Panic!

Vollyer turned away from the dead cop, fitting another cartridge into the Remington, and looked along the wheel ruts at the fleeing forms of Lennox and the girl. He was facing directly into the half-revealed plate of the sun and its light was like burning embers thrust against the surface of his eyes; he still had only partial focus, the wavering shadows had broadened, and the two of them down there were indistinct images viewed through warped glass. He would just be wasting time and ammunition trying to pick them off from here, looking into that goddamn sun; he had missed them both at a closer range from the slope, hadn’t he? Hitting the cop as he had, had been more luck than marksmanship, the way his eyes were now, and they were bad —there was no use in kidding himself any longer, they were very bad.

He started to the cruiser, and as he did so, he saw the slope through the swimming blur and Di Parma was there, on his feet, pitching down toward him. A gaping hole in his left shoulder, just under the collarbone, splashed blood in bright red streams over the front of his shirt and trousers as he moved, and his left arm flopped uselessly, almost comically, at his side. When Vollyer had run past him moments earlier, to make sure about the cop, Di Parma had seemed not to be moving and he had thought he was dead; now, seeing him still alive, Vollyer felt nothing at all. Di Parma was still a stranger, a nonentity, a lump of clay—alive or dead, it no longer made any real difference.

He came up and there was wildness in his eyes, a mixture of pain and fright. He was whimpering, red froth at the corners of his mouth. “I’m hurt, Harry, I’m hurt bad, oh God, oh God, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Not yet,” Vollyer said, “not until we get to Lennox and the girl.”

From inside the cruiser, the short-wave radio crackled abruptly, angrily to life; a voice demanded acknowledgment. Di Parma looked at the car, looked back to Vollyer. “There’s other cops around here, they’ll be swarming all over this place in a few minutes!”

“We’re going after the witnesses,” Vollyer said. “Get in the car.”

Di Parma’s face contorted into a grimace of agony and rage. “You’re crazy, I’m not listening to you any more, oh, you bastard, I’m hurt and I need a doctor, I need Jean, there’ll be cops, I’m getting out of here!” and he pushed past Vollyer and staggered to the cruiser’s open door.

Vollyer lifted the Remington and dispassionately shot him in the back.

The bullet shattered Di Parma’s spine just above the kidneys. He screamed once, very briefly, a shrill, surprised feminine sound, and then pitched forward onto his face and lay dead there in the blood-spattered dust.

Pivoting, emotionless, Vollyer scrubbed at his eyes with his free hand and peered along the wheel ruts again. He could still see the girl and Lennox down there. Silence now, thick and brittle, save for the continued crackling of the short wave; but there was no sign, no sound, of approaching cars from either direction. He had time, he still had time. It would take only a couple of minutes to catch the two of them, and then he would drive out, get back to the Buick if he could or find a place to ditch the cruiser and pick up another car; but he had to get the two of them first, it was no good without getting them. You play all the way or you don’t play, and he had always played all the way; that was why he was a winner and Lennox and the girl and Di Parma, too, were all losers.

He loaded the Remington once more and slid in under the wheel of the cruiser. The engine started on the first ignition turn. He backed the car away from the boulder and drove over Di Parma’s legs, down to the wheel ruts, hunching forward, eyes slitted, and went after the running, shimmering, distorted figures on the flatland ahead.

Eleven

Looking back over his shoulder as they ran, Lennox watched the fat one kill two men in the space of a minute—the wounded police officer and, incomprehensibly, his partner, who had survived the bullet which had felled him on the slope. Vomit boiled up into Lennox’s throat. What kind of man is that, he thought sickly, what kind of black union could have created a man like that?

He saw the fat one get into the cruiser, and he thought then: He won’t come after us now, he’ll know that poor cop isn’t alone, that there have got to be others close by. He’ll run, he doesn’t have any choice now. He’ll have to forget about us, he’ll have to run, he’ll have to let us alone.

But he didn’t believe it. The brutal, senseless way the fat one committed murder, the relentless way he had pursued Jana and him until now made a false hope of Lennox’s thoughts—and when he glanced back again and saw the patrol car bearing down on them along the rutted trail, he knew beyond any doubt that the situation was as critical now as it had been before the arrival of the single officer.