Panic! by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

him, and he couldn’t run, there was no place for him to go. He knew he was going to die, and the knowledge released his sphincter muscles; the odor was strong and sour in the hot, still room.
    “No,” he said, “no, there’s some kind of mistake.”
    “No mistake,” Vollyer said quietly.
    “Listen, please, they promised me it was all right. They said I could get out; they said nothing would happen. Listen, I’m clear, I’m out of it, I never said a word, I’m no fink. Listen, don’t you understand? For Christ’s sake!”
    “All right, Livio,” Vollyer said.
    “No!” the target screamed. “No, no, no, no!”
    They shot him six times, three times each, the bullets transcribing a five-inch radius on his upper torso. The target died on his feet, the way he was supposed to die, without making another sound.

Four
     
    Lennox finished stacking crates of tinned goods against the near wall of the storage basement, and rubbed sweat from his eyes with the back of one arm. It was close in there, the air thick with fine particles of dust. The back of his throat felt hot and parched.
    He tried to work saliva around inside his mouth, but the ducts seemed to have dried up. A spasm of brittle coughing seized him, and he pushed away from the wall to stand in the middle of the still-cluttered room. His mind felt sluggish, and yet somehow claustrophobic. He had an irrational impulse to rush headlong into one of the walls and pound it with his fists. He wanted to cry. The need to vent the deep brooding futility in some tangible way, to rid himself of the pressure building in heavy waves within the shell of him, was almost overpowering.
    He thought: What’s happening to me? Why can’t I get straight with myself any more?
    He dragged air into his lungs in open-mouthed suckings, and the paroxysm of coughing subsided. The impression of crushing entrapment retreated with it, and he felt a little better, a little more in control. His hand trembled only slightly when he raised it to wipe away the fresh sheen of sweat on his forehead.
    Phyllis, you bitch, he thought.
    And then he wondered if Perrins would let him have a beer. Christ, he needed one; his throat was so dry it was abrasively sore. Well, why wouldn’t Perrins let him have one? He was working for wages, wasn’t he? If he couldn’t get one gratis, then let the bastard take it out of his salary.
    Lennox drew a shuddering breath and moved slowly to the set of stairs. He climbed them, working the rough edge of his tongue over his lips, and pushed the trap door up; its hinges were new, oiled, silent. Once in the storeroom, he lowered the trap, stepped around the cartons toward the door leading into the café—a soft-moving man by nature, creating no sound on his rubber-soled shoes.
    He heard Perrins’ voice just before he reached the door. “Listen,” it said, “don’t you understand? For Christ’s sake!”
    The tone, the inflection, of those words caused Lennox to pull up next to the door, concealed by it but close enough so that he could lean forward and look around it into the café. He did that curiously, cautiously. He saw Perrins standing there behind the lunch counter, face the color of buttermilk, and he saw two neatly dressed men positioned in front of the counter, partially turned away from him. But their faces were clear in profile, hard and impassive, faces carved in stone, and he heard one of them say “All right, Livio,” and he saw Perrins put up his hands as if to ward off a blow, heard him begin screaming “No!” again and again. Lennox saw the guns then, for the first time, saw them and understood, in that fraction of a second before the room became filled with smoke and explosive sound, just what kind of scene was being enacted before him.
    He watched in a kind of numbed horror as the deafening echo of the gunshots faded and red blossoms appeared on the front of Perrins’ white shirt, trailing down like thickly obscene tear streams over the