Panic! (12 page)

Vollyer caught his arm. “Sports car,” he said.

Di Parma looked along the road, and the machine was nearing them rapidly. It was a sleek yellow Triumph with New York plates; the dust cloud billowed out behind it like a gigantic dun-colored parachute attached by invisible wires. Di Parma squinted against the glare of the sun, and he could see two people inside, a woman driving and the passenger a man sitting hunched forward on the seat.

The Triumph drew parallel to them, and Vollyer and Di Parma were far enough away and at enough of an angle to be able to look through the open window on the passenger side. They saw the dust-streaked, sunburned face of the man, saw it clearly, and it was the same face smiling out from the portrait photograph in Vollyer’s pocket—it was him, Lennox, the witness. Di Parma, staring, was incredulous. Harry had been right, he had been backing a winner after all. Jesus, the guy had come straight across the desert and hit this road ...

Vollyer reacted instantly at the moment of recognition. He pulled off his sunglasses and gained his knees, turning slightly, planting his left foot at an angle out from his body to brace himself. He extended his left arm, crooked horizontally, and rested the long barrel of the Remington on his forearm, squinting through the Bushnell scope. The Triumph was pulling away, fifty yards beyond them, and Di Parma sucked in his breath, watching Vollyer, thinking: Squeeze off, squeeze off, Harry, for Christ’s sake!

Vollyer waited a moment longer. And fired.

Again.

Rolling echoes of sound fragmented the brittle late-afternoon stillness. Di Parma saw a hole appear in the dusty plastic of the Triumph’s rear window, saw the spurt of air and dust as the left rear tire blew. The little car began to yaw suddenly, its rear end snapping around, and Di Parma thought for an instant that it was going to roll. But it remained upright, plunging off the road on their side, hurtling through thick clumps of creosote bush, skidding sideways as the girl fought the wheel and the locked brakes, tilting, rear end folding in on itself as it slammed into a chunk of granite, caroming off, a second tire blowing now, driver’s door scraping another boulder, front end fishtailing again to point at still another outcropping, meeting it with a glancing blow and finally coming to a shuddering halt better than a hundred yards off the road.

Vollyer was already halfway down the slope, not looking back. Di Parma scrambled after him, and there was elation soaring through him. We’re all right! he thought. We’re going to come out of it just fine, Jean baby, I’ll be home in the morning...

Inside Lennox, the panic was a living, screaming entity.

It had been reborn the instant the angry, whistling pellet slashed through the rear window and imbedded itself in the dashboard, narrowly missing the girl. He had twisted in the seat and then the tire had blown and Jana had cried out, a keening sound that was a knife blade prodding the belly of the panic, enraging it, spiraling it out of control. The world spun and tilted crazily, and he felt himself thrown forward, felt sharp pain above his right eye as his head struck the windshield, felt blood flowing down to further distort the spinning montage outside the vehicle. Impact, grinding of metal, impact, the girl crying out again, impact, impact, and through it all the bright, hot panic clawing at the cells of his brain. He was not dazed, he was not confused. He knew what had happened, or the fear within him knew it; the equation was so very simple. They had found him: the killers had known about him all along and they had been looking for him and they had found him; he had no idea how, the how was not important, only the
why
was important and he knew the why.

Even before the car stopped moving, he was preparing flight.

And when it did stop, and the surrealistic movement became once again a motionless desert landscape, his hand was on the door handle, shoving it down, leaning his weight against it. Metal protested, binding, and he kicked at the door savagely,
run, run,
sweat commingling with the blood to half-blind him, and the girl was moaning words now, saying “My God, oh my God!” He looked at her—even with the panic he looked at her and she was the color of old snow, eyes glazed, still clinging to the wheel, repeating over and over, “My God, oh my God!”

Lennox kicked again at the door, and it gave finally and opened wide with a rending sound, run! and he was half out now, one foot on the ground, and his head jerked around, eyes searching through the dim red haze for the road, locating it. They were there, just as he had known they would be. Sunlight gleaming off metal extensions of their hands. Coming for him. Bringing death.

