Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  Brackeen went over the car again and found nothing else of relevance. With his pocket knife, he dug the bullet out of the dash panel and examined it in the palm of his hand; it had been badly damaged on impact, and he wasn’t able to identify it. He put the pellet in the pocket of his uniform shirt and walked slowly back to the cruiser.

  Using a clean handkerchief, he toweled his face free of sweat and then called Bradshaw on the car’s short-wave radio. He gave him the TR-6’s license number and told him to have it checked out; he also requested the services of Hank Madison and Cuenca Seco’s county-maintained wrecker. After he had given the ten-four sign-out, he sat there in the heat-washed silence, pulling speculatively at his lower lip. Then, abruptly, he got out of the cruiser again and walked back to where he had found the first piece of broken taillight. From the direction of the tire impressions, it seemed probable that the Triumph had been traveling north, toward Cuenca Seco, when it had suddenly gone out of control. If you assumed that the shooting was what had been responsible, and it was a reasonable assumption, whoever it was had to have been anchored somewhere to the south and somewhere near the road and somewhere on an elevation of several feet.

  Brackeen studied the terrain to the south, and then moved in that direction. Fifteen minutes later, five minutes before the wrecker arrived, he found the locked and deserted Buick Electra where it had been hidden behind a jagged sculpture of sandstone.

  Five

  Di Parma said, “Where are they? Goddamn it, where are they?”

  Vollyer put the binoculars to his stinging eyes, blinking away sweat, and reconnoitered the area on all sides of them. Stillness. Wavering heat. Great pools of bluish water that were nothing more than layers of heated air mirroring the sky. They were on the far side of the craggy butte now, and the land here was both flat and roughly irregular, both rocky and barren. Cactus and ocotillo and creosote bush dominated the patches of vegetation. The silence was like that in a vacuum: almost deafening.

  Slowly Vollyer lowered the glasses and touched his parched lips with the back of his free hand. He sank exhaustedly onto a granite shelf in the shade of an overhang. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “We should have found them by now. There aren’t that many places they could have gone.”

  “Are you sure you saw them, Harry?”

  “I saw them, all right.”

  “And this is where they were heading?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Your eyes can play tricks on you out here—”

  “My eyes are fine, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes.”

  “Okay,” Di Parma said. “Okay.” He sank to his knees in the shade near where Vollyer sat and pulled the knapsack off his shoulders. He got the last container of water from it and drank a little, resisting the urge to drink it all, knowing that Vollyer was watching him. His legs and arms felt awkward, as if he had only partial control of them, and there was a thrumming pain in his temples.

  It was all wrong, this whole thing had a bad feel to it. Three times this Lennox had gotten away, twice with the girl, and it was like an omen, like something was trying to tell Harry and him that it was useless, warn them to give it up and get out while they were still able. He didn’t like it, he was scared, he wanted civilization, people, a cool place to sleep, he wanted Jean—God, he wanted Jean! But the chase had become like an obsession with Harry, you couldn’t reason with him, you couldn’t talk to him; he’d tried that last night, and the way Vollyer had looked at him had been almost murderous, almost as if he was thinking about using the belly-gun or that frigging Remington. It had shaken him and he’d kept his mouth shut since, remembering those stories he had heard, remembering that look in Harry’s eyes. Still, how long could they keep up the hunt? The water was almost gone, you couldn’t live very long without water on the desert. Why didn’t they just call it off? Lennox and the girl had been without water, without food, for almost two days now; they couldn’t last much longer, the heat would do the job of silencing as effectively as they could ...

  Vollyer said, “Give me a little of that water, Livio.”

  Di Parma handed him the container and watched while he drank sparingly. When Vollyer handed it back to him, he asked, “What time is it, Harry?”

  “After one.”

  “We’ve been out here almost twenty-four hours.”

  “I know it.”

