Panic!

God oh God, where were the rest of the cops? It couldn’t be just the one, there had to be others, they had to have figured out what had happened somehow, or else the one wouldn’t be here. But if they didn’t hurry they would be too late—where were they, where were they?

Lennox swung his head around again, holding onto Jana, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his side where the bullet had creased him. No place to hide, no sanctuary, not enough time to cross the trail and try to re-climb the slope on the other side, nothing in front of them but a flat plane of cactus and sparse ground cover and the remains of a long-abandoned set of rail tracks—sections missing and grown with mesquite, sections collapsed or windblown into drunken angles—that came looping around the incline from the south, dissolved in favor of the trail, and then resumed in a straight run to the edge of the deep arroyo winding away on their left.

There was only one way for them to go, and Lennox altered their course in an abrupt quarter-turn toward the brink of the arroyo; if they could get down into that wash, out of the open, maybe they could hold out until more police arrived, if more police arrived. Slim chance, frail chance, but they had nothing else, nothing at all, and behind them the cruiser swerved sharply off the ruts, pursuing, the sound of its engine like the rumbling swell of an approaching earthquake in the quiet morning, the sun-baked soil beneath their feet seeming to ripple to complete the illusion. Lennox cast another wild look over his shoulder, saw the machine bouncing and swaying over the rough ground, gleaming metal leaping at them, a thing gone berserk, gaining in spite of the uneven terrain.

Dust choked his lungs, bringing on a spasm of coughing, as he dragged the faltering, panting Jana to the edge of the arroyo. It was some one hundred and fifty yards wide and forty feet deep at this point, with steep, layered shale walls that were treacherous but scalable, extending away on both sides, in both directions. Boulders and ironwood and mesquite littered its sandy bed, and a few yards beyond, below where the rail line crawled up to the edge of the wash, twisted chunks and lengths of rusted, disintegrating steel, sun-bleached bits of rotted wood that had once been ties formed heaps and piles and pyramids the width of the jagged incision—all that remained of a long-collapsed, long-forgotten trestle.

Lennox had the fleeting, disjointed image of a massive, grotesque display of Pop Art sculpture, created by the forces of nature long before man learned the dubious aesthetics to be found in the arrangement of junk and scrap metal. And then, without thinking any further, his ears filled with the rumbling, rattling howl of the cruiser, he turned Jana’s face to his chest and took her over the edge.

Twelve

Thirty yards from where he had seen the girl and Lennox start down into the arroyo, Vollyer was forced to abandon the patrol car. The ground was too rough here, dotted with too many rocks and thickly grown vegetation, and the glare of the rising sun through the windshield was hellish on his eyes.

He scrambled out of the car, not hearing the demanding voice half garbled in static on the radio, not thinking about anything but the job he had to do. He had the Remington clenched in his right hand, and he pulled at his coat pocket with his left for the .38; he was taking no chances now, there was time, but very little of it, this particular game had gone as far as it could go.

He ran in a drunken wobble to the arroyo and ducked his head against his shoulder to clear away some of the astringent sweat, and then looked down into the fissure. He couldn’t see them. Hiding, they were hiding; if they were still on the move he would have been able to pick them out easily from up here; there were plenty of places of concealment at the immediate bottom of the wash, but once you got fifty yards on either side you couldn’t run very far without exposing yourself. And they hadn’t had time to make it all the way across, to scale the bank on the opposite side. No, they were down there, all right, just down there, hiding, and it was only a matter of seconds now.

Vollyer transferred the Remington to his left hand, holding both guns up and away from his body, and dropped into a sitting position with his legs splayed out and pointing at an angle into the arroyo. He went down the bank that way, like a plump and begrimed child going down a long slide, using his right hand and the heels of his shoes to restrain momentum. A few feet from the bottom, an edge of rock bit painfully into the back of his left thigh, opening a deep gash. causing him to limp slightly when he struggled finally into an upright position on the dusty floor. The Remington back in his right hand, he moved forward, slowly, exhorting his eyes in mute viciousness to mend so that he could see clearly, exhorting in vain.