Panic!

Other Books by Bill Pronzini

The Hangings

Firewind

With an Extreme Burning

Snowbound

The Stalker

Lighthouse (with Marcia Muller)

Games

“Nameless Detective” Novels by Bill Pronzini

The Snatch

The Vanished

Undercurrent

Blowback

Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)

Labyrinth

Hoodwink

Scattershot

Panic!

Bill Pronzini

SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

NAPLES, FLORIDA

2011

Panic!

Copyright © 1972 by Bill Pronzini

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

9781612321066

For Bruni—with love

and

For Barry N. Malzberg—gifted, gloomy,

Exasperating, and above all, a friend

What is the use of running,

When you are on the wrong road?

—GERMAN PROVERB

The First Day...

One

The desert surrounded the moving bus like an earthly vision of hell.

Heat shimmered in liquid waves on the polished black ribbon of the highway, in thick tendrils across the arid wastes extending eastward to the horizon, westward to a low stretch of reddish foothills. The noonday sun, in a charred cobalt sky, was a fiery yellow-orange ball suspended on glowing wires. Nothing moved beyond the dust-streaked windows except the heat; the only sign of life was a carrion bird, a black speck lying motionless above something dead or dying in the far distance.

Inside the bus, the air had the same furnacelike quality, smelling of dust, of sweat and cracked leather, of urine from the faulty toilet facility in the rear. It was not crowded. There were only five people riding in addition to the driver: two silent old ladies, with skin that had been dried and cured by twenty thousand appearances of the desert sun outside; a fat man, sleeping, snoring softly; a young, homely girl who sat with her legs splayed wide because the heat had chafed her inner thighs painfully; and, well in the rear on the driver’s side, a lean, hollow-eyed man sitting slouched against the window, breathing through his mouth, thinking about nothing at all.

The hollow-eyed man’s name was Jack Lennox, and he had long, shaggy black hair that hung lifelessly over a high, ascetic forehead, curled around large flat ears, partially draped the collar of a shapeless, sweat-stained blue shirt that had cost twelve dollars new two years before. There were deep, shadowed furrows etched into the once smoothly symmetrical planes of his face, a dissipated sheen to the once affluent healthiness of light olive skin. His eyes, sunken beneath thick, straight brows, were like green Christmas bulbs long burned-out, the whites tinged with a yellow that gave them a sour-buttermilk quality. He was thirty-three years of age, and he was an old, old man.

As he sat staring at the barren wasteland rushing past outside, he reached in an automatic gesture to the pocket of his shirt, fumbled, touched only the thin material and nothing more. He had smoked his last cigarette two hours before. He lowered his thin-fingered hands, untrimmed nails like black half-moons, and rubbed the slickness of them back and forth across the coarse material of his corduroy trousers; then, slowly, without turning his head from the window, he brought the hands up and dry-washed his face, palms grating lightly over the four-day growth of beard stubble there.

I wonder what time it is, he thought then. I wonder what day it is. I wonder where we are. But none of those things really mattered to him, and the questioning thoughts were rhetorical thoughts, requiring no answers. He stopped thinking again.

Outside, in the wavering distance, a second black ribbon had appeared, winding away from the main interstate highway through outcroppings of lava rock, dry washes, rocky and irregular land surface grown heavily with creosote bush and mesquite, porcupine prickly pear and ocotillo, giant saguaro cactus like lonely, entreating soldiers on a mystical battlefield. A moment later he could see the intersection between the county road and the main highway. A large post-supported sign stood there, with a reflectored arrow pointing eastward; below that:

CUENCA SECO 16

KEHOE CITY 34