  Di Parma lifted the tattered remains of his suit jacket and stared at it. Jean had picked it out for him; she said he looked very dashing—that was the word she used, dashing—in a light blue weave. He would have to throw it away now, and how was he going to explain the loss of it to Jean? Maybe he wouldn’t have to, maybe he could replace it from one of the shops off the Loop before he went home; if they could match the style and color, she’d never know the difference—that was what he would have to do, all right.

  He wondered what Jean was doing now and if she was okay. She would be worried about him, that was for sure, because he hadn’t called her since yesterday morning and he always called her every night and every morning when he was on the road. He hoped she wouldn’t be too upset, he hated to see her upset, when she cried it was like little knives cutting away at his insides and he felt big and helpless. The first thing he had to do when they got out of this desert, the very first thing was to call Jean and let her know that everything was fine, he could make up some story about entertaining a buyer to explain his silence. She would understand, she would accept his word without question; that was one of the beautiful things about Jean: she trusted him, she knew he would never violate that trust. He hated the lying to her, but there was no other way without hurting her and he would never hurt her.

  Kneeling there, loving her, wanting her, Di Parma thought: Damn Lennox and that bitch from the Triumph! Damn them for keeping Jean and me apart ...

  Six

  Exhausted, bodies puckered like raisins from the dehydrating sun, Lennox and Jana lay belly down in the shade tunnel created by a low, eroded stone bridge. The sand there was cool and powdery, soft against their fevered skin, and they had been lying in it for the better part of an hour. When they had reached the butte and skirted it at its base, Lennox had begun looking for a place to rest immediately, realizing the girl’s near-prostration, knowing that he, too, was approaching collapse—but it seemed to have taken hours before they found the sanctuary here beneath the bridge.

  Lennox stirred now, rolling painfully onto his back, and he wondered vaguely if his legs would support him when he tried to stand again. The familiar burning pangs of hunger stabbed harshly at his belly, intensified by the added bodily deprivation of liquids, and he knew that unless they found food shortly—at the very least, some water—they would be physically unable to continue. It was a small miracle that they had managed to come this far; and it was amazing how much the human body could endure if put to a major test.

  He moved his head, looking at Jana. She had slept—passed out?—the moment she was prone in the sand, and she lay motionless now, her face somehow pale beneath the dust and the sweat and the sunburned mosaic of red and brown patches, and for a moment he had the feeling that she was dead. He sat up convulsively, leaning toward her. One of her hands twitched then, like the slim paw of a sleeping kitten, and he knew a sense of relief. The protectiveness, the responsibility, he felt toward her was an odd sort of thing; he had never really committed himself, he thought with a kind of detached and yet vivid insight, to anyone but himself in all his thirty-three years—not even to Phyllis in the beginning, when he had loved her intensely, not even to Humber Realty except where it could further his own ends. Jack Lennox had been his entire life, his sole purpose—Jack Lennox’s feelings, needs, triumphs, and defeats, pleasures and pains. No one else had ever really mattered, witness that poor old man in the bus depot, witness him. And now, inexplicably, a girl he barely knew, a girl who might die because of him, a girl who shared his pain and his loneliness, this girl mattered. She had, unwittingly, b
roken through to touch the core of him, and there was suddenly an awareness in him of his own self-centeredness, of his limitations and his failings, a vague understanding of what he was and why he was what he was. The revelation was not a pleasant one, but the sluggishness of his mind, while it refused to allow him to dwell on it, also refused to allow him to reject it.

  Sitting with his legs splayed out in front of him, his hands folded between his knees, Lennox stared out at the bright, stark desert world. A line of ancient, element-carved rocks stretched away to the north—he had learned to read the sun like a compass in the past two days; interesting, the little tricks a running man picks up—and when he and Jana were able to move again, those rocks would serve as cover.

