Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  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, tightlipped, “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.