Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  “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.”