and into the rocks, or when he had told her there in the wash what all of this was about; in spite of her shock, her horror at the knowledge of the situation she had suddenly been thrust into, she had not been a hindrance, a danger to his chance for survival as well as to her own.

But he felt responsible for her. If it had not been for him, she would be safe now, in Cuenca Seco or wherever it was that she had been staying in this area. God, he wished now that he had obeyed the transitory impulse which he had felt when he first came upon her. He had thought, then, of simply taking her car, stealing it, leaving her there to walk back to Cuenca Seco; it would have been a quicker, more positive method of escape, he had thought, than trying to find some way out of the town when she dropped him off there. If he had done that, she would be free of this; he would still be alone. But he had not wanted to hurt her in repayment for her kindness, had not wanted her safety on his conscience. And now — ironically, bitterly — her safety weighed far heavier on his mind than it would have if he had followed that original impulse.

The wind seemed to blow colder, murmuring, and across from him Jana hugged herself. A great stillness had settled over the desert now, and her head was cocked slightly to one side, as if she were listening for the next sound. Lennox thought she looked very small and very vulnerable.

In a voice that was cracked and brittle, like glass breaking a long way off, he said, “How are you feeling?”

She stared at him with dull, silent hatred.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry you had to get involved in this.”

“That’s a great deal of consolation.” The dry tremble of her own voice softened the bitterness of the words.

“Do you think I wanted any of this?” he said. “Do you think I wanted to be a witness to a murder?”

She looked away, at the bright face of the moon. A lone, tattered cloud drifted eerily across the lower half of it, giving it for a brief moment a whiskered, ancient appearance. After a long pause she said in what was almost a whisper, “I’m afraid.”

“I know,” Lennox said. “I know.”

“And thirsty. I’ve never been this thirsty in my life.”

“Don’t think about it. It only makes it worse if you think about it.”

“What are we going to do?” softly, plaintively. “How long can we keep running away from them?”

“As long as we have to.”

“I don’t know how much further I can go.”

“You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Will I? Will the thirst and the fear be gone then?”

“I’m sorry,” Lennox said again.

“You’re sorry, oh God, you’re sorry.”

She sat rigidly, her face in profile and soft in the moonlight. Lennox felt strangely drawn to her in that moment, to this woman about whom he knew nothing but to whom he was bonded by a bitter quirk of fate. Since his discovery of the kind of cold and calculating bitch Phyllis was, he had mistrusted women; except for a plump divorcée he had picked up in a bar outside of Reno, and a waitress in a hash joint he had worked in Utah — two biologically initiated liaisons which had left him depressed and unfulfilled on both occasions — he had had little to do with them since the night he had begun running in earnest. But it was not a physical thing, this attraction he felt for the girl named Jana Hennessey. It was, instead, an innate recognition deep within himself that their common bond was far more basic than the immediacy of their plight, that they shared a kind of kinship; he saw something of himself in her, something dark and lonely and empty, and he could not explain what it was.

Impulsively he said, “Tell me about yourself, Jana.”

Her head moved slowly until she was facing him again. “Why?”

“I’d like to know.”

“What difference does it make, now?”

“You come from New York, don’t you?” he said.

She did not answer.

“Jana?”

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

“What do you do there?”

“I write books.”

“What kind of books?”

“Children’s books.”

“Is that why you’re out here?”

“I... yes. Yes.”

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

“I was making some sketches.”

“You do your own illustrating?”

“Yes.”

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

“It’s a lot of hard work.”

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

“I don’t live in New York any more.”

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

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

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

“How are we going to get away?”

“I don’t know. We’ll get away.”

“No,” she said, “no, we won’t.”

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

“In a hotel,” Jana answered. “Why?”

“In Cuenca Seco?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone know you came out here today?”

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

“Anyone else?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did the clerk seem interested in you?”

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

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

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

“It’s a chance, that’s all.”

“Is it the only chance we have?”

“No. No, not the only one.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Leave me alone, just leave me alone.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

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

“All right.”

“All right.”

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

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

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

And slept.

The Third Day...

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.

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 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.

The Final Day...

One

Vollyer came awake just before dawn — and he was blind.

A soft, strangled cry bubbled in his throat; he sat up, pawing at his eyes. Darkness, darkness, with light shimmering faintly at the edges, with light flickering a long way off like candles at the end of a long, dark tunnel; but there were no images, no colors, there was only the light and pain, pain hammering behind the swollen lids, pain pulsating at the core of each eyeball. He shook his head and kept on shaking it, scratching wildly at the mucus-crusted sockets with the tips of his fingers.

Di Parma had been sitting on a rock nearby, watching the eastern horizon turn a dusty gray with the approach of dawn, eating the last of the tinned meat with chilled fingers. He came running over to Vollyer and knelt beside him. “Harry, what’s the matter? Jesus, Harry, what is it?”

“Get away from me!” Vollyer snapped at him. Control, control, get control of yourself, don’t panic, only the losers panic. Hands away from your eyes, only makes it worse rubbing at them, that’s it, blink now, blink, blink, light growing brighter, yes, taking away the darkness, force those lids up all the way, blink, blink, the sky, you can see the sky now and Di Parma, fuzzy but it’s Di Parma, concentrate, blink, his features, eyes, nose, mouth, blink, concentrate, blink, fuzziness fading, focus coming back, you’re all right, you’re not really blind, only temporary, bad strain that’s all, you can see now, you can see as well as before...

Vollyer dragged cool air into his lungs and sat up again, looking around him. The solid objects had faint, dancing perimeter shadows until he stared at one in particular and then the shadow went away. His head ached massively, malignantly, and there were searing needles probing at the retinas of his eyes. He got shakily to his feet and held his hands out in front of him and stared at their backs; the hands were trembling, but there were only two of them and they had no dancing shadows.

Di Parma said, “Was it your eyes, Harry? Mine have been giving me hell, too. It’s the glare of that sun...”

Vollyer said nothing. He walked slowly to the rock on which Di Parma had been sitting and took the binoculars from it and then went to where he could look out over the desert to the north. He lifted the glasses, squinting through the lens. The moon was gone now, the stars fading, and the landscape lay cold and starkly quiet under the retreating gray-black of the sky. He could see a long way, he could see cactus, rocks, bushy shrubs, distinct and identifiable forms. He released a long, soft breath, turning, calm again.

“Come on,” he said to Di Parma. “It’s time to be moving. We’re close to them, I can feel it. Even with you shooting at that snake last night, we’re close to them. It won’t be long now...”

Two

Brackeen said, “I can’t take any more of this sitting around. I’m going out and check with the deputy I posted at the junction.”

“If he had anything to report, he would have radioed in,” Gottlieb said. He sat across from his partner, Dick Sanchez, at one of the desks in the substation, drinking his tenth or eleventh cup of coffee and chain-smoking cork-tipped cigarettes. Both men owned tired eyes and disheveled suits, and they were playing two-handed pinochle with no enthusiasm at all.

Brackeen stood at the front counter, looking out through the window. The first pale, cold light of dawn touched the empty street beyond, an inchoate dissolution of the shadows resting in doorways and alleyways and at the corners of the false-fronted buildings. “I know that,” he said without turning. “But I’m ready to climb the goddamn walls.”

“Lydell will have those men I asked for here any minute now,” Gottlieb told him. “Why don’t you wait for him and we’ll all go out together?”

“I’d feel better moving around, that’s all.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“Radio when you’re coming?”

“As soon as we leave.”

“What time are the choppers going up?”

“They should be in the air any minute now.”

“Then we’ll have a report in another hour or less.”

“About that.”

Brackeen passed a hand across his face. There were deep circles etched into the puffy flesh beneath his eyes, and the lack of sleep had made the lids heavy and put a cottony taste in his mouth that was enhanced by the amount of coffee he had drunk and cigarettes he had smoked since last night. His nerves were raw-edged from inactivity, fatigue, caffein, nicotine. But his mind was clear and alert, kept that way by the prospect of movement and accomplishment, and by the presence of Gottlieb and Sanchez; the three of them had passed the hours since the arrival of the state investigators shortly after midnight in talking Brackeen’s theory through, examining every possibility, planning the moves to be made on this day.

As Brackeen picked up his Stetson and crossed to the front door, Gottlieb said mildly, “Stay loose, huh?”

“As loose as the two of you,” Brackeen said, and went out.

He drove to the junction and talked to the deputy again, and there was nothing to report. The sky was much lighter now, splashed with gold and deep red on the eastern horizon, and it would not be long before the rounded rim of the sun edged up there like a huge golden shield. A narrow wash paralleled the county road for a short distance here, beginning just beyond the rutted surface of the abandoned rail company road; a red-topped, black-and-white striped Gila woodpecker swooped low over it, shrieking maniacally all the while. There was no other sound; the county road was deserted at this hour of the morning.

Brackeen stood by his cruiser, looking up into the lightening heavens. The hell with this, he thought. He slid under the cruiser’s wheel and entered the abandoned road, driving slowly, his head moving in careful quadrants from the road surface to the terrain stretching away to the east. He did not expect to see anything, but this was better than just sitting, waiting for Lydell to show up, waiting for the choppers to report.

A half-mile, by the odometer, beyond the place where he had found the rental Buick the day before, Brackeen U-turned and started back again. He passed the sandstone formation which had concealed the Buick, passed the dry wash where the wrecked yellow Triumph had lain, and followed the gentle curve in the road from due north to northeasterly. Less than a mile from the junction, he slowed, remembering the all but obliterated shortcut from the rail company road to the county highway several miles to the east of the junction; trucks carrying road-grading equipment and the men who operated it had made the cut across the flatland here in order to save some eight miles in the haul out of Kehoe City. Brackeen had been over the rutted surface several times. It skirted a long, deep arroyo, over which the railroad, in the early days of the century, had built a trestle for a proposed spur to Cuenca Seco; the trestle had long since collapsed into the arroyo, and there was little else remaining of the abortive line of tracks branching off the later-abandoned line to Kehoe City. The railroad had not had much luck in this area of the desert over the years.

Brackeen did not want to return to the junction just yet; it only meant more passive waiting. He swung the cruiser off the road, onto the creosote-choked flatland. It wouldn’t do any harm to check the area out here, he thought; there was always the chance that he might spot something, and even if he didn’t it would consume some time until the air reconnaissance could be made and Lydell could get off his fat ass and into Cuenca Seco with the team of men.

Slowly, dust blossoming in lazy plumes behind him, Brackeen drove toward the flaming brass light in the eastern sky.