  He became gradually aware, as he looked out at the silent emptiness, of a large cylindrical cactus, crowned with small scarlet flowers, growing just beyond the blanket of shade cast by the stone arch overhead. He gave it his attention, studying the striated, thorn-covered trunk, the greenness of it, and something—a scrap of knowledge, read or heard at some time in his life and then filed away in the archives of his brain—nudged at his consciousness, evanescent and yet demanding. He groped at it, retrieved it, held it grimly.

  There was a kind of cactus which stored moisture in its pulp, enabling it to stay green longer than any of the other varieties. You could get liquid, drinkable liquid, from that pulp. Barrel cactus, that was the name of it. You sliced off the top of the barrel and the pulp was there inside ...

  Lennox pulled his legs under him and staggered to his feet, staring at the cactus growing that short distance away. It was barrel-shaped, all right, it looked like a barrel, all right, and he stumbled toward it, coming into the direct glare of the sun again, wincing as the furnacelike air struck him savagely across the face and neck. He fumbled at his belt and got the knife-contoured piece of granite free and stepped up to the cactus; he drove the pointed end into the barrel’s trunk a few inches below the crown, plunging it deeply, sawing with it, unmindful of the needle-sharp spines jabbing at his hands and wrist and forearm, sweat streaming down into his eyes, his mind blank. The trunk was thick, but its fibers yielded to the desperate hackings and finally the top broke free and dropped to the sandy earth, resembling a fresh scalp with a vividly festooned bonnet, the flowers like splashes of blood in the brilliant light.

  Lennox dropped the granite knife and reached inside the cactus with his hand cupped, touched cool wet pulp, seized it, pulled it out and up to his face, squeezing the juice past his parted and eroded lips. It was bitter, it was ambrosial, it dripped into the back of his throat and soothed the constricted passage and returned feeling to the swollen blob that was his tongue. Again and again he dipped out handfuls of the heavy pulp, and after a time he could swallow again, there was less complaint from the contracted muscles of his stomach.

  He scooped out a double handful, then, and hurried back to where Jana lay prone in the shade. Using his knee, he turned her and held the barrel pulp low over her mouth, squeezing lightly, letting a few droplets fall on lips that were almost as deeply split as his own. She stirred immediately, her eyes fluttering open, and he said gently, “Open your mouth, Jana. I’ve found something we can drink.”

  Thickly, painfully: “What ... what is it?”

  “Cactus pulp. Open your mouth.”

  Obediently she parted her lips and he pressed out the juice carefully, trying not to waste any. When the pulp yielded no more, he tossed it aside and helped her into a sitting position. She swallowed and coughed dryly. “More,” she said.

  “Can you stand up? Can you walk?”

  “I ... don’t know.”

  He drew her to her feet and supported her to the decapitated barrel cactus; she moved gracelessly, jerkily, like a wooden-jointed marionette, but she remained upright. Lennox cooped free another double handful of pulp and squeezed the juice into her mouth—a third and a fourth. She was better now, he could see that; there was an alertness to her eyes once more, and she could stand without assistance, without swaying.

  He retrieved the granite knife and returned it to his belt. Then he and Jana each took handfuls of the pulp back into the shade and sat down cross-legged in the sand and drank. When there was no more moisture, they used the pith to rub some of the caked dust and sweat from their faces.

  At length Lennox said, “How do you feel?”

  “Light-headed,” she answered.

  “Can you go on?”

  “Do we have any choice?”

  “No.”

  “Then I can go on.”

  He touched her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers. “You’ve got a lot of courage,” he said softly.

  “Sure.” She did not look at him. “Can we get juice from all the cactus like that one?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “It’s something.”

  “How did you think of it?”

  “One of those scraps of knowledge you hear somewhere and file away and forget about. When the time is right, you remember it again.”

  “Do you know of some way to get food, too?”

  “No—unless we could catch a squirrel or a jackrabbit or something. But we’d have to eat the meat raw if we did.”

  Jana shuddered faintly.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Lennox said. “We’ll be out of here before too much longer. Maybe by nightfall.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “I believe it.”