Run!

He levered his body up, supporting himself on the sprung door, and behind him the girl was still saying “Oh my God!” Suddenly, acutely, Lennox was fully aware of her. He looked at her, sitting rigidly in momentary shock, staring at nothing.
Run, run,
but something held him back, the girl held him back as if by some subconscious telepathy. He couldn’t leave her here, they would kill her, and even with the panic screaming there inside him, he couldn’t allow it to happen. He was responsible for her, he had gotten her into this, she was innocent. He had to take her with him. There was no inner debate, no real decision, it was simply a thing he was compelled to do.

Lennox reached back inside, and he had developed awesome strength. He locked his fingers on her arm and pulled her out of the seat, out from under the wheel, out of the car. She cried out in pain as a sharp edge of metal gashed her leg, and then he had her on her feet and he was staggering away from the car, half-dragging her behind, feeling her resist in spite of her shock and refusing to yield, dimly hearing her moan something at him but listening only to the shrill, clear voice of the panic now.

Into the rocks, near-falling, gasping, and a long way off a dull cracking sound, and another, and he knew they were shooting without really knowing it—keep moving, dodging, hang onto the girl, get away, get away, escape, fear shriveling his groin, fear gagging his throat, fear clamped onto his brain like a parasitic slug. And through the numbing wash of terror, a disjointed and yet intense feeling that it had always been this way for him, that his entire life had been one headlong flight; but like a wild thing in a wheel, he had never really escaped anything and never really would—and like that same wild thing, he would die running blind and running scared without ever having stopped running for even a little while ...

Di Parma raised his arm and fired a third shot from the reloaded .38, but Lennox and the girl had vanished into the jagged mosaic of rocks. Vollyer yelled at him, “Save your ammunition! Think, Livio, think!”

He was a few steps ahead and to one side of Di Parma as they passed the damaged Triumph and plunged into the rocks. In his right hand was the other belly gun; the Remington was tucked into the waistband of his trousers now. It was only a two-shot, and the rest of the ammunition he had brought for it was in the case under the Buick’s front seat.

Pinnacles and arches and knobs jutted up from the sandy earth on all sides of them, and there were sharp-thorned cacti and thick growths of mesquite. They fanned out, probing the terrain with slitted eyes, but there were a thousand hiding places here, a thousand barriers to camouflage flight. They saw nothing. There were small sounds—shoes scraping stone, a muffled cry—but when they pursued they found nothing.

Deeper into the craggy patchwork, moving more slowly now, listening. Silence. The startled cry of a martin. Something reptilian slithering beyond a boulder. A soft, rattling sound—dislodged pebble—directly ahead of them. They converged on the spot, just in time to see a small brown rock squirrel scamper into a crevice; it gave off a high-pitched, frightened whistle and was quiet.

They spent another ten minutes searching—futilely. At the end of that time they paused in the shade under a rocky ledge and Di Parma rubbed at his mouth with his free hand. His face was screwed up as if he were about to cry, lower lip trembling faintly. Vollyer, looking at him, thought that he resembled a pouting little boy; but there was no fondness, no paternal tolerance, in the image now. You’re getting to be an albatross, Livio, he thought. Don’t let it happen. Don’t wind yourself around my neck.

Di Parma said, “Not again, Harry. Goddamn it, not again.”

“We’ll find them.”

“How did they get away? How?”

“They haven’t gotten away.”

“But we had them. We had them cold.”

“Even losers get lucky for a little while.”

“Who do you think that girl is?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. No, I guess not.”

Vollyer was thinking, calculating. “You keep looking, keep moving around. But don’t get lost.”

“All right.”

“If you see them, fire a shot.”

Moving in an awkward run, Vollyer made his way back to the sandstone formation and the Buick; it was undetectable from the road, if anyone chanced by, and he decided to leave it where it was. From the briefcase, he removed the spare ammunition for the Remington and the box of shells for the .38s and slipped them into the knapsack he had taken from Del’s Oasis. The binoculars were on the front seat, and he looped them around his neck. Then, carrying the knapsack, he closed the door and returned to where the battered Triumph had finally come to rest.

