“Go right on ahead.” She gave him an annoyed glance.
“Nah.” He put a hand on her back. Her blouse was damp. He untucked it and slipped his hand beneath it. She sat up straight, and sighed as he caressed her.
When he fingered the catches of her bra, she said, “Don’t get carried away. They could show up any second.”
“On the other hand, maybe they won’t show up at all.”
“Don’t kid around like that, okay?”
“I’m not entirely kidding.”
“Maybe they arescrewing around.”
“You said they wouldn’t.”
“Well, I don’t know, damn it.”
“Maybe we’d better go see.”
Jean wrinkled her nose.
“If they did run into trouble,” Larry said, “we aren’t making matters any better by procrastinating. They might need help.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Besides, their beers are getting warm.”
He picked up the bottle for Pete, stood, and waited for Jean. Then they walked to the end of the porch. Larry peered around the corner. The area alongside the building was clear, so he leaped down. Jean covered the mouth of Barbara’s bottle with her thumb and jumped.
“I don’t know about this,” she said.
“They can’t expect us to wait forever.”
Larry led the way, wanting to be a few strides ahead of Jean in case there really was trouble.
At times like this he wished his imagination would take a holiday. But it never left him alone. It was always busy churning up possibilities — most of them grim.
He pictured Pete and Barbara dead, of course. Slaughtered by the same pack of desert scavengers he’d dreamed up when he saw the overturned car.
Maybe Pete had been killed, Barbara abducted.
We’d have to go looking for her. Run back to the van first and get Pete’s gun.
Maybe they both got killed by a criminal using the old town as a hideout.
Or by an old lunatic on the lookout for claim jumpers.
Maybe they’ll just be gone. Vanished without a trace.
Pete has the keys to the van. We’d have to walk out of here.
He supposed the nearest town was Silver Junction.
God, it’d take hours to get there. And maybe someone would be after them, hunting them down.
“Better warn ‘em we’re coming,” Jean said.
He stopped near the corner of the building, looked back at her and shook his head. “If they ran into someone...”
“Don’t even think it, okay?”
From the look on Jean’s face, he could see that she’d already considered the possibility.
“Just go ahead and call out,” she said. “We don’t want to barge in on something.”
Speak for yourself, he thought. If Pete was having at her, he wouldn’t mind a glimpse of it. Not at all. But he kept the thoughts to himself.
Without looking around the corner, he yelled, “Pete! Barbara! You all right?”
No answer came.
A second ago he’d pictured them rutting. Now he saw them sprawled dead, murderous savages hunched over their bodies, heads turning at the sound of his voice.
He gestured for Jean to wait, and stepped past the end of the building.
Three
“Where are they?” Jean whispered, pressing herself against his side.
Larry shook his head. He couldn’t believe the couple was actually gone. “They probably just wandered off somewhere,” he said. The idea that he would catch them fooling around had been the product of wishful thinking, and he knew that his worries about murder had been farfetched. But so had his worries that they’d disappeared.
“We’d better find them,” Jean said.
“Good plan.”
But all he saw were the rear facades of the other buildings, and the desert stretching away toward a ridge of mountains to the south.
“Maybe they’re playing some kind of trick on us,” Jean suggested.
“I don’t know. Pete was awfully eager for his beer.”
“People don’t go for a leak and vanish off the face of the earth.”
“Only on occasion.”
“It’s not funny.” Her voice was trembling.
“Look, they’ve got to be around.”
“Maybe we’d better go and get the gun.”
“It’s locked in the van. I don’t imagine Pete would be very happy about a broken window.”
“Pete!” she suddenly shrieked. “Barb!”
A distant voice called, “Yo!”
Jean’s eyebrows flew up. Her head snapped sideways and she squinted out at the desert.
Some fifty yards off, Pete’s head and shoulders rose out of the wasteland. “Hey, y’gotta see this!” he shouted, and waved for them to approach.
Jean glanced at Larry, rolled her eyes and sagged as if her air had been let out.
He grinned.
“I think I may kill them myself,” Jean said.
“I’ll go get the gun.”
“Break allthe windows, while you’re at it.” Her voice sounded shaky.
“Come on, let’s see what they found.”
“It better be good.”
They walked over the hard, baked earth, moving carefully as they stepped on broken rocks, avoided clumps of cactus and greasewood. Near the place where Pete waited was an old smoke tree. Larry guessed that Barbara had wandered farther and farther away from Holman’s, looking for a suitably large bush or rock cluster, and had finally decided upon the tree. Its trunk was thick enough to afford privacy, and there was shade beneath its drooping branches.
Pete was standing some distance from the tree. At his back the ground dropped away.
“What’d you find?” Larry asked. “The Grand Canyon?”
“Hey, glad you brought the suds.” He lifted the front of his knit shirt and wiped his face. “It’s nastyout here.”
Larry handed the full bottle to him.
The depression behind Pete was a dry creek bed some fifteen or twenty feet lower than the surrounding flatlands. Barbara, sitting on a rock at the bottom, looked up and waved.
“Did you forget about us?” Jean asked Pete.
He finished taking a swig of beer, then shook his head. “I was just on my way to get you. Figured you might want to see this.” He started down the steep embankment, and they followed.
“We were getting a little worried,” Larry said, watching his feet as he descended the rocky slope. “Thought you might’ve fallen victim to a roving band of desert marauders.”
“Yeah? That’s a good one. Make a good story, huh?”
Barbara stood up and brushed off the seat of her white shorts. “God, it’s hot as a huncher down here,” she said, as they approached. Her blouse was unbuttoned, its front tied, leaving her midriff bare. The knot was loose enough to leave a gap. Her bra was black. Larry saw the pale sides of her breasts through its lace. “No breeze at all,” she added.
“What’s the big discovery?” Jean asked, handing a beer to her.
“It’s no big deal, if you ask me.” She tipped the bottle up. Larry saw a bead of sweat drop from her jaw, roll off her collarbone, and slide down her chest until it melted into the edge of her bra.
“Over here,” Pete said. “Come on.”
He led the way to a cut eroded into the wall of the embankment. There, lying in shadows and partly hidden by tangles of brush, was the demolished carcass of a jukebox. “Must’ve come from that cafe,” he said, nudging its side with his shoe.
“How’d it get all the way out here?” Jean asked.
“Who knows?”
“The thing’s no good, anyway,” Barbara said.
“It’s seen better days,” Larry said, feeling a touch of nostalgia as he pictured it standing fresh and bright near the lunch counter in Holman’s. He guessed that someone had dragged it out and used it for target practice. It would’ve made a tempting target, all decorated with bright chrome and plastic — if the shooter happened to be an asshole who took pleasure from destroying things of such beauty. After the box was blasted to smithereens, it had probably been shoved off the edge of the slope for the fun of watching it tumble and crash.
Larry crouched beside its shattered plastic top. The rows of record slots were empty. The tone arm dangled from its mount by a couple of wires.