Panic!

“That’s right. I can’t pay much—a few bucks—but you’ll eat for three-four days and you can sleep on a cot in the storeroom. And you’ll be able to buy another bus ticket out when you’re through.”

The pain was omnipresent in Lennox’s stomach, gnawing, gnawing. He did not have to consider the offer at all. “All right,” he said.

The balding man smiled briefly. “My name’s Perrins, Al Perrins.” He kept his hands at his sides.

“Mine’s Delaney,” Lennox said.

“Okay, Delaney. How about a couple of burgers? You can start work afterward.”

Lennox made a dry clearing noise in his throat. His legs felt even weaker now, but it was the weakness of sudden relief. “Sounds good.”

“The food ain’t,” Perrins said, and laughed. “But it’ll fill your belly. Come on.”

They turned and walked slowly inside the café. Lennox was thinking about the burgers Perrins had promised, and he felt nauseous with his hunger; he wondered if he would be able to keep any of the food down.

He was able to—most of it, anyway.

Five

When the young bright-face, Forester, finished his morning patrol and returned to the county sheriff’s substation in Cuenca Seco, Andy Brackeen—the resident deputy-in-charge-went down to Sullivan’s Bar to drink his lunch.

It had been a long morning, and Brackeen was badly hungover and very thirsty. He had gotten into a pointless argument with his wife, Marge, the night before and had driven over to Kehoe City in a huff; there had been a poker game in the back room of Indian Charley’s, and he had lost heavily and drunk too damned much gin in the bargain. He still could not remember driving home, and that was very bad; he was hanging onto his job by a thread now, and the last stroke of the scissors would be a tag by one of the Highway Patrol units or cruising county cars for drunk driving in a county vehicle. He was a goddamned fool for getting into the gin like that; he couldn’t handle gin, he had never been able to handle gin. It did things to his mind, blacked him out so that he could not recall what he had done after a certain point in the evening. But if he stayed with the beer, he was all right. He could drink beer with the best of them, and he was always in full control of his faculties; things were just fine if he stayed with the beer.

Brackeen had no illusions about himself. He knew what he was and why he was what he was. There had been a time when that knowledge had been heavy and consumptive within him, but that had been sixteen years ago, in another world named San Francisco—that had been before the desert and the beer, before Marge. Now the perception was only a dimly glowing ember resting on the edge of his soul.

He was a big man, thick-chested, and he had in his youth fought amateur bouts in the heavyweight class, almost but not quite qualifying for the Golden Gloves; but the once-powerful musculature of his body was now overlaid with a soft cushion of fat, and his belly swayed liquidly beneath his dark khaki uniform shirt, partially concealing the buckle of his Sam Browne belt, brushing across the checked grip of the .357 Colt Python Magnum on his right hip. Each of his forty-one years was grooved for all to see on the sun-blackened surface of his face, as the elements had carved the centuries on the desert landscape he had made his home more than fourteen years before. Perpetually damp black hair, speckled with gray and pure white, was thickly visible beneath a deep-crowned white Stetson; gray eyes, red-rimmed and flatly expressionless, seemed as fixed as bright marbles solidified in lucite.

He was not particularly well-liked in the town of Cuenca Seco, but neither was he hated nor feared; he was, for the most part, simply tolerated and ignored. As he moved now along the heat-waved sidewalk toward Sullivan’s Bar, walking slowly because of the throbbing ache in his temples and because of the hot sun, he passed townspeople whom he knew—but there were no exchanges of greeting, no nods of recognition. He walked alone on the busy street, and it was the way Brackeen had come to want it; he could live with himself only as long as he was able to lock the secret of his disintegration as a man deep within, and he knew that friendships, liaisons, often brought probings which, if well-meaning, could still be ultimately destructive. He could never talk about it. He had never told anyone about it, not even Marge, even though she might have understood.

Sullivan’s Bar was crowded with lunch trade, and Brackeen’s eyes narrowed into thin slits at the sudden change in light as he entered. There was an air-conditioning unit behind the simulated kegs-and-plank bar, and the cool air was a salve on his pulsing temples, the feverish skin of his face. He moved across the wooden floor, up to the bar, and the men there made room for him without ceasing conversation, without looking at him, without acknowledging his presence in any way.