Panic! Page 12

  And so he resigned from the force, quietly, and everyone seemed to understand without anything being said. After a few aimless months in the Bay Area, during which he found and lost several jobs—always for the same reason: listlessness and inattentiveness and disinterest—he drifted south. A year in Los Angeles working the produce market, six months in Dago as a hod carrier, and then, finally, the desert and Cuenca Seco and Marge and marriage. He worked in the freight yards in Kehoe City for a while, and when Marge’s uncle offered him a job in his feed store, Brackeen accepted that.

  He had no intention of taking on the resident deputy’s position when it came up. Marge had managed to pry loose from him at one time or another the fact that he had once been a cop, but that was all of his past he would reveal to her; she told her uncle about it, and the uncle had some kind of political pull with the county and offered to finagle the job for Brackeen if he wanted it. Brackeen said no, and he meant it at first; but they worked on him, Marge and the uncle, reminding him of how unhappy he was at the feed store, chipping away at his resistance in a dozen little ways. He began to think about it, and the cop in him—a thing that, like the shame and the guilt, had not died over the years—forced him eventually into doing some checking on the resident’s duties. They consisted, he learned, mostly of sitting behind a desk, making routine patrols, and administering traffic tickets—no hassles, no problems, no crises to face, no partners to watch out for. He wondered if he could wear a gun again. He went with the uncle to the substation in Cuenca Seco and strapped one of the Magnums on and took it out and held it in his hands. Something stirred deep within him, but he did not tremble and he did not sweat and he did not feel sick at his stomach. As long as he wasn’t forced to use it, he thought, he might be all right.

  He took the job.

  And here he was.

  Brackeen lay in the early-morning darkness, the warm pressure of Marge’s hip against his thigh, and thought it all through again for the first time in a decade.

  He did not want to think about it, and yet his mind dwelled on it just the same. There was no pain now; time had put a thick skin over the wound even though it had failed to heal it. But what there was, was a deep feeling of incompletion, a kind of vague hunger that seemed to have always been there, unfulfilled. The same emptiness he had experienced that afternoon in Sullivan’s Bar. The past was touching him again, as it had not touched him in a long time, and the ghosts of pride and manhood haunted him vaguely, like wraiths half-felt in the darkness, never quite manifesting themselves and yet never quite vanishing either.

  It was this goddamn killing that was responsible; he couldn’t get it out of his head, he couldn’t combat the perverse mental involvement in it. It was as if, strangely, it was a personal thing, demanding his intervention, demanding a commitment on his part that he had been unable and unwilling to make since that cold, wet February night when a part of him died along with Bob Coretti. And he didn’t know why; the reason for it was an enigma that he could not solve.

  Brackeen turned his head on the pillow and looked at the luminescent dial of the clock on the bedside table. Five A.M. Another hour and a half before the alarm would ring. Another three hours before he was due at the substation to assign Forester some innocuous paperwork. This was one of the days, of which there were two in each week, when county policy dictated a reversal of roles: the bright-face would sit behind a desk and Brackeen would make the routine patrols. The idea was to give the assistant deputies a taste of office duty, while the residents kept abreast of their districts on the outside. Brackeen had always disliked the patrolling—it reminded him, in an ephemeral but uncomfortable sense, of the days and nights he and Coretti had cruised the Potrero in San Francisco—and the prospect of it on this day was even more unappealing. He wanted to know what was happening in Kehoe City and in the capital on the Perrins thing; he wanted to know what the fingerprint and personal background checks had turned up; he wanted to tell Lydell and the State Highway Patrol investigators what he thought and to make some recommendations and to hell with rocking the boat. Damn it, he wanted to be involved in it.

  Even though he did not want to be involved in it.

  The ambivalence was so strong in him, so frustrating in him, that it was almost like physical pain.

  Two

  Dawn.

  On the desert, the first light is silvery and cold. The moon and the stars fade as darkness recedes, and the quiet is absolute, almost eerie. Then, slowly, magically, the silver becomes gold and the sun peeks almost shyly between distant mountain crests. There is warmth in the air again as the long shadows of towering saguaros stretch across the desert floor, as the grotesquely beautiful rock formations turn the color of flame.

  Once again the light changes, becoming a brilliant yellow-white, as the sun reveals more of itself on the eastern horizon. The stillness is broken now by the chattering of quail, by a half-muffled burst of machine-gun fire that is nothing more than the cry of a cactus wren. The desert begins to shimmer with heat and mirage, and as the temperature rises with the sun and the glare increases, human vision once again blurs and there is no more softness, no more beauty, no more serenity to the land. Illusion is consumed by reality, and reality is a middle-aged whore at high noon: coarse, ugly, and uncompromising.

