Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  Item: one Buick Electra hardtop, current model, rented in the capital two days ago by a man named Standish, who had possessed a valid Illinois driver’s license and other necessary identification. The name was being checked through Illinois channels; no report as yet. Except for a small empty case under the front seat, passenger side—and two expensive suitcases, containing quality men’s clothing in two different sizes but nothing which could be used for immediate identification purposes—the car had been clean. Fingerprints were possible, but since Lydell had refused to listen to a request to send Hollowell and his equipment to Cuenca Seco, the interior had not been dusted as yet.

  Item: a dead man who had used the name A1 Perrins and whose effects had borne out that identity—but whose fingerprints were those of a man named George Lassiter, a native of St. Louis, two convictions for the sale and possession of narcotics, one in 1951 and the other in 1957. Lassiter was or had been a purported member of the Organization, but was rumored to have severed his affiliations recently by mutual consent. But he had been shot six times in the chest, all six bullets within a five-inch radius, and that was a mark of a contracted professional hit.

  Item: a man named Jack Lennox, the drifter, whose fingerprints—taken from the oasis and the overnight bag found in the storeroom there—revealed him to be a fugitive from justice in the Pacific Northwest. He was wanted for assault and battery, and for assault with intent to commit murder, both charges having been filed by his ex-wife; he was also wanted for nonpayment of alimony to the same ex-wife. At present he, too, was still missing; law enforcement agencies had been alerted in a dozen western states, asking his detainment for questioning in connection with the Perrins/Lassiter murder, but there had been no reports to date on his possible whereabouts.

  Item: the owner of the Triumph, gender unknown, presence in this area unknown but thought to be innocent—a tourist, or perhaps an artist or writer on assignment if the notebook and sketch pad discovered in the Triumph were indicative of profession. Current whereabouts also unknown.

  Item: a man named Standish, hirer of the Buick. Presence in this area unknown. Current whereabouts unknown.

  Add it all up and what did you get? A connection. A corroboration of the idea Brackeen had had all along that Perrins/Lassiter had been murdered by a pair-figuring two now, from the suitcases in the Buick’s trunk—of professional sluggers. Extrapolating: Lennox had witnessed the killing of Lassiter, and had run, and had given himself away in the process. He had gone straight across the desert, maybe with close pursuit. Somewhere along the abandoned road he had met the Triumph’s owner and talked him into a ride out. The sluggers had discovered this in some way and ambushed the TR-6, but the bullets and the subsequent crash had failed to do the job for them; Lennox and the car’s owner had managed to escape, again with close pursuit. And now? Well, now they were somewhere out on the desert, all of them, the hunters and the hunted; that was why the Buick had still been there, hidden behind the rocks.

  All of it made sense, all of it dovetailed—too perfectly to be a pipe dream. The only other possible answers involved heavy coincidence, and Brackeen did not trust coincidence on that level of occurrence. Every known fact substantiated his theory; there were no discrepancies.

  The thing was, could he convince the State Highway Patrol boys—screw Lydell and the goddamn county—that he was right? Could he convince them to send out helicopters, search parties, before it was too late? He did not have the authority to do anything on his own; the most he could do, and he had already done that, was to post a special deputy at the junction of the county road and the abandoned road. If the sluggers came back for their Buick, they would find it gone and they would have no choice but to hike out. But Brackeen did not want that to happen. Because if it did, and if his previous knowledge of the operating code of the professional assassin still held true today, it would mean that Lennox and the Triumph’s owner were certainly dead. As it stood now, one or both of them might still be alive, might still be saved—if he could juice the state investigators into acting as soon as possible.

  That might not be easy, he knew. When he had finally come in off the desert, after two hours of abortive reconnaissance of the area where he had discovered the two cars, and the reaching of his decision to intervene, he had called Lydell for information —and the sheriff had told him to tend to his duties and to stay out of the murder investigation; it wasn’t his problem, Lydell said, in spite of the fact that the killing had happened in his district. Brackeen had tried to argue, but Lydell had simply hung up on him. He had had to go around the old bastard, to a deputy he knew from the poker games at Indian Charley’s, in order to obtain the information on Perrins/Lassiter and on Lennox. He had had no better luck when he’d called the Highway Patrol office. Neither Gottlieb nor Sanchez was there, and the sergeant on duty had referred him to the main investigative office in the capital. They had come through with the information on the rented Buick—that was what the call a few minutes previous had been about—but only because to them it had no bearing on the murder. When he had tried to press for facts on the case, they had told him the same thing as Lydell: stay out of it.

  But now that he had committed himself, he couldn’t stay out of it. There was anger in him again, and a sense of duty, and a sense of purpose. The emptiness was gone, and he felt whole again for the first time in fifteen years, he felt like a resurrection of the old Andy Brackeen, the proud one, the one with guts. And yet, it was not the kind of feeling that he could rejoice in, not with the source of his immediate rebirth unresolved.

  He reached out for the telephone. And it rang just as his fingers touched the receiver.

  He caught it up, said, “Sheriff’s substation, Cuenca Seco. Brackeen.”

  “My name is Harold Klein, I’m calling from New York’,” a man’s excited voice said. “I want to report a missing person.”

