Panic!

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.

Fifteen