Three

Lennox and Jana left the tank at the first fading of darkness, rested and with regathered strength, and began moving toward a long sloping rise to the north. The air was no longer cold, though still cool, and they went as swiftly as their stiffened, aching bodies would allow; they had drunk deeply of the pulp of another barrel cactus outside the tank, and the moisture would stay with them for a while, until the sun climbed into the sky and set fire to the desert again.

They had passed the long night wrapped in each other’s arms, insulated against the biting wind, against the terror which lay without. The need for words had not come to either of them, and they had slept, and when they had awakened there was still no need to put voice to what they had shared. Jana had met Lennox’s gaze when he looked at her, and smiled faintly and nodded, thanking him with her eyes, telling him that she was all right now, that she knew and accepted the truth about herself.

As they ran, Lennox found himself wondering how deeply his feelings for Jana were rooted — if he could possibly be in love with her. There was none of the wild, joyous exhilaration he had felt with Phyllis in the beginning, none of the electricity, the chemical magnetism that draws and fuses two individuals; there was only the peace she generated within him, the bond that was theirs, the tenderness that overwhelmed him each time he looked at her and touched her. Was that love? Or the beginnings of love? He didn’t know, but he wanted to know. He wanted to know her better, he wanted her to know him, he wanted them to get out of this place, this trap, so that the understanding and the perception each seemed to have of the other’s inner self could be nurtured and developed.

He gripped Jana’s hand tightly, looking over his shoulder at her, trying to smile with his cracked mouth. She returned the pressure of his fingers, touching him with her eyes, and he knew that she felt some of the same things about him — and the knowledge filled him with hope and with pleasure and with urgency.

They approached the crest of the rise, threading their way between scattered boulders and thick clumps of mesquite; the sky was bright with the building haze of heat now, and Gambel’s quail and an occasional jackrabbit scurried away before them, startled by their presence in a world that belonged to creatures instead of men. Finally, minutes later, they topped the rise, and Lennox stopped abruptly, staring at what lay beyond. “Oh God,” he said softly.

Flat, semi-barren land stretched away from them, void of all but transitory cover; there was a line of rocky outcroppings to the west, but they were some distance away and he and Jana would have to cross a great expanse of open ground to get to them. Naked, they would be naked...

Jana said sharply, “Jack, look!”

“What is it?”

“Down there! Is that a road?”

Lennox followed her pointing arm with his eyes. Near the foot of the long slope falling away into the flatland was a pair of faintly discernible wheel ruts, obliterated in spots, grown over with brush in others, but ruts nonetheless, coming from around the rocks to the west, hooking eastward to parallel a wide arroyo cut deeply, like a jagged scar, into the dry, desolate plain. They would lead somewhere, they would lead to Cuenca Seco or to another road, they would lead out.

Lennox felt a surge of wild hope. He saw the same relief mirrored on Jana’s face, the sudden brightness of her eyes, and she said, “Oh, Jack, a road, a road!” and then they were running down the slope, unaware now of the rocky, treacherous soil and the gleaming cactus needles and the multiple, clutching arms of the mesquite and ocotillo, forgetting the danger of exposure on the open flat, seeing nothing but the wheel ruts, the path to safety...

Four

The pain in the lids and sockets of Vollyer’s eyes had become excruciating, and the shadows were back at the edges of solid objects, distorting them slightly, putting them vaguely out of focus. The edge of the sun had crawled above the eastern horizon now, and the glare of daylight wavered over the landscape, contracting the pupils, intensifying the agony.

They were coming on a long rise, and he stopped to catch his breath, to rub gingerly at the swollen pits with his pocket handkerchief. Di Parma said, “You sure your eyes are okay, Harry? Jesus, they don’t look too good—”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes!”

“Harry, listen, we’ve got to call it off pretty soon. We can’t stay out here much longer, Harry, not without food and water. We may have gone too far as it is, it’ll take us a full day or more to get back to the car—”

“Shut up, will you shut up?”

Di Parma caught his arm. “Listen, I’m telling you, I don’t want to die on this desert!”

Vollyer pushed him away savagely and swung the binoculars up. At first he could not see anything but blurred images through the lens, and he thought: I can see, I can see, my eyes are all right and I can see, clear up now, you bastards, clear up so I can see! He blinked frantically, and the blur lessened and there was substance, there were shapes; he tried to swallow into a constricted throat, fighting the double vision that would not completely dissipate, moving the glasses in a wide are, west to east, along the top of the rise—

They were there, Lennox and the girl, standing there at the crest and looking down to the other side, just standing there, five hundred yards away.

Vollyer jerked the glasses down, and the Remington scope-handgun was in his right hand. He began to run up the slope. Di Parma hesitated and then ran after him, reaching his side. “Harry, what is it, did you see them?” but even as he said the words, Di Parma was looking up at the crest of the rise and the two figures standing there, looking at them for a brief instant before they jumped forward to disappear on the other side. He had been carrying his jacket, and he fumbled the .38 out of the pocket, flung the garment down; his lips pulled away from his teeth, and the fingers of his huge hand were spasmodic on the sweating metal of the belly-gun.

They ran diagonally across the slope, toward the spot where Lennox and the girl had been standing. Vollyer gagged on each breath, running on legs that were like jagged edges of bone, and sweat poured acid agony into his eyes. He fell once and Di Parma slowed automatically and pulled him to his feet, and then they were at the crest and looking beyond and Lennox and the girl were almost to the bottom of the slope on that side, running to the west. Vollyer pawed away sweat, pawed away some of the shimmering blur, but he was still too far away for an accurate shot, he had to get closer, a little closer, and he plunged downward with Di Parma at his heels, slipping, sliding wildly on the incline, moving in a diagonal again to cut off the targets at the bottom.