  The runners are there, running there, running since that first silvery light, running now through a sea of cactus—barrel, agave, saguaro, prickly pear, cholla, beavertail. Thorns like tiny needles, like slender jade daggers, like gleaming stilettos rip at their skin, at their clothing, inflicting painful but half-noticed scratches and punctures that bleed for a moment and then dry up almost immediately. They are three-quarters of the way across, and their momentary objective—a low butte—looms reddish-brown and barren in the climbing sun.

  They are no longer running blind, they have a direction now. North. Cuenca Seco or the county highway or perhaps even the dead-end road. It is the best choice in spite of the fact that it is the obvious one, this is what Delaney—is that really his name? —told Jana in the fort this morning. She does not know if he is right but she has to believe in him because there is no one else to believe in in the suddenly miniaturized confines of her world. She no longer hates him. Like her, he is here as a result of cruel and bitter circumstance; the fault is not his, there is no fault. She does not want to be alone and she does not want to die out here, even though she is very certain that she is going to die out here. But hope is the foundation of sanity, and there is hope even in the most fatalistic of men if that man is sane. Let the fearful be allowed to hope. To the last breath, to the bitter end, to the final revelation. Ovid said it and Aristotle said it and the New Testament said it and now Jana Hennessey is saying it.

  I’m keeping the faith, baby; I’ve got hope.

  Her mind is touched by these random thoughts, and random others, as she runs. She wonders what Harold Klein will say when he learns of her death. What Don Harper will say. Even what Ross Phalen at Nabob Press will say. She wonders if there will be much pain or if it will be over quickly. She wonders if God is alive and if He is, what Heaven is like; she has sinned, yes, many times in many ways but she does not believe in the existence of an orthodox Hell, fire and brimstone and all that nonsense, only the truly wicked—which she is not—are unforgiven at the Judgment and their souls are destroyed instantaneously rather than having to suffer eternal damnation.

  She wonders what kind of man this Delaney, this drifter, is. She wonders why he asked her about herself last night. She wonders why she was unable to control the violent reaction to his touch, to his offer of warmth, when it was so obviously genuine. She had almost frozen, lying there with the wind chilling her, wanting to go to him and the warmth of him and yet afraid, afraid of the maleness of him, afraid of her own actions—immediate and ultimate. Her loneliness, magnified by the coldly brittle stars, the fat white moon, the velvet blackness, had been immense; and yet, the other thing, the fear of herself, had been stronger. Even with dea
th so apparently imminent, she could not and cannot bring herself to face the question which has been in her mind for the past few weeks, the root of her flight from New York. She would rather die with the question unanswered; it would be better that way.

  More thoughts come and go, fleetingly, like subliminal messages on the surface of her brain. Some of them make little sense.

  Listen, it’s too bad they took the cigarette commercials off television. You could, do one where these two beautiful people are running in slow motion through the desert instead of through a grassy meadow. They stop beside a dry stream bed and light up, holding hands, laughing, and two men jump out with guns and shoot them. Very symbolic, you see. The American Cancer Society would love it.

  Do you know what happens when you drink too much water? Well, what happens is, you keep having to pee. And if you have to stop to pee, how can you keep on running? Ergo, not drinking any water allows you to keep on running, and not eating any food—well now, let’s not get vulgar, remember that writers of children’s books must never be vulgar. That’s what Ross Phalen says and I wonder what Ross Phalen would say if he knew just how vulgar writers of children’s books could get. He would crap, excuse me, Ross, he would have a bowel movement or would you prefer defecate, he would crap in his pants and I’m so tired, oh God, I’m so tired. And thirsty, I’m so thirsty my tongue has dried up and fallen out of my mouth like, like, come on, Jana, what’s a writer without his similes and metaphors, like a pistil from a withered flower, there now I knew you could do it ...

  Delaney—somehow, Jana feels that is simply not his real name—stops abruptly and bends into the shadow of a cactus. When he straightens again, he holds in his hand a long, slender piece of granite, smooth and rounded on one end, flared and sharply pointed on the other. It resembles a hunting knife, and it shines wickedly in the sun.

  Jana finds words. “What good is that thing?”

  “I don’t know,” he answers. “It’s something, at least.”

  “I have to rest pretty soon, I can’t go much further without some rest.”

  “When we get around that hill.” He puts the granite knife into his belt on the left side.

  She tries to compose her thoughts as they run again, but the heat and the malevolent cactus thorns and the hunger and the thirst are anathema to coherent reasoning. The disjointed images come and go as the butte, promising momentary respite, looms larger ahead of them.

  Bad guys chasing the hero and heroine across the barren wastes. The situation appears hopeless, all appears lost. But wait—what’s that? Hoofbeats? A bugle? We’re saved! It’s Roy and Trigger, Gene and Champion, Batman and Robin; it’s Superman and Sam Spade and the boys from Bonanza. Here we are, gang! Look here, over here! Do you see us, do you see us over here ... ?

  Three

  Vollyer saw them.

