‘Well, um, to tell you the truth,’ Prentice said, flustered, ‘he’s handling my case on a no win-no fee basis. But look here.’ He ran on, clearly not wanting this to sink in too deeply. ‘My wife’s cousin promised me he’d wire some funds to the Tontines; we’ll settle up there.’
Tom barely registered this; he was thinking about Swai-Phillips, recalling the lawyer’s brusque assertion: ‘I don’t do no win-no fee personal-injury cases.’ Surely this was further confirmation — if any were needed — that from the outset, Prentice’s offence had been far more serious than his own?
After they had negotiated the maze of blast walls wreathed with razor wire, then sat — mute but tense — while the bored Tugganarong cops checked the underside of the SUV with telescopic mirrors, Tom was surprised by the cursory inspection of their laissez-passers. The officer leaned in through the window and slung the papers on to Tom’s lap.
‘You headed to the Tontines?’ he asked.
‘Sure am,’ Tom replied.
‘You blokes have a good trip, then.’ He waved them on with the muzzle of his sub-machine gun.
Beyond the checkpoint Route I stretched out ahead, a dirty tongue already flexing in the building heat. The surface alternated between metalled and dirt, so Tom concentrated on his driving, changing up when they came off the blacktop to avoid wheelspin.
Apart from the agitation of the flies and the soughing of the wind through the windows, there was silence in the car. After an hour or so, Prentice turned on the radio. There was a faint whoop of joy. ‘Yes! He’s had him! He’s clean-bowled — and he’s not going to like that one little bit, he’s. .’ which then faded into static. With a tortured expression, Prentice hunched forward and dickered with the radio controls as if he were a blind piano-tuner. Then, deflated, he sat back.
Tom wondered: where has all the traffic gone? The road-trains, the pick-ups and the retirees’ Winnebagos that had been in line for gas the night before had all evaporated. The highway was empty, and the hurting blue sky devoid of the twin-rotored helicopters that had clattered overhead the previous day.
Towards mid morning, Tom saw a burned-out car beside the road. He slowed to assess whether this was a recent happening; but then, seeing the rust streaking the buckled panels, and the interior choked with sand, he accelerated.
Soon there were other abandoned vehicles. Some were more or less intact, with perhaps only a rumpled fender, starred windows and a few bullet holes in their side panels. Others had been wrung-out by awesome forces, their bodywork twisted and crushed, as if a giant child, tiring of his toy cars, had had a destructive tantrum. There were SUVs, pick-ups — even the trucks used by the paramilitary police. Every sort of vehicle Tom had seen on Route I was present in this edge city of hulks. Further away from the road, he saw a gasoline tanker, its tank opened out in petals of blackened metal.
Prentice, normally keen to sermonize on the basis of this or that wayside attraction, remained silent, rocking and rolling as the car bucketed along.
Then there came a quite ordinary sedan — ornamental tissue box still intact on its rear-window shelf — that was still alight. Vivid flames licked the mashed hood, dense billows of black smoke clotted in the air. Prentice roused himself a little as they drove by — then relapsed into torpor. Not knowing what else to do, Tom kept driving.
But a few miles further on he had to stop.
The first indication that something was seriously amiss came when a clutch of helicopters roared low over the car. These were single-rotor aircraft with bulbous plastic canopies. Even though they were gone in moments, Tom saw the missiles mounted beneath them. Where the helicopters disappeared over the horizon a column of smoke was visible; although whether this had been caused by them or was an effect they were seeking to dispel, he could not be certain.
Tom slowed to a crawl as two cops approached the SUV. With fluorescent batons, they directed him into a lane formed by striped cones. They also held signs. One read NO WEAPONS, the other GET IN LANE. Beyond the cops, stubbed out in a crater by an inky finger of smoke, was McGowan’s road-train.
Further off on the bled, the helicopters stood, shiny visages facing one another in a conversational grouping. Slow- turning rotors idly chit-chatted, as if these were bored guests at a party, the centre-piece of which was this enormous barbecue.
‘What’s the problem?’ Prentice asked the sergeant who came up to his window.
Tom thought this a deranged denial of the obvious, but the Tugganarong took it in his stride.
‘Bing-bong buggers stuck another IED under the highway, sir,’ he said, taking the sheaf of papers Prentice handed him. ‘No worries, Aval mob, they’ll be way over there by now, yeah.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, then tucked his baton between his thick thighs so he could check through the permits and the laissez-passers.
‘Are those your rifles on the back rack, sir?’ asked the second cop, who had come up to the driver’s window.
‘Uh, yeah. I mean, of course they are,’ Tom replied nervily.
‘Have to take ’em off of you, I’m afraid. Purely routine safety — and your ammo. I’ll hand ’em back to you a half-klick on, where you rejoin the road, OK?’
‘Yeah, fine. I guess.’
Tom handed over the boxes of ammunition, then waited while the cop took the green-sleeved Galils from the rack. When the sergeant handed Prentice their papers and rapped on the roof, Tom pulled away.
The lane of cones took them on a neat diversion across the bled, circumventing the burning road-train. Prentice made to light a cigarette, but Tom snapped at him, ‘Are you fucking crazy, man! Why d’you think they took the guns? There’s spilled fuel all over the place.’
Globs, dashes and even pools of thick black viscosity smirched the sable. One of McGowan’s semi-trailers had been thrown up in the air by the explosion, and come down on top of the other. Both were burning. From a hundred yards off Tom could feel the angry pulse of the flames. Flames that licked the ruptured faces of the giant Neapolitan mamas. Crates smashed by the blast had disgorged their contents: the doughy discs lay scattered on the ground — fast-food fallout, cooked to a turn. The aroma of melting mozzarella mixed weirdly with the gas fumes.
The rig, however, was hardly damaged. It stood on the crown of the highway, only a few detached slats of fairing to suggest that it wasn’t idling for a moment before roaring away. There were these, and there was also McGowan’s corpse, which, as the car bumped back on to the road, they both got a good sight of.
The driver’s face was composed, his posture relaxed, his hair smoothed against his rounded head — all of which was strange, because McGowan was tilted backwards out of the window of the cab, as if he had attempted a Fosbury Flop to safety at the very moment of his expiry. His chest had also been liquidized, so that through each hole in his string undershirt squirmed a worm of tomato purée.
The cone lane terminated in a makeshift roadblock. Cops lounged about, accessorized by their carbines and flying helmets. The sergeant drove up in a jeep and offloaded Tom’s rifles.
Tom got out of the car and went to help him clip them to the rack. ‘Is there any. .’ He decided to change tack: ‘What would your assessment be of the security situation between here and the Tontines, officer?’
Tom hoped this sounded authoritative — brave, even. The sergeant didn’t seem taken in; he looked sceptically at Tom.
‘No worries out here, sir,’ he said. ‘Insurgents’ll only hit fuel or other supply trains — stuff headed for the bauxite mines at Kellippi. This is a basic law and order problem for us — no big drama. And no offence, but these crims couldn’t give a rat’s arse about a couple of stray Anglos.’