Panic!

“Another week.”

“Is that definite?”

“I think so, yes.”

Klein sighed a second time. “When you get back to New York, girl, you and I are going to have a nice long talk about the facts of life. You’ve got to understand that running off unannounced this way—”

“Harold, I’m not coming back to New York.”

“What?”

“I’m not coming back,” Jana repeated.

Silence hummed over the wire for a moment, and then Klein said half-incredulously, “You’re not serious.”

“I’m very serious.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“I’ve had it with New York, that’s all, I’m sick to my soul of New York. I feel as if I’m ... suffocating there.”

“Where do you expect to go? What do you expect to do, a young girl alone?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll travel, I’ll go to Canada, to Mexico, I’ll see some of the great wide world.” She tried to make her tone light, but she had the feeling that her voice was strained and uncertain.

“Jana, I think you’re making a rash and foolish decision. Your place is here, with people you know, with people you can equate with.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Harold, I’ve made up my mind. Now I don’t want to discuss it any more. I’ve got to get to work on Desert Adventure if you want a manuscript in a week.”

“All right, we won’t discuss it any more,” Klein said, and Jana detected an irritating note of patronage in his voice. “What’s the name of the place where you’re staying? The telephone number?”

She told him.

“I’ll call you in a day or so, to see how you’re coming along. Sooner, if anything urgent comes up.”

“Fine.”

“You won’t go running off again, now?”

“No, I’ll stay right here.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

They said parting words, and Jana put the receiver down quickly. The telephone conversation had gone about as she had expected it to, but it had upset her nonetheless. Harold meant well, but he was a prober, a man who tried to burrow his way into your soul, to examine each cell of your being in an effort to determine its relationship with every other cell. And that was exactly the kind of thing which frightened her, which she wanted desperately to avoid.

Harold must never know.

No one must ever know.

Hers was a private hell, and it could be shared by no one—no one at all.

Four

The roadside oasis was situated just outside the crest of a long curve in the main interstate highway, like a detached nipple on some gigantic contour drawing of a woman’s breast.

It was set something over two hundred yards from the highway, umbilically connected to it by a narrow, unpaved access road that blended into a rough-gravel parking area in front. There were, in actuality, three buildings: the main structure, old and sprawling, unpainted, with two weathered gas pumps under a short wooden awning; at the right edge of the parking area, a lattice-fronted, considerably smaller construction that obviously housed rest rooms; and a cabinlike dwelling set directly behind the main building—living quarters for the owner or owners. A large wooden sign, mounted on rusted steel rods on the roof of the main building, read Del’s Oasis in heat-eroded blue letters.

Lennox saw all of this through dulled eyes as the bus turned off the black glass of the highway, onto the access road. It bounced jarringly, raising heavy clouds of dust, and he clutched at the armrests with both hands, his teeth clamped tightly together at the intensification of the pain which still burned deep within his belly. The bus slowed as it swung onto the surface of the parking lot, and the driver maneuvered it to parallel the gas pumps directly in front, switching off the diesel immediately. The doors whispered open, and heat-shrouded silence crept in.

Lennox got sluggishly out of his seat and followed the other passengers and the driver onto the gravel beneath the wooden awning. He saw that a screen door was set into the front of the structure, above which was a warped metal sign: Café. There were two windows, dust-caked, with green shades partially drawn inside, one on either flank of the door. In the left window was a Coca-Cola sign and a card that said Open; in the right was a shield advertising Coors beer.