Vollyer stood on a high shelf of rock, the binoculars fitted to his eyes, and turned in a slow pirouette until he had described a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. It was like looking at a particularly vivid three-dimensional painting: the motionlessness was absolute. He lowered the glasses finally, reluctantly, and climbed down to where Di Parma sat drinking from one of the plastic water bottles.
Wordlessly, Vollyer sat beside him and pressed his hand up under his wishbone. The ulcer was giving him trouble again, not enough to hamper him seriously but just enough to be annoying — like an omnipresent but not especially painful toothache. As if that wasn’t enough, his eyes still ached, and even now, with darkness approaching rapidly, they were still watering. Ruefully, he looked down at the dusty, torn material of his expensive trousers and shirt, the now-filthy-gray cashmere of his jacket lying with Di Parma’s suit coat and the knapsack in the dust at their feet. I must look like hell, he thought; I must look like something off the Bowery in New York. I wonder what Fine-berg, the tailor, would say if he could see me now — or one of those bow-and-scrape waiters in the restaurants along the Loop back home. No man can be cultured or refined or genteel — or even respectable — when there’s dirt on his face and a rip in his pants. One of the game’s little axioms.
Di Parma said, “Nothing, right?” in a dull voice.
“Nothing,” Vollyer answered.
“Now what do we do?”
“We don’t have much choice, Livio.”
“You mean we spend the night out here?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh shit, Harry.”
“We’ve come too far to backtrack to the car now.”
“Snakes come out at night,” Di Parma said, and his voice was that of a complaining child. “I don’t like snakes.”
“You haven’t seen any snakes yet, have you?”
“They don’t move around during the day. Night’s when they hunt. It’s too hot in the daytime.”
“Tell me some more about the desert.”
“I don’t know anything about the desert.”
“You know about the snakes.”
“I told you, I don’t like the goddamn things,” Di Parma said, as if that explained it.
“You can see a long way on the desert at night, isn’t that right?” Vollyer said. “When the moon is up, it can get to be just as bright as day, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know,” Di Parma said.
“It’s right,” Vollyer told him. “We’ll sleep in shifts. Because of the snakes and because Lennox and the girl might try moving after dark, figuring to cross us up.”
Di Parma drank again from the water bottle. He said, without looking at Vollyer, “How long are we going to stay out here looking?”
“Until we find them.”
“That could take a week, a month.”
“It won’t take another full day.”
“I don’t see how you can be so sure.”
“We found where they’d been in that arroyo,” Vollyer said. “We found where they left it again. We’re on their trail.”
“Maybe,” Di Parma said doubtfully. “But I still say they could be anywhere. They could’ve doubled back to the road by now.”
Vollyer looked out over the desert again. A faint glow lingered on the horizon, prolonging the twilight, but the sky directly above them was dark and clear, speckled with the indistinct and precursory images of what would soon be crystal-bright stars. “They’re out there,” he said softly. “Hiding now, maybe, but not any longer than dawn. He’s a runner, Livio, and runners have to run.”
“He’s got the girl with him. Maybe she’ll change his mind, if she hasn’t already.”
“I don’t think so.”
Abruptly, Di Parma stood, picked up his jacket, and walked a few feet away. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and slid his large hands into the pockets.
He said, “It cooled off in a hell of a hurry.”
“One of nature’s little games.”
“You think the Buick will be okay where we left it?”
“It’s well hidden from the road.”
“Suppose somebody sees it?”
“Then they’ll figure it to belong to sightseers. Or hikers.”
“Our suitcases are in the trunk, Harry.”
“There’s nothing in them but a couple of changes of clothes.”
“The girl’s car — what about that?”
“It’ll sit for months in that wash before it’s found.”
“Not if she had somebody waiting for her in town,” Di Parma said. “Not if she’s reported missing and the cops put out a search party. We don’t know what she was doing out here all alone.”
“She was sketching,” Vollyer said.
“What?”
“There was a sketch pad behind the front seat, full of desert landscapes.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that she could have been expected somewhere.”
“Maybe. But she was alone today. She could be alone, period.”
“Damn it, Harry, that’s only a guess. How do we know who she might have told she was coming out here? How do we know what friends she might have?”
Vollyer’s stomach had begun to throb painfully. “Livio,” he said, “Livio, you’re pushing me, Livio, you’re getting on my nerves, Livio. I’m in charge, I’m giving the orders here and you’re taking them and I don’t want to hear any more bitching or any more back-talk, Livio. This is business, this is my business, you’re just a punk kid in my business. Do you understand, Livio? Livio, do you understand?” Voice calm, almost gentle, face showing no emotion at all.
Di Parma opened his mouth, closed it again, and then lowered his eyes. His shoulders were hunched inside his jacket. He took his hands out of his pockets and looked at them and put them away again. Almost inaudibly he said, “I understand, Harry.”
It was the right answer.
Eighteen
Drenched in moonlight, the eroded, multishaped formations of granite and sandstone and occasional lava had a ghostly, otherworld look and the desert held the chilling enchantment of a graveyard at midnight. Overhead, the stars burned in a brilliant display against the backdrop of silken blackness. To the east, under the great pallid gold moon, the yellowish spines of vast clusters of cholla seemed to glow like distant lights, beckoning false sanctuary. The stillness was less acute now, with the first venturings of the night creatures — a horned owl made a questioning lament in silhouette against the moon, a coyote bayed querulously, a small and harmless yellow-breasted chat emitted a wailing shriek that sounded more as if it had been made by some giant beast. And the temperature dropped with almost startling rapidity, ultimately as much as fifty or sixty degrees.
Near a deep, wide wash, in the ineffectual shelter of a kind of natural rock fort, Lennox sat hugging his knees, shivering occasionally when the whispering night wind touched him with cold fingers. He felt weak, feverish, and the inflamed skin of his face and neck and arms burned with a hellish intensity; there was pain in his head, in the muscles and joints of his legs, in the cracked, swollen blisters that were his lips. He kept trying to work saliva through the arid cavern of his mouth, but there was no moisture left within him; his throat was a sealed passage that made swallowing impossible.
But his mind, curiously, was clear. It had been clear from the time he had stopped and hidden behind the smoke tree in that other wash; the panic had abated then, the consuming force of it at least, and the running since that time had been a calculated if desperate thing. There had been more rest stops than he would have liked — because of the girl and because of his own flagging strength — but they had seen no sign of their pursuers. Lennox had not deluded himself, however; he knew they were behind somewhere, and because of the urgency of his flight with the girl, there had been no time to cover their trail; the two men, city-bred or not, would not have had much difficulty in following, especially across the unavoidable open ground they had encountered from time to time.