  “New York, did you say?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right.”

  Brackeen gripped the handset a little tighter. “The name of this missing person?”

  “Jana Hennessey. Miss Jana Hennessey.”

  “Is she a visitor in Cuenca Seco?”

  “Yes, she’s researching a book, she writes children’s books, you see, I’m her agent, and I called this Joshua Hotel where she’s staying just now and the clerk said she went out into the desert yesterday and hasn’t come back, he didn’t think anything of it, the damned fool, but I’m worried, she promised me faithfully she’d be working, she’s just a girl ...”

  “What kind of car does she own?” Brackeen asked tightly.

  “Car? A little yellow sports model, she bought it a couple of weeks ago ...”

  That’s it, Brackeen thought, that’s all I need. The bastards will listen to me now. He took Klein’s number and told him he would be in touch; then he switched off and dialed the State Highway Patrol office in Kehoe City. And as he waited, his eyes, sunken in deep pouches of fat, were bright and alert and alive.

  Eight

  Di Parma almost stepped on the rattlesnake.

  They were making their way to higher ground, into towering spires of rock, for a better vantage point of the vicinity. On their left, poised on the western horizon, the setting sun was a flaming hole in the pale fabric of sky, painting the landscape in golds and magentas. Vollyer, legs like thick needles thrusting pain at his groin and hips with every step, had dropped several paces behind; his breath whistled agonizingly in his throat, and there were skittering images playing at the corners of his eyes.

  Face set grimly, Di Parma climbed with his shoulders hunched forward, arms swinging loosely at his sides. He came around a thrusting projection and his left foot was upraised for another step when he sensed the movement directly beneath him. He looked down then, and the rattler was there—a huge, pale, indistinctly marked diamondback, slithering out from beneath a rock, thick body gyrating sinuously, head coming around as it sensed danger, hooded, deadly eyes seeming to stare at him and a thinly fo
rked tongue licking agitatedly at the air.

  Di Parma recoiled in horror. He staggered backward, nausea rising in his throat, and his hand clawed at the pocket of his jacket draped over his left arm. The diamondback was beginning to coil, still seeming to stare at him, evil, evil, and the belly-gun was in Di Parma’s hand now, triggered once, triggered twice; the snake’s head snapped free of its body, now you see it and now you don’t, and the body jerked, twisted, a hideous danse macabre, and then straightened and was still as the echo of the shots rolled like fading thunder through the quiet dusk. Shuddering violently, Di Parma turned away, stomach muscles convulsed, and vomited emptily.

  It had happened very quickly, and Vollyer did not know what it was until he stumbled up and saw the body of the diamondback, spasming again, faintly, in the dust. Savage rage welled up inside him. He went to Di Parma and spun him upright and slapped him across the face, forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. “You son of a bitch! You stupid shithead!”

  There was a glazed look in Di Parma’s eyes. “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God, Harry.”

  “You let them know where we are. You couldn’t have done a better job of it if you’d raised a signal flag!”

  “Harry, the snake, did you see the snake ...”

  “I don’t care about the bitching snake.”

  “It was coiling up, it was going to strike.”

  “The hell it was.”

  “It was, I tell you!”

  “And you panicked.”

  “I didn’t have any choice,” Di Parma said whiningly. “God, you don’t know how I hate snakes, Harry. They’re the one thing I’m afraid of, I want to puke every time I see one.”

  “You’ll puke, all right,” Vollyer said. “You’ll puke.”

  “Harry, for Christ’s sake, I couldn’t help it.”

  Vollyer stared at him, and it was as if Di Parma was a stranger, it was as if he had never seen him before in his life. The rage was ebbing, and there was no emotion whatsoever to replace it; he felt nothing for Livio now, no paternity, no friendship, no liking and yet no disliking. Just—nothing. Di Parma had been put to the test out here, and he had shown just what he was made of, and now, as far as Vollyer was concerned, he was a void, a stranger, a lump of clay. Nothing at all.

  His hands still shaking, Di Parma put the .38 away in his jacket. He was unable to meet Vollyer’s gaze. “Maybe they didn’t hear the shots, Harry,” he said. “Maybe they’re too far away.”

  “They’re not too far away,” Vollyer said tonelessly. “And sounds carry a long way out here.”

  “They might not be able to tell where the shots came from.”

  “You’d better hope not.”

  “Harry, listen—”

  “Shut up.”

  Di Parma looked at the sun-blistered face, its plumpness swollen almost grotesquely, and a tremor of fear caused another stomach paroxysm; Harry’s eyes, in that moment, were those of the snake’s—cold and hooded and deadly. He shook his head, sharply, and the illusion vanished. Vollyer turned then and started upward, and after a time—circling the dead rattler, avoiding it with his gaze—Di Parma followed on legs that had suddenly been weighted with lead.

  Nine

  When the two closely spaced gunshots sounded, Lennox pulled Jana behind a wall of rock and they crouched there breathlessly, listening. Silence prevailed again, heavy and unbroken.

  She whispered, “That was gunfire, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And not far off.”

  “Too close,” he said. “Too damned close.”