Vollyer became aware, through the stinging obscurity of his vision, that there was some kind of road or cart track down there — that was what they were running for and they were looking at that, only that, they did not know that he and Di Parma were up here behind them and that was all the edge he needed, the game was definitely over now, no mistake now. The gap was closing, closing, two hundred yards, less, near enough, one bullet for Lennox and one for the girl, and he skidded to his knees on the slope halfway down, bracing himself, washing away sweat with the palm of his free hand, bringing the Remington up into the crook of his arm and sighting with the scope. Two of Lennox and two of the woman, oh you goddamn bastard eyes, blink, blink, concentrate, clear up, there now, there, finger closing on the trigger, steady, steady—

The first shot.

Pause.

And amid rolling vibrations of sound that filled the yellow-gold morning like distant thunder, the second shot...

Five

With the window rolled down, and the cruiser’s speed held to a crawl, Brackeen heard clearly the deep, hollow reports and knew immediately what they were.

Reflexively, his foot bore down on the accelerator and the patrol car responded with instant power, rear tires spewing dust and pebbles. He clung grimly to the wheel, body tensed, eyes probing the flaming distance, trying to see beyond the line of rocks just ahead. The shots had come from somewhere on their far side, somewhere close, and he knew with the intuitive sixth sense of a born cop that it was not a kid potting at jackrabbits or quail, or one of the local settlers target-practicing at an early hour; he knew that this was it, that this was the showdown, that the waiting had come to an abrupt end and there would be no need for the helicopters any longer, no need for Lydell and his search party, knew that he would find all of them — Lennox and Jana Hennessey, dead or alive now, and the professional sluggers — waiting for him just a few seconds away...

Brackeen remembered the bullet he had found in the dashboard of the wrecked yellow Triumph, too badly mutilated for accurate identification but obviously of a high caliber; remembered, too, the dead body of Perrins/Lassiter and the six bullet holes within a five-inch radius on the upper torso, testimony to a deadly marksmanship. One man, possibly both, with a high-velocity weapon of some kind and more than likely the smaller handguns they had used on the hit, revolvers or automatics... automatics... automatics...

And Brackeen’s mind was suddenly filled with a vivid reproduction of the rain-slick fire escape and the frightened white face of Feldman and the heavy automatic leveled upward, the huge black bore of the gun, the explosion and the destructive impact of the bullet which had seemed so real and yet had only been illusion; Coretti’s face, alive and dead, smiling and bloodily pulped, alternating like shuffled Before and After photographs across the surface of his mind. Sweat flowed thickly, hotly over his face and under his arms and into his crotch, and there was fear in the center of his belly now, fear twisting at his vitals, the same kind of fear he had felt staring at Feldman’s gun that night, staring at death and the terrible black void beyond.

I can’t face a gun, he thought. I can’t let it happen again!

And then he thought: But I have to, there’s nobody else, if I back off and radio for Gottlieb and Sanchez, for help, it might be too late by the time they got here and Lennox and the Hennessey girl could still be alive right now, no, I’ve got to see it through, I can’t crap out on them now...

The back of Brackeen’s neck grew cold and bristling, then, and his thoughts became very clear and sharp. Understanding flowed through him, taking the edge off the building panic in his belly, quieting the stutter of his heart. He had to see it through. That was the way it had to be all right, that was the only way it could be. Because the commitment and the resurrection of Andy Brackeen had to be full and complete or else there was no real commitment and no true resurrection at all. You couldn’t start living again halfway, with half-knowledge, and subconsciously he had known this from the very beginning. He had known there was a good chance it would come to this, to a confrontation, a showdown, and he had wanted it to be that way. Jesus Christ, he wanted to face the gun or guns out there, he had to face them — that was why he had come out alone this morning, that was why he had been so nervous with the waiting last night and today; he wanted it because without it he would still be half a man, and he had to know what Andy Brackeen really was, he had to know.

He caught up the hand mike on the cruiser’s radio and called the substation. Demeter was there. Brackeen 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 and veer straight at the nearest of the two killers, saw the driver’s door fly open and the big uniformed officer tumble out, saw the near one on the slope fall to his knees, heard the hollow, cracking sound of gunshots and the savage whine of bullets striking metal; they were, all at once, awed and breathless spectators, divorced from the unfolding drama, clinging to one another, held spellbound by the abrupt and inexplicable turn of events.

Jana felt the bunched muscles of Lennox’s arm and shoulder, and his blood stained her fingers where they were caught in the front of his shirt. I love him, she thought, as she had thought lying in his arms last night, as she had thought waking in his arms this morning. It isn’t possible, it isn’t reasonable, but I love him. Part of it is a reaction to what happened between us, part of it is gratitude for giving me the courage to face myself and for helping me to understand the truth — and yet, it’s more than that, it’s deeper than that, it means much more than the wild, giddy infatuation I had with Don. I need him, he needs me, we can help each other, we can learn from each other, we can lean on each other. We can’t die now, we simply can’t die now...