  “No,” Jana said, and she was looking at him now. “No, you don’t.”

  “Jana ...”

  “Do you know where we are? Do you have any idea at all where we are? Tell me the truth.”

  He wanted to lie to her, to reassure her, but he could not seem to do it; it was as if honesty was a vital thing between them now, as if their kinship had become so strong that lying was completely unnecessary. “No,” he said, “I don’t know where we are. And I don’t think we’ll get out of here by nightfall. I don’t know if we’ll ever get out of here.”

  She continued to look at him, and he saw a kind of confusion flickering across her features, as if a small, incomprehensible battle were being waged inside her. He wanted desperately to know what she was thinking in that moment; and as if a certain telepathic communion had been established between them, she put words to her thoughts, she said, “What’s your real name? It’s not Delaney, is it?”

  And before he could consider consequences, before he could think anything at all, he answered, “No. No, it’s Lennox, Jack Lennox ...”

  Seven

  Seen through the substation’s long front window, the main street of Cuenca Seco was dusty and quiet; the elongated shadows cast by buildings on both sides of the thoroughfare met in the exact center, touching one another and then merging like lovers unable to wait for darkness, finding magic in the golden stillness of late afternoon. But Brackeen, standing just beyond the front counter, listening intently to a crackling voice that originated in the state capital, was not in the least interested in what lay outside the window; he had far more important things on his mind than the capriciousness of shadows.

  He had made his decision.

  He was in it now, he was in it all the way.

  The crackling voice stopped talking, finally, and Brackeen muttered a thanks and dropped the phone back into its cradle. He turned to look at the tall, rangy figure of Cuenca Seco’s night deputy, Cal Demeter. “I’ll take any calls that come in myself—for a while anyway. I’ll be in my office.”

  Demeter nodded sourly. He did not care for Brackeen at all, and the less contact he had with him the better he liked it; but it was past six-thirty now, an hour and a half since Brackeen had officially gone off duty, and he was still hanging around, throwing out orders. It wasn’t like Brackeen, not that slob. Neither was it like him to jump all over Forester the way he’d done at five o’clock, telling him he was a snot-nosed bright-face with a lot
to learn about being a cop, telling him he was sick and tired of his half-assed opinions and smart-assed remarks, telling him to get the hell home and not to go out tonight because he wanted Forester on stand-by. And all because the kid had done a little more bragging about finding this dead guy, Perrins, at Del’s Oasis the day before. That fat son of a bitch had something biting him, biting him so hard it was going to bite him right out of a job. Forester was one of Lydell’s fair-haired boys, the kind of kid who could hold a grudge, too, and he didn’t like Brackeen any more than Demeter did. Lard-belly had made a big mistake opening up to Forester like that, sure and sweet enough he had; wouldn’t be long now before he’d have to find some other source besides the county to pay for his beer and his whores in Kehoe City...

  Brackeen went into his partitioned cubicle across the office. He sat down behind his desk and lit a cigarette and stared at the clock on the wall without seeing it. He had enough facts now to be fairly sure of the validity of the conclusions he had formed earlier that afternoon, conclusions which had forced his decision to involve himself. Carefully, he went over all of it in his mind.

  Item: one Triumph TR-6, registered to a Daryl Setlak in New York City. But Setlak was a college kid who had sold the Triumph three weeks before, for cash, to a Manhattan used-car dealer; it had obviously been purchased since then, but the bureaucratic red tape involved in any state or federal agency had delayed the entry into the records of the new owner. A telephone call to the used-car dealership had gone unanswered; with the three-hour time difference in the East, it had been past six there when Brackeen called and the place was obviously closed for the night. An appeal had been made to the New York police, but there was no report from them as yet; the current owner of the TR-6 was still unknown. And still missing. All he knew was that the car had been ambushed, fired upon with some kind of high-powered weapon. Later it had been pushed or driven into the dry wash, so as to hide it, apparently, from view of anyone passing on the road.