Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  “I don’t know. You lied about your name ...”

  “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “What does it have to do with?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re running from something else, aren’t you?” she said. “Something besides those men.”

  He stiffened slightly. “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “Suppose it is. What difference does it make?”

  “None, I guess. I just want to know.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Why not—now?”

  “You want my life history, but you won’t say a thing about yourself,” Lennox said. “Let’s try that tack for a while.”

  “I told you all there is to know last night.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  Lennox studied her—and, slowly, he realized just what the bond was between them, the kinship he had intuited last night and today. “Maybe we’ve both got something to hide,” he said. “Maybe you’re running away from something else, too.”

  A kind of dark torment flickered across Jana’s features, and then was gone. “Maybe I am,” she said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s ... I just couldn’t, that’s all.”

  “Any more than I can.”

  “Any more than you can.”

  They fell silent. Lennox wanted to say something more to her, but there did not seem to be anything to say. He thought: I wonder if it would do any good to bring it out into the open, I wonder if I could talk about it? He looked at her, bathed in the soft moonshine—the weary, pain-edged loveliness of her—and suddenly he was filled with an overpowering compulsion to do just that, to unburden himself, to lay bare the soul of Jack Lennox. He had wanted to do it, without consciously admitting the fact to himself, ever since he had impulsively confessed his real name to her that afternoon. It was as if the weight of his immediate past had become dead weight, too heavy to carry any further without throwing it off for just a little while. It had been coming to this for some time now, you can only dam it up inside you for so long, just so long, and then it has to come out; the levees of the human mind can hold it no longer. He was going to tell her. There was a fluttering, intense sensation in the pit of his stomach, the kind of feeling you get when you know you’re going to do something in spite of yourself, right or wrong, wise or foolish, you know you’re going to do it anyway. He was going to tell her, all right, he was going to tell her—

  “Phyllis,” he said. The word was thick and hot in his throat.

  “What?”

  “That’s what I’m running from. A woman and a life and a hell named Phyllis,” and it all came spilling out of him, floodgates opening, words rushing forth—all of it, from the beginning:

  The night he had first met Phyllis at a cocktail lounge, she was new in his town then, a secretary with a Seattle firm that had opened a branch office there, and how he had fallen in love with her after their fourth Gibson, a major joke between them when the feeling had been fresh and good and clean in the beginning. The courtship and the love-making, the whispered endearments, the plans, the hopes, the dreams, the promises. The picnics and hikes through giant redwood forests. The afternoon they had gone swimming nude in the Pacific and he had been pinched by a sand crab on his left buttock, another fine private joke to be shared. The engagement, the marriage, the long hours at Humber Realty, the striving for growth and position and monetary security. The house he had built and the things he had bought to fill it. Phyllis’ reluctance to have children—“why don’t we wait a few years, darling, we’re not ready for parenthood just yet.” Her increasing awareness of social standing, her desire to belong to organizations and country clubs and in-groups, her attraction for expensive clothes, expensive appointments, expensive friends.

  The change—or the realization of things having changed: The pushing and the pettiness and the mild rebukes of his manners, attitudes, feelings in public and in private that had soon become open ridicule. The breakdown of all communication. The taunting sexual denial. The emergence of a predator, demanding everything and giving nothing, shutting him out, using him, denying his worth as a man and a human being. The sudden, bitter understanding that the thing he had once thought was love in her was only sugared hate.

  And, finally, the lover whose identity he had been unable to uncover and whose existence he could never prove except by her mocking eyes. The separation and the divorce. The court hearing. The complete victory she had won at the hands of a sympathetic judge, and the cold and triumphant smile she had given him as they left the courtroom. His decision to quit Humber and the town and the state, to deny her the alimony she so strongly coveted. The drunken late-evening visit to the house that he had built and paid for and which no longer belonged to him. The words and the slaps—the final insult, the last straw. His rage, and the result of that rage. Her words, flung at him through broken and bleeding lips. And his flight; the desperate need to run—the running itself, the panic, the desire to escape, the desire which had carried him along on a blind course through five states in the past nine months, carried him here, to this desert, to now, to this...

  When he stopped talking, finally, Lennox felt as if he had undergone a massive catharsis. There was drying sweat on his forehead despite the cold night breeze. Jana sat motionless, looking at him, and the silence was absolute, pressing in on them from the surrounding rock walls, from the sweeping panorama above; she had not interrupted him while he talked, and she did not speak for a long while now. Then, at last, she stirred slightly in the sand and put her hands on her knees.

  She said, “I’ve got no real right to ask you this, but—why did you decide to run away?”

  Lennox raised his head. “I told you why. She made it plain what she was going to do, and she did it—oh yes, I know Phyllis and she did it. It wouldn’t surprise me if she lied to the cops to make it look worse than it was. That’s something she would do, all right.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Jana said quietly. “I meant, why did you decide to run away before you went to see her that night? Why did you quit your job?”

  “I told you that, too. I wasn’t going to pay her that alimony on top of everything else. I just wasn’t going to do it.”

  “You let her beat you, Jack.”

  “The hell I did. She didn’t get her alimony, did she?”