She held him more tightly, careful of the wound in his side that her gently probing fingers told her was only superficial, watching the figures moving beyond through the shimmer of gathering heat, the thoughts spinning and sustaining her, blotting out the fear. She watched the one man get to his feet and begin to run up the incline, saw the second one scurrying higher above him. Then the officer stepped out to the front of the cruiser and a brief wisp of smoke spiraled out and up from his extended right hand and the near one jerked and fell amid the booming echo of the gunshot. Jana’s heart seemed to hurl itself at the walls of her chest, we’re going to be all right! and then she saw the officer reel and fall, heard a louder reverberation, and exultation instantaneously dissolved into returning horror.

“No,” she said, “oh no, no, no!”

The remaining pursuer broke away from the cactus behind which he had taken refuge, from behind which he had fired, and began to stumble down the grade. Lennox said, “Jesus!” and spun Jana around and they were running again, running with panic again. She forced her legs to keep working, her slender body screaming against the renewed demands of it, and her mind chanted in a frenzied cadence, Hope, no hope, hope, no hope, because all of this was a hideous fluctuation, as if God could not make up His mind, as if He were ridden with indecision as to the outcome, and that made it so much more terrible, so much more of a nightmare...

Ten

Vollyer turned away from the dead cop, fitting another cartridge into the Remington, and looked along the wheel ruts at the fleeing forms of Lennox and the girl. He was facing directly into the half-revealed plate of the sun and its light was like burning embers thrust against the surface of his eyes; he still had only partial focus, the wavering shadows had broadened, and the two of them down there were indistinct images viewed through warped glass. He would just be wasting time and ammunition trying to pick them off from here, looking into that goddamn sun; he had missed them both at a closer range from the slope, hadn’t he? Hitting the cop as he had, had been more luck than marksmanship, the way his eyes were now, and they were bad — there was no use in kidding himself any longer, they were very bad.

He started to the cruiser, and as he did so, he saw the slope through the swimming blur and Di Parma was there, on his feet, pitching down toward him. A gaping hole in his left shoulder, just under the collarbone, splashed blood in bright red streams over the front of his shirt and trousers as he moved, and his left arm flopped uselessly, almost comically, at his side. When Vollyer had run past him moments earlier, to make sure about the cop, Di Parma had seemed not to be moving and he had thought he was dead; now, seeing him still alive, Vollyer felt nothing at all. Di Parma was still a stranger, a nonentity, a lump of clay — alive or dead, it no longer made any real difference.

He came up and there was wildness in his eyes, a mixture of pain and fright. He was whimpering, red froth at the corners of his mouth. “I’m hurt, Harry, I’m hurt bad, oh God, oh God, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Not yet,” Vollyer said, “not until we get to Lennox and the girl.”

From inside the cruiser, the short-wave radio crackled abruptly, angrily to life; a voice demanded acknowledgment. Di Parma looked at the car, looked back to Vollyer. “There’s other cops around here, they’ll be swarming all over this place in a few minutes!”

“We’re going after the witnesses,” Vollyer said. “Get in the car.”

Di Parma’s face contorted into a grimace of agony and rage. “You’re crazy, I’m not listening to you any more, oh, you bastard, I’m hurt and I need a doctor, I need Jean, there’ll be cops, I’m getting out of here!” and he pushed past Vollyer and staggered to the cruiser’s open door.

Vollyer lifted the Remington and dispassionately shot him in the back.

The bullet shattered Di Parma’s spine just above the kidneys. He screamed once, very briefly, a shrill, surprised feminine sound, and then pitched forward onto his face and lay dead there in the blood-spattered dust.

Pivoting, emotionless, Vollyer scrubbed at his eyes with his free hand and peered along the wheel ruts again. He could still see the girl and Lennox down there. Silence now, thick and brittle, save for the continued crackling of the short wave; but there was no sign, no sound, of approaching cars from either direction. He had time, he still had time. It would take only a couple of minutes to catch the two of them, and then he would drive out, get back to the Buick if he could or find a place to ditch the cruiser and pick up another car; but he had to get the two of them first, it was no good without getting them. You play all the way or you don’t play, and he had always played all the way; that was why he was a winner and Lennox and the girl and Di Parma, too, were all losers.

He loaded the Remington once more and slid in under the wheel of the cruiser. The engine started on the first ignition turn. He backed the car away from the boulder and drove over Di Parma’s legs, down to the wheel ruts, hunching forward, eyes slitted, and went after the running, shimmering, distorted figures on the flatland ahead.

Eleven

Looking back over his shoulder as they ran, Lennox watched the fat one kill two men in the space of a minute — the wounded police officer and, incomprehensibly, his partner, who had survived the bullet which had felled him on the slope. Vomit boiled up into Lennox’s throat. What kind of man is that, he thought sickly, what kind of black union could have created a man like that?

He saw the fat one get into the cruiser, and he thought then: He won’t come after us now, he’ll know that poor cop isn’t alone, that there have got to be others close by. He’ll run, he doesn’t have any choice now. He’ll have to forget about us, he’ll have to run, he’ll have to let us alone.

But he didn’t believe it. The brutal, senseless way the fat one committed murder, the relentless way he had pursued Jana and him until now made a false hope of Lennox’s thoughts — and when he glanced back again and saw the patrol car bearing down on them along the rutted trail, he knew beyond any doubt that the situation was as critical now as it had been before the arrival of the single officer.

God oh God, where were the rest of the cops? It couldn’t be just the one, there had to be others, they had to have figured out what had happened somehow, or else the one wouldn’t be here. But if they didn’t hurry they would be too late — where were they, where were they?

