The car was unfamiliar to Brackeen, and the New York license plates told him the reason for that. There was no registration holder attached to the steering column, nothing in the glove compartment — anywhere in the car — to point to the owner. Behind the front seat, he discovered a bag with a notebook and a sketch pad inside; some of the pages in each were crumpled and torn, but the descriptive notes in the one and the stark desert sketches in the other were discernible. He was no expert, but the handwriting in the notebook appeared to be feminine, and the drawings had a certain feminine quality — but he could be wrong and he knew it. The only things that seemed certain were that whoever owned the Triumph had spent some time out here on the desert, and not long ago.
And that he — or she — was now apparently and unexplainably missing.
Brackeen went over the car again and found nothing else of relevance. With his pocket knife, he dug the bullet out of the dash panel and examined it in the palm of his hand; it had been badly damaged on impact, and he wasn’t able to identify it. He put the pellet in the pocket of his uniform shirt and walked slowly back to the cruiser.
Using a clean handkerchief, he toweled his face free of sweat and then called Bradshaw on the car’s short-wave radio. He gave him the TR-6’s license number and told him to have it checked out; he also requested the services of Hank Madison and Cuenca Seco’s county-maintained wrecker. After he had given the ten-four sign-out, he sat there in the heat-washed silence, pulling speculatively at his lower lip. Then, abruptly, he got out of the cruiser again and walked back to where he had found the first piece of broken taillight. From the direction of the tire impressions, it seemed probable that the Triumph had been traveling north, toward Cuenca Seco, when it had suddenly gone out of control. If you assumed that the shooting was what had been responsible, and it was a reasonable assumption, whoever it was had to have been anchored somewhere to the south and somewhere near the road and somewhere on an elevation of several feet.
Brackeen studied the terrain to the south, and then moved in that direction. Fifteen minutes later, five minutes before the wrecker arrived, he found the locked and deserted Buick Electra where it had been hidden behind a jagged sculpture of sandstone.
Five
Di Parma said, “Where are they? Goddamn it, where are they?”
Vollyer put the binoculars to his stinging eyes, blinking away sweat, and reconnoitered the area on all sides of them. Stillness. Wavering heat. Great pools of bluish water that were nothing more than layers of heated air mirroring the sky. They were on the far side of the craggy butte now, and the land here was both flat and roughly irregular, both rocky and barren. Cactus and ocotillo and creosote bush dominated the patches of vegetation. The silence was like that in a vacuum: almost deafening.
Slowly Vollyer lowered the glasses and touched his parched lips with the back of his free hand. He sank exhaustedly onto a granite shelf in the shade of an overhang. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “We should have found them by now. There aren’t that many places they could have gone.”
“Are you sure you saw them, Harry?”
“I saw them, all right.”
“And this is where they were heading?”
“How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Your eyes can play tricks on you out here—”
“My eyes are fine, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes.”
“Okay,” Di Parma said. “Okay.” He sank to his knees in the shade near where Vollyer sat and pulled the knapsack off his shoulders. He got the last container of water from it and drank a little, resisting the urge to drink it all, knowing that Vollyer was watching him. His legs and arms felt awkward, as if he had only partial control of them, and there was a thrumming pain in his temples.
It was all wrong, this whole thing had a bad feel to it. Three times this Lennox had gotten away, twice with the girl, and it was like an omen, like something was trying to tell Harry and him that it was useless, warn them to give it up and get out while they were still able. He didn’t like it, he was scared, he wanted civilization, people, a cool place to sleep, he wanted Jean— God, he wanted Jean! But the chase had become like an obsession with Harry, you couldn’t reason with him, you couldn’t talk to him; he’d tried that last night, and the way Vollyer had looked at him had been almost murderous, almost as if he was thinking about using the belly-gun or that frigging Remington. It had shaken him and he’d kept his mouth shut since, remembering those stories he had heard, remembering that look in Harry’s eyes. Still, how long could they keep up the hunt? The water was almost gone, you couldn’t live very long without water on the desert. Why didn’t they just call it off? Lennox and the girl had been without water, without food, for almost two days now; they couldn’t last much longer, the heat would do the job of silencing as effectively as they could...
Vollyer said, “Give me a little of that water, Livio.”
Di Parma handed him the container and watched while he drank sparingly. When Vollyer handed it back to him, he asked, “What time is it, Harry?”
“After one.”
“We’ve been out here almost twenty-four hours.”
“I know it.”
Di Parma lifted the tattered remains of his suit jacket and stared at it. Jean had picked it out for him; she said he looked very dashing — that was the word she used, dashing — in a light blue weave. He would have to throw it away now, and how was he going to explain the loss of it to Jean? Maybe he wouldn’t have to, maybe he could replace it from one of the shops off the Loop before he went home; if they could match the style and color, she’d never know the difference — that was what he would have to do, all right.
He wondered what Jean was doing now and if she was okay. She would be worried about him, that was for sure, because he hadn’t called her since yesterday morning and he always called her every night and every morning when he was on the road. He hoped she wouldn’t be too upset, he hated to see her upset, when she cried it was like little knives cutting away at his insides and he felt big and helpless. The first thing he had to do when they got out of this desert, the very first thing was to call Jean and let her know that everything was fine, he could make up some story about entertaining a buyer to explain his silence. She would understand, she would accept his word without question; that was one of the beautiful things about Jean: she trusted him, she knew he would never violate that trust. He hated the lying to her, but there was no other way without hurting her and he would never hurt her.
Kneeling there, loving her, wanting her, Di Parma thought: Damn Lennox and that bitch from the Triumph! Damn them for keeping Jean and me apart...
Six
Exhausted, bodies puckered like raisins from the dehydrating sun, Lennox and Jana lay belly down in the shade tunnel created by a low, eroded stone bridge. The sand there was cool and powdery, soft against their fevered skin, and they had been lying in it for the better part of an hour. When they had reached the butte and skirted it at its base, Lennox had begun looking for a place to rest immediately, realizing the girl’s near-prostration, knowing that he, too, was approaching collapse — but it seemed to have taken hours before they found the sanctuary here beneath the bridge.