  He was standing on an outcropping, scanning the desert with the binoculars as he had done several times that morning, sweeping through a long, flat expanse grown thickly with cactus. His eyes had been bothering him since sunrise and the returning glare—they watered heavily, aching, causing him moments of double vision—and he almost missed the rapid movement in the shining green and brown. He snapped the glasses back, and after a moment he saw them, running toward a craggy mesa or butte or whatever the geological term for a desert hill was. They were a long way off, well out of range of the Remington, but the important thing was their exact location had finally been pinpointed.

  There was no excitement in Vollyer as he watched Lennox and the girl. The excitement was in the machinations, the maneuvers, of the game—not in the final and assured victory. But the fatigue he had begun to feel as a result of the draining heat and the rough terrain, the throbbing in his stomach which the few hours’ rest and the last of the fresh fruit had failed to quiet, the burning ache behind his eyes, were each of them forgotten.

  He lowered the binoculars, half-smiling, and climbed down to where Di Parma stood waiting.

  Four

  Brackeen found the wrecked Triumph TR-6 a few minutes before noon.

  He had spent the morning cruising the area west and north of Cuenca Seco, and making periodic radio checks with Bradshaw on the Perrins thing. If the state or county investigations had turned up anything, they were not letting it out, even to the substation in whose district the killing had occurred; Bradshaw had heard nothing at all. Brackeen knew that he was going to have to make a direct inquiry in order to get information—but the desire for both involvement and noninvolvement was still raging ambivalently inside him, and he could not seem to make up his mind one way or the other. He was early coming back in to Cuenca Seco for his lunch break, and he decided to conduct the weekly check of the abandoned dead-end road winding into the desert just east of town; it was always quiet and deserted out there, and you could be alone with your thoughts.

  He drove the full length of the road, U-turned, and started back. He still didn’t know what he wanted to do. The indecision continued to anger and frustrate him, and he was mentally absorbed in it so deeply as to be oblivious to his surroundings, driving mechanically. It took the blinding reflection, from well to one side of the road—like a huge blood ruby catching and refracting the sun’s rays—to jerk him out of it.

  Brackeen slowed, frowning, and then stopped the cruiser. Instinctive curiosity, a trait police officers learned very early in their careers if they weren’t born with it, made him step out into the harsh glare of midday and cross to where the object glinted in the sunlight near a large boulder; as he approached, he saw that it was a piece of red taillight glass, lying cupped upward in the rocky soil. It did not have a filming of dust, he noticed, as it would have if it had been there for any length of time. No accidents had been reported in this vicinity, and if Forester was as good as he liked you to believe, he would have investigated the reflection had it been here the week previous.

  More than curious now, Brackeen began to prowl the area. He saw faint impressions that might have been tire tracks, erratic and irregularly shaped, such as a car would leave if it had gone out of control. He found a streak of yellow paint on one of the boulders nearby. He found another broken section of taillight. And when he saw no sign of a vehicle amongst the granite and sandstone and extended his prowling to the dry wash in the distance, he found the Triumph.

  He stood for a moment on the bank, looking down at the battered wreckage, and then made his way carefully into the wash. The convertible top was crushed badly on the passenger side, but when he got down on his knees on the driver’s side, and looked beneath, he could see that it was empty. And he could see, too, where a large-caliber bullet had gouged a deep hole in the dash panel.

  A faint excitement stirred inside him. He straightened and walked around the car and saw that it could be righted without a great deal of exertion. He braced his body against the chassis, finding handholds, and the muscles which had once been prominent responded under the layers of soft fat; in less than a minute he had the Triumph tilted crookedly against one of the rocks, on its axles and what was left of its tires.

  Brackeen sifted through the tangled metal. He located a rounded hole in the crumpled plastic of the rear window, at the very top, and it was obvious to him that it had been made by the same bullet imbedded in the dash panel. From the angle of trajectory, he determined that it had been fired from a height of several feet. There were no bloodstains in the interior, at least none that he could find, and it seemed reasonable to assume that no one had been seriously wounded either by bullets or in the crash. It was hardly likely that anyone could have crawled out of the Triumph if he had been in it when it went into the wash; the way it looked, the shooting had taken place over on the road and the car had gone off it there, fishtailing into the one boulder where he had found the taillight shard, scraping another and leaving the streak of yellow paint. The TR-6 had been driven or pushed into the wash later on. But by whom? And for what reason?

  The car was unfamiliar to Brackeen, and the New Y
ork license plates told him the reason for that. There was no registration holder attached to the steering column, nothing in the glove compartment—anywhere in the car—to point to the owner. Behind the front seat, he discovered a bag with a notebook and a sketch pad inside; some of the pages in each were crumpled and torn, but the descriptive notes in the one and the stark desert sketches in the other were discernible. He was no expert, but the handwriting in the notebook appeared to be feminine, and the drawings had a certain feminine quality—but he could be wrong and he knew it. The only things that seemed certain were that whoever owned the Triumph had spent some time out here on the desert, and not long ago.

  And that he—or she—was now apparently and unexplain-ably missing.