Panic!

Add it all up and what did you get? A connection. A corroboration of the idea Brackeen had had all along that Perrins/Lassiter had been murdered by a pair-figuring two now, from the suitcases in the Buick’s trunk—of professional sluggers. Extrapolating: Lennox had witnessed the killing of Lassiter, and had run, and had given himself away in the process. He had gone straight across the desert, maybe with close pursuit. Somewhere along the abandoned road he had met the Triumph’s owner and talked him into a ride out. The sluggers had discovered this in some way and ambushed the TR-6, but the bullets and the subsequent crash had failed to do the job for them; Lennox and the car’s owner had managed to escape, again with close pursuit. And now? Well, now they were somewhere out on the desert, all of them, the hunters and the hunted; that was why the Buick had still been there, hidden behind the rocks.

All of it made sense, all of it dovetailed—too perfectly to be a pipe dream. The only other possible answers involved heavy coincidence, and Brackeen did not trust coincidence on that level of occurrence. Every known fact substantiated his theory; there were no discrepancies.

The thing was, could he convince the State Highway Patrol boys—screw Lydell and the goddamn county—that he was right? Could he convince them to send out helicopters, search parties, before it was too late? He did not have the authority to do anything on his own; the most he could do, and he had already done that, was to post a special deputy at the junction of the county road and the abandoned road. If the sluggers came back for their Buick, they would find it gone and they would have no choice but to hike out. But Brackeen did not want that to happen. Because if it did, and if his previous knowledge of the operating code of the professional assassin still held true today, it would mean that Lennox and the Triumph’s owner were certainly dead. As it stood now, one or both of them might still be alive, might still be saved—if he could juice the state investigators into acting as soon as possible.

That might not be easy, he knew. When he had finally come in off the desert, after two hours of abortive reconnaissance of the area where he had discovered the two cars, and the reaching of his decision to intervene, he had called Lydell for information —and the sheriff had told him to tend to his duties and to stay out of the murder investigation; it wasn’t his problem, Lydell said, in spite of the fact that the killing had happened in his district. Brackeen had tried to argue, but Lydell had simply hung up on him. He had had to go around the old bastard, to a deputy he knew from the poker games at Indian Charley’s, in order to obtain the information on Perrins/Lassiter and on Lennox. He had had no better luck when he’d called the Highway Patrol office. Neither Gottlieb nor Sanchez was there, and the sergeant on duty had referred him to the main investigative office in the capital. They had come through with the information on the rented Buick—that was what the call a few minutes previous had been about—but only because to them it had no bearing on the murder. When he had tried to press for facts on the case, they had told him the same thing as Lydell: stay out of it.

But now that he had committed himself, he couldn’t stay out of it. There was anger in him again, and a sense of duty, and a sense of purpose. The emptiness was gone, and he felt whole again for the first time in fifteen years, he felt like a resurrection of the old Andy Brackeen, the proud one, the one with guts. And yet, it was not the kind of feeling that he could rejoice in, not with the source of his immediate rebirth unresolved.

He reached out for the telephone. And it rang just as his fingers touched the receiver.

He caught it up, said, “Sheriff’s substation, Cuenca Seco. Brackeen.”

“My name is Harold Klein, I’m calling from New York’,” a man’s excited voice said. “I want to report a missing person.”

“New York, did you say?”

“Yes, yes, that’s right.”

Brackeen gripped the handset a little tighter. “The name of this missing person?”

“Jana Hennessey. Miss Jana Hennessey.”

“Is she a visitor in Cuenca Seco?”

“Yes, she’s researching a book, she writes children’s books, you see, I’m her agent, and I called this Joshua Hotel where she’s staying just now and the clerk said she went out into the desert yesterday and hasn’t come back, he didn’t think anything of it, the damned fool, but I’m worried, she promised me faithfully she’d be working, she’s just a girl ...”

“What kind of car does she own?” Brackeen asked tightly.

“Car? A little yellow sports model, she bought it a couple of weeks ago ...”

That’s it, Brackeen thought, that’s all I need. The bastards will listen to me now. He took Klein’s number and told him he would be in touch; then he switched off and dialed the State Highway Patrol office in Kehoe City. And as he waited, his eyes, sunken in deep pouches of fat, were bright and alert and alive.