Lennox swung his head around again, holding onto Jana, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his side where the bullet had creased him. No place to hide, no sanctuary, not enough time to cross the trail and try to re-climb the slope on the other side, nothing in front of them but a flat plane of cactus and sparse ground cover and the remains of a long-abandoned set of rail tracks — sections missing and grown with mesquite, sections collapsed or windblown into drunken angles — that came looping around the incline from the south, dissolved in favor of the trail, and then resumed in a straight run to the edge of the deep arroyo winding away on their left.

There was only one way for them to go, and Lennox altered their course in an abrupt quarter-turn toward the brink of the arroyo; if they could get down into that wash, out of the open, maybe they could hold out until more police arrived, if more police arrived. Slim chance, frail chance, but they had nothing else, nothing at all, and behind them the cruiser swerved sharply off the ruts, pursuing, the sound of its engine like the rumbling swell of an approaching earthquake in the quiet morning, the sun-baked soil beneath their feet seeming to ripple to complete the illusion. Lennox cast another wild look over his shoulder, saw the machine bouncing and swaying over the rough ground, gleaming metal leaping at them, a thing gone berserk, gaining in spite of the uneven terrain.

Dust choked his lungs, bringing on a spasm of coughing, as he dragged the faltering, panting Jana to the edge of the arroyo. It was some one hundred and fifty yards wide and forty feet deep at this point, with steep, layered shale walls that were treacherous but scalable, extending away on both sides, in both directions. Boulders and ironwood and mesquite littered its sandy bed, and a few yards beyond, below where the rail line crawled up to the edge of the wash, twisted chunks and lengths of rusted, disintegrating steel, sun-bleached bits of rotted wood that had once been ties formed heaps and piles and pyramids the width of the jagged incision — all that remained of a long-collapsed, long-forgotten trestle.

Lennox had the fleeting, disjointed image of a massive, grotesque display of Pop Art sculpture, created by the forces of nature long before man learned the dubious aesthetics to be found in the arrangement of junk and scrap metal. And then, without thinking any further, his ears filled with the rumbling, rattling howl of the cruiser, he turned Jana’s face to his chest and took her over the edge.

Twelve

Thirty yards from where he had seen the girl and Lennox start down into the arroyo, Vollyer was forced to abandon the patrol car. The ground was too rough here, dotted with too many rocks and thickly grown vegetation, and the glare of the rising sun through the windshield was hellish on his eyes.

He scrambled out of the car, not hearing the demanding voice half garbled in static on the radio, not thinking about anything but the job he had to do. He had the Remington clenched in his right hand, and he pulled at his coat pocket with his left for the .38; he was taking no chances now, there was time, but very little of it, this particular game had gone as far as it could go.

He ran in a drunken wobble to the arroyo and ducked his head against his shoulder to clear away some of the astringent sweat, and then looked down into the fissure. He couldn’t see them. Hiding, they were hiding; if they were still on the move he would have been able to pick them out easily from up here; there were plenty of places of concealment at the immediate bottom of the wash, but once you got fifty yards on either side you couldn’t run very far without exposing yourself. And they hadn’t had time to make it all the way across, to scale the bank on the opposite side. No, they were down there, all right, just down there, hiding, and it was only a matter of seconds now.

Vollyer transferred the Remington to his left hand, holding both guns up and away from his body, and dropped into a sitting position with his legs splayed out and pointing at an angle into the arroyo. He went down the bank that way, like a plump and begrimed child going down a long slide, using his right hand and the heels of his shoes to restrain momentum. A few feet from the bottom, an edge of rock bit painfully into the back of his left thigh, opening a deep gash. causing him to limp slightly when he struggled finally into an upright position on the dusty floor. The Remington back in his right hand, he moved forward, slowly, exhorting his eyes in mute viciousness to mend so that he could see clearly, exhorting in vain.

Something moved, a quick stirring, ahead and to his left. Vollyer reeled around a steel-draped boulder, and the long rattled tail of a sidewinder swayed into the dimness at its base. Cautious of his footing, he backed away and crossed to where a stunted smoke tree offered possible cover. Nothing. A conglomerate of twisted steel. Nothing. He stopped, ducking his face into his shoulder again, and then squinted with myopic intensity on all sides of him. Nothing.

A high, flat-topped rock, with bonelike fragments of bleached wood strewn at its base, beckoned nearby. That was what he needed, a high vantage point in this proximity; if he could scale that rock, he might be able to locate their place of concealment. He went toward it, painfully, watchfully, listening to the ragged sound of his own breathing. It was otherwise very quiet. But they were close, he could sense their nearness; a tic jumped spasmodically along his right temple, and another pulled the left side of his mouth down crookedly.

They were very, very close...

Thirteen

The running was over.

Crouched with Jana in a right angle formed by a canted boulder and a mound of crumbling debris, Lennox knew that with sharp, crystal clarity. He could not run any more; he simply could not run any more. Whenever a crisis had arisen in his life, he had run away from it, he had taken the easy way out — as a child, as a teen-ager, as an adult, never standing firm, never meeting the crisis head-on, just letting the panic take possession of him, welcoming it, never fighting it. And each time he had run away — unnecessarily, foolishly — he had lost a little more of himself, abrogated a little more of his manhood. He knew now that this was what Jana had seen in him, what she had been trying to tell him last night; at long last he, too, was facing his weakness, just as she had faced hers, coming to terms with himself, understanding himself, realizing that if it had not been for Jana and for the ordeal which was now reaching its culmination, he would have been irreclaimably destroyed by the poisons of his fear.