  “They weren’t shooting at us, were they? They’re not that close, are they?”

  “No, not at us. A snake, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “We don’t have much longer, do we?”

  “What kind of talk is that?”

  “I’m tired, Jack. I’m so tired.”

  “Listen, don’t give up on me now.”

  “It seems so useless, all this running.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not quitting, I can’t quit.”

  “Hope springs eternal,” she murmured.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “I won’t let you quit either, Jana.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ll have to find a place to spend the night,” he said grimly. “We can’t stay here, it’s too open.” His eyes moved over the surrounding terrain. “We’ll follow these rocks to that high ground over there. Should be enough cover, if we’re careful. It’ll be dark pretty soon, and they won’t be able to find us in the dark. They probably won’t even try.”

  Jana nodded and he took her hand and she did not pull away; the dry, cracked surface of his palm seemed to comfort her somehow. There was a tenderness in him, a gentleness that she had not expected to exist in a man so obviously plagued by fear—fear that went deeper, went beyond that which their current predicament had generated. It was as if he had lived with fear of one kind or another for a long time, as if it had distorted the genuine qualities he possessed. She wondered again who he was and why he had not told her his real name until that afternoon, why he had hidden his true identity—and why he had finally decided to confide in her. She had wanted to ask him that, in the shade under the stone arch, but he had risen abruptly, telling her it was time to be moving again, they couldn’t afford to stay there any longer.

  Now, following him across the rough ground, Jana wanted to ask him again. It was somehow important that she know more about this man, this Jack Lennox who had unwittingly endangered her life, and then saved it—if only for a little while. Maybe, she thought, it’s because he cares. And because he’s the first person I’ve ever known who could possibly understand what it’s like to live within the shell of oneself, lonely and afraid ...

  The last of the flaming sun had dropped beneath the horizon, and the sky was streaked in smoky pink and tarnished gold, when he found a night refuge for them.

  It was a large, flat, sheltered area hollowed out between several sheer pinnacles, a natural water tank that would fill with cool, fresh rainwater during the wet months; seepage and gradual evaporation under the drying sun had left the surface cracked and powder-dry, and so it would remain until the rains came once again. There was only one entrance, a narrow cleft which Lennox had very nearly missed in the sheer rock facing. It would be virtually impossible to locate once darkness settled; even with the wash of moonlight, deep shadows would hide the entrance—the dry stream path which angled upward through the cleft, crested, and dropped away into the hollowed tank several feet below.

  On level ground, where the path began its rise to the rock spires, a barrel cactus grew rounded and green. Once Lennox had discovered and cautiously examined the tank, and returned to tell Jana of what he had found, he used the granite knife to slice off the crown of the barrel; they dipped out pulp hurriedly, watching their backtrail, sucking greedily at the bitter droplets of cactus juice. Then, silently, they soothed the cool pith over their rawly burned faces and climbed into the tank.

  They lay on the dry floor of it, weak and spent. Half forgotten in the urgency of their flight, pain came to them again, harsh and lingering—the pain of hunger, the pain of sunburn, the pain of blistered foot soles. Dozens of tears and tiny holes in their clothing marked the location of stinging cuts and abrasions and cactus bites, and their exposed arms and hands were tapestries of scabrous scratches. The cactus liquid had soothed their burning throats, and momentarily appeased the bodily cry for moisture; but they were badly dehydrated and their need had grown greater, would continue to grow greater, with each passing minute.

  Darkness settled, erasing the polychromatic sunset from the sky, and the moon leaped high with that surprising desert suddenness. The stars began to burn like fired crystal. Outside the tank, a soft, silvery wraith slipped quickly in and out of shadows—a bushy-tailed kit fox, the size of a large house cat, prowling for wood rats and kangaroo rats and other nocturnal rodents. Overhe
ad, owl wings made faint, faraway sounds in the ghostly silence.

  It was pleasantly cool for a time, and the night wind salved Lennox and Jana, soft, gentle. But then it turned cold and disdainful, chilling them, and they stirred and awoke, almost simultaneously. After a moment, without speaking, they left the tank and returned to the barrel cactus and drank again of its pulp. The air, there below, was filled with a heady fragrance that came from a night-blooming cereus somewhere nearby—and if it had not been for the pain and the weakness and the fear that was theirs, the night might have held a deep magic allure.

  In the tank again, they sat facing one another, close but without touching. Jana said softly, “Talk to me, Jack. I need something to keep my mind off how hungry I am, and what’s out there behind us. And tomorrow—I don’t want to think about tomorrow.”

  “What should I talk about?”

  “I don’t know. You—Jack Lennox.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “There’s always something to say.”

  “Not in my case.”

  “Jack,” she said simply, “I want to know.”

  “All right. I’m thirty-three years old, a native of the Pacific Northwest, divorced and a gentleman of the road, as they used to say. I work when I feel like it, and play when I feel like it, and move on to new places when I feel like it.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all.”

  She was silent for a time, and then, softly, “Are you involved with those men out there?”

  “What?”

  “That story you told me about seeing them kill somebody—is that really true?”

  “Of course it’s true.”

  “And that’s why they’re chasing you—us?”

  “Yes. What did you think?”