Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  Other Books by Bill Pronzini

  The Hangings

  Firewind

  With an Extreme Burning

  Snowbound

  The Stalker

  Lighthouse (with Marcia Muller)

  Games

  “Nameless Detective” Novels by Bill Pronzini

  The Snatch

  The Vanished

  Undercurrent

  Blowback

  Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)

  Labyrinth

  Hoodwink

  Scattershot

  Panic!

  Bill Pronzini

  SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

  NAPLES, FLORIDA

  2011

  Panic!

  Copyright © 1972 by Bill Pronzini

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  9781612321066

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by Bill Pronzini

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  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?”