Davidoff grunted again, plainly having not the faintest idea what Sherman was talking about. He pushed the pedal down and came up behind the truck, glanced in his wing mirror and pulled out round it. A corner of the silver car became visible again, back in the slow lane, a few cars ahead. As they got closer, though, Sherman frowned.
As their angle on the front of the truck narrowed, a second silver Pontiac came into view, on the tail of the other. At this range it was hard to make out the number plates. One of them was their boy, but the other one…
‘Better get a bit closer. There’s another silver bloody car up there. We don’t want to lose -’
There was a bang.
Davidoff abruptly pumped the brake and Sherman was thrown forward. Something flew up from the road, very fast, and smacked the top half of the windscreen before bouncing up off and behind them. Sherman, startled, looked round and looked behind. Something black disappearing under the wheels of the car following.
‘What was -?’
Davidoff, frowning a little but with the car under control. Up ahead Sherman could see the front tyre of the eighteen-wheeler flapping in rags. The driver was slowing down, trying to get a slight fishtail under control. Davidoff let the car fall back, then powered forward past it. They’d lost a couple of hundred metres on the Pontiacs.
‘Blowout,’ he said. ‘Step on it. We’re losing them.’
Ahead, there was a cloverleaf junction and the traffic was slowing down as a column of cars joined the freeway from the right. The two Pontiacs, further on, went under the shadow of an overpass. A car joining the freeway shot across their bows without signalling. Davidoff muttered something and braked again.
It was a silver Pontiac. It lurched out wide into the left-hand lane, accelerated round an SUV, waggled back into the middle lane and shot off up under the overpass.
‘It’s – hang on…’ Sherman could see, through the traffic ahead, the other two silver Pontiacs. The third caught them up. ‘We’ve got to catch up with the -’
‘I can see,’ said Davidoff in a voice at once distracted and alive with irritation. ‘I’m trying but these – SHIT!’
The people in this place were maniacs. They were carved up again, this time someone swinging in from behind, then undertaking and cutting back in front of them, before going wide and, with a honk of horns, screeching round that SUV.
Another – oh, for crying out loud.
As Davidoff concentrated on trying not to be crashed into, Sherman scanned the road ahead. He could now see four identical silver Pontiacs. At least four. One of them – one of them was taking the exit. It was marked Arthur Langford Parkway East. He couldn’t make out the licence plate.
‘Davidoff – he’s leaving. He’s taking the exit.’ Davidoff wrenched the wheel. They were in the slip road. Just as they were about to be committed, Sherman had second thoughts.
‘No! It’s the other one! Don’t take the exit! Stay on the road.’
Davidoff swore again, wrenched the wheel back and they crossed the stripy lines back onto the main road, narrowly missing the sand-filled oil drums protecting the junction. A dirty white Toyota behind them roared up the exit, missing their rear bumper by a smaller distance than Sherman was comfortable with, its horn emitting a wail of outrage.
He could see three Pontiacs several car-lengths ahead. Davidoff was making valiant efforts to catch up with them, weaving freely in and out of all four lanes of traffic. To their right, Sherman became aware of another line of traffic sloping down a ramp and waiting to join the freeway – the westbound traffic from the road they’d just passed under. Rush hour was approaching and these would be the first people making their way out from the centre of town into the western suburbs. The Pontiacs, where he could make them out, glimpsing the tops of their roofs, were just past where the traffic merged.
The traffic had slowed to twenty or thirty miles an hour. The sun winked off an angle of one of the cars waiting to join the freeway and Sherman glanced sideways. Just ahead and to the right of them, spilling into the traffic ahead, were three more silver Pontiacs, tailing a wood-panelled station wagon, which was itself tailgating another silver Pontiac.
Sherman had lost count. Seven, was it? Maybe eight. A rise in the road a little later on allowed him to see them all at once, spread out across four lanes and a couple of hundred metres of the road ahead.
Sherman had by this stage formed a hunch. The boy was leaving town, and he was most likely to head west. West was where the aeroplane thing had happened. West was where he was supposed to be flying, or had at least bought a ticket to. West was the best bet. Two Pontiacs whose numbers were impossible to see took off along the eastbound exit.
The main pack of Pontiacs carried on. Sherman leaned forward in his seat, his jaw working. The exit for the westbound carriageway of the interstate came off the left, the fast lane. One of the silver cars, its indicator winking for a good forty seconds before it made its way into the faster traffic, pulled out. The indicator stayed on. It was travelling slightly too slowly – as if its driver wasn’t confident about what he was doing.
He had slowed enough to give a glimpse of the first two digits of the number plate… B4… 84… B4? Was it?
‘Got you,’ said Sherman. ‘Follow that one.’
Davidoff swung out across two lanes of traffic and entered the slip road only three cars behind the target. None of those cars was silver. ‘Hope you’re sure about this,’ he said.
‘I’m sure,’ said Sherman. The slip road rose in a gentle left-hand curve from ground level up and over the southbound carriageway of the 285 before cresting and then sloping down to join the fat interstate heading west. The silver car disappeared round the curve ahead of them, and as they coasted over the top of the rise and faced down, they were momentarily dazzled by the sun.
The silver car must have already joined the main road. Cars were shuffling between lanes just off the slipway. The I-20 ribboned off towards the horizon, and as far as Sherman and Davidoff could see – three lanes of faded blacktop – the roofs of cars reflected the sun’s coppery light like the scales of a snake. It was beautiful, all those cars crawling westwards together.
Every car for as far as the eye could make out was silver. Every one – Sherman knew at that moment in his guts – was a Pontiac.
‘Let’s go back to the motel,’ he said. ‘We may have to think again.’
Davidoff steered them off at the next exit and they looped back round towards Atlanta, Sherman dialling Ellis’s number, letting his thumb hover over the green button to call, and then thinking better of it.
Chapter 8
There did seem to be an awful lot of silver cars on the road, Alex thought as he drove out of the city. Odd. Perhaps there was a factory nearby.
Then he was back into his thoughts. Those thoughts. They seemed less pernicious, less circular, less – if he was honest about it – thinky than the thoughts he had been having beforehand. Always nearer by not keeping still. Now he was moving and his thoughts were calm to the point of being almost contentless.
He was even able to avoid thinking about some of the things he usually found himself thinking about. He had decided not to think about the effect on his credit card of hiring a car for two weeks, and lo and behold, here he was, not thinking about it. He had decided not to think about the likelihood that he’d fail to finish his PhD, lose his funding and have to move back in with his mum, and lo and behold, here he was not thinking about it. He had decided not to – well, he was really not thinking about that. He ran through a whole list of the things he wasn’t thinking about – some more quickly than others, and none of them bit him.
‘I might take up not thinking for good,’ he said aloud to himself – something he realised he had started to do over the last couple of days. Not thinking was working splendidly. He knew from the atlas on the passenger seat that he was headed for the west, and that it would take him a few days to get there. All he knew was that the next big town was Birmingham. That was fine.