He parked his car, went inside and told Lili of the praise heaped on him. He read the story to Magda, sat at the dinner table, complimented Lili on the cooking and asked about her day. He said nothing of the cloud hanging over him.
He had been dozing, might have been snoring gently, when the first shot hit the Pajero.
He was thrown forward, bounced off the back of the front passenger seat, then cannoned into the door. More shots followed.
Badger had woken fast. Since they had been on the big drag, which she had said was Highway 6, she had opened her window, unclipped the rifle and let it rest on her lap. The guy called Hamfist had a weapon peeping out into the growing darkness. He was awake. There were men milling in the road, lit by the Pajero’s headlights and probably half blinded by them. One crawled and seemed to scream up into the night. He might have had a broken leg.
‘What the fuck…’ Badger murmured, for want of something sharper.
The road was clearing and the girl was shooting, Hamfist too. He heard her say it was thieves, and that Harding had hit one with his front fender. Corky might have winged another. They had gone straight over one of the tyres left in the road to slow vehicles down.
He could see the lights of the first Pajero, where Foxy was, then the flash and the screaming moving light – it would have been about a hundred metres in front. The light went past the front of that vehicle and carried on across black open ground. There must have been a berm or a dune because it exploded. Shagger swore and called it an RPG round. Hamfist matched the obscenity. They’d gone off the road into a ditch and Badger’s elbow was driven sharply into his ribcage.
He thought they bucked over the sand and scrub for about a quarter of a mile. Then the wheel was wrenched again and they tilted, climbed and ground up onto the road. For a few seconds the two vehicles were side by side, stationary. The Six lady didn’t speak, but there was a fast exchange between Harding and Shagger in a military patois. Badger deciphered enough to learn that thieves had put tyres on the road to slow vehicles, then stop them to rob the passengers of valuables and cargo. One thief had been run down, another had been shot. Around thirty bullets had been fired at the two Pajeros, and one rocket-propelled grenade.
Was it par for the course? Badger didn’t ask. Neither Harding nor Shagger reckoned their tyres had been damaged.
Now she spoke: ‘Can we, please, move off and get the hell out?’
They went on in darkness.
Mostly the road was clear, but a few times men emerge would from the dark, dragging along a pack-beast, and a few times great lorries drove towards them and made a chicken-game challenge. There were dull lights at a shack that seemed to serve food but had no customers, and there was a police road-block, but the Pajeros had their pennants up and were waved through without having to slow. Badger reckoned they wouldn’t have slowed anyway, would have kept going and might have started shooting again.
They’d come into a town. She whispered that it was the Garden of Eden and Badger hadn’t any idea what she meant, but again the windows were down and the guns readied. They crossed a bridge, and there was enough light for him to make out a sluggish, stinking flow of water. It looked a crap place, and he didn’t see an orchard with apples, any naked girls or a fellow with a fig leaf for modesty. Out of the town, the bridge behind them and the road emptying again, they were on a track and the front Pajero threw up a dust storm they had to drive through. There was enough moon for the surface to be visible without the vehicles’ headlights.
Badger closed his eyes, clamped them tight, and the pain lessened in his ribs and arm.
The end of a road, at a broken gate that had posts set into a sagging wire fence: through the gate there were heaps of discarded, rusted piping that went nowhere. He realised it meant oil and that it had been bombed. He’d carried his bergen, the fullest and heaviest, and had made certain he accepted none of the Jones Boys’ offers to help. There was a single-storey concrete building with little compartment rooms that were filthy, shrapnel- spattered, looted. He’d taken one, and Foxy had been next door – but there were no doors. There was pain, though.
Badger was on the sleeping bag spread on the concrete floor. He didn’t realise she was there. He could hear a constant drone of mosquitoes in flight but they had not bothered with him yet. There was no light, but the subdued sound of a radio playing soft jazz, maybe New Orleans – he’d have had to strain his ears to hear it better.
Staying still on the bag killed some of the pain. She was standing over him. ‘Are you bad or good, hurt or in one piece?’
He blinked, tried to make her out in the darkness, couldn’t. The movement he made in reacting to her voice hurt his ribs and he bit his lip. ‘Thanks for asking. I’m fine.’
‘Are you injured?’
‘Bruised.’
‘Does that mean “wrecked”?’
‘No.’
‘I have to ask.’
‘I’ve answered.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘What for?’ Badger shifted to face her. He had told the truth, and he would go on.
‘Because I want to.’
He heard authority in her voice and doubted there was a future in argument.
‘I want to know what state you’ll be in when you go forward.’
‘I won’t be a passenger – not alongside him.’
‘Open your shirt.’
He did. He could smell her breath and sweat – no deodorant. Excellent, professional. In this sort of place, Badger reckoned, you wouldn’t know when you might have to burrow into a hole while the bad guys went by, and the smell of toothpaste or deodorant was the worst giveaway. Now he rated her higher than he had just on the evidence of her skill through the ambush, shooting well and fast, leaving the driver to do the driving and Hamfist to put down the main suppressive fire. He had the buttons on the camouflage top loose and rucked up the lightweight khaki T-shirt. He wouldn’t show that it had hurt. She didn’t use a torch but moved her fingertips across his skin, paused when he winced. Her face was close to his and the darkness was around them. A guy did a trumpet solo on the jazz that was playing, and he had to lift his arm so that she could get more easily onto the place where the elbow had hurt his ribs. He couldn’t see her eyes, but her breath was on his face. The pain seemed to go.
She eased across him, slipped a leg over his hip and her fingers played on his skin.
Foxy Foulkes was dreaming. He had forgotten the name of the hotel and which junction he had come off at, and had forgotten the number of the motorway. He had forgotten, too, what the room had looked like, its decor, and what was in the chilled mini-bar. He had not forgotten, over seven years, that a lift had been offered from the training course for Greater Manchester Police, that she had been in the force’s computing team and was going to a seminar in London. He was going south. She had put her hand on his thigh, and music had played. He’d wrenched the wheel at the junction, and they’d checked in without baggage. Both had been half stripped before they used the little key to open the fridge and take out a half-bottle of fizzy stuff. It was a hell of a good dream, him with Ellie, now his wife.
His blazer was on the floor, in the dream, and his trousers and underpants, her clothes scattered over them. It was passionate, even frenzied, at the start, but the second time had been calmer and quieter. He’d told her they were soul-mates, and in the dream they did it a third time – nearly bloody killed him – and she’d sighed… He had dozed, and then thought he was dreaming, but he was awake.
He heard a grunt through the wall and struggled to find Ellie. Then he sat up, listening. Bloody hell, were they at it?
Abigail Jones asked herself, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’ She could have talked through a hundred reasons, or ten, and could have decided that none made sense. She used a tiny beam from a pocket torch to guide herself down the corridor, past the open doorway into the older man’s room, and came into the big area where the gear was. She let the beam rove around. Shagger and Corky were on their sides, on the bags, and seemed to be asleep. Hamfist was hunkered against a wall, facing the outer doorway. He had an AK assault job, with two magazines taped, on his lap. He reached towards the small CD/DVD player to cut the music,