  “No,” Jana said, “but she won, anyway. In the long run, she’s the winner.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If you hadn’t run, if you’d stayed there and paid her the money, you’d have beaten her. If what you told me about her is true, the thing she wanted at the end of it all was to destroy you completely. And she’s doing that now.”

  “I’d have been her goddamn slave if I’d stayed and paid that alimony!”

  “For a while, maybe. But then you’d have found somebody else, you’d have regained yourself, your spirit. And you’d have been the one who won out in the end, Jack.”

  “Oh Christ,” Lennox said.

  “What has the running gotten you?” Jana asked. “Are you happy, secure, have you forgotten Phyllis, have you regained your self-respect? What are you now, Jack? A drifter, a lonely man and a frightened one. Filled with hate that keeps on festering inside you. What kind of existence is that?”

  He stared at her. He didn’t want to believe what she was saying, what did she know about it, goddamn it, just from listening to him tell it in an encapsulated form? He didn’t want to believe her—and yet, the last nine months, in sober retrospection, had been a nightmare of running and fearing and hating, just as she said. Filled with hate, yes, hate for Phyllis that was cold and complete; and filled with another kind of hate, too, hate for himself and what he was becoming and trying to put all the blame on Phylli
s when in reality a part of it was his—no, that wasn’t true, no, it was Phyllis, Phyllis, Phyllis—

  “I don’t care,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I don’t care any more, do you hear me?”

  “You care,” Jana said. “If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t keep running now. You care, Jack, you cling to life too desperately not to care.”

  I don’t want to hear any more of this crap, Lennox thought savagely. He said, “Listen, who are you to analyze what I am? You’re running, too, you’re afraid of something, too. Well, why don’t you spit it up the way I just did, get it out into the open, let me tell you some things then. What do you say, Jana?”

  “No,” she said, and she shook her head. “No, we’re talking about you—”

  “Not any more, we’re talking about you now. Come on, what are you afraid of? Why are you running? Come on, Jana.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes, it’s easy. Just open your mouth and say it, that’s what I did, let’s play with your guts for a while.”

  “No. No.”

  Lennox moved closer to her. He felt confused and angry; she had touched and opened something deep inside him with her words and what he had glimpsed within that fissure was repulsive. He wanted to strike back at her, unreasoningly, childishly. “Come on, Jana, talk to me, tell me all about it. I’m a good listener too, you know, I’ve got a good analytical mind—”

  “No.” Jana turned away from him, hugging herself, shivering in the cold wind that blew down into the tank. “No!”

  He reached out and took her shoulders, firmly, and turned her back to him. He was very close to her now, his eyes looking into hers, his breath warm on her face, his hands pressing her nearer so that her breasts almost touched the ragged front of his shirt. “Tell me about it, Jana! Tell me what you’re afraid of, tell me!”

  She struggled in his grip, and in the reflection of bright moonlight he saw raw terror brimming in her eyes. A frown creased his forehead and he released her. She fell away from him, sprawling into the dust, and cradled her head in her arms; her shoulders trembled as if she were crying, but she made no sound.

  The anger, the demand for retribution, left him and he felt an immediate return of the compassion that he had experienced throughout the day, the protectiveness; he didn’t want to hurt her, not really, for God’s sake, what was the matter with him? He moved to her side, and his fingers were gentle on her arms this time as he brought her over onto her side, exposing her face to the shine of the moon again. Her features were twisted, a veil of despair.

  “Jana,” he said in a low, soft voice, “Jana, what is it?”

  He saw the word no form on her lips, but she did not put voice to it. It was, then, as if all her inner defenses crumbled, as if—as with him—the incubus had become too much and the levees had ceased to wall it in. A shuddering sob tremored through her body; and in a voice that was a half-whisper barely audible above the murmuring wind she said:

  “I’m a lesbian. God forgive me, God help me, I’m a lesbian!”

  Ten

  It took Brackeen more than two hours to obtain a promise of action from the State Highway Patrol.

  Most of that time was spent in locating Fred Gottlieb, the man in charge of the murder investigation; Gottlieb had all the facts, he was told by both Kehoe City and the main Patrol office in the capital, and there could be no authorizations based on speculative evidence—no matter how well it all dovetailed—without his approval. Once Brackeen found him, at the home of a married sister in a nearby community, and outlined the facts and the conclusions he had drawn from those facts, Gottlieb did not require much convincing. He listened attentively, asked several questions, confided that he and his partner, Dick Sanchez, had been looking into the possibility of Perrins/Lassiter’s death being a contracted Organization hit, and agreed without reluctance that the theory had considerable merit. Brackeen’s opinion of the State Highway Patrol went up considerably; he was dealing with a good, competent officer here, not fools like Lydell and the bright-face, Forester.

  It was past dark by this time, and both men decided that there was not much that could be done until the daylight hours. Brackeen suggested an airplane or helicopter reconnaissance of the desert area to the east, south, and west of Cuenca Seco, and Gottlieb told him that he would have machines in the air at dawn. He said also that he would contact the county office in Kehoe City and have Lydell arrange for a team of experienced men on standby in Cuenca Seco, in the event the air reconnaissance uncovered anything; even if it didn’t, Gottlieb concurred that a careful foot search should be made of the area surrounding the location of the wrecked Triumph and the rental Buick.