But now, if he had to die, he could die as a man, and he was very calm. He had felt the exorcism of the panic, the need and the capacity for flight, when he and Jana reached the bottom of the arroyo moments earlier. They could have tried to make it across to the far bank, they could have kept running and they could have died running, but with the understanding, he had instead brought Jana here, to the first concealment he had found. It was here they would make their final stand, if it was to be their final stand; he would fight, somehow, in some way, he would make a fight of it.

He looked at Jana and their eyes met, and he knew she was with him, all the way, unquestioning, undemanding, seeing the resolution in him and taking strength from it. Together, her eyes seemed to be saying. In life or in death, together.

He did not want her to die. He wanted her to live even more than he wanted to live himself — the first truly unselfish commitment of Jack Lennox to anything or anybody other than Jack Lennox — and anger rose in him, and hatred, cold and calculating, for the man-thing that thought of them not as human beings but merely as insensate objects, threats to his own warped existence. Lennox listened. Movement, soft, stealthy, coming from somewhere on the other side of the boulder, shoes sibilant on the sand, a deep wheezing of constricted breath. Jana heard it too, tensing slightly beside him, touching his arm. Lennox did not look at her; his full concentration was on the movement and the sounds beyond. Coming closer? Yes, closer, but not too close, not yet, there was still a minute or two.

A weapon, he had to have a weapon.

And he remembered the knifelike piece of granite.

His hand came up to touch his belt, where he had put the stone earlier — and it was gone. Damn, damn! It must have pulled free when the bullet skinned his side and he had fallen on the slope. He released a silent breath, passing his fingers over his split and puckered lips, looking around him, looking for another weapon, any weapon. His eyes touched small stones, a piece of decaying wood, an unwieldy section of rail — discarded them, moved on, restless, urgent, wanting something substantial, something heavy, something to throw, perhaps, or something sharp

and he saw the rusted splinter of steel.

It lay in the sand eight feet away from him, on open ground. Some two feet long, warped but otherwise unbent, it was a dull, cankered brown in the sunlight, its forward edge tapered into a point that appeared sharp, that appeared capable of penetrating flesh. Beside it was a long section of rail, the parent which had spawned it through metal fatigue or through impact in the collapse of decades past.

Lennox stared at the splinter, and he thought: Spear, it looks like some primitive spear, and there was a bitter irony in the association. Wasn’t what was happening here, this battle for survival, a primitive thing too — as old as man, as old as life itself?

He had to have that spear. He had to take the chance of going out there to get it. That two feet of slim oxidizing steel represented the last remaining thread of hope, the battle lance, and without it they were naked — there could be no battle.

He put his lips to Jana’s ear and breathed, “I’m going out after that piece of steel, stay here and keep down,” and then, because this was perhaps the final goodbye and there was the need, just this once, to put it into words, “I love you, Jana.”

He waited for her reply, the same three words, and when they were his he squeezed her hand and then moved out toward the splinter, the spear, lying in the sand beyond. He advanced in a humped, four-point stance, fingers splayed just ahead of his shoes, both sliding silently through the sand, his head turned to the left so that he could see the widening area around the boulder. He made a foot, another foot, coming out of the shade now, coming out of hiding, and from just beyond his vision there was a scuffling sound, leather scraping rock, pebbles tumbling, and he stopped moving and leaned forward, holding his breath, craning his neck, and twenty feet away, atop a high flat rock, the fat one, the killer, was pulling himself onto his feet, turned in profile, Death standing outlined against the bright, bright blue of the desert sky.

There was no quickening of Lennox’s heart, no tightening of his groin, none of the symptoms of fear and panic and irresolution. Time had run out, there was no more time to brace himself with the lance, there was only time for one quick attack before the fat one turned and saw him, a single offensive and nothing more.

He thought: This is the moment, this is the judgment — and lunged toward the waiting spear.

Fourteen

Breath whistled asthmatically between Vollyer’s lips as he straightened on top of the rock. He hunched forward, squinting, turning his body as he tried to fuse the dancing shadows below with the objects from which they sprang, cursing his eyes, screaming silently at his eyes. Sweat streamed down from his forehead, over his cheeks, and he lifted his left arm and in that moment he saw the movement, definite movement, independent of the shadows.

His body stiffened, the cords in his neck straining as he tried to focus on the source of the movement. It took shape for him, a man-shape, Lennox, Lennox, and the Remington came up in his right hand, jumping, roaring unsighted as the distorted figure ran across into the open. The bullet ricocheted off the boulder there, showering flakes of rock and dust, goddamn these eyes oh goddamn these eyes, and Lennox was bending down there in the sand, bending, two of him wavering, dancing. Vollyer dropped the Remington and the .38 slapped against his right palm and he fired and sand puffed up a foot wide, I missed him, you son-of-a-bitching eyes, I missed him, and then Lennox was coming up and moving forward, arm drawn back, something in his hand, and Vollyer squeezed the trigger again and again he missed, and Lennox’s arm pistoned frontally and the something in his fingers broke free, a blur, a thin brown blur, he threw something at me, get out of the

