Panic!

Vollyer inclined his head speculatively. The fact that Di Parma had not flushed Lennox—the odds were good that it was this Lennox—indicated that the runner had kept on running, that he hadn’t chosen to hide in the rocks, waiting to make his way back to the oasis after Vollyer and Di Parma had gone. Of course, there was still the possibility that he had been hiding out there, was at this moment hiding, and that Livio had overlooked him; but Vollyer knew something about human nature, and as far as he was concerned, the runners would always run, the hiders would always hide, the fighters would always fight. People reacted in the same way time after time; they were predictable. This Lennox was obviously not a fighter, and he was obviously not a hider; if he had been either one, he would have remained out of sight in the storeroom or in that cellar until he had the place to himself—and then he would have gone directly to the cops to volunteer help or he would have gathered up his belongings and slipped out of there quickly and quietly. But instead, he had run; and that made him a runner, and the bet a safe one that he was still running.

This fact made him no less dangerous to the two of them; but the way Vollyer saw it, he and Di Parma had time—just how much time he could not be sure, but enough so that he was not particularly worried, not yet. In fact, the challenge of the situation seemed to stimulate him in an oddly perverse way; it was at times like this that the game really became intriguing, when you were forced to use every bit of knowledge and strategy at your disposal in order to emerge the winner, again the winner.

He told Di Parma what he had done inside the café, what he had found there, how it figured to give them some time and an edge to find this Lennox. He told him not to worry. He told him things were going to be just fine.

Di Parma was not convinced. He said, “Harry, if that guy gets to the cops—”

“He’s not going to get to the cops.”

“We’ll never find him out there.”

“Maybe not.”

“Then what do we do?”

Vollyer said, “We go take a look at that map we’ve got in the car.”

Six

The rock formation was a small, oblique confusion of wind- and sand-eroded granite, situated some two hundred yards to the south of the little-used dirt road, six and a half miles out from Cuenca Seco. At one end of the formation, a tapered flat-topped extremity pointed accusingly at the sky; in the shadow of this, Jana finished spreading out a heavy blanket from the trunk of the TR-6 and looked out over the desert.

In the distance, an irregular blue coloration, darker than the sky itself, appeared like a gigantic wet spot across the horizon—the reflection of the bright blue sky off the surface of a highway, the most common of all desert mirages. Except for the wavering of distant mountains in the blur of heat, movement seemed not to exist. Less than twenty feet away, a giant saguaro stood tall and majestic, like a patriarch overseeing his vast holdings, its accordion-pleated trunk dotted with holes made by Gila woodpeckers in search of insect larvae. To the left, dense stands of rabbit bush carpeted a wide swath of the desert floor in a brilliant mantle of gold; to the right, several clusters of ocotillo, their thorny stalks reminiscent of bundles of sticks tied at the bottom, grew in regulated rows, as if planted by the hand of man. There was reddish soil and bluish basalt rock and small black lava cones; there were natural bridges, arches, mounds, knobs, shapes of every description—a fairyland or a nightmare, depending on the direction of the viewer’s imagination. And to Jana’s continuing surprise, there were few totally barren patches, and no sand dunes at all.

As she watched, a sudden flurry of activity occurred almost directly in front of her. A small dun-colored roadrunner, moving with great speed, flashed out of a clump of mesquite, raced thirty or forty yards across the rocky earth, and then struck with a slashing motion of its long sharp bill; its feathered head jerked up a moment later, a gecko lizard held firmly by the head, struggling in vain. The roadrunner carried its prey off quickly, vanishing as rapidly as it had appeared.

Jana repressed a shudder and went to where she had parked the Triumph a few yards away. From inside, she took the handbag with her sketch pad, notebook, and writing and drawing implements—and the sack containing the food and water she had purchased in Cuenca Seco. She arranged these on the blanket and sat down in the exact center of it, Indian fashion, with the sketch pad open across her lap.

Well, she thought, here we are. The wide-open spaces. Nature in the raw. The Wild, Wild West. Beats the stifling, sweating, polluted canyons of New York City all to hell, doesn’t it?

Sure it does.

You bet.

She picked up a piece of thick charcoal and began to draw the patriarchal saguaro with rapid, fluid strokes.

Seven

The runner, running: