Panic!

Vollyer settled back comfortably against the cool leather of the booth, folding his hands across his paunch. That Livio. Thirty-six years old, married a full five months now, and he went around like a kid on the third day of his honeymoon, calling Jean two and three times in a twenty-four-hour period whenever they were away from the city, worrying about her, talking about her incessantly. There was nothing wrong with love, Vollyer supposed, even though he had never experienced it and did not feel particularly cheated because he hadn‘t—there was nothing wrong with love but there were limits, and he could not understand how a grown man could become that hung up on a woman. Women had their purpose, Vollyer had never been one to put women down, but you had to treat them as simple equals—or inferiors if they deserved it; you just didn’t put them up on pedestals like Roman goddesses or something.

Even though he could not understand Di Parma’s constant preoccupation with his wife, he condoned it, he was indulgent of it. The thing was, Livio had not let this personal hang-up of his interfere in any way with the efficiency of his professional life; when he was working, he was cool and thinking, following orders, making all the right moves. That being the case, how could you put him down for a simple character flaw? Vollyer had decided that Di Parma’s shortcomings were just a part of the game, and as such, had to be accepted, tolerated, because he liked Di Parma, he really did like Di Parma. He hoped that nothing would happen to change things; he hoped Livio would keep right on being cool and efficient when it counted.

The waitress came around with their lunch and set the plates down and went away again. Di Parma said, “What happens after we eat, Harry? Do we stay here or do we make the rest of the drive today?”

“Better if we stay here,” Vollyer answered. “We’ll find a motel, something with a pool and a nice lounge. We’ve only got sixty miles left, over the desert, and we can make that in an hour in the morning.”

“What time do we leave?”

“Seven. We want to get there around eight.”

“There shouldn’t be much doing that early.”

“We don’t want anything doing.”

“How soon do you figure we can get back home?”

“If everything goes okay, the day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll call Jean tomorrow night,” Di Parma said. “She’ll meet us at the airport. Listen, Harry, why don’t you come out to the house then? You haven’t seen the new house.”

Vollyer had no particular desire to see the new house, but he smiled and said, “Sure, Livio, all right.”

There was no getting around it, he really did like Di Parma.

Three

From the window of her room at the Joshua Hotel, Jana Hennessey stood looking down the length of Cuenca Seco’s dusty main street to the spanning arch of the huge wooden banner marking the town’s westward entrance. Even though the black lettering on the front of the sign was not visible from there, she had taken her yellow Triumph TR-6 beneath it late the previous afternoon —after better than fifty miles of desert driving—and she remembered clearly what it said:

Welcome to Cuenca Seco

Gateway to a Desert Wonderland

As far as Jana was concerned, the wording was misrepre-sentational. The Wonderland it spoke of was little more than a dead sea sustaining grotesque cacti with spines like razor-edged daggers, a haven for vultures and scorpions and fat brown venom-filled snakes, an arid and polychromatic graveyard strewn with the very bones of time. And the Gateway—well, the Gateway was an anachronism in a world of steel-and-glass, of hurtling chrome-toothed machines, of great, rushing, ant-busy throngs of people; it was an elaborate set for an Old West movie, with too many false-fronted buildings and sun-bonneted women and Stetsoned men moving ponderously beneath a demoniacal sun, with dust-caked metal extras miscast in the roles of horses and carriages; it was make-believe that had magically become a reality, and been given an aura of antiquity that was somehow a little frightening.

Jana expelled a long, soft breath. The trouble with me is, she thought, I’m a big-city girl. I can’t appreciate native Americana because I’ve never seen any of it face-to-face; I’ve never really been out of New York City until now. How much of the grass roots can you see in Brooklyn or Long Island or downtown Manhattan? It’s not so easy to adjust to a different way of life, it’s not so easy to surround yourself with nature instead of with people, with life-in-the-raw instead of life-insulated-by-luxury; it’s not so easy to break away, to change, to forget.

To forget ...