impact, Jesus! sudden pain, blackness behind his eyes, fire spreading out molten from his stomach, no, no, what did he throw, my belly, oh oh my belly, and the gun clatters down onto the rock at his feet, he staggers, his hands come up and encounter coarse steel, a length of steel, imbedded there and deep deep inside him, sticky wet, blood, steel, a spear, he threw a steel spear at me but that’s not right he’s a runner he’s not a fighter runners don’t fight, and Vollyer’s legs no longer support him, he falls to his knees, blind, fingers jerking desperately at the shaft penetrating the soft flesh just below his breastbone, trying vainly to pull it free

and he feels himself falling, blackness spinning all around him, dizzying within and without, his head strikes something, his arm strikes something, he is falling off the rock, and there is a solid jarring, an explosion of fresh pain that is still not as great as that in the core of his belly and the blackness becomes redness, flashing, pulsating, dissolves to blackness again and his hands flutter ineffectually at his stomach, the steel is gone now but the blood is there and the hole, the hole

dying, I’m dying, and he did it with a spear, a spear, what kind of thing is that, a goddamn spear, what kind of way is that to play the game...

Fifteen

Lennox had flung himself to the sand after releasing the steel splinter, looking up, preparing to roll toward a thick wooden tie if the hurtling shaft missed; but then he saw it strike flesh, saw the killer reel and stagger, the one gun drop, saw him topple off the rock into the sand at its base — and he allowed his body to go limp and his head to drop forward into the crook of his arms. He lay that way for a moment, finally lifted his head, and the fat one was still lying there in the sand, not moving. Lennox thought giddily: He shot at me point-blank, three or four times at point-blank range, and he missed every time and I had one primitive chance and I didn’t miss, maybe there is a God after all...

And then Jana was there, kneeling in the sand beside him, holding his head, pressing his face between her breasts, trying to cry but finding no moisture for her tears. “I saw it all, I saw it, oh Jack, oh God, Jack, are you...?”

“No,” he said, “no, I’m all right.”

A sobbing, almost hysterical laugh — a release of the spiraled tension inside her — spilled from Jana’s throat. “It’s over,” she said, “we’re all right, we’re all right.”

He felt tired, he felt incredibly tired. Hunger clawed just under his breastbone, and every inch of his body ached hellishly. He wanted to lie there and sleep, he wanted to lie with his head against Jana’s warm breast and sleep for days, for weeks. His mind seemed to have gone blank, incapable in that moment of sustaining thought, and it was good that way, for just a little while; all the thinking that had to be done had already been done before this final confrontation — all the examining and understanding — and there was no need for introspection now. They had survived, they had found one another and they had found a future, and there was simply nothing else to think about in this moment.

“Jack,” Jana said, “Jack, he’s moving up there, he’s still alive.” There was a kind of sickness in her voice — but nothing more.

She released his head, and Lennox stared at the crumpled form lying a few feet away, saw it twitching in the sand. He got painfully to his knees, finally onto the enervated spikes that were his legs, and walked there cautiously, stopping to pick up a heavy rock on the way. But there was no need for caution; blood pumped in diminishing geysers from the wound in the fat man’s round, soft stomach, and clawed fingers clutched uselessly at the earth. The eyes were open, but Lennox had the feeling that they were sightless, already sightless.

He felt no more hatred, he felt no emotion of any kind toward this dying lump of flesh. Rattling, liquid sounds began in the convulsing throat, the split lips opened, moved, as if trying to form words. He knows I’m standing here, Lennox thought, he knows I’m looking at him, and blood dribbled out at the corners of the small, broken mouth as it tried again to make intelligible sounds.

Lennox knelt, not knowing exactly why he knelt, and leaned close to the mottled, contorted face. Blood filled the mouth now, thick and red, overflowing, and Lennox felt nausea ascend in the pit of his stomach, intensifying the hunger pain there. He started to rise, to turn away, and then the rattling sounds became words, almost inaudible and yet very clear, forced through the bright blood along with a final, spasmodic exhalation — words that for Lennox had no meaning at all.

The words: “Fuck the winners.”

They climbed out of the arroyo at the same point at which they had entered it, and just as they emerged, there came from the west the high-pitched scream of sirens. They stood on the flatland, and seconds later three cars came very fast along the rutted trail — two black-and-white county cruisers and an unmarked black hardtop. One of the cruisers slowed and stopped near the two bodies at the foot of the slope, and the other two machines continued along the ruts.

A chattering, whirring sound reached their ears, coming from the sky to the east, and when they looked up they saw a dark shape — a helicopter — flying just to the near side of the golden rim of the sun, like an insect moving away from a naked light bulb. They looked back to the wheel ruts as the cruiser and the black hardtop drew abreast of them, came to shuddering halts one behind the other. Doors were flung open, and men burst out and began to run toward them across the rocky flatland.

The helicopter was very close now, the sun reflecting off the transparent glass bubble beneath its rotors, coming directly overhead. The hot turbulence generated by its spinning blades was somehow soothing on Jana’s face, billowing her dust-grimed hair, the tattered remains of her clothing. It really is over, she thought with a kind of wonder, it’s finally over. And then her eyes turned to Lennox and she thought: No, it’s just beginning.

He took her hand, held it tightly, and they started toward the approaching men.

Walking now.

Walking together.

Content

Bill Pronzini
Panic!

The First Day...

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

The Second Day...

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

The Third Day...

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

The Final Day...

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen