Panic!

Vollyer’s stomach had begun to throb painfully. “Livio,” he said, “Livio, you’re pushing me, Livio, you’re getting on my nerves, Livio. I’m in charge, I’m giving the orders here and you’re taking them and I don’t want to hear any more bitching or any more back-talk, Livio. This is business, this is my business, you’re just a punk kid in my business. Do you understand, Livio? Livio, do you understand?” Voice calm, almost gentle, face showing no emotion at all.

Di Parma opened his mouth, closed it again, and then lowered his eyes. His shoulders were hunched inside his jacket. He took his hands out of his pockets and looked at them and put them away again. Almost inaudibly he said, “I understand, Harry.”

It was the right answer.

Eighteen

Drenched in moonlight, the eroded, multishaped formations of granite and sandstone and occasional lava had a ghostly, otherworld look and the desert held the chilling enchantment of a graveyard at midnight. Overhead, the stars burned in a brilliant display against the backdrop of silken blackness. To the east, under the great pallid gold moon, the yellowish spines of vast clusters of cholla seemed to glow like distant lights, beckoning false sanctuary. The stillness was less acute now, with the first venturings of the night creatures—a horned owl made a questioning lament in silhouette against the moon, a coyote bayed querulously, a small and harmless yellow-breasted chat emitted a wailing shriek that sounded more as if it had been made by some giant beast. And the temperature dropped with almost startling rapidity, ultimately as much as fifty or sixty degrees.

Near a deep, wide wash, in the ineffectual shelter of a kind of natural rock fort, Lennox sat hugging his knees, shivering occasionally when the whispering night wind touched him with cold fingers. He felt weak, feverish, and the inflamed skin of his face and neck and arms burned with a hellish intensity; there was pain in his head, in the muscles and joints of his legs, in the cracked, swollen blisters that were his lips. He kept trying to work saliva through the arid cavern of his mouth, but there was no moisture left within him; his throat was a sealed passage that made swallowing impossible.

But his mind, curiously, was clear. It had been clear from the time he had stopped and hidden behind the smoke tree in that other wash; the panic had abated then, the consuming force of it at least, and the running since that time had been a calculated if desperate thing. There had been more rest stops than he would have liked—because of the girl and because of his own flagging strength—but they had seen no sign of their pursuers. Lennox had not deluded himself, however; he knew they were behind somewhere, and because of the urgency of his flight with the girl, there had been no time to cover their trail; the two men, city-bred or not, would not have had much difficulty in following, especially across the unavoidable open ground they had encountered from time to time.

He and Jana had been here in the rock fort since dusk. He had wanted to continue, to keep running well into the night, but both of them were exhausted. You could run only so far in a single day, and then you had to have rest; you could run only so far ...

There had been no conversation between them. Jana had sprawled out, face down in the sandy bottom of the fort, and sleep had claimed her immediately. Lennox had found a crevice which allowed a wide view of their backtrail, and he had sat there until just a few minutes ago, when darkness came. Would the two men keep looking in the bright white shine of the moon? He didn’t think so; they would need rest, too, and they would not want to take the chance of missing a sign in the deep pools of shadow the moonlight did not reach. Too, they would figure him and the girl to be exhausted, to seek out a hiding place for the night. No, they were safe now, until morning. And then—

And then.

He did not know what to do. If they kept running as they had today, blindly, they would be no better off than they were now; but he did not know where they were, or how far away the town of Cuenca Seco was—and the killers would be expecting them to move in that direction anyway. Could they double back to the road? Maybe—but there was no guarantee they would not stumble right into the arms of the men who pursued them; and he was not sure any longer in which direction the road lay. They could stay where they were, hidden here in the fort, hope that they were passed by, and then run in the opposite direction; but if their backtrail led to here, and the killers were able to follow it, they would be waiting in self-dug graves—they had no weapons, they could not make a stand. There was only one thing for them to do, then.

Keep running.