He stood beside it, letting his eyes sweep the area. Five hundred yards distant, angling sharply into the rocks, was what looked to be an arroyo. He hurried there and saw that the wash was thirty or forty feet deep and another fifty feet wide, with a boulder-strewn bottom sustaining ironwood and mesquite. He went back to the Triumph, pausing to listen; he heard only silence.

The driver’s door was jammed shut, and he had to move around to the passenger side to get into the car. Wedged behind the front seat was a handbag with a sketch pad and a notebook inside, and Vollyer took a moment to shuffle through them. The keys hung from the ignition lock. He switched it on and pressed the starter. At first, from the dull whirr, he thought that the car was inoperable, that it would have to be pushed out of sight instead; but on his fourth try, the engine caught and held feebly.

Vollyer went through the gears experimentally, and found that the transmission had not been damaged. He let out the clutch slowly, and the car thumped backward on its blown tires, the rims grating sharply, metallically over the rock. He backed and filled, skirting the stone formations at a crawl until he located a clear path to the edge of the arroyo. Once there, he set the hand brake just enough to prevent the car from rolling forward of its own volition, and then slipped out on the passenger side and went around to the rear. He leaned his weight against the crumpled deck, grunting as his soft muscles dissented, and managed to edge the lightweight machine forward until its front wheels passed the rim; momentum took care of the rest.

The Triumph slid in a rush down the steep wall of the arroyo. The front bumper struck a shelf of rock three-quarters of the way down, and the car flipped over and landed on its canvas top, crushing it, filling the air with the reverberation of breaking glass and twisting metal. One of the wheels turned lazily in the bright glare of the falling sun; stillness blanketed the landscape again.

Vollyer returned for the knapsack, which he had placed on the ground before entering the Triumph, and a few moments later Di Parma came out of the stone forest to join him. He had a small wedge of yellow material in his left hand, and he extended it to Vollyer. “Found this on a cactus in there. It must be from the girl’s blouse.”

“No sign of them otherwise?”

“No.”

“You know where you found this?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Vollyer nodded and gave him the knapsack. “Put this on,” he said. “We’ve got water, food, and shells in there—and three guns and a compass and a pair of binoculars. They don’t have a damned thing. We’ll get them, sooner or later.”

“It had better be sooner,” Di Parma said grimly. His big red hands were nervous at his sides. “I’m no good at chases, Harry. I don’t like anything about this.”

They moved forward into the rocks.

Jana and the man she knew as Pete Delaney were on higher ground, running parallel to the dry wash toward a low butte in the distance, when they heard the echoing crash somewhere behind them. It was a brittle and metallic sound, the kind a car would make upon impact with something hard and unyielding—the sound of ultimate destruction.

He stiffened and stumbled to a halt, looking past her, still holding roughly to her wrist. But there was nothing for him to see. He started forward with her again, but Jana held back, fighting breath into her lungs. Her temples pounded rhythmically, and the inside of her head felt as if it were layered in thick cotton. The effects of the shock which had gripped her following the Triumph’s wild flight off the road still lingered, and she could not seem to compose her thoughts; they were sluggish, like fat weevils in the cotton bunting.

She knew that it was no accident that they had gone off the road; she had heard the bullet humming just over her right shoulder, slamming into the dash, had heard reports behind them just before the rear tire exploded. Someone had shot at them, shot at them! But
why?
Pete Delaney? And those two men on the road running after them—more gunshots? She could not remember, she had been so dazed. Running, the rocks and the cacti, the fingers like steel bands on her wrist. The fear. She could feel it rise within her of its own volition, and, as well, seem to enter her body like an electrical current emanating from this man, Delaney. He radiated fear, it seeped from his pores like an invisible and noxious vapor. His face was a mask of it: gaffed mouth, protuberant eyes, throbbing veins.