Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  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.