Panic! (10 page)

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.

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.

Lennox pushes away from the granite profusion, again into the blinding glare of the sun. The few moments in the shade have helped his vision, and he can see again in a wavering focus. His eyes sweep the terrain: strange outcroppings of rock, tall cacti, mesquite and creosote bush and cat-claw, thick clumps of cholla climbing halfway along a volcanic cone—

What’s that?

There, there, off to the right?

Something ... bright yellow, fiendishly reflecting the rays of the sun. Something made of metal—a car? the hood of a car? Is there a road over there? Are there people? A car means both, a car means help, a car means escape—
is that a car?

Lennox feels the welling of relief, but tempered by the dim reminder of mirage, of other possible explanations for the brilliant reflection, of shattered hope. He fights down the urge to fling himself in that direction; it is a half-mile or more to where he sees the glare and he cannot run a half-mile, not now. Steadily, that is how he has to move, steadily.

But it is no more than a hundred yards before he breaks into a staggering and painful run ...

For Jana, it had been a quiet day.

Her sketch pad was now, in late afternoon, half full with charcoal and pencil drawings of the stark landscape which lay spread out before her, and she had made several notes and observations to be incorporated into the text of Desert Adventure. The intense heat had bothered her considerably after a while, and she had had to periodically relocate the blanket and her position in order to remain in one of the shifting patches of shade; but there had been nothing else to disturb her work—no inquisitive visitors, animal or human—and in spite of her mild aversion to her surroundings, she had immersed herself in the day’s project as completely as she had immersed herself in the outline yesterday.

Sitting now in the shadow of an oddly humped outcropping of granite, she laid the sketch pad aside and drank from the bottle of mineral water. Then she sat leaning back on her hands, feeling hot and drowsy, not quite ready to make the drive back into Cuenca Seco. She allowed her thoughts to drift, and when the image of Don Harper materialized, she did not recoil from it.

Detachedly, as if she were a disinterested third party clinically examining a relationship between two other people, she placed him mentally against a changing background of memories: Washington Square in the Village, gray sky, fluttering pigeons, leafless trees like skeletal fingers reaching upward, his cheeks flushed from the bitter-cold winter wind, laughing; an off-Broadway theatre with no name, a dramatic production with a forgotten title, sitting intently forward, brow creased, eyes shining, totally absorbed in the illusion being enacted under the floodlights below; the sparkling blue of Long Island Sound, streaked with silver afternoon light, cold salt spray flecking his cheeks as the bow of the sleek white sailboat glides through gentle swells, one large soft hand competent on the tiller, the other possessively on her hip, shouting merriment into the wind ...