  Brackeen said, “Will you be coming down yourself?”

  “As soon as I can get back to Kehoe City and round up Sanchez,” Gottlieb answered. “Where will you be?”

  “Here in the substation.”

  “I might be pretty late.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Okay,” Gottlieb said. “Listen, Brackeen, you did a hell of a job putting all this together. We’d have got it eventually, but probably not in time; there may still be a chance, now, for Lennox and the Hennessey girl.”

  Brackeen said, “There are some things you can’t forget.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Never mind. You going to want to take charge of things when you get here?”

  “Officially, yes,” Gottlieb said. “Unofficially, it’s your district and you’ve got a free wheel.”

  “Thanks, Gottlieb.”

  “Sure. Later, huh?”

  “Later.”

  Brackeen put down the phone and stared at it. He should have felt relieved now, or pleased, or satisfied, but he was more keyed up than he had been before the long-distance call from the girl’s New York agent, Klein. He had proven something to the world, which did not matter—and something to himself, which did matter—but that was somehow not enough; this thing wasn’t done with yet, none of it was done with yet, and he knew that the tenseness would not leave him until it was, if it was.

  He picked up the phone and called Marge for the second time in the past several hours and told her he would not be home, that he was spending the night in the substation. She didn’t protest; that was one thing about Marge, she never complained, never sat heavy on his back. Talking to her, he felt a trace of guilt—an emotion new to him—for all the times he had cheated on her with the plump young whores in Kehoe City. She was a good woman, she was too goddamn good a woman to have to put up with that kind of thing. Well, she wouldn’t have to put up with it any more, he told himself. Not any more.

  There was a lot of time between now and the arrival of Gottlieb and Sanchez—between now and dawn—and Brackeen felt nervous and edgy with inactivity. He left the cubicle, told Demeter that he was going out for a while, and picked up his cruiser. He drove east through the bright moonlight and stopped at the junction of the county road and the abandoned dead end; the special deputy he had stationed there several hours earlier was alert and eager, but he had seen nothing. Brackeen sat with him for a time, debating the idea of patrolling the abandoned road, and then decided against it; wherever they were on the desert, they would not be moving in the darkness—even with the drenching light from the moon. If Lennox and Jana Hennessey were still alive, they would be hiding now, waiting for dawn. Half dead from hunger and thirst, from the burning sun, from fear and from running.

  If they were still alive.

  Brackeen drove back to the substation to await the arrival of Gottlieb and Sanchez.

  Eleven

  Jana saw shock and disbelief register on Lennox’s face, and she thought: No, no, I didn’t want to say it, why did you make me say it? She pulled away from him again, rolling her body into a tight cocoon, withdrawing from the sick pain that the almost involuntary revelation had unleashed inside her. But the shell she had so carefully constructed these past ten days was cracked and broken now, irreparably, and she had no defenses. It was in
the open now, the word—the fear—had been spoken, he knew, somebody knew. God, oh God, why had she pried into his soul and he into hers, they were like leeches sucking at one another, and for what reason? Strength? Succor? Or was it just that each of them sought to lessen his own misery by exposing that of the other?

  She felt his hands touching her again and shrank from them, making a sound that was almost a whimper in her throat; but she was boneless, she was plastic, and he lifted her and held her upright. She would not look at him, she could not. I want to die now, she thought. I can’t face it, I just can’t face it, I was trying to run away from myself, just like Jack, and you can’t escape from yourself—

  “Jana,” he said, “Jana, it’s not true, I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh yes,” she said woodenly. “Oh yes. Don’t you hate me now? Don’t I disgust you?”

  “Why? Because of some mistake you might have made? Jana, I don’t hate you, I could never hate you.”

  “I’m a lesbian, don’t you understand?”

  “You’re a normal woman, you couldn’t be anything else.”

  “A lesbian! I am, I know I am.”

  “You know you are? Why do you say it like that?”

  Don’t tell him any more, don’t talk about it, don’t, Jana, don’t—but what difference does it make now? He knows, you told him and he knows and what difference does the rest of it make?

  “Jana?”

  “I liked it, you see,” she said, and her eyes were glazed, shining like bright wet stones. “I liked being with Kelly, I liked it the first time and I liked it the last time, I liked being in her arms, I liked her touching me, I liked—”

  “Stop it!” Lennox shook her and it was like shaking Raggedy Ann. She did not hear him; she was listening to bitter memories now, and putting voice to them without conscious realization of it, lost and wandering in her own private hell.

  “The first time I was drunk and I didn’t know what Kelly was, she was just a casual friend who lived down the hall and I thought she was being sympathetic because I had just broken up with Don and I was angry and soured at the rejection and we were sitting there, in my apartment, sitting there and talking and drinking and I started to cry and she held my head and whispered to me and I put my arms around her, it was all so natural, and then I went to sleep or passed out and when I woke up we were in bed together, my bed, and she was holding me and kissing me and telling me that she loved me and I ... I couldn’t stop her, it seemed so good to be loved after what Don had done to me ...”