Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  “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?”