“No,” she said, “oh no, no, no!”
The remaining pursuer broke away from the cactus behind which he had taken refuge, from behind which he had fired, and began to stumble down the grade. Lennox said, “Jesus!” and spun Jana around and they were running again, running with panic again. She forced her legs to keep working, her slender body screaming against the renewed demands of it, and her mind chanted in a frenzied cadence, Hope, no hope, hope, no hope, because all of this was a hideous fluctuation, as if God could not make up His mind, as if He were ridden with indecision as to the outcome, and that made it so much more terrible, so much more of a nightmare...
Ten
Vollyer turned away from the dead cop, fitting another cartridge into the Remington, and looked along the wheel ruts at the fleeing forms of Lennox and the girl. He was facing directly into the half-revealed plate of the sun and its light was like burning embers thrust against the surface of his eyes; he still had only partial focus, the wavering shadows had broadened, and the two of them down there were indistinct images viewed through warped glass. He would just be wasting time and ammunition trying to pick them off from here, looking into that goddamn sun; he had missed them both at a closer range from the slope, hadn’t he? Hitting the cop as he had, had been more luck than marksmanship, the way his eyes were now, and they were bad — there was no use in kidding himself any longer, they were very bad.
He started to the cruiser, and as he did so, he saw the slope through the swimming blur and Di Parma was there, on his feet, pitching down toward him. A gaping hole in his left shoulder, just under the collarbone, splashed blood in bright red streams over the front of his shirt and trousers as he moved, and his left arm flopped uselessly, almost comically, at his side. When Vollyer had run past him moments earlier, to make sure about the cop, Di Parma had seemed not to be moving and he had thought he was dead; now, seeing him still alive, Vollyer felt nothing at all. Di Parma was still a stranger, a nonentity, a lump of clay — alive or dead, it no longer made any real difference.
He came up and there was wildness in his eyes, a mixture of pain and fright. He was whimpering, red froth at the corners of his mouth. “I’m hurt, Harry, I’m hurt bad, oh God, oh God, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Not yet,” Vollyer said, “not until we get to Lennox and the girl.”
From inside the cruiser, the short-wave radio crackled abruptly, angrily to life; a voice demanded acknowledgment. Di Parma looked at the car, looked back to Vollyer. “There’s other cops around here, they’ll be swarming all over this place in a few minutes!”
“We’re going after the witnesses,” Vollyer said. “Get in the car.”
Di Parma’s face contorted into a grimace of agony and rage. “You’re crazy, I’m not listening to you any more, oh, you bastard, I’m hurt and I need a doctor, I need Jean, there’ll be cops, I’m getting out of here!” and he pushed past Vollyer and staggered to the cruiser’s open door.
Vollyer lifted the Remington and dispassionately shot him in the back.
The bullet shattered Di Parma’s spine just above the kidneys. He screamed once, very briefly, a shrill, surprised feminine sound, and then pitched forward onto his face and lay dead there in the blood-spattered dust.
Pivoting, emotionless, Vollyer scrubbed at his eyes with his free hand and peered along the wheel ruts again. He could still see the girl and Lennox down there. Silence now, thick and brittle, save for the continued crackling of the short wave; but there was no sign, no sound, of approaching cars from either direction. He had time, he still had time. It would take only a couple of minutes to catch the two of them, and then he would drive out, get back to the Buick if he could or find a place to ditch the cruiser and pick up another car; but he had to get the two of them first, it was no good without getting them. You play all the way or you don’t play, and he had always played all the way; that was why he was a winner and Lennox and the girl and Di Parma, too, were all losers.
He loaded the Remington once more and slid in under the wheel of the cruiser. The engine started on the first ignition turn. He backed the car away from the boulder and drove over Di Parma’s legs, down to the wheel ruts, hunching forward, eyes slitted, and went after the running, shimmering, distorted figures on the flatland ahead.
Eleven
Looking back over his shoulder as they ran, Lennox watched the fat one kill two men in the space of a minute — the wounded police officer and, incomprehensibly, his partner, who had survived the bullet which had felled him on the slope. Vomit boiled up into Lennox’s throat. What kind of man is that, he thought sickly, what kind of black union could have created a man like that?
He saw the fat one get into the cruiser, and he thought then: He won’t come after us now, he’ll know that poor cop isn’t alone, that there have got to be others close by. He’ll run, he doesn’t have any choice now. He’ll have to forget about us, he’ll have to run, he’ll have to let us alone.
But he didn’t believe it. The brutal, senseless way the fat one committed murder, the relentless way he had pursued Jana and him until now made a false hope of Lennox’s thoughts — and when he glanced back again and saw the patrol car bearing down on them along the rutted trail, he knew beyond any doubt that the situation was as critical now as it had been before the arrival of the single officer.
God oh God, where were the rest of the cops? It couldn’t be just the one, there had to be others, they had to have figured out what had happened somehow, or else the one wouldn’t be here. But if they didn’t hurry they would be too late — where were they, where were they?
Lennox swung his head around again, holding onto Jana, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his side where the bullet had creased him. No place to hide, no sanctuary, not enough time to cross the trail and try to re-climb the slope on the other side, nothing in front of them but a flat plane of cactus and sparse ground cover and the remains of a long-abandoned set of rail tracks — sections missing and grown with mesquite, sections collapsed or windblown into drunken angles — that came looping around the incline from the south, dissolved in favor of the trail, and then resumed in a straight run to the edge of the deep arroyo winding away on their left.
There was only one way for them to go, and Lennox altered their course in an abrupt quarter-turn toward the brink of the arroyo; if they could get down into that wash, out of the open, maybe they could hold out until more police arrived, if more police arrived. Slim chance, frail chance, but they had nothing else, nothing at all, and behind them the cruiser swerved sharply off the ruts, pursuing, the sound of its engine like the rumbling swell of an approaching earthquake in the quiet morning, the sun-baked soil beneath their feet seeming to ripple to complete the illusion. Lennox cast another wild look over his shoulder, saw the machine bouncing and swaying over the rough ground, gleaming metal leaping at them, a thing gone berserk, gaining in spite of the uneven terrain.
Dust choked his lungs, bringing on a spasm of coughing, as he dragged the faltering, panting Jana to the edge of the arroyo. It was some one hundred and fifty yards wide and forty feet deep at this point, with steep, layered shale walls that were treacherous but scalable, extending away on both sides, in both directions. Boulders and ironwood and mesquite littered its sandy bed, and a few yards beyond, below where the rail line crawled up to the edge of the wash, twisted chunks and lengths of rusted, disintegrating steel, sun-bleached bits of rotted wood that had once been ties formed heaps and piles and pyramids the width of the jagged incision — all that remained of a long-collapsed, long-